Kenneth Graham (editor) - Shakespeare On Stage and Off

SHAKESPEARE

ON STAGE AND OFF

SHAKESPEARE

ON STAGE AND OFF

Edited by
Kenneth Graham and Alysia Kolentsis

McGill-Queens University Press
Montreal & Kingston London Chicago

McGill-Queens University Press 2019

ISBN 978-0-7735-5924-0 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-7735-5925-7 (paper)

ISBN 978-0-2280-0006-8 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-0-2280-0007-5 (ePUB)

Legal deposit fourth quarter 2019

Bibliothque nationale du Qubec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free

(100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Stratford Festival.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Shakespeare on stage and off / edited by Kenneth Graham and Alysia Kolentsis.

Names: Graham, Kenneth J. E. (Kenneth John Emerson), 1960 editor. | Kolentsis, Alysia, 1976 editor.

Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190161507 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190161531 | ISBN 9780773559240 (cloth) | ISBN 9780773559257 (paper) | ISBN 9780228000068 (ePDF) | ISBN 9780228000075 (ePUB)

Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 15641616Dramatic production. | LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 15641616Stage history. | LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 15641616Adaptation. | LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 15641616 Criticism and interpretation.

Classification: LCCPR3091 .S33 2019 | DDC 822.3/3dc23

This book was typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon.

For Josephine Harris and in memory of Dr Jules Harris

CONTENTS

KENNETH GRAHAM AND ALYSIA KOLENTSIS

ANTONI CIMOLINO

CHRISTINA LUCKYJ

LAUREN ERIKS CLINE

RODERICK H. MCKEOWN

CHRISTIE CARSON

LINDA MCJANNET

JULIA REINHARD LUPTON

JULIA REINHARD LUPTON

RUSSELL J. BODI

DAVID B. GOLDSTEIN

JEFFREY R. WILSON

R.W. JONES

PETER HOLLAND

HAYLEY OMALLEY

AMRITA SEN

LISA S. STARKS

BRANDON CHRISTOPHER

JACOB CLAFLIN

GINA HAUSKNECHT

ERIC SPENCER

FIGURES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many of the essays in this volume were presented in June 2017 at the second Shakespearean Theatre Conference, Shakespeare 401: Whats Next? in Stratford, Ontario. Two others were presented in 2015 at the inaugural Shakespearean Theatre Conference, Language in Text and Performance. We would like to thank everyone involved in both conferences, including our institutional sponsors, the Stratford Festival, the University of Waterloo, and St Jeromes University. We are especially grateful to Dr Jules and Josephine Harris for their generous financial support of the conferences, as well as of this book. Mark Abley, Jonathan Crago, Kathleen Fraser, and the rest of the team at McGill-Queens University Press believed in this project from the beginning and provided expert guidance, while the insights of the presss anonymous readers significantly strengthened the result. Finally, we would like to thank our families, Beth and Jimmy Graham and Mike, Lucia, and Anna Crosby, for the love, encouragement, and joy they give us.

SHAKESPEARE

ON STAGE AND OFF

INTRODUCTION

KENNETH GRAHAM AND ALYSIA KOLENTSIS

Shakespeare On Stage and Off is dedicated to the proposition that Shakespeares enormous prestige as poet, playwright, and popular culture phenomenon both enriches our culture and provides an occasion to reflect upon developments within it. The books three parts, Playing with Shakespeare, Working with Shakespeare, and Living with Shakespeare, explore contemporary stagings of Shakespeares plays, propose a new approach to those plays through the work we do every day, and probe Shakespeares persistent and adaptive presence in life beyond the stage. Together they portray a Shakespeare who animates conversations about such apparent oppositions as work and play, tradition and experiment, performance and identity, unity and diversity, similarity and difference, reader and text, and audience and artist. This Shakespeare is inescapable, but he is also malleable, subject to constant redefinition and new understandings. He speaks to us only as much as he is spoken to by us. What we are is inseparable from what he is, or, to put it differently, we understand him partly by understanding ourselves, and vice versa.

The idea for this volume emerged from Shakespeare 401: Whats Next?, the second Shakespearean Theatre Conference, held in Stratford, Ontario, in June 2017, and the majority of the chapters that follow were first presented there. Written for an audience both of specialists and of general readers with a special interest in Shakespeare, the nineteen chapters showcase the variety and vitality of Shakespeares interaction with contemporary life and culture. Their subjects include stage productions of Shakespeare in London, Stratford-upon-Avon, Edinburgh, New York, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Stratford, Ontario; live theatre broadcasts from London and Stratford-upon-Avon (as watched in Austin, Texas, and South Bend, Indiana); films from India and the United Kingdom; and television shows from the United Kingdom and the United States. There are also chapters on reading stage directions and modernizing Shakespeares language, and a cluster of chapters proposing a new multidisciplinary approach to the plays that emphasizes their relationship to professional and personal forms of knowledge. Regrettably, there are limits to what a volume such as this can cover. Readers will find no consideration of graphic and manga Shakespeare (especially popular among students familiar with these formats), web series such as Nothing Much to Do (also aimed at a young audience), or novelistic rewritings of Shakespeare (e.g., the Hogarth Shakespeare); and, apart from Amrita Sens chapter on Vishal Bhardwajs Shakespeare films, they will find no sustained discussion of Shakespeares presence outside North America and the United Kingdom. What they will find is a set of lively and readable contributions in several written modes, from close readings to personal reflections, from careful analysis of staging practices to an account of a dinner party. All, we hope, are provocations to further thought about our relationship to Shakespeare, wherever we encounter him.

PLAYING WITH SHAKESPEARE

As Antoni Cimolino begins this section by pointing out, the text of Hamlet is a script that can be performed on stage in multiple ways. Playing Shakespeare entails a process of playing with Shakespeares script, a process of invention and discovery in which some possibilities are tried and rejected, others are tried and adopted, and many more are never attempted at all. Initially, the director faces major decisions about performance style: for example, Christie Carson shows that a production of Two Gentlemen of Verona might aim for psychological realism and believable characters, or it might opt for a less naturalistic, more self-consciously theatrical effect. As the process approaches its goal of performance, it becomes more and more specific by virtue of the choices it embodies. Hamlet, for example, may wear black tights or blue jeans; he may appear to be melancholy or mad; and he may be played by a man or a woman. Together, the accumulated performance choices of live theatre create new meanings for the play in its historical moment: this is not some universal idea of