Reenacting Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath: The Intermedial Turn and Turn to Embodiment

349 Pages·2019·5.34 MB·English

by  Thomas Cartelli

REENACTING
SHAKESPEARE
IN THE
SHAKESPEARE
AFTERMATH
The Intermedial
Turn and Turn to
Embodiment
Thomas Cartelli
Reproducing Shakespeare
Series Editors
Thomas Cartelli
Department of English
Muhlenberg College
Allentown, PA, USA
Katherine Rowe
Office of President
The College of William & Mary
Williamsburg, VA, USA
Reproducing Shakespeare marks the turn in adaptation studies toward
recontextualization, reformatting, and media convergence. It builds on
two decades of growing interest in the “afterlife” of Shakespeare, show-
casing some of the best new work of this kind currently being produced.
The series addresses the repurposing of Shakespeare in different techni-
cal, cultural, and performance formats, emphasizing the uses and effects
of Shakespearean texts in both national and global networks of reference
and communication. Studies in this series pursue a deeper understanding
of how and why cultures recycle their classic works, and of the media
involved in negotiating these transactions.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14505
Thomas Cartelli
Reenacting
Shakespeare in the
Shakespeare Aftermath
The Intermedial Turn and Turn to Embodiment
Thomas Cartelli
Department of English
Muhlenberg College
Allentown, PA, USA
Reproducing Shakespeare
ISBN 978-1-137-40481-7 ISBN 978-1-137-40482-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40482-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018962898
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
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Cover image: Maria Baranova
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This book is dedicated to my students
and to the artists in question
A
cknowledgements
A book like this one requires the good faith cooperation and generos-
ity of artists and theater administrators who supply access to their own
or their company’s work without forewarning of how it will be used or
assessed. Artists who have been generous in this way include, first and
foremost, Annie Dorsen and also Brigitte Maria Mayer, Péter Lichter,
and Matías Piñeiro. Antonia Ruder at Berlin’s Schaubühne permitted me
to freely reproduce images from Thomas Ostermeier’s productions of
Richard III and Hamlet as well as trusting me to keep a private record-
ing of Hamlet private, and Marlene Kenens of Toneelgroep Amsterdam
has twice now freely supplied me with images from Roman Tragedies
along with permission to reproduce them. Mike Farry and Clay Hapaz
of The Wooster Group have been similarly gracious in making materials
available and helping me find what I need. I’d also like to take this occa-
sion to thank photographers Maria Baranova, Paula Court, Arno Declair,
Jim Findlay, Hugo Glendinning, Bruno Pocheron, Richard Termine, Jan
Versweyweld, and Teddy Wolff both for their artistry and for permitting
me to reproduce their work.
Funds that allowed me to purchase photographs and permissions
were drawn from Muhlenberg College’s Daniel J. and Carol Shiner
Wilson Research Grant. A full year’s freedom from teaching along with
additional funding that helped me relocate to London to work at the
British Library was supplied by Muhlenberg’s Class of ’32 Research
Professorship. The greater part of this book was composed in the fif-
teen months covered by this award. Much of it, however, derives from
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
conference papers, lectures, panel presentations, and the articles and
book chapters they spawned over the course of the last dozen years. I
contributed several of these papers and presentations to meetings of
the Shakespeare Association of America, the International Shakespeare
Association, and the European Shakespeare Research Association, whose
sponsoring parties have provided fertile ground for my work’s develop-
ment in addition to expert feedback and productive collaboration. I owe
special thanks to Bruce Smith for inviting me to participate in a memo-
rable plenary session of the SAA alongside Bruce and Michael Dobson,
and to Gail Paster and Doug Lanier for encouraging me to contribute a
revised version of that paper to a special volume of Shakespeare Quarterly.
I also owe thanks to Mariacristina Cavecchi and to the late (and greatly
missed) Mariangela Tempera for inviting me to present my developing
work at the University of Milano and the Centro Shakespeariano Ferrara,
respectively. Early versions of material appearing here were also presented
at Rhodes University and the University of the Witwatersrand in South
Africa; at Columbia University, the George Washington University, the
University of Maryland, and the University of Georgia; and at NYU, Abu
Dhabi.
I’ve been especially energized by collaborations with Shakespeare
scholars whose groundbreaking work in Shakespeare performance stud-
ies has been instrumental in helping me develop my own. First among
equals here would be the late Barbara Hodgdon for her fearless quest to
forge connections that challenged everybody’s status quo. Bill Worthen
continues to set the standard for work in the field that he’s named, and
Susan Bennett, a long-established authority on all things theatrical, has
lately become a welcome comrade-in-arms in reckoning with the enig-
matic Ivo. I’ve enjoyed similarly gratifying professional camaraderie
over the years with James Bulman, Peter Holland, Ted Leinwand, and
Katherine Rowe, and, through my European work, have been forging
new connections with both younger and older colleagues, whose number
includes Aneta Mancewicz and Robin Nelson, whose unpublished paper,
“Intermedial Shake-shifts,” supplied me with a state-of-the-art point of
departure for my discussion of the intermedial turn. Though I’ve only
ever shared a word or two in passing with her, my thinking in this book,
particularly at the start of Chapter 4, has been sharpened by virtually
everything Pascale Aebischer has published in the last few years. I’ve also
greatly benefited from the scholarship of the legion of performance stud-
ies and new media scholars whose work is repeatedly cited and quoted
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
in my text and footnotes. And though I haven’t taken the suggestion of
my Palgrave “clearance reader” to choose a different title for this book,
I can’t imagine finding a better, more constructive reader for my work
than that still anonymous individual.
The staff of Muhlenberg’s Trexler Library has been remarkably
responsive to the many requests I’ve made of them over the years, par-
ticularly Kristin Brodt, Karen Gruber, and Joy LeFevre. Last but not
least, I want to thank my Theater department colleagues—especially Jim
Peck whose 2015 production of Ulysses in Nighttown proved inspira-
tional—for teaching me more than they know every time they mount a
play, and my English department cohort—Jim Bloom, Francesca Coppa,
and Barri Gold—for helping make our collective existence both enter-
taining and enlightening.
The case study that comprises Section 3 of Chapter 2 is largely drawn
from “‘The Killing Stops Here’: Unmaking the Myths of Troy in the
Wooster Group/RSC Troilus & Cressida (2012),” Shakespeare Quarterly
64: 2 (2013): 233–43. Roughly half of Chapter 8 draws on the last
third of “Essentializing Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath:
Dmitry Krymov’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It), Matias
Piñeiro’s Viola, and Annie Dorsen’s A Piece of Work: A Machine-Made
Hamlet,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 67: 4 (2016): 431–456. Material from
both essays is reproduced here by permission of The Johns Hopkins
University Press. The first half of Chapter 3 offers a revised take on an
essay that first appeared as “Shakespeare in Pain: Edward Bond’s Lear
and the Ghosts of History,” Shakespeare Survey 55 (2002): 159–69,
while Chapter 6 elaborates on “Channeling the Ghosts: the Wooster
Group’s Remediation of the 1964 Electronovision Hamlet,” Shakespeare
Survey 61 (2008): 147–60. Material from both pieces is reproduced
here by permission of Cambridge University Press. Most of “High-Tech
Shakespeare in a Mediatized Globe: Ivo van Hove’s Roman Tragedies
and the Problem of Spectatorship,” James Bulman (ed), The Oxford
Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, Oxford UP, 2017, 267–83,
reappears in revised, recontextualized, and enlarged form in Chapter 7
and is reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.
c
ontents
Part I Introduction
1 Reenacting Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath 3
1.1 Mapping the Terrain 3
1.2 Points of Departure 10
1.3 Excess, Exhaustion, Reenactment 17
1.4 Experiment, Exception, Avant-Garde 27
1.5 Case Study: Shakespeare Through the Looking Glass 36
2 The Intermedial Turn and Turn to Embodiment 47
2.1 The Intermedial Turn 47
2.2 The Turn to Embodiment 52
2.3 Case Study: The Wooster Group Meets the RSC at the Swan 63
2.4 A Brief Postdramatic Postscript 78
Part II Ghosts of History
3 Ghosts of History: Edward Bond’s Lear & Bingo
and Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine 85
3.1 Ghosts of a Dead Religion 85
3.2 The Writing on the Wall 91
3.3 “Was Anything Done?” 102
3.4 “The Script Has Been Lost” 107
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