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CANADIAN
THEATRE REVIEW
NUMBER 111
Edited by
$10.50
SUMMER 2002
Daniel Fischlin
and Ric Knowles
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Forthcoming in
CANADIAN
THEATRE REVIEW
CTR 112 • Fall 2002
Jazz, Blues and Theatre
Edited by Allan Watts
CTR 113 -Winter 2002
Urjo Kareda
Edited by Ann Wilson
CTR 114 -Spring 2003
Celebrating Canadian Plays
Edited by Ric Knowles
CTR 115 • Summer 2003
Military Re-enactments
Edited by Alan Filewod
CTR 116 • Fall 2003
Latino Theatre
EditorTBA
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comments on current issues and
suggestions about future ones .
Enquiries should be addressed to :
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Diane Flacks (left) plays Titania to Waneta Storms as Oberon in Kate Lynch's all-woman
production of A Midsummer Night's Dream .
PHOTO: DAVID KINSMEN
CTR I I I Summer 2002
Adapting Shakespeare in Canada
Edited by Daniel Fischlin and Ric Knowles
Tom Stroud and Winnipeg's Contemporary Dancers fought against Hamlet's misogyny
by allowing Gertrude (Nina Battison, above) and Ophelia spaces to express themselves .
See "Dancing with Shakespeare :' p. 43 .
PHOTO BY IAN MCCAUSLAND
CONTENTS
5
22
33
Redescribing a World
A lively look at four
dramatic adaptations of
Shakespeare, from Gertrude
and Ophelia to Harlem
Duet, working towards a
theory of Shakespearean
adaptation as parody.
LINDA BURNETT
Virtually Canadian
Web sites ranging from theatre promotions to educational cartoons bring "the
artist of the millennium"
home to Canada .
SUSAN BENNETT
A Midsummer Night's
Mash-up
"To dream, perchance to
rave ." Serenity Industries
serves up a passing strange
I0
The Spectre of Straight
Shakespeare
Goodnight Desdemona and
Mad Boy Chronicle provide
new ways of looking at old
texts - finding them a little
queer .
ELLEN MCKAY
Midsummer Night's Dream
as a Canada Day rave .
MARK MCCUTCHEON
28
Adapting the Bard : A
Virtual Guide
From Bard on the Beach to
Shakespeare by the Sea,
Canadian Shakespeare
festival web sites adapt
Shakespeare for mediasavvy audiences .
JENNIFER AILLES
I5
Dave veut jouer Richard 111
What if the actor playing Shakespeare's deformed King had
a real handicap? asks Montreal's Nouveau Theatre
Experimental .
LEANORE LIEBLEIN
46
43
Dancing with Shakespeare
Tom Stroud and Winnipeg's
Contemporary Dancers have
been dancing around the
words of Shakespeare for
nearly a decade . In 2001
The Garden located Hamlet
on a dirt-covered stage .
"The air is so thick you
could cut it with a bare
bodkin ."
MARK FORTIER
CANADIAN
THEATRE REVIEW
SUMMER 2002
Shakespeare in a Blender
What happens when the
Marx brothers make coffee
for the Monty Python gang
at a slumber party where
everyone is watching Bugs
Bunny? Ottawa's Company
of Fools makes fun out of
Shakespeare .
JESSICA SCHAGERL
50
Kate Lynch's All-Woman
Dream
Kate Lynch, director of
Theatre Passe Muraille's
stellar all-woman production of A Midsummer
Night's Dream, discusses
gender, doubling and
dreaming in a wide-ranging
interview. "Can we talk
about the gender politics of
your show?"
TANNER MIRRLEES
I
CONTENTS, continued
60
Loreena McKennitt,
Merchant of Song
When Richard Monette
asked internationally
acclaimed Canadian Celtic
bard Loreena McKennitt to
write music for The
Merchant of Venice he got a
mixture of themes that
remind us of snakes
writhing out of baskets and
gypsies dancing sinuously
through the streets .
JUDY VAN RHIJN
63
Adapting Shakespeare to
the Prairie Landscape
Is Shakespeare a prairie
playwright? The Free Will
Players and the realities of
outdoor Shakespeare in
Edmonton .
STEPHEN HEATLEY
SPECIAL
DOCUMENTS
VIEWS AND
REVIEWS
CANADIAN
THEATRE REVIEW
SUMMER 2002
NUMBER 111
Editorial Committee
88
Two-Tier Theatre?
Commentary by Matthew
Hays on what the Mirvishes'
success means for Canadian
theatre .
91
Adaptations of
Shakespeare : A Critical
Anthology of Plays from the
Seventeenth Century to the
Present, edited by Daniel
Fischlin and Mark Fortier.
Routledge, 2001 . Reviewed
by Christie Carson .
Guest Editors
Editorial Advisory Board
Review Editor
Alan Filewod
Ric Knowles
Harry Lane
Allan Watts
Ann Wilson
Daniel Fischlin
Ric Knowles
Lorraine Camerlain
Reid Gilbert
Jenny Monday
Margaret-Gail Osachoff
Catherine Graham
Editorial Assistant
Claire Tansey
Editorial Secretary
Phyllis Reynen
Advertising Coordinator
Audrey Greenwood
Cover Design
Audrey Greenwood
Production/Layout Artist
David Knight
Copy Editor
Ned Morgan
Founding Editors
96
Publisher
Don Rubin
Joseph Green
University of Toronto Press
Shakespeare in Canada : A
World Elsewhere?, edited
by Diana Brydon and Irena
R . Makaryk . University of
Toronto Press, forthcoming
2002 . Reviewed by
Catherine Graham .
Theatrica
a i n
of Shakespeare
ada : A Workin
Bibliography
compiled by
Daniel Fischlin .
e
Dialogue for
Commencen_nnF D, .y
1915, by S, ,t
Agnes of
I
r
I.
caderny, . '~
Introduced by
Daniel Fischlin . ,
~%k
The Canada Council
for the Arts
Le Conseil des Are
do Canada
ONTARIO ARTS COUNCIL
CONSEIL DES ARTS DE L'ONTARIO
CTR gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada
Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council .
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2
COVER PHOTO
Periodicals postage paid at Buffalo, NY.
Adapting Shakespeare in Canada can take many forms, including
extraordinarily ambitious ones .The cover shows English actor Peter
Darling performing Ophelia in Elsinore, Robert Lepage's tour de force
one-man version of Shakespeare's Hamlet, published here for the first
time in either English or French .
PHOTO BY CLAUDEL HUOT
US Postmaster : Send address changes to U of T Press Inc ., 2250
Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150-6000
US Periodicals Registration Number 006628
Canada Post : Send address changes to University of Toronto Press
Incorporated, 5201 Dufferin Street, Toronto, ON M3H 5T8 .
CTR III
by DANIEL FISCHLIN AND
RIC KNOWLES
People have been working on "what to do with
Shakespeare" - a more accurate, if more awkward term
than "adapting" - for over four hundred years . Even in
England in his own lifetime fellow playwrights were citing, rewriting and contesting the work of this "upstart
crow." His younger colleague and collaborator, John
Fletcher, went so far in 1611 as to write The Woman's Prize;
or The Tamer Tamed, a fanciful sequel and arguably protofeminist response to The Taming of the Shrew . Since then,
reproductions, homages, appropriations, exploitations,
citations, translations, adaptations and tradaptations of
various kinds, dramatic and otherwise, have surfaced in
an astonishing range of historical periods and cultural
contexts, ranging from respectful updatings and popularizings in classic cartoons and mainstream modern dress
productions to resistant rewritings such as, archetypically,
Aime Cesaire's postcolonial La Tempete . "Shakespeare" has
been appropriated in the service of everything from "Ye
Olde" faux Tudor "Shakespeare Arms" pubs everywhere,
through conservative cultural critiques such as Robertson
Davies' Tempest Tost, to armaments advertising that links
Shakespeare's Globe, early modern imperialism and
Britain's contemporary global arms trade ; from journalistic accounts of the O .J . Simpson trial (Othello) through, in
Canada, pop-music, de- or re-contextualized settings of
Hamlet's "Never Doubt I Love" by singer/songwriter
Melanie Doane, to irreverent, almost gratuitous gestures
directed at the Shakespearean high-cultural sheen, as in
the album title, Shakespeare My Butt, by the rock group,
Lowest of the Low (which includes no other references to
Shakespeare) . The gesture positions Shakespeare on the
wrong side of the Pink Floyd rock culture anthem, "We
don't need no education/We don't need no mind control,"
an agent of what Louis Althusser has taught us to call the
Ideological State Apparatus.
But of course Shakespeare himself was an adaptor,
and many adaptations of "the Bard," consciously or
unconsciously, with tongue more or less in cheek, return to
his own sources for grounding or justification . When Anne
Marie MacDonald in Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning
Juliet) and Michael O'Brien, in Mad Boy Chronicle ironically cite or draw upon supposedly lost or actual
Shakespearean source texts, however irreverent or subversive their adaptations, they are claiming a place with
Shakespeare, justifying their own work by positioning
themselves, as adaptors, beside the acknowledged master.
They are also doing something very similar to what
Shakespeare's revisers have done for centuries, as when
Nahum Tate's eighteenth-century History of King Lear
restored the happy ending (and generic decorum) of
SUMMER 2002
Shakespeare's own source play, the anonymous King Leir.
When Ken Mitchell dedicates the published script of Cruel
Tears, his 1975 apparently populist Prairie revisioning of
Othello written with the country band, Humphrey and the
Dumptrucks, to "William Shakespear [sic] and Geraldi
Cinthio" (Shakespeare's primary source for Othello), he is
at the same time reifying, renewing and revitalizing
"Shakespeare" with all his imperialist cultural authority
and staking a high-culture claim for his own work, positioning Shakespeare himself as a revisionist and Mitchell
and the Dumptrucks as inheritors of a noble
"Shakespearean" tradition of renewing classic texts . In
Canada, Shakespearean adaptation, translation and citation have ranged broadly across a spectrum that includes
both anglophile, high-cultural, literary alignments such as
Charles Mair's nineteenth century neo-Shakespearean
closet verse drama, the colonialist "Red Indian" play,
Tecumseh and resistant contemporary work by those like
Native playwright Daniel David Moses, who claims to
have modeled his revisionist, anti-colonialist play,
Brebeuf's Ghost, on Hamlet . But Canadian adaptations reach
far beyond the dramatic, vary in tone from reverence to
renunciation and perform cultural work on a continuum
from the most extreme kinds of radical revisionism to the
most conservative forms of reification . Even when discussion of "Shakespeare" in Canada is confined, as it is here,
to performative forms, it extends to everything from youth
subcultural "raves" to the mutually validating collaboration of the Stratford Festival with high-end-pop Celtic
singer-songwriter and international recording artist
Loreena McKennit (whose first album included a sequence
from the Stratford production of Blake, and who has set
Shakespearean lyrics to music on subsequent albums) .
"Shakespeare" in Canada has been adapted to cartoons,
the Internet and Internet cartoons; to a diverse range of
sexualities and textualities ; to a range of acting styles,
training regimens, abilities and disabilities; to high-tech
and low-tech forms and to landscapes and mindscapes in
various languages and cultural locations from coast to
coast .
This issue presents a small sampling of that activity
and in its working bibliography points toward a great deal
more, showing the extent to which Canada's theatrical history is thoroughly tied to a wide range of performative
and ideological practices in which Shakespeare is invoked
in some way . Our aim, then, is to indicate, however incompletely, the astonishing range of theatrical practices associated with Shakespearean adaptation in Canada and to
suggest the breadth of the ideological content of those
practices . A 1902 play by A . E . de Garcia, entitled Canada,
3
Fair Canada, which relies heavily on Romeo and Juliet for its
plot (as adapted to a Canadian setting), features the following exchange between Jean Chopineau, President of
the Great Canadian Transportation Company and Lady
Rivers (the very names of the protagonists speaking to the
kind of cultural divide so crucial to the conception of
Canadian national identity) :
Chopineau : In a word, from Sydney to Victoria,
from Kingston to Dawson City, the country is alive .
Canada has awoke [sic] from her sleep and realizes
the importance of her destiny among the nations of
the world . We are up against the rush and go-aheaditiveness of other commercial countries, and if we
are not equal to it, we will be left behind in the procession . Destiny foreordains the onward march of
the Goddess of Progress . She hasn't got time to
wait for him to get out of her way, and he obstinately refuses to move . Well, she must pass over
him and grind him down, that's all .
Lady Rivers : But this is the doctrine of the survival
of the fittest .
Chopineau : Call it what you will, it is the doctrine
of the age and must become the doctrine of awakened Canada . (Knight)
strangely consonant with the turn-of-the-century situation
that many contemporary Canadians would recognize one in which the ideologies of progress and Darwinian
survival surmount manifest destiny in the name of commerce. The (un)easy adaptation of Shakespearean theatrical contexts to such an ideology very precisely denotes
how an iconic cultural referent like Shakespeare cannot be
detached from the ideological content with which it is
associated . If we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and
if part of what we dream takes the form of theatrical representation, then we do well to understand how those who
speak our dreams to us in the name of Shakespearean
adaptation contribute to shaping the material realities that
Canadians continue to forge in the theatre and beyond .
For better or for worse, "what we do" with Shakespeare in
Canada reflects on "what we do" more generally. This
issue of CTR hints at just what that "doing" might mean in
the context of a myriad of adaptive strategies undertaken
in the diverse theatrical practices to be found throughout
this country. CTR
Work Cited
Knight, Albert Ernest (A . E . de Garcia) . Canada, Fair Canada .
Montreal: Montreal Shorthand Institute and Business College,
1902 .
At the turn of the nineteenth century in Canada and
in a Shakespearean context, the exchange might seem
4
CTR 111
"Redescribing a
World :"Towards a
Theory of Shakespearean
Adaptation in Canada
A lively look at four dramatic adaptations of Shakespeare .
by LINDA BURNETT
You're floundering in the waters of a flood; the Mona Lisa
and a babe float by. Which one of these two treasures do
you save? I've saved the baby, and let the Mona drown Or did the Author know that I'd be coming here, and leave
a part for me to play?
-Ann-Marie MacDonald, Goodnight Desdemona
(Good Morning Juliet)
In "Saving Desdemona and/or Ourselves,"
Marianne Novy wonders why Ann-Marie MacDonald's
Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), which toured
Canada, won a Governor General's Award, and went
into multiple printings almost immediately, was so much
more successful than Paula Vogel's Desdemona: A Play
About a Handkerchief, which closed after very short runs
at two theatres in New York . At first, Novy attributes the
difference in their popularity to "a greater interest in
Shakespearean intertextuality in Canada," citing Linda
Hutcheon, who
has speculated that 'writers in places like Ireland
and Canada, working as they do from both inside
and outside a culturally different and dominant
context,' are especially drawn to parody .
Later Novy decides that the "difference in tone"
between MacDonald's and Vogel's plays is "more
responsible" for this difference than "the national contrast . Both plays are parodies, but MacDonald's is much
more affectionate" (67-85) .
The tone of MacDonald's play is "much more affectionate" than that of Vogel's play. MacDonald clearly
admires Shakespeare . In a CBC Radio interview in 1992,
MacDonald declared that when she decided to master the
measure of her teacher, the iambic pentameter, she felt like
she was "apprenticing [her]self to someone [she] could
really trust" (Rogers) . In another interview MacDonald
says that she likes to take "something people identify with
or revere, like Shakespeare," and "turn this upside down."
She insists, however, that she "would never lampoon
something that [she] hated," but only something that "fasSUMMER 2002
Ann-Marie MacDonald, shown here as Constance Ledbelly with her
Fool's Cap in the Canadian Stage's 2001 revival of the play, directs our
attention in Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) to the way
women's academic work has too often been slighted by the male-dominated academy.
PHOTO BY MICHAEL COOPER
cinates" her, and that if she is "fascinated by it then it
means there is a deep attraction to it" (Much 136) .
The same can be said about the tone of the other
Canadian dramatic re-visions of Shakespeare that I have
encountered : Margaret Clarke's Gertrude & Ophelia, Ken
Gass's Claudius and Djanet Sears's Harlem Duet. While
such "creative vandalism," to borrow Jonathan
Dollimore's term (Bennett 1), cannot help but entail acts of
appropriation and subversion, in these plays it is also
respectful, functioning both to pay tribute to and to sabotage Shakespeare . And this double voice marks its resemblance to parody, which also asks searching questions of
even as it pays homage to earlier works, or, as Linda
Hutcheon puts it, is characterized by a "combination of
respectful homage and ironically thumbed nose" (Parody
33) .
5
In fact, if parody is defined as "a form of 'metaliterary' criticism" which presents "an argument within the
confines of fictional reference" (Rose 19), then such adaptation of Shakespeare could be understood as the postmodern manifestation of the parodic strategy. Such an
understanding is supported by the comments of a number
of contemporary theorists who recognize, as David
Roberts does, that the "affinity of parody and postmodernism lies in their common strategy of revision, a rereading of the authorised texts which turns all texts into pretexts" (183) .
In Claudius, Gass raises some questions about the
"wonderful concept" (24) that is war . As Polonius explains
to Claudius, a king can invent "always a reason for war."
To cover up the scandal created by his murder of the old
King, all Claudius has to do is "wage a goddamn war" (22)
for any reason but the real reason : "The English . . . fishing
in [Denmark's] waters again" will do just fine . It does not
even matter if they "lose the war, as long as people are distracted," and Claudius goes "down in history as the most
beloved king this nation ever had" (50) . Wars are not
always fought in the best interests of the people .
These Canadian adaptations certainly do use
Shakespeare's plays as "pretexts" for what Brian Vickers
refers to as "'applied politics,' an attempt to change not
only the academy . . . but society itself" (329) . In Goodnight
Desdemona, for example, MacDonald directs our attention
to the way women's academic work too often has been
slighted by the male-dominated academy. For years,
Constance has been writing articles for Professor Claude
Night, her colleague, to publish under his own name, articles that have enhanced Night's reputation greatly .
Despite this, Night patronizes Constance with remarks
about her "interesting little mind" (24), and her peers
refuse to take her own scholarship seriously.
In Harlem Duet, Sears explores two extreme responses to the racism faced by Blacks in North American society - integration and separation - and finds each lacking .
Othello chooses to "enter the Whiteness" (91) . "My culture
is Wordsworth, Shaw, Leave it to Beaver, Dirty Harry," he
tells Billie, "what does Africa have to do with me" (73) . In
his search for "white respect" (55), however, Othello loses
his own cultural identity. Billie's response is equally
flawed . She moves from intense pride in her culture
through anger and suspicion to a full-blown racism that
nearly consumes her. During the course of their relationship, Othello and Billie shift from a middle ground of
shared cultural pride and sense of the wrongness of discrimination to a place where one repudiates Black culture,
the other White culture .
And in Gertrude & Ophelia, the politics of staging is
aired . Clarke's male Actor keeps pushing her female
Playwright to include Hamlet on her stage . "No play can
stand on its feet just on the strength of two women talking," he advises her . "In the end you know you'll have to
make changes if you want this play to draw an audience . I
think it will either have to be the shadow scenes or a real
Hamlet" (S10) . Later, the Actor suggests that the
Playwright's play will never get "onto a mainstage without a Prince Hamlet," but will "wear itself out on little
stages." Clarke's Playwright, who is well aware of "the
ways one gets on the mainstage," remains firm . She will
not have Hamlet in her play (S14) .
Harlem Duet Djanet Sears's imaginative prequel to Othello, explores
responses to racism by a latter day Othello and his first wife, Billie,
played here by Alison Sealy Smith (r) . Aman, comforting Billie, is played
here by Dawn Roach .
PHOTO BY CYLLA VON TIEDEMANN
6
Unquestionably, then, these Canadian adaptations of
Shakespeare offer social and political commentary .
Moreover, if this was all they did or the bigger part of what
they did, it would make sense to refer to such re-vision as
the "postmodern" manifestation of parody. But these
adaptations do something more, something best understood in terms of the differences between a deconstructive
postmodernism and constructive postcolonialism, the
most significant of which is that postcolonialism - because
of the way it views the subject and history - has a "distinct
political agenda," as Hutcheon argues, while postmodernism is "politically ambivalent ." Whereas postmodernism uses irony simply to tear down, postcolonialism
uses it both to disassemble and to reassemble ("Circling"
168) . It goes beyond the deconstruction of the texts that
make up our cultural history to create new texts in which
the old stories are re-imagined and reinterpreted from formerly excluded perspectives .
Further, it is postcolonialism's constructive project
that interests me. For although postcolonialism is critical
of the "homogenizing tendency" (Mishra and Hodge 282)
CTR 111
of imperial discourse and its master narratives, its ultimate
goal is not to defeat and replace these narratives (of colonialism, nationalism, patriarchy, etc .) with its own master
narrative . Its goal is not to vanquish the stories that have
been told, even those that have been told from the perspective of the colonizer. Rather, it is to advance narratives
to stand beside (in addition to) earlier narratives . Its
attempt is not so much to offer "counter-narrative[s] to the
long tradition of European imperial narratives" (Hart and
Goldie 155) - as it is to offer narratives that act to counterbalance those earlier univocal narratives .
Put differently, if reality is a never-to-be-completed
patchwork quilt of multiple perspectives, the postcolonial
enterprise is to stitch to this quilt new patches, squares to
represent the perspectives that have been suppressed by
totalizing colonial practices . It is not to rip out and replace
old patches with new or to start the quilt from scratch, but
to add to an ongoing work . Salman Rushdie uses a similar
analogy when he describes
the Humsa Nama, a Mughal miniature style
wherein seven to eight painters from different
parts of India worked on one picture . . . . According
to Rushdie, the form represents the very basis of
Indian art which is pluralistic . It has got to do with
the combining of many different ways of looking .
And if you select one of those ways of looking you
make a false picture. (Kirpal xv)
What the postcolonial writer must deal with, therefore, is the "false picture" of the colonizer, who possessed
the power to distort reality by allowing only one way of
looking .
By now it must be clear that I agree with both of
Novy's observations . I do think that Canadian writers "are
especially drawn to parody." I also think that all the
Canadian adaptations of Shakespeare I have experienced
are "more affectionate" parodies than Vogel's . And both
their affinity for parody and the affectionate tone of their
adaptations makes sense when it is acknowledged that as
"writers of the postcolonial condition," these Canadian
playwrights "are not so much removers as introducers of
things not there before" (White 4) . Their goal is not to paint
over what Shakespeare contributed to the cultural canvas.
It is, to borrow a phrase Rushdie borrows from Saul
Bellow's The Dean's December, to "open the universe a little
more" by adding to the canvas those six or seven "different ways of looking" (Kirpal xv) that were excluded by the
imperial power - and, in so doing, bring about a change in
the nature of reality .
The affectionate tone of their adaptations makes even
more sense given that Shakespeare, in his plays, lays the
foundation for their constructive postcolonial project of representing the past . Sears points out, in "Notes of a
Coloured Girl," her introduction to Harlem Duet, that
Shakespeare's "Othello is the first African portrayed in the
annals of western dramatic literature" (14) . As for women,
Shakespeare may well do only a sketchy job when it comes
to the "ways of looking" of Gertrude and Ophelia .
However, when these women "do appear on stage, they're
fascinating women," who are so "truly" written
(Gabereau) that in Gertrude & Ophelia Clarke "does not
SUMMER 2002
change [Shakespeare's] plot, but honours his honesty
about the typical fates of women in his world" (Clarke) .
Clarke's suggestion that in Hamlet we do hear the
voice of the marginalized second sex, however softly, and
Sears' observation that in Othello the Other appears for the
first time on the Western stage suggest that they are drawn
to Shakespeare's plays because it is possible to uncover in
them a tacit questioning of authority, or what Stephen
Slemon and Helen Tiffin refer to as "resistance . . . already
present within the domain of power" (xv) . Stephen
Greenblatt makes a similar suggestion with respect to The
Tempest . Greenblatt does not believe that the "salvage and
deformed slave" Caliban triumphs with his claim "this
island's mine, by Sycorax my mother ." For this to happen,
writes Greenblatt, "it would take different artists from different cultures . . . to rewrite Shakespeare's play." What is
significant about The Tempest, though, is that
even within the powerful constraints of
Shakespeare's Jacobean culture, the artist's imaginative mobility enables him to . . . record a voice,
the voice of the displaced and oppressed, that is
heard scarcely anywhere else in his own time .
(Greenblatt 231-32)
In short, Shakespeare does inscribe, albeit faintly, on
the cultural canvas those perspectives generally excluded
by his society.
In their adaptations of Shakespeare, Canadian playwrights pay close attention to the marginalized characters
in Shakespeare's plays . Once this is done, it is impossible
not to notice that even though Shakespeare has left much
out, many of these characters do have a voice, albeit a
muted one, which can be amplified . In Gertrude & Ophelia,
for instance, Clarke intensifies Ophelia's voice so that we
cannot fail to miss her critique of both Hamlet's tragedy
and tragedy generally . These playwrights also introduce
new viewpoints, and sometimes, as in the case of Sears in
Harlem Duet, add a perspective that Shakespeare has
missed entirely, such as that of the black woman in Othello;
at other times, they retell Shakespeare's story from another point of view. Clarke, for example, tells us that she
wanted to explore Hamlet's story from "a woman's point
of view." She wanted to know "what it's like to be the
mother of that kind of son," and "what it must have been
like to be the girlfriend of such a man" (Gabereau) .
In addition to perspectives not found in Shakespeare,
these playwrights introduce "different ways of looking" at
Shakespeare . Their quarrel, their plays suggest, is less with
Shakespeare, whom they enlist in the service of their counterbalancing project, than with traditional interpretation,
which has limited what Shakespeare can mean by granting only the patriarchal point of view. "We, men, women
and Ph .D .s have always read," to quote Carolyn Heilbrun,
Shakespeare "as men" (Robinson and Vogel 286) . It is also
with tragedy itself, which since the founding of the polis in
ancient Greece has been employed in the service of
European patriarchy to promote the values of an aristocratic, white and masculine elite .
One of the different ways of looking that these
Canadian playwrights introduce to the picture is the per-
7
spective of the feminist or postcolonial critic who reads
Shakespeare in opposition to traditional criticism and/or
from the viewpoint of Shakespeare's women or marginalized characters . In Harlem Duet, for instance, Sears suggests that Othello desires Desdemona, not because he
loves her, but because he views her as his way of gaining
"access to the White man's world" (55) and the power that
patriarchal world bestows on men . And MacDonald, in
Goodnight Desdemona, emphasizes sides of Desdemona
and Juliet that have often been ignored by critics to show
that these women are not "real wimps who just get
snuffed out" (Rogers), but forceful women . "Academe"
may believe that the "gentle Desdemona" (I .ii.25) is "a
doomed and helpless victim," but Constance finds her to
be "magnificent!" (41, 42) .
Juliet and Othello to undermine tragedy . In Goodnight
Desdemona, she foregrounds sides of Desdemona and
Both Clarke in Gertrude & Ophelia and Gass in
Claudius suggest that it is not lust that motivates Gertrude .
Clarke, Gass, and Sears also make use of subtexts in
Shakespeare's plays . The goal of Clarke's Playwright in
Gertrude & Ophelia is to subvert patriarchy, the "eternal
male script" (2 .1) . To this end, Clarke sees her play as a collaboration with Shakespeare, one in which, her "scenes
became interchapters of his" in her attempt to amplify
what is muted in Shakespeare, to write, "a reality that
Shakespeare could only suggest by the absences in his
play" (Burnett) . Picking up on Hamlet's contemplation of
the "delicate and tender prince," Fortinbras, his "spirit
with ambition puffed," who risks his own life and the lives
of "twenty thousand men" for what amounts to "an
eggshell" (4 .4 .937-50), Claudius suggests that war usually
has nothing to do with honour and everything to do with
power politics and the male ego . And Harlem Duet, for its
part, points to places in Shakespeare's play intimating that
Othello, who according to the Duke is "far more fair than
black" (1 .3 .289) has completely embraced the ideology of
patriarchy, including its desire to control women's sexuality : "0 curse of marriage,/ That we can call these delicate
creatures ours/ And not their appetites" (3 .3 .272-4) .
Othello's vulnerability, her play asserts, is a direct result of
Clarke challenges those critics who, in the words of
Clarke's Playwright, identifying "like crazy with Hamlet
and his pals" (1 .1), explain Gertrude's marriage to
Claudius by portraying Gertrude as a lecherous monster
who deserves our contempt . Instead of giving us Gertrude
through the eyes of Hamlet, Clarke lets Gertrude speak for
herself . The result is an intelligent and pragmatic woman,
one who marries Claudius in haste because she knows
"what a Queen does to survive" (2 .7) in a society where
women's choices are limited . For his part, Gass suggests
that the reason Gertrude could marry Claudius so soon
after old King Hamlet's death, is that these two brothers
are so much alike . In the words of Gass's Gertrude, they
are "oranges and pears" (96) . In those of Rene Girard, who
proposes a similar interpretation, they are "brothers in
murder and revenge," and Gertrude "moves in a world
where prestige and power count more than passion" (274,
276) .
Another of the "different ways of looking" that these
playwrights introduce to the picture is the perspective of
the critic who is mindful of the subtexts in Shakespeare's
plays that raise questions about patriarchy and its spokesgenre, tragedy. Directing their anger, as Carol Thomas
Neely remarks of feminist critics generally, "against the
male culture which has misread [Shakespeare] . . . on
behalf of its own values" (243-44), these Canadian playwrights defend the bard in their adaptations with the suggestion that just because tragic theory, from Aristotle on
(together with those who have told us how to read
Shakespeare), reflects the political attitudes of the patriarchal powers that be, it does not follow that Shakespeare
does . If on one level Shakespeare's tragic drama reflects
the ideology of patriarchy, at another, this same drama
offers an argument against tragedy and what tragedy
speaks for in Shakespeare's culture .
In his discussion of the way that Shakespeare undermines revenge tragedy in Hamlet, Rene Girard contends
that Shakespeare transforms the silence "at the heart of
Hamlet" into a subtext, which allows him to provide "the
crowd with the spectacle they demand while simultaneously writing between the lines, for all those who can read,
a devastating critique of that same spectacle" (283, 287) .
MacDonald makes use of similar subtexts in Romeo and
8
Juliet that have often been ignored to show that even
though they have been "really watered . . . down" (49) by
Shakespeare to suit a genre that cannot accommodate
independent women, these women are sisters of the
attractive, strong,
unconventional
women
of
Shakespeare's comedies, who as Evelyn Gajowski has also
noted, "interpenetrate the tragic genre and even destabilize it" (22) . MacDonald also foregrounds places in
Shakespeare's plays where Shakespeare appears to challenge what her play's protagonist, Constance Ledbelly,
refers to as the "tragic tunnel vision" (ref) of a genre which
equates romantic love and death, and a code of male honour and destruction .
"As for the women . . :' Sears fleshes out the female cast . Shown here (I-r) are Barbara
Barnes Hopkins as Maji and Dawn Roach as Amah .
PHOTO BY CYLLA VON TIEDEMANN
CTR 111
his determination not to "change the recipe," but to claim
a "piece" of the sexist and racist "pie" that is white patri-
Kirpal, Viney, ed . The New Indian Novel in English
1980s . Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1990 .
: A Study of the
Much, Rita . "Ann-Marie MacDonald : Interview." Fair
Play, 12
Women Speak: Conversations with Canadian Playwrights . Judith
archy (Sears 73) .
In summary, in their adaptations, these Canadian
playwrights certainly do use Shakespeare's plays for
applied politics: to raise questions about the male-dominated academy, the politics of war, the racism faced by
Rudakoff and Rita Much . Toronto : Simon & Pierre, 1990 .
127-143 .
MacDonald, Ann-Marie . Goodnight Desdemona
Juliet) . Toronto : Coach House Press, 1990 .
(Good Morning
blacks in North American society, "the ways one gets on
the mainstage" (Clarke xx), and other social and political
issues . But what is really significant about these playwrights' endeavour is their refusal to start a new picture
from scratch . Instead of painting over Shakespeare's work,
they touch it up some places and in others add their own
representations to stand beside his. In so doing, they are
engaged in the constructive postcolonial project that
Rushdie calls "redescribing a world ." And by adding to
Mishra, Vijay and Bob Hodge . "What is Post(-)colonialism?"
Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory : A Reader . Ed .
Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia
UP, 1994 . 276-290 .
Neely, Carol Thomas . "Epilogue : Remembering Shakespeare,
Revising Ourselves ." Women's Re-Visions of Shakespeare: On
Responses of Dickinson, Woolf, Rich, H.D ., Eliot, and Others . Ed .
Marianne Novy . Urbana and Chicago : U of Illinois P, 1990 .
242-52 .
the cultural canvas those perspectives previously left out
of the picture, they are, again in Rushdie's words, taking
the "necessary first step towards changing" a world (14),
towards transforming the nature of reality . After all, "it is
not the literal past," as Brian Friel writes in Translations, or
Novy, Marianne . "Saving Desdemona and/or Ourselves: Plays
by Ann-Marie MacDonald and Paula Vogel." Transforming
Shakespeare : Contemporary Women's Re-Visions in Literature and
Performance . Ed . Marianne Novy. NY: St . Martin's Press, 1999 .
"the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past
embodied in language" (445) . CTR
Roberts, David . Comic Relations : Studies in the Comic, Satire
Parody . Ed . Pavel Petr, David Roberts, Philip Thomson .
Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1985 .
Works Cited
Robinson, Lillian S. and Lise Vogel. "Modernism and History."
Images of Women in Fiction : Feminist Perspectives. Ed . Susan
Koppelman Cornillon. Bowling Green, OH : Bowling Green
State UP, 1972 . 278-307 .
Performing Nostalgia : Shifting Shakespeare and the
Contemporary Past. London : Routledge, 1996.
Bennett, Susan .
Clarke, Margaret. "Gertrude and Ophelia ."
1993) : S1-S15 .
Theatrum (April/May
-. Personal Interview. 4 May, 1998 .
Case, Sue-Ellen .
Feminism and Theatre . New York : Methuen, 1988 .
Friel, Brian. "Introduction ."
377-451 .
Translations. London : Faber, 1996 .
Gabereau, Vicky. "Interview with Margaret Clarke ."
CBC Radio, 5 February, 1992 .
Gabereau .
The Art of Loving : Female Subjectivity and Male
Discursive Traditions in Shakespeare's Tragedies . Newark: U of
Gajowski, Evelyn.
Delaware P, 1992.
Gass, Ken.
Claudius . Toronto : Playwrights Canada Press, 1995 .
Girard, Rene. "Hamlet's Dull Revenge : Vengeance in Hamlet ." A
Theater of Envy : William Shakespeare . New York and Oxford :
Oxford UP, 1991 . 271-289 .
Greenblatt, Stephen . "Culture ." Critical Terms for Literary Study.
Ed . Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin . Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1990. 225-232 .
Hart, Jonathan and Terry Goldie . "Post-Colonial Theory ."
Rogers, Sheila . "Interview with Ann-Marie MacDonald ."
Arts Tonight . CBC Radio, 24 February, 1992 .
Rose, Margaret. "Defining Parody."
(1980) : 5-20 .
The
Southern Review XIII .1
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands:
London : Granta Books, 1991 .
Sears, Djanet.
and
Essays and Criticism .
Harlem Duet . Toronto: Scirocco Drama, 1997 .
Shakespeare, William . The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen
Greenblatt, et al . New York : W.W. Norton, 1997 .
Slemon, Stephen and Helen Tiffin, ed . After Europe: Critical
Theory and Post-Colonial Writing . Sydney: Dangaroo P, 1989 .
Vickers, Brian . Appropriating Shakespeare : Contemporary
Quarrels . New Haven and London : Yale UP, 1993 .
Critical
White, Jonathan, ed . Recasting the World : Writing After
Colonialism . Baltimore : Johns Hopkins UP, 1992 .
Linda Burnett teaches Shakespeare at Tennessee State
University, Nashville . She is working on a book entitled
Women's Lament and Shakespeare's Self-Subverting Tragedy .
Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory : Approaches
Scholars, Terms . Ed . Irena R . Makaryk. Toronto: U of Toronto P,
1993 .155-58.
Past the
Last Post : Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism . Ed .
Hutcheon, Linda . "Circling the Downspout of Empire ."
Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin . Calgary : U of Calgary P, 1990 .
167-189 .
Theory of Parody : The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art
Forms. New York and London : Methuen, 1985 .
-. A
SUMMER 2002
9
The Spectre o
Straight
Shakespeare
New ways of looking at old texts in
Goodnight Desdemona and Mad Boy
Chronicle.
by ELLEN MACKAY
he constitutive Shakespeareanness of Canadian
theatre is a fact little neglected by either its historians or its critics . Yet the imperial logic that
brought about this cultural paradox, and that surfaces, for instance, in Tyrone Guthrie's invention of
Shakespeare as the prerequisite to a national stage, or in
Michael Langham's grumpy contention with the "unnerving assault of Canadian nationalism" while at the helm of
the Stratford Festival (7), remains a beguiling topic of critical inquiry, particularly for its flagrant, unapologetic visibility. What is perhaps less conspicuous - or rather, what
lies hidden in plain sight - is the degree to which this institutionalization of Shakespeare at the heart of Canadian
theatrical culture has promoted, by Stratfordian repetition,
straight and narrow gender roles . Even those few productions that have foregrounded national issues rather than
the putatively universal appeal of young or dynastic love
- Langham's Anglo/Quebecois Henry V, for instance, or
the Lepage/McCall Romeo & Juliette - only illustrate the
reflexiveness with which Shakespearean dramatizations of
courtship and marriage have been tapped as allegories of
reconciliation for Canada's "two solitudes ."1 In other
words, Canadian Shakespeare, when it acknowledges its
local habitation, disseminates politics in terms and acts of
heterosexual love .
T
The omnipresence of this idiom makes itself felt in
the very architecture of Canada's pre-eminent
Shakespearean stage . For in its self-conscious evocation of
the Globe, Stratford's Festival Theatre, the locational ne
plus ultra in the teleology of mainstream Canadian actorly,
directorial and designer achievement, is haunted by heteroerotic romance and, which is all too much the same
thing, heteroerotic disaster. That burnished playing space
is dominated by a second-story gallery, supported by
columns that demarcate a latter-day discovery space
below. The overall effect is of a Tudor wooden glow, but
more particularly, the Festival stage's furnishings call to
mind the architecture of Romeo's ascendant wooing scene,
with its balcony always already "o'erperched" by "love's
light wings" (2.1 .108) and its room beneath imprinted by
the "mistress" discovered there "murdered in her bed"
10
The "bona fide" Desdemona, played by Alison seat' Smith in the Canadian Stage pro
duction of Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) in 2001, directed by Alisa
Palmer. "Shakespeare really watered her down, eh?"
PHOTO BY MICHAEL COOPER
(5 .1 .192) . These associations are not anecdotal . A glossy,
souvenir publication entitled Shakespeare: Court, Crowd, and
Playhouse inscribes as the exemplary use of "the gallery
above the stage" the "balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet"
(69) 2 ; to turn to a more high-brow authority, The Norton
Shakespeare similarly lists Juliet's balcony first and foremost among the dramatic places mapped onto the "above"
space (3287) . Likewise, the "poisoned sight" of wife-murder that concludes Othello is the spectacle most searingly
bound up with the discovery space (5 .1 .362) ; to account for
this theatrical locale, the New Globe web site explains that
its curtains "could be opened up to show a king's throne,
or Desdemona's bed, or the body of Polonius" (Gurr,
"Experimenting . . ."), though, as Michael Neill has proved
in his discussion of the astonishing output of illustrations
of Othello's bedchamber scene, it is the second of these
examples that has most tenaciously gripped the popular
imagination and best fed the public's "voyeuristic compulsions" (267) . So it is that before the gender dynamics of
its Shakespearean repertoire are taken into account, the
Festival stage is inflected by what D .A . Miller calls the
"hetero-structuration of the visual field" (109) .
When they are taken into account, the critical complexity of those gender dynamics tends to be not very
much in evidence either in the interpretative practices of
the Stratford directoriate or in the more abstract and generalized understanding of Shakespeare as a man and a
dramatic legacy. For though academics have long detected
in boy actors, cross-dressing characters and certain sonnets
rich opportunities for questioning how stable and normative heterosexuality was to Shakespeare, his work is
nonetheless writ large in mass culture as the stuff straight
love stories are made on . Richard Burt takes this argument
to its corporeal extreme by illustrating the frequency with
which Shakespeare's plays have been appropriated, adapted and cited in pornographic films ; Othello : Dangerous
Desire (Joe D'Amato 1997), The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and
CTR 111
Juliet (A . P. Stootsberry 1968) and Hamlet: For the Love of
Ophelia (Luca Damiano 1996) - to cite three of Burt's
numerous examples - demonstrate as explicitly as any
critic could hope that the plays from which they derive
exert a heterosexual imperative . Less raunchily, the Oscarwinning Shakespeare In Love (John Madden, 1999) makes
the same point, by imagining the playwright' s literary
achievement to depend upon his own lived history of
glamorous (if brief) romance . Indeed, the bet cinematized
Shakespeare wins for having dramatized "the true nature
of love" - the kind, of course, that dare speak its name - is
clinched by virtue of the fact that he embodies and literally stands in for his own romantic hero of Romeo ; moreover, he does so upon a stage made safe for the Hollywood
mainstream by its unhistorical incorporation of a clearly
female Juliet . (In what seems like an anxious refutation of
Judith Butler's claim for the performativity of gender, heterosexual love in this imagined inaugural production is
not feigned by men and boys but is instead emphatically,
biologically authentic .) So whatever the indeterminacy of
his sexuality, and whatever gender radicalness scholars
might detect in his work and theatre, Shakespeare is popularly embraced as a figure altogether straightened out,3
to the degree that Romeo and Juliet is no mere play, and its
author no mere playwright, but serve as metonyms for
true, perfect and - as in all ideology, it goes without saying - heterosexual love . As the RSC director Barry Kyle
recounts in an interview about Shakespeare's enduring
popularity,
The stories told (and retold) by Shakespeare have
become "myths" that people respond to almost
subconsciously. A friend once told me about a conversation with a boyfriend and this guy said,
"Look, it may not be Romeo and Juliet, but I still love
you ." That's why the plays continue to interest us .
(Cooper, N .35)
To look to Shakespeare as the core of Canada's theatrical practice is therefore to see, if not necessarily to perceive, canonical drama as heteronormative drama . It is
this tradition of sexual tradition, as it were, so surreptitiously imprinted upon Canadian theatre and public consciousness, that is interrogated by Ann Marie
MacDonald's Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)
and Michael O'Brien's Mad Boy Chronicle - two plays that
use Shakespeare to uncover and display a broader spectrum of gender behaviours . Their strategies of
Shakespearean usage prove particularly canny, for by
hitching their plots to the star of Canada's most prestigious theatre festival, both MacDonald and O'Brien
endow their plays with a claim to critical importance (and
indeed, both plays have been recognized with awards and
accolades4 ), even as they seek to undermine the narrowness of vision that comes with reverentially restaging his
works . Both Goodnight Desdemona and Mad Boy play off,
and profit from, the fetishization of Shakespeare by engaging in a conceit of textual priority : each play represents
itself as a more authentic, more historical account of the
travails of characters adulterated by the Bard - as
MacDonald's Constance succinctly puts it, after an
encounter with the "bona fide" Desdemona, "Boy,
Shakespeare really watered her down, eh?" (49) . The
mechanics of this operation differ from play to play: while
Goodnight Desdemona dramatizes an untenured female lecturer's magical quest for the ur-text that Shakespeare
plundered to create Othello and Romeo and Juliet, Mad Boy
stages, with abundant comic license, thirteenth-century
Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta Danorum, the
acknowledged source of Hamlet. Both works, however, by
bringing into focus the illusion of Shakespeare's originality, not to mention the impossibility of retrieving his "original" texts, make it possible to see Shakespearean plays as
fictions and constructs rather than as masterful illuminations of trans-historical truths . The implications of this
rather postmodern observation - one normally confined to
Desdemona exhibits a martial
ferocity to rival Othello's .
Alison Sealy Smith and Andy
Velasquez as Desdemona and
lago at the Canadian Stage .
PHOTO BY MICHAEL COOPER
SUMMER 2002
11
academic discussion - are particularly pronounced when
the plays treat issues of gender . For instance, when she
recovers the "real" Romeo from Shakespeare's allegedly
"corrupt" script (15), Constance discovers that the true
nature of his love is that it "swing[s]" like a "capricious
pendulum" (66) in its gender preference; so unabashedly
polymorphous is Romeo's desire that he switches his
attentions in an instant from Juliet to the apparently male
"Constantine," and resolves to "wear a woman's gown" in
order to embody the "piece of skirt" he feels sure his new
love seeks (66) . In scenes like this one (and she scripts several), MacDonald imagines Shakespeare's world-picture to
be a bowdlerization of a much more diverse historical reality, replete with individuals entirely (and rather hilariously) unfettered by supposedly natural sexual alignments .
As befits rewrites of Shakespeare, both Goodnight
Desdemona and Mad Boy have garnered critical attention
for their literary achievement, the former for MacDonald's
"skill . . . in making up pseudo-Shakespearean blank
verse" (Crew), the latter for O'Brien's "amusing
debase[ment]" of "the exquisite poetry of Shakespeare"
(Morrow), or, somewhat less ambivalently, his creation of
a "silly yet plausible dialect" that is "wonderfully suited to
a portrait of the Vikings as dirty, crude, cruel and none too
bright" (Taylor) . But while these plays manifestly rewrite
and rework Shakespeare's verse, 5 and thereby broaden the
scope of what good - i.e ., Shakespearean - theatre sounds
like, they also, arguably more crucially, revise the iconography of Shakespearean performance . For though
Canada's preoccupation with Shakespeare originates with
the acknowledged excellence of his writing - his plays initially substituted for a national dramatic literature that had
yet to emerge, then set an impossible standard for it to
achieve - the ideological impact of his work lies less in
what it says that in what it looks to be saying .
Take, for example, Hamlet apostrophizing Yorick's
skull, a posture of soliloquy frequently reproduced, and
associated particularly with Lawrence Olivier's 1948 black
and white film - not coincidentally, the first production of
the play to penetrate mass culture .6 Hamlet's selfdescribed "readiness" that follows his encounter with the
remains of Yorick is not as grand as the warmongering
machismo of Henry V, but it has set a pattern and privilege
of masculinity : that of stoicism in the knowledge of death's
implacable force . The diffusion of Hamlet/Hamlet as epitomized in this iconic pose, however, transmits more than
what such a contextualized reading would tell . For in the
pensive Hamlet, iconographically not much different from
Rodin's "The Thinker," the act of study, the enterprise of
metaphysics, the prerogative of solitude, the very selfawareness that is the prerequisite for melancholy, are all
gendered male, classed aristocratic and raced white . While
not everyone has read the story of Hamlet, it is nearly
impossible to have avoided contact with this sight of him,
and to have failed to absorb the message that it canonizes
by virtue of the play's own cultural canonicity - namely,
that the script of heroic masculinity (as written by the most
"truthful" and "universal" of authors) celebrates the nobility of the nobleman's philosophical struggle, and romaticizes his antisocial (not to mention misogynist) deportment .
12
I
A
Juliet is clearly undaunted by the heterosexual imperative . Ann-Marie
MacDonald as Constance and Cara Pifko as Juliet (1-r) . "Heavenly days,
what's come over you?"
PHOTO BY MICHAEL COOPER
Contrast this image of Hamlet to the Mad Boy
Horvendal in O'Brien's play, on a "frozen swamp"
addressing the skull of a "cannibalized wolf" with suicidal
fervour, pleading for the "dead doggie" to lead the way to
oblivion, once he has bashed a hole in the ice with its cranium to provide himself an exit from the mortal plane
(130) . And the companion spectacle to this reconfiguration
of Hamlet's momento mori is Lilja, Ophelia's equivalent,
holding the severed head of her disastrously unpaternal
father in a pose that similarly calls to mind Hamlet's Yorick
scene (save for the fact that Lilja has just performed her
father's decapitation) . While these re-visions smack of parody, Mad Boy Chronicle defuses such a misapprehension by
representing itself as the source that Shakespeare appropriated, and not as an appropriation of Shakespeare . And
while this claim is something of a tongue-in-cheek authorial gambit - O'Brien acknowledges "scop[ing] inspiration"
from works that had no influence on Shakespeare, like
Jane Goodall's Life Among the Wild Chimpanzees and
Hrafnkel's Saga "by some Icelandic monk," as well as from
Shakespeare himself (8) - there is truth to the historicity of
the gendered behaviour he puts on display ; to wit, Sela, a
Norwegian princess affiliated with the Amleth (or Hamlet)
story, is presented by Grammaticus as "a skilled warrior
and experienced in roving" (Grammaticus 23), praise well
suited to the take-charge character of Lilja, who does not
suffer tyranny (domestic or monarchical) gladly .
By proffering these kinds of striking iconographic
subversions and inversions, and by presenting them as
original scenes which Hamlet debased (and not vice versa),
O'Brien makes visible Shakespeare's contortion of a rather
nasty history of equal opportunity violence into a
Renaissance fable of masculine loss and transcendence . In
other words, O'Brien outs the constructedness of Hamlet's
idealized masculinity, thereby dispelling the aura of timeless archetype that it has come to acquire. At the American
CTR 111
debut of Mad Boy, directed by Denise Gillman at the 24th
Street Theatre in Los Angeles, the production poster
accosted its audience by taking this gesture of outing even
further : the caption attached to the fierce-looking Viking
who dominates the frame proclaims "Hamlet is a pixie
boy!" The significance of this promotional come-on is
tricky to tease out : on one hand, the Viking might represent Fengo/Claudius, taunting his nephew in typical
Helsingor style, albeit using Renaissance nomenclature .
But if it is Shakespeare's character - the one who actually
goes by the name of Hamlet - that the Viking is referencing, then Gillman's Mad Boy Chronicle would seem to
announce a larger ambition, which is to read back into that
most famous of tragedies a script of male heroism that is,
by comparison to Grammaticus's saga, a little queer .
Though the tone is of a locker-room insult, the effect is to
restore to Hamlet the kinds of sexual alignments and gendered behaviours all but eradicated by present-day investments in glorifying the Shakespearean protagonist as a
masculine, and thus inevitably straight, hero .
In Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) Ann
Marie MacDonald engages in exactly this kind of restorative re-vision by retooling, like O'Brien, the iconic
moments of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies . To
return to the heteroerotically haunted "above" space, for
instance, MacDonald rewrites the scene of Juliet's wooing
into a scene of Juliet as wooer, with the ostensible ingenue
clad in men's apparel, appealing to the perplexed and balconied Constance from Romeo's place below. Labouring
under the misconception that Constance is a boy - "a
young deviant of Greece" in point of fact (68) - Juliet
appeals to her love in familiar terms, but with some critical differences :
Oh Constantine, wherefore are thou bent? I . . . I
Deny thy preference and refuse thy sex ;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And henceforth never will I be a girl . (68)
Like Romeo, Juliet is clearly undaunted by the heterosexual imperative that her tragedy has helped to
enforce . But as MacDonald argues, her character's sexual
brashness is not a belated invention, but a recuperation of
a defiance already authentically present in the text . In an
interview with the Washington Post, MacDonald asserts
that her impulse to write Goodnight Desdemona was her
frustration with the fact that the women in Shakespeare
"were all a bunch of wimps" (Sommers) . Upon closer
analysis, however, MacDonald noticed that "the fault lay
not so much with Shakespeare as with the productions
[she] had seen at Stratford [Ontario]," in which "characters
such as Desdemona and Juliet were depicted as gossamer,
delicate, feminine in the extreme ."
In lieu of Stratford's tradition of extremity,
MacDonald provides her own equally radical vision of
Shakespearean femininity, displacing Juliet from her perch
and Desdemona from her bed . The former acquires a
capacity to desire that refuses modern categorization (and
points back to the Renaissance as an era that lacked a rigid
concept of sexual identity), while the latter exhibits a martial ferocity that rivals Othello's . Attired like an Amazon,
Desdemona proves herself as "gullible and violent" as her
husband (85), and in the end it is she who suffers the hallucinatory jealousy and wields the lethal pillow in
MacDonald's play. The discomfort that these role reversals
engender - as Constance says to Juliet, "heavenly days,
what's come over you?!/You're supposed to be all innocence" (69) - only highlights the synonymousness of idealized womanhood with passivity and renders obvious the
performative and ideological limitations of that construct .
The slyest re-vision of Shakespeare at work in
Goodnight Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet, however, is the
"Alas poor Yorick" revisited : the Mad Boy (Shaun Smyth) pleads for
doggie-assisted suicide in the Alberta Theatre Projects playRites
Festival production in 1995, directed by Bob White .
PHOTO BYTRUDIE LEE
SUMMER 2002
writer/actor simultaneously embodied by Constance and enacted in turn, in Canadian Stage's 2001 revival, by
MacDonald herself - whose on-stage presence makes visible the author's role in scripting human "nature" (and
doesn't merely reflect it back in some impartial mirror) .
Like Shakespeare, whose conjectured performance as the
Ghost in his own tragedy literalizes his spectral presence
in Hamlet, Constance/MacDonald stands at the centre of
Goodnight Desdemona and impels a certain kind of story to
be played out . That is, her dramatized perception of
Desdemona and Juliet produces a different, but no less
authentic, take on these women . The resulting play
demonstrates that revision is a viable alternative to dominant Shakespeare, but it is the elusive manuscript
Constance seeks that finally explains the necessity of her
repositioned gaze : "For those of you who have the eyes to
see : Take care - for what you see, just might be thee" (86) .
What this aphorism seems to say is that Canada's
peculiar compulsion to discern its culture in performances
13
of Shakespeare entails, as the legacy of this myopia, the
inscription of apparently Shakespearean - but, more accurately, Stratfordian - ideologies onto Canadian audiences .
As MacDonald and O'Brien prove, a fine way of disrupting the conservative gender politics disseminated by the
visual culture of Shakespeare is to stage his plays' own
revisionist tendencies, as well as the blinkered interpretive
conventions that govern Shakespearean production . By
reconfiguring the iconography of Othello, Romeo and Juliet
and Hamlet, and by doing so with the aim of painting a
truer historical and literary picture, Goodnight Desdemona
and Mad Boy Chronicle demonstrate that the performance
of gender exhibited across Canada's most famous stage,
and at play in the works of Canada's most revered author,
is just that : a performance . CTR
Notes
1 In his article "From Nationalist to Multinational : The Stratford
Festival, Free Trade and the Discourses of Intercultural
Tourism," Richard Paul Knowles discusses the "cynic[ism]" of
Langham's gesture at Canadian content in this 1956 production (24) .
2 This colourful guidebook is sold at London's New Globe gift
shop.
3 For a sharp and detailed account the ways Madden's film
straightens out its subject, see Sujata Iyengar's "Shakespeare in
HeteroLove ."
4 Goodnight Desdemona received the Dora best play award, the
Governor General's Award (1990) for Drama, and the
Chalmers Award (1988) . Mad Boy was nominated for the
Governor General's Award (1996) .
5 In MacDonald's case, this reworking blurs the divide between
Shakespeare's reverenced verse and Goodnight Desdemona's
additions to . it, for although the print text of her play italicizes
quotations from Shakespeare, audiences have no way (save
prior knowledge) of segregating new lines from old . By this
indistinction, MacDonald broadens the repertoire of canonical
drama and problematizes the obviousness of Shakespeare's literary supremacy .
6 So well received was his film that Olivier earned a Best
Director and a Best Actor Oscar for his effort .
Stephen Greenblatt. New York : Norton, 1997 .
Iyengar, Sujata . "Shakespeare in HeteroLove ." Literature/Film
Quarterly 29. 2 (2001) : 122-7
Knowles, Richard Paul . "From Nationalist to Multinational : The
Stratford Festival, Free Trade and the Discourses of
Intercultural Tourism ." Theatre journal 47 (1995) : 19-42 .
Langham, Michael . Introd. The Stratford Scene 1958-1968 .Ed .
Peter Raby . Toronto : Clark, Irwin, 1968 . 6-12 .
Laroque, Francois . Shakespeare : Court, Crowd and Playhouse . Trans.
Alexandra Campbell. London : Thames and Hudson, 1993,
1997 .
MacDonald, Ann Marie . Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning
Juliet) . Toronto : Coach House Press, 1990 .
Miller, D . A . "Visual Pleasure in 1959." Out Takes : Essays on Queer
Theory and Film . Ellis Hanson, Ed . Durham : Duke UP, 1999 .
97-128 .
Morrow, Martin . "A Viking free-for-all, February 6, 1995 ."
Reprinted in Michael O'Brien . Mad Boy Chronicle . Toronto :
Playwrights Canada Press, 1996 .
Neill, Michael . "`Unproper Beds' : Race Adultery and the
Hideous in Othello ." Putting History to the Question : Power,
Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama New York :
Columbia UP, 2000 . 348-412 .
Madden, John, dir. Shakespeare In Love . Miramax : 1998 .
Shakespeare, William . Hamlet . Ed . Harold Jenkins. London : The
Arden Shakespeare, Routlege, 1982 .
- . Othello . Ed . E . A . J . Honigmann . London : The Arden
Shakespeare, Routlege, 1997 .
- . Romeo and Juliet . Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. The Norton
Shakespeare. New York : Norton, 1997.
Sommers, Pamela. "Get Thee to a Funnery ; Shakespeare is Hot.
But Why Will? And Why Now?" Washington Post 20 February
1994: G 4 .
Taylor, Kate . "Mad Boy Chronicle : Black Spoof Charming if
Lightweight ." The Globe and Mail 23 August 1997 .
Ellen MacKay is a doctoral candidate in theatre at Columbia
University.
Works Cited
Burt, Richard . Unspeakable Shaxxxpeares : Queer Theory and
American Kiddie Culture . New York : St . Martin's Press, 1998 .
Cooper, Jeanne . "What's Shaking in Washington Theater?
Shakespeare, All Over" The Washington Post 4 February 1994 : N
35 .
Crew, Robert . "Goodnight Desdemona Puts a Twist on The
Bard ." The Toronto Star 4 April 1988 . C 5 .
Grammaticus, Saxo . Historica Danica . Trans . Oliver Elton .
London : D. Nutt, 1894 . In Joseph Satin, ed. Shakespeare and his
Sources . Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1966 .
Gurr, Andrew. "Experimenting with the Globe ." 11 December
2001 . Available:
http ://www.rdg .ac .uk/globe/Articles/experiments .htm
- . "The Shakespearean Stage" The Norton Shakespeare . Gen . Ed .
14
CTR 111
Dave veut jouer
Richard III
Interrogating the Shakespearean
Body in Quebec I
by LEANORE LIEBLEIN
"C'est `touchy,' les handicapes, hien?" Pictured here are Salome Corbo
as Lady Anne and Dave Richer as Richard III in Dave veut jouer Richard III
at Nouveau Theatre Experimental .
PHOTO BY LUCTAILLON
hakespeare has always served francophone Quebec
as a site of difference . He has been both a rival to
Moliere and an agent of the British and angloCanadian other. His work has been emulated and
denigrated, parodied and defaced . Even when admired,
the performance of Shakespeare in Quebec has never been
uncontaminated by its multiple colonial associations ; thus,
Quebec adaptations of Shakespeare have also been a site of
resistance : Michel Garneau's 1978 "translation" of Macbeth
into Quebecois, for example, demonstrated in the context
of his nationalist project that Quebecois was not merely a
dialect but a language, one that had the maturity and the
flexibility to render the words of even Le grand Will . At the
same time, given Garneau's sense of Quebec's otherness of
language, culture and politics, the ostensible act of translation could not be other than an act of adaptation - or
tradaptation, the word he coined - in which Shakespeare's
Scotland became "notre pauvre pays," the victim of a
tyrannical oppressor (Brisset 199-297 and passim) .
Through the act of adaptation, Quebec playwrights
have used Shakespeare to explore their difference and
resistance . Since 1968, when in Robert Gurik's parody
Hamlet became a prince of a Quebec longing to be free of
a federalist Canada, Shakespearean adaptation has been a
medium for staging the Quebecois, as opposed to the
Canadian, body politic . Quebec has been represented in a
variety of ways, from a giant wooden horse in Jean-Claude
Germain s Rodeo et Juliette (1970) to an impotent king surrounded by a monetarily, sexually and scatologically
obsessed younger generation in Jean-Pierre Ronfard's carnivalesque Lear (1977) .
In October 2001, the Nouveau Theatre Experimental
(NTE) presented an "atelier" titled Dave veut jouer Richard
III, which once again explored Shakespeare as a site of difference and resistance . "Dave" is Dave Richer, an actor suffering since birth from cerebral palsy, and the production written by Alexis Martin, directed by Jean-Pierre Ronfard
and performed by Daniel Briere, Salome Corbo and Dave
Richer - stages his desire to play the tragedy of the
deformed king . In Dave veut jouer it is Dave's disability that
becomes the register of difference and Shakespeare's play
becomes its instrument .
S
SUMMER 2002
Dave veut jouer is not easy to watch . Dave performs
not only Richard but also himself, not only Shakespeare's
character but also his own handicap . His performance confronts the audience with the discomfort people tend to feel
when presented with the efforts of movement and the
efforts of speech of the disabled actor . It leads to spectator
ambivalence : licensed by the invitation of theatrical performance to look, the social taboo against staring at a
handicapped person leaves one, at times, longing to look
away. In the words of playwright Alexis Martin, "C'est
'touchy,' les handicapes, hein?" ( qtd . in Belair) .
Like many other Quebecois Shakespeare adaptations,
Martin's text cannibalizes Shakespeare's in order to
explore the issue of performing otherness . Similarly, the
challenge of Dave's performance lies in the assertion of the
right of his handicapped body to participate in and claim
for itself the authority of Shakespeare . By staging his disability and compelling spectators to experience their
unease, he exposes the orthodoxies of the Shakespearean
acting tradition that we have taken for granted . Dave's
desire to play Richard is rooted in his identification with a
character in whose deformity he sees an emblem of his
own . For an audience, however, the imposition of Dave's
handicapped body on the Shakespearean text is scandalous . The discomfort spectators experience forces them
to confront their presuppositions about playing
Shakespeare and their expectations for Shakespearean performance . By differing from the "norm" of Shakespearean
acting, which is usually so taken for granted that it is naturalized into invisibility, the transgressiveness of Dave's
acting foregrounds the embodiedness of theatrical performance and our assumptions about what we have taken
to be the Shakespearean body, even when that body is
enacting the supposedly deformed King Richard . Dave
veut jouer adapts Shakespeare's Richard III to raise questions about the Shakespearean body. Further, as a production of the Nouveau Theatre Experimental, Dave veut jouer
participates in a tradition of using the body as a site on
which to explore Quebecois ambivalence toward
Shakespeare.
This article discusses the complex relationship of
Alexis Martin's text to Shakespeare's, and Dave's body to
15
Richard's . I will explore the intersection of Dave the actor
(or is "Dave" in fact a dramatic character played by Dave
Richer within the fiction of Dave vent jouer?) with Richard
the character, ultimately suggesting that Dave's identification with the character of Richard is complicated by the
way in which his performance interrogates both the
Shakespearean text and the Shakespeare body.
First, it is important to understand the NTE's atelier
process itself as an act of interrogation . The Nouveau
Theatre Experimental grew out of the Theatre
Experimental de Montreal (founded 1975) and has always
been faithful to its mandate of exploring theatre as a medium of creation and communication . These explorations
have taken many forms, from the reconceiving of classic
texts to the creation of new work . In recent years, however, one of the NTE's favoured forms has been the atelier, a
low-budget workshop around a problem or question, the
fruits of which are shared in performance with an audience. Described by Michel Belair as an intermediate form
somewhere between roundtable discussion and theatrical
performance (C3), recent ateliers have focused on individual theatrical components or performative elements .
Light, words, objects and the voice are the ones mentioned
in the program .
This spirit of interrogation is reflected, in the case of
Dave vent jouer Richard III, not only in the text but in the
choice of performance space . While the old fire station
known as L'Espace Libre, which the NTE has shared with
Theatre Omnibus (and in earlier years with Carbone 14), is
being renovated, the company has become itinerant, and
with their usual flair, has chosen to theatricalize the
unlikely space of the small Justine Lacoste-Beaubien medical lecture amphitheatre in the basement of the Sainte-
_.may
J•
"To lose oneself in one's character is to forget one's handicap ; to find oneself in
one's character is to efface one's otherness ." Jacques (Daniel Briere), coaches Dave
Richer as Richard III from Dave's wheelchair.
Justine Children's Hospital . It is a modern lecture hall,
with conventional lighting, a small semi-circular stage and
seating for sixty. The stage is backed by a blackboard on
which are written the names of the dramatis personae of
Shakespeare's play and their genealogies . The pedagogical
and clinical setting of the performance and the institutional look of Dave's room, in which the play is set, not only
invites reflection on the trope of disability as difference
raised by the production itself but also is intended to suggest its relevance to the experience of the sick and handicapped children who inhabit the floors above (Martin, q td .
i n Belair) .
In Shakespeare's Richard III, the character of Richard
creates himself through his performance . The basic question raised by Martin's script is the relation of the actor to
his role . Dave vent jouer Richard III appropriates the
Shakespearean text, the program tells us, so that it may
"interroge le desir de l'acteur face au personnage qu'il
pourrait incarner" ["interrogate the actor's desire with
respect to the character he might embody"] . The key
words, around which I shall organize the discussion that
follows, are "desire," embody" and "interrogate ."
Desiring
Dave's desire is to forget the limitations of his own
body. It is only "par le jeu ["through acting"] . Par la grace
du jeu . . . " (5)2 (which rhymes with Dieu [God]) that he
has on occasion been able to find a kind of transcendence .
There is also a suggestion that through acting Dave finds
himself (" . . . qa m'a permis de mieux me connaitre et
mieux reconnaitre les autres" [5]) . There are two intertwined discourses at work here - the discourse of the
transparent actor who disappears into the character he
represents and the discourse of Shakespeare's universality,
in which the dilemma of the deformed king crosses centuries and continents to speak to the experience of a handicapped person today. Both discourses are problematized,
however, by the suggestion that Dave's ability to disappear into the role depends upon the very thing he is trying
to forget : the disability that ties him to Richard . Further,
Jacques, the friend and acting coach with whom Dave
meets weekly, belies the possibility of forgetfulness by
suggesting that Dave's performance of Richard improves
to the extent that he recognizes himself in the character.
For the disabled person who is set apart and handicapped
by difference, both discourses have an unmistakable
appeal . To lose oneself in one's character is to forget one's
handicap; to find oneself in one's character is to efface
one's otherness .
At the same time, while both ends may be longed for,
neither is really attainable or even desirable, as the play
shows . Dave acknowledges his special attraction for playing Richard, but he is aware as well of the danger of succumbing to the attractions that Richard represents . In
Richard he sees
PHOTO BY LUC TAILLON
16
CTR 111
to serve his own ends . For example, when it becomes clear
that Jacques's friend Celine, for all the pleasure she has
taken in playing Lady Anne to Dave's Richard, will not
offer him the role in her company's production of
Shakespeare's play, he sublimates his desire for vengeance
by flipping into Richard's lines, asking Catesby to spread
the rumour that his wife is gravely ill, by implication vicariously killing her off as Lady Anne .
Dave's lines as Richard invariably refer to him as
well, because the physical impediments of his body and
the strain of working with them are always before the
spectators' eyes and the actor can never be forgotten in the
character. Since Shakespeare's lines are situated within the
narrative of Dave's handicap and his desire to play
Richard, they invariably refer not only to the Richard
within Shakespeare's play but to the Dave within
Martin's . In the play's persistent metatheatricality Dave is
also himself when he is Richard, and thus the lines resonate in both directions .
For example, when
Dave/Richard, near the end of both Martin's and
Shakespeare's plays, says "Richard aime Richard, et je suis
bien moi" (24) ["Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I"
(5 .3 .183)1 ,3 we understand that Dave who loves Richard is,
like Richard, exploring the question of loving one's notalways-lovable self.
Embodying
In the 1977 Lear by Jean-Pierre Ronfard at Nouveau Theatre
Experimental, the kingdom's moral bankruptcy was inscribed on the
flaccid body of Lear, played by Ronfard himself .
PHOTO BY D. KIEFER
Un infirme qui se venge du monde et des hommes,
qui assassin la beaute, qui salit cc qui est noble,
qui detruit pour le plaisir de detruire ."
[a cripple who takes revenge against the world . . .
who assassinates beauty, who sullies that which is
noble, who destroys for the pleasure of destroying.] (27) .
Richard, who is everything evil, is also what makes it
possible to recognize that which is defined as good :
Richard, c'est le Negatif, qui permet que le Bien triomphe une fois pour toutes! Pour que Richmond (il
pointe du doigt Jacques) puisse exister . . . blond,
beau, juste, et fier, it faut un Richard . . . .
[Richard, he's the Negative, who permits the Good
to triumph once and for all! For Richmond (he
points his finger at Jacques) to be able to exist . . .
blond, beautiful, just, and proud, it takes a
Richard . . . .] (27)
Dave recognizes the dangerous appeal of Richard's
power, independence and audacity. He shares Richard's
sense of being an outsider as well as his anger and his
ambition . But he makes clear that for all its seductiveness,
the vengefulness he attributes to Richard is not the route
that he chooses . However, he uses the Shakespearean text
SUMMER 2002
Dave's desire to play Richard III is only partially fulfilled through his weekly sessions with Jacques, which
remain private . The issues raised by Celine's reluctance to
cast him in a public performance are ones that could also
be raised about the production of Dave veut jouer itself and
are not easily dismissed . For example, Celine raises the
ethical question of making a spectacle of deformity . She
feels it would be exploitative to cast a handicapped person
in the role of Richard, to use his handicap in order to do
something different and for effect . She also insists on the
actor's body as an instrument of his performance and has
the courage to question whether Dave's disabled body is
capable of meeting the demands she, in her role as director, would make upon it .
The question of the actor's relationship to his character in terms of the body has been raised earlier in the play .
When Dave wonders why Jacques, after a successful
career, has been having a hard time getting roles, or even
auditions, Jacques admits that he doesn't know.
C'est mysterieux: pourquoi les gens croient en toi
ou pas? Pourquoi to serais credible clans un role
et pas dans on autre? Pourquoi les roles que to
pourrais interpreter sont rares?
[It's a mystery : why do people believe in you or
why don't they? Why would you be believable in
one role and not in another? Why are the roles
you would be able to interpret rare?] (4)
It may be obvious that all the acting in the world
will not make Dave's handicapped body disappear, but
Jacques in these comments implies that no actor is a
transparent medium who can effortlessly disappear into
17
any and all characters . Nevertheless, the bottom line is
that Jacques still thinks that he can at least try to make
others believe he is Dave, but Dave can never make others believe he is Jacques .
Jacques would like to think that all actors work
against the constraints of their own bodies . The challenge
is to build an interpretation of the character by making use
of one's physical limitations : "Don't you use everything
that you are when you perform?" he asks Celine .
Toi, to utilises pas tout ce que to es quand to fais
un spectacle? . . . Le souvenir de to mere qui es[t]
morte, quand t'as besoin de faire monter les
larmes . . . ton gout du sexe quand t'as besoin
d'avoir fair convaincante en jeune premiere? Tes
seins, tes yeux, to voix pour seduire le public
quand to veux le seduire?
(Jowett 104, 106, 107, 108) . But whatever the relationship of
the physical body of each of these actors to the Richard he
portrays, each could have chosen to portray Richard (within limits, of course) physically otherwise . As Jowett has
written, "Richard's physical characteristics generally
belong to the role as acted rather than the body of the
actor" (33) . This flexibility is denied to Dave Richer . In the
case of Dave, Richard's body is understood to be congruent with his own body, which he inhabits and displays . His
performance insists that he can only be seen as Richard if
he is first seen as himself .
Paradoxically, to see Dave as himself is to understand
[Everything you are can be made use of, and you
don't hesitate to use it! The memory of your dead
mother, when you need to cry . . . your enjoyment
of sex when you need it to convince . . . ? Your
breasts, your eyes, your voice to seduce the audience when you want to? (italics in the original)]
(17)
But Celine accuses Jacques of bad faith . All physical
limitations are not equal . There is a difference in degree
between being short or tall or speaking nasally, and the
speech impediment or the spasticity that are features of
cerebral palsy. The actor's training (after all, Jacques has
been one of her teachers), she argues, is to develop plasticity of the body and the emotions, as well as the freedom
of the actor to make choices in using these instruments .
Dave is not as free as other actors because the range of
possibilities within which he can alter his diction and
movement is narrower in the case of his handicapped
body. Indeed, the audience witnesses the aching legs, the
fatigue, the breathlessness, and the sheer physical effort
that accompany his performance of Richard, sharing
Jacques' anxiety and solicitousness when Dave needs to
take a rest .
And yet, for all the discomfort (for both the actor and
the audience) of watching Dave act, his performance of
Richard is remarkably moving and illuminating . Dave's
desire for Richard is materialized in his performance,
which gives new meaning to Richard's deformity .
Whatever the historical truth, Shakespeare's language
insists on a Richard who is
Rudely stamp'd, [ . . .]
Curtail'd of [ . . .] fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before [his] time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up .
(1.1 .16-21)
On the stage Richard has been represented in a range
of ways from - just to cite some recent performances - the
hunchback on long crutches of Antony Sher (1984) or the
"yuppie with shaved head and pinstriped suit" of
Andrew Jarvis (1988-89) to the fascist of Ian McKellen
(1990) and the "lumpish" Simon Russell Beale (1992)
18
Robert Gravel as Richard Premier with his mother Queen Catherine (Marthe Turgeor
in in Jean-Pierre Ronfard's Vie et mort du Roi Boiteux at Nouveau Theatre Experimental
in 1981 .
PHOTO COURTESY OF NOUVEAU THEATRE EXPERIMENTAL
Richard in a new way. Because for Dave deformity is not
represented but lived, we are invited to imagine a version
of Richard for whom deformity is not a metaphor but a
product of a material body . The insistent presence of
Dave's handicap, in which every word and every movement emerges with enormous strain, makes Dave's performance a hyperrealistic representation of a deformed
Richard .
Interrogating
The presence of Dave Richer the actor in the represented Richard forces us to question our assumptions
about Shakespearean acting . Dave's Richard comes with
impediments of speech and movement . He enunciates
with difficulty and moves lurchingly, and the spectator
must at times wait patiently for the words to emerge and
the movements to be accomplished . The work of his body
is painful and palpable . As Celine (whose training has
striven for a suppleness of the body) recognizes, Dave's
performance makes visible the labour of acting that naturalistic acting is designed to hide . It also makes evident the
work of the audience, who must strain to make sense of the
lines . The effort comes from both sides .
Dave's performance confronts us with our expecta-
CTR 111
tions of the body that plays Shakespeare. It is, we have
learned from Bakhtin, a classical body whose excesses are
a product of the actor's choice, discipline and skill . The
Shakespearean body is not a body whose arms may flail
out to maintain its balance, or a body that occasionally
may need to support itself by leaning on an available wall
or chair or bed . Yet Dave's is a body whose gestures, whatever their source, are made to read, sometimes triumphantly . It is difficult to know whether its postures such as outstretched arms, hand on a raised hip, knees to
the side or crossed ankles, many of which are suggestive
of theatrical cliches of a flamboyant and seductive Richard
- are governed by the actor's interpretive decisions or limited by what the handicapped body can do . But it is difficult not to be impressed by what the handicapped body
can do . For example, the choreography of the stage fight,
which even for the most agile of actors always contains an
element of danger, is breathtaking . Taken together, the
actor's movements generate a coherent and moving theatrical representation of a character who is sometimes
Dave-as-Richard and sometimes Dave .
Dave's Richard similarly makes us aware of and
requires us to re-examine our assumptions regarding
Shakespearean speaking. Recent influential theories of
voice training, which construct the actor's voice and body
"as empty space, the neutral conduits through which
'Shakespeare' can speak directly, uncontaminated by accidentals of historicity" (Knowles 94), make no provision for
the contingency of impaired speech . Dave's voice is nasal,
his speech is slurred and slow, and at the beginning he is
not easy to understand, especially because we have not
been prepared for it by our previous theatregoing experience . Yet Dave in fact does speak the Shakespearean lines
with clarity, emphasis and intelligence, and the effort of
listening pays off. By the end, he seems easier to understand . Jacques comments on his improved diction, but it is
not altogether clear whether Dave has in fact improved,
whether as a good actor he is performing the improvement, or whether the spectators have become better listeners . (Although I should remind readers that I make
these observations as an anglophone for whom French is a
second language and as a Shakespearean for whom the
text of Richard III, even if in French, is familiar, it was my
impression from overheard conversations that other spectators shared my views .)
It is not irrelevant here that the translation Alexis
Martin draws upon for Richard's scenes is the prose translation of Francois-Victor Hugo, a "classic" from the nineteenth century that is generally avoided in contemporary
productions . On the one hand, Dave is trying to claim for
himself a place in the Shakespeare whose authority, in the
French-language tradition, passes through Hugo . On the
other, the lines Dave speaks do not so much render
Shakespeare as render the "idea" of Shakespeare . Rather
than translate Shakespeare's lines, they point to them, and
the focus for the spectator is not so much what the lines
SUMMER 2002
are saying but how they are made to read on Dave's body.
The uniqueness of the challenge offered by Dave veut
jouer Richard III becomes evident in a comparison with Al
Pacino's film Looking for Richard. In both cases the actor,
who is playing himself as well as the Richard he wishes to
perform, is exploring his desire to play the role . Not unlike
Dave, Pacino (with his American accents and intonations)
is trying to enlarge the parameters of the acceptable
Shakespearean voice .
Pacino's focus, however, is on his wish to make
accessible to a popular audience (i .e ., the audience for his
films) the "greatness" and the "relevance" of Shakespeare .
Shakespeare, he assumes, is there to be known if
explained with appreciation (by the person in the street as
well as by experts) and performed with empathy . And the
operative fiction is that even the actor with the turnedaround baseball cap, if he works at it, can (with the help of
talent, makeup and costume) efface himself and transform
himself into Richard . Dave, as we have seen, does not disagree with the attribution of greatness and relevance to
Shakespeare . But Dave veut jouer Richard III not only brackets the Shakespearean text but appropriates it to its own
ends . Implicitly, the play challenges the way in which the
view of playing Shakespeare offered by a film like Looking
for Richard excludes Dave from participating in Pacino's
Shakespeare and leaves Pacino's audience incapable of
recognizing Dave Richer's Richard as Shakespeare .
Recent years have seen a number of theatrical challenges to the classical body. These have included performances by elderly, overweight and handicapped people .
(Such performances differ from a play like David
Freeman's Creeps, which staged cerebral palsy, but did so
in a realistic representational mode and did not employ
handicapped actors .) However, the important thing about
Dave vent jouer Richard III is not that in spite of his disability Dave wants to act, but that Dave wants to act
Shakespeare . In this he, through Martin's text, participates
in the Quebecois challenge to the authority of
Shakespeare . Needless to say, Richard III has been part of
that challenge .
Not that we have seen in Quebec many productions
of the play. Of the forty-seven francophone Shakespeare
productions between 1945 and 1998 in Gilbert David's
theatrographie, only one of Richard III, a joint production in
1989 of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and the
Theatre du Rideau Vert in Montreal, is listed . There have
been no further productions of the play since 1998 . There
have, however, been at least three Quebecois adaptations,
plays in which Shakespeare's Richard III, and through
Richard the Shakespearean body, has been an important
presence - or absence .
The Nouveau Theatre Experimental has, over the
years, been at the forefront of interrogating both
Shakespeare and the Shakespearean body . In the 1977 Lear
by Jean-Pierre Ronfard, in which culture is described as
the life-support system for the dying body which is the
kingdom (28), the kingdom's moral bankruptcy and
exhaustion was inscribed on the flaccid body of Lear in an
19
open dressing gown, while the Edmund-figure sat on a
pail in which he stirred with a finger and then threw
around "boules de marde" ["balls of shit"] and the
Cordelia figure represented her refusal to speak by sticking out her tongue . In 1979-80, members of the Nouveau
Theatre Experimental embarked upon a project called
"Shakespeare Follies," in which the group systematically
studied the plays of Shakespeare and eventually planned a
cabaret-style event to be filled with Shakespearean characters (Godin and Lavoie 12) .
From this work emerged what was to become JeanPierre Ronfard's landmark six-part, all-day Vie et mort du
Roi Boiteux [Life and Death of the Limping King] . Richard
Premier, the Roi Boiteux, is of course, in his disabled body,
his dynastic ambitions, his moral perversity and his murderousness, a version of Shakespeare's Richard . But just as
the Roi Boiteux's body overflows its boundaries, so does
his identity, which in the rich intertextuality of Ronfard's
script is repeatedly invaded by echoes of Oedipus, Nero,
Hamlet, Orestes, Agamemnon and Odysseus, to name a
few. Ronfard's imagination refuses to be contained by
Shakespeare's . And the explicit corporeality of Richard
Premier, who makes his appearance in the world on a cart
filled with meat and blood, is similarly dispersed throughout the play - in the decrepit body of the Lear-like patriarch Filippo Ragone, in the play's juxtaposition of the
sacred with the corporeal and the sexual with the material,
and in repeated references to and displays of bodily orifices, protuberances and processes (Feral 77-78) . Ronfard's
Shakespeare is filtered through the carnivalized and
grotesque body of the Roi Boiteux .
Similarly, in 1985 the Theatre Zoopsie, which
describes its aesthetic as " grossiere et cruelle" ["crude and
cruel"], and in its work explores the relationship between
theatre and economic, social and cultural marginality
(O'Sulllivan 209), presented Richard 3, an adaptation of
Shakespeare's play written and directed by Dennis
O'Sulllivan, who also played the role of Richard . 4 The production seems to have worked through a series of displacements . Spectators convened at the artists' entrance of
the Place-des-Arts theatre complex, were sent to buy their
tickets at the shopping mall across the street and then were
taken by minibus to a number of locations in the city
which stood in for locations in Richard III, finally ending
up in a run-down former commercial space, where the text
was performed . In this production, the body was both corporealized and dematerialized . On the one hand, Richard
wore a necklace of dolls representing his victims . On the
other, Richard played the seduction scene to a Lady Anne
behind a glass on a video monitor he held but whose
screen he could not see . The use of video (representing the
media industries) effected a displacement of the body.
Even the breaking of the glass from behind which Lady
Anne spoke did not liberate her . The fiction of
Shakespeare's Richard III, in O'Sullivari s Richard 3, could
not find its home in the bodies of the actors who were continually being intruded upon by competing economic,
social, material and physical claims .
Finally, 1991 saw the production of Les Reines
[Queens] by Normand Chaurette, an adaptation of
Shakespeare's Richard III in which the body of Richard has
20
disappeared . Richard, an obsessive presence for the
Queens of Chaurette's play, exists not in the body of an
actor but only in the Queens' evocation of him .
Shakespeare in Quebec has been a site of both difference and resistance . Quebecois playwrights have adapted
Shakespeare by carnivalizing, distorting, displacing, and
effacing Shakespearean texts . Dave vent jouer Richard III
participates in this process of engaging and resisting the
cultural authority of Shakespeare by appropriating the
Shakespearean text, by refusing to be bound by the limits
of the classical Shakespearean body, and by refusing to let
Shakespeare remain impervious to the challenge of the disabled body. As one leaves the "theatre" after Dave vent
jouer, one passes through the corridors and staircases of the
Sainte-Justine Children's Hospital to reach the street . The
world of the hospital has made a space for the world of
Shakespeare; in Dave veut jouer Richard III the world of
Shakespeare has been penetrated by the world of Dave's
disability and the world of the hospital .CTR
Notes
1 Some of the work in this article has benefited from support to
the McGill Shakespeare in Performance Research Team by the
Fonds pour la Formation de Chercheurs et l'Aide a la
Recherche (FCAR) of the Ministry of Education of Quebec . I am
grateful to graduate assistant Felicity Enayat for her contribution.
2 Citations from the play are taken from the typescript generously provided by Isabelle Gingras of the NTE . Translations into
English are my own .
3 All lines in English from Richard III are taken from The Riverside
Shakespeare.
4 I am guided in my comments on this production by Paul
Lefebvre's description in Jeu .
Works Cited
Belair Michel. "Qui jouez-vous, vous? Un atelier du NTE se
penche cette fois sur le personnage, le role, l'image . . . " Le
Devoir 13-14 Oct. 2001 .
Brisset, Annie . Sociocritique de la traduction : Theatre et alterite au
Quebec (1968-1988). Longueuil : Le Preambule, 1990.
Chaurette, Normand . Les Reines . Ottawa: Lemeac, 1991 .
David, Gilbert . "Shakespeare au Quebec : theatrographie des productions francophones (1945-1998) ." L'Annuaire theatral 24
(1998) :117-38 .
Feral, Josette . "L'oeuvre ouverte ." Cahiers de theatre Jeu 2 :27
(1983) : 67-84.
Freeman, David . Creeps . Toronto : U of Toronto P, 1972 .
Garneau, Michel, trans . Macbeth de William Shakespeare: Traduit en
quebecois . Montreal : VLB Editeur, 1978 .
Germain, Jean-Claude . Rodeo et Juliette. 1970; rev. 1971 .
Typescript, 1971 .
Godin, Jean-Cleo and Pierre Lavoie . "Vie et mort du Roi Boiteux,
ou l'imagination au pouvoir." Ronfard, Vie et mort du Roi
Boiteux, Vols . 19-24. Ottawa : Lemeac .
Gurik, Robert . Hamlet, prince du Quebec. Montreal: Editions de
1'Homme, 1968 .
Jowett, John. Introd . The Oxford Shakespeare Richard III. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2000 .
Knowles, Richard Paul . "Shakespeare, Voice, and Ideology :
Interrogating the Natural Voice ." Shakespeare, Theory and
Performance. Ed . James C . Bulman . London : Routledge, 1996 .
CTR 111
92-112 .
Lefebvre, Paul. "Richard 3 ." Cahiers de theatre Jeu 35 .2 (1985) :
148-51 .
O'Sullivan, Dennis . "Notre plus grand merite : etre obstines ."
Cahiers de theatre Jeu 35 .3 (1985) : 209-11 .
Pacino, Al, dir . Looking for Richard . Twentieth-Century Fox, 1996 .
Videocassette . Fox Searchlight Pictures, 1996 .
Ronfard, Jean-Pierre . Lear. Cahier Trac . Montreal : Theatre
Experimental de Montreal, 1977 .
-.
Vie et mort du Roi Boiteux .
2 vols . Ottawa : Lemeac, 1981 .
Salter, Denis . "Acting Shakespeare in Postcolonial Space."
Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance . Ed . James C . Bulman.
London: Routledge, 1996 .113-32 .
Blakemore Evans, G ., ed . The
Houghton Mifflin, 1974 .
Riverside Shakespeare .
Boston :
Leanore Lieblein is a member of the McGill Shakespeare in
Performance Research Team . She has published on various
aspects of early modern and contemporary theatre .
SUMMER 2002
21
Virtually
Canadian
The "artist of the millennium" is
right at home in Canada .
by SUSAN BENNETT
Theatre Inconnu's One Man Hamlet is the tour de force of artistic director Clayton Jevne .
USED BY PERMISSION
lmost certainly, in every Canadian city, some
theatre at some point in each and every year will
produce a Shakespeare play, motivated in no
small part by the fact that their production will
likely have little difficulty finding an audience . This is
because, as Michael Bristol has told us, "there is no doubt
that Shakespeare is one of the great show business success
stories" (viii) . It is not Shakespeare's blue-chip cultural
capital that surely motivated the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation web site to choose him as its Artist of the
Millennium? (see CBC, Act II) .
The CBC's web site had its origins in materials presented by Laurie Brown for "On the Arts" and introduces its
subject thus : "Shakespeare is more popular than ever - on
stage, in print, in the movies and in popular culture . Here
we are at the cusp of a new millennium and still the entire
world's a Shakespearean stage" (cBc, Act I) . The various
sections of the CBC's tribute to Shakespeare (charmingly
organized as "acts") account for his impact on popular culture, his ongoing presence "through the ages," as well as
for the perennially thorny question, "Who was he?"1
If the title "artist of the millennium" emphasizes the
extent of his artistic reach over many centuries, many continents, and in many media, the specificities of his
Canadian theatre history can be found on-line in the
Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia (see "Shakespeare") . The
Encyclopedia's front page for their Shakespeare entry provides three handsome production photographs (one of
William Hutt in the lead role of Stratford's 1996 production
of King Lear, one of Theatre du Rideau Vert's 1993 production of Nuit des RoislTwelfth night and one of Bill Glassco's
2000 production of Measure for Measure for the Montreal
Young Company) . Like the CBC's Shakespeare site and like
this essay's opening claim, the Canadian Theatre
Encyclopedia makes its case by way of the breadth of
Shakespeare's impact:
A
The most produced non-Canadian playwright, his
works are at the foundation of theatre in this country and are performed in all styles at virtually all the
major theatres, in French and in English, across the
nation . ("Shakespeare")
22
The Encyclopedia entry is a useful one, though . It provides a brief history of Shakespeare in Canada with a
number of links to other relevant entries including Allen's
Company of Comedians ("Allen's Company") who came
from Philadelphia to settle in Quebec and presented
Shakespeare to Canadian audiences as early as 1786 .
The Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia site also provides
information and links to key Canadian Shakespeareans
(actors, directors, adaptors, translators) as well as to
numerous contemporary Canadian companies dedicated
to productions of the Bard . The site concludes with the
assertion, "What remains clear about Shakespeare's works
is that they continue to seduce artist and spectator in
Canada, generation after generation ." The webography
provides a reference to a 1996 Canadian book, a reviews
archive and under "Documents of Interest," a wonderfully lively account by a Mrs . E .C. Smyth of her experience of
an 1860 production of Macbeth staged in Victoria
("Interesting Documents") . 2 This site offers an ideal starting place for thinking about Shakespeare on the Canadian
stage, and the web designers and authors deserve abundant praise for their uncluttered design and, more crucially, clearly presented and well-researched information . 3
If the CBC locates Shakespeare in a universalized history and the Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia locates him
more specifically in Canada, then we need to click on to
the web site for the Stratford Festival to cyberize his most
visible Canadian presence . Here we move to a high-end
commercial site, invested in selling theatre tickets and
other merchandise on-line and providing other "visitor
services" (The Stratford Festival) . Intriguingly, none of the
six images on Stratford's homepage features Shakespeare ;
perhaps, for the Festival at least, the Bard's cultural presence can be a little too overdetermined . The authors of the
Stratford site are at pains to suggest that the Festival is
very much more than "just" Shakespeare .4 The text to the
left of the images sets out the 2002 season at the four
Stratford venues while the text at the right offers downloadable maps, calendars and seating plans, as well as
links to request visitors' guides and a priority booking site
for groups and schools . Links to individual plays
CTR 111
(Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean) in the season
offer Spartan detail - an abbreviated list with names of
director, designer and featured actors - along with a very
short description of the play's plot and the inclusive dates
for the play's run .
This is not to say that the site is all about buying tickets, finding a hotel and making a dinner reservation .
Through its "Beyond the Stage" link (see "Beyond the
Stage"), the Festival presents information about other
events in the 2002 season ; conservatory, musical and general auditions; as well as a "development" area covering
endowment, finances, corporate membership and
"Stratford Express 2002" - a black-tie gala on 25 May that
starts with a train ride from Toronto's Union Station to
Stratford (see "Stratford Express") . For any student of the
business of producing Shakespeare for large festival audiences, this site offers a multitude of insights into the complex commercial arrangements that necessarily underwrite
such a large scale venture in contemporary Canada .
It is evident, then, that it is not only on the Canadian
stage that this canonical superstar has a remarkable presence . Shakespeare is also a cyber-phenomenon . What I am
concerned with here is the adaptation of Shakespeare for
the virtual domain and how web-based Shakespeares
inform, construct and inhabit Canadian cultural capital as
these particular adaptations appear and proliferate on the
electronic stage . Such representations summon diverse
audiences and I am interested, too, in how users might, in
many different ways and for very different purposes, surf
the Canadian Bard . Whatever geographical location in
Canada (or, for that matter, anywhere else in the world) we
call home, we likely "know" Canadian Shakespeare as the
Stratford Festival . But what the Internet presence of
Shakespeare allows is a virtual tour of the many
Shakespearean practices rendered in/as Canadian theatre
from coast to coast . From a computer terminal, it is
straightforward enough to glean some sense of the
"Shakespeare experience" from Victoria to St . John's .5
In Victoria, Theatre Inconnu has produced more than
sixty productions since 1987 and has toured widely in
Canada and Europe . Since 1991, it has produced the
Victoria Shakespeare Festival and also offers in its repertoire a One Man Hamlet . The Festival, according to Theatre
Inconnu's web site, caters to
both locals and visitors alike who return year after
year to re-experience this most unpretentious and
exciting experience of the greatest drama and comedy in the English language . It is our hope that you
will join these growing ranks! (Theatre Inconnu,
"Shakespeare")
Their One Man Hamlet is the tour de force of Artistic
Director, Clayton Jevne . A touring show, One Man Hamlet
has played key fringe festivals including Edinburgh and
Edmonton and the web site offers numerous extracted
reviews . Also detailed are the show's technical and other
requirements for prospective bookings : the play
comes in any desired length between 50 and 120 minutes and is readily adaptable - with minimal technical requirements - to a variety of performance situations, including schools and theatres. (Theatre
Inconnu, "One Man Hamlet")
SUMMER 2002
In Vancouver, Bard on the Beach is a well-known professional summer festival company, presenting their
Shakespearean performances in a tent in Vanier Park June
through September each year . The upcoming summer 2002
season promises productions of Henry V, Twelfth Night,
Cymbeline and "Special Events ." Obviously on a smaller
scale than Canada's premier festival, this site (see Bard)
nonetheless resembles Stratford's in its multi-page layout
including links to the schedule, box offices, youth programs, membership, and gift shop . For the researcher, the
most interesting aspect is its archives (Bard, "Archives")
which at present offers a list of each year's productions
(shifting from one production in 1990, to two per season in
1991 and to three per season in 1999) and a brief company
history which reveals, among other things, that their audience base has grown from 6000 in the first year to 65,000 in
2001 . Links under construction promise connection to each
individual season in the more than ten-year history of the
company.
Alberta is represented on the Web by two not-for-profit theatre companies : Free Will Players of Edmonton and
Mount Royal College's Calgary-based Shakespeare in the
Park . Devoted to the production of Shakespeare's plays,
the Free Will Players have produced thirteen of them
between 1989 and 2001 "as well as a number of other
Shakespeare-inspired events around the city" (Free Will
Players) . Their River City Shakespeare Festival provides
more summer Shakespeare "under the canopy at the
Heritage Amphitheatre in Hawrelak Park ." In Calgary,
Shakespeare in the Park has produced summer
Shakespeare since 1987 without cost to the audience
(though a five dollar donation is suggested) . As a not-forprofit company, Shakespeare in the Park, for its Olympic
Plaza performances, has had to attract a wide range of corporate sponsors :
The Mount Royal College Foundation, government
grants from Human Resources Development
Canada, The Alberta Foundation for the Arts,
Calgary Parks and Recreation and the Calgary
Downtown Association, and contributions from
Husky Energy, Penn West Petroleum Ltd ., CBC 1010
Radio One, Calgary Stampeders Football Club, The
Calgary Herald, Sport Swap Ltd ., the Auburn
Saloon, Eau Claire Market and many individual
donors . (Shakespeare in the Park)
On the Prairies, best known is Shakespeare on the
Saskatchewan . Here, too, festival sponsors have a prominent role in the company's web site information . Topped
with a quotation from the Department of External Affairs,
a "sponsors" page (see Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan) features Canada Life with the claim "Canada Life is proud to
contribute to the quality of life in Saskatchewan-and
proud to be the presenting sponsor of Shakespeare on the
Saskatchewan [sic] ." There is a link to Canada Life's homepage as well as to several other categories of sponsor
(among them, CBC Saskatchewan, the City of Saskatoon,
Party World Rentals and SaskTel) . The Summer 2002 productions under the "Red and White Tent," now a cultural
landmark for Saskatoon, are Hamlet and Ben Jonsori s The
Alchemist . The "Yellow and White Tent" offers Sir Toby's
tavern for pre- and post-show socializing on the riverbank.
23
Ontario has several representatives in cyberspace .
Resurgence Theatre Company (based in Newmarket)
offers the York Shakespeare Festival performed under a
tent on the shores of Fairy Lake (see Resurgence) . The 2002
season will be its fourth and a $180,000 operating grant
from the Ontario Trillium Foundation has allowed the
expansion of the festival from one production in four
weeks to two over six weeks (for 2002, Romeo and Juliet and
The Tempest) .
Artistic Director Chris Giacinti describes the Hamilton
Urban Theatre as
not exclusively a Shakespearean company,
[although] his plays form a large part of the company's focus and mandate . Through a process of
steady development, it seeks to nurture both an
audience and the opportunity to bring Shakespeare
to the local community. (Hamilton)
Their current production is King Lear with dates
scheduled at Hamilton Place and the Meadowvale Theatre
in Mississauga .
Toronto's Shakespeare in Action describes itself as
"Canada's Leader in Shakespeare Education" (Shakespeare
in Action) and has been working since 1987 . In 1991, they
established a program for young offenders (Shakespeare
in the Prisons), in 1992 a summer youth program, in 1993
a program targeted at K-8 students and in 1997 established
a National Teaching Shakespeare Institute in association
with York University. Also in their repertoire is "an innovative computer workshop program introducing
Shakespeare on the Net ." This program can be offered to
up to fifty students and lasts sixty minutes,
designed to give relevance to the work of the Bard in
today's Global Village . What sources are available?
How do we access them and how useful are they?
What about Shakespeare and CD ROM? (Shakespeare
in Action, "Teacher Training")
In Ottawa, A Company of Fools has operated for thirteen years and performs Shakespeare's plays
like you've never seen them before . Fun, fast, and
furious, the Fools [sic] brand of physical theatre
brings the bard to life . Whether you'd consider
yourself a Shakespeare snob or even if you despise
the very name of Shakespeare, you'll find something
to like about the unique style of the Fools as we
move the bard off the page and into your hearts . (A
Company)
Their upcoming summer production is Two Noble
Kinsmen, to be staged on the Strathcona Park Stage and
"various parks around the region" for a "pass the hat"
donation.
Repercussion Theatre in Montreal is another wellknown Shakespeare company, again producing outdoors
(see Repercussion) . Formed in 1988, it describes itself as
"North America's only touring Shakespeare-in-the-Park
Company." With beautifully designed new web pages,
Repercussion offers details of their 2001 tour, a gallery of
photographs from past productions and a call for
Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto auditions for their 2002
International Shakespeare in the Park tour .
24
As "North America's most easterly Shakespeare festival," in St . John's, the Shakespeare by the Sea Festival produces at the Cabot 500 Theatre in Bowring Park (see
Shakespeare by the Sea) . Set for April 2002 is The Compleat
Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), one of a number of
Shakespeare spin-offs the company has produced in its
eleven-year history along with I Hate Hamlet and
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead . Their last two seasons have also included two murder mysteries (The
Mousetrap and Dial "M" for Murder) and Tennessee
Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire .
Perhaps the most interesting Shakespeare adaptation
on this web site was the "Petro-Canada Prospero's
Challenge Grant ." This grant goes each year to a member
of Newfoundland's arts community
who has demonstrated his or her commitment to the
arts through a record of professional work in the
areas of either performance, directing or teaching .
Each year's grant recipient will act as an advisor and
mentor to others involved in the Festival .
(Shakespeare by the Sea, "Prospero's Challenge")
Here it's particularly interesting to consider the claims
made in the page's first paragraph that establish the context of the award . The Tempest was the Shakespeare by the
Sea Festival's inaugural production (1993) and we're told
that the "play features the character of Prospero, a fatherly, magical character who attempts to guide and instruct
all those around him" - something that postcolonial
Shakespearean criticism has done much to debate . The site
then localizes Prospero as the actor who played the character in this 1993 production, Richard Buehler (seen on the
web page in his Prospero role), "one of Newfoundland's
most venerable actors, and a beloved former teacher of
many of those involved in the Festival ." The collapsing of
the cultural weight of Shakespeare into the local presence
of a highly regarded actor to signify the merit of the award
provides a powerfully concise illustration of how layered
Canadian Shakespeares can be as well as the specific, local
purposes to which Shakespeare can be adapted .
These kinds of emphases provide, almost accidentally,
our richest resources . It's not, then, just the vicarious pleasure of "seeing" productions coast-to-coast but the enormously productive accounts of how companies in Canada
finance their work, elect particular production values and
contexts for individual plays, find audiences both at a
home location and on tour and encourage the interactive
relationships of actors, administrators and audiences
(actual and prospective) . This, it seems to me, takes the
study of how Shakespeare has been adapted in and for
Canada into a new comparative frame . Few of us have the
luxury of traveling widely to see theatre and are often limited (and often profitably so) to study our local or close-tolocal Shakespeares . With an Internet resource as wide as
we now have, an overarching sense of the Canadian
Shakespeare scene helps answer specific and complex
questions about the plays we might actually, not virtually,
attend . Moreover, this virtual archive provides multiple
points of entry for multiple categories of user - theatregoer, practitioner, scholar, student and always, the generalinterest surfer. One of the most immediate effects of such a
CTR 111
web site survey is the provision of material for discourse
analysis of what and how "Shakespeare" means in
Canada .
Nor need such analysis be restricted to Shakespeare as
a (Canadian) theatrical phenomenon . Adaptations abound
as much in the electronic world as they do in more traditional performance venues, albeit often similarly competing for the consumer dollar. Alberta-based Pro Coro
Canada offers a CD, "Fancy's Child - Songs from
Shakespeare" (see Pro Coro Canada) and svi Productions of
Nova Scotia (see svp) offers another, "Walter Borden Reads
Sonnets by William Shakespeare," recording thirty of the
sonnets read by the Neptune Theatre actor and accompanied by the guitar music of Fernando Sor performed by
Paul Martell. Links on svi's website provide reviews of
their CD, all 154 Shakespearean sonnets, an mp3 file so
surfers can sample the disk as well as biographical information on Shakespeare and Sor. The CBC's "Artist of the
Millenium" archive provides as its epilogue (see CBC,
"Links") a Shakespeare at the Movies "pop up foto-flip
book," and a match-the-Shakespeare-quotation-to-theplay game, "Shockwave Shakespeare ." Although the site
describes the game as "worth downloading for the challenge," it wouldn't, alas, download for me . And if all this
technological frustration drives the web surfer back to
print media and more old-fashioned extra-theatrical pursuits, then don't log off before checking out the review (see
"Dishing it up") of Sonia and Betty Zyvatkauskas' book
Eating Shakespeare: Recipes and More From the Bard's Kitchen,
two Ontario writers who successfully pitched their
Shakespearean adaptation to Prentice Hall . Their cookbook answers the question "What if there were cookbooks
in Shakespeare's time?" and indeed adds "a suitable quote
from one of Shakespeare's works" to each recipe .
These Canadian adaptations all come from popular
sources and suggest some of the very many ways the
world's most overdetermined cultural icon has been given
cyberlife by Canadian creators . Scholarly cyber
Shakespeare is no less prolific and Canadians are here, too,
energetic participants in the global industry of
Shakespeare on the Net . In the context of this essay, I will
refer to only one Canadian example - Internet Shakespeare
Editions (IsE) produced by Michael Best at the University of
USED BY PERMISSION
SUMMER 2002
Victoria (see Internet) .6 I include this site here because of its
groundbreaking work in establishing parameters of collection and presentation that insist on academic integrity .
Moreover, the innovative site architecture encourages the
user to become, almost self-consciously, an actor in the
staging of the archive .
The development of sites with strong scholarly content has provoked heated debate in the academic world
and David Gants, among others, worries that we need peer
recognition to encourage scholars to produce welldesigned web sites and to encourage electronic publishers
"to continue to produce materials of value to all academics" (B8) . Best's site goes a long way toward establishing
protocols that insist on appropriate evaluation of webbased research and resources . For that reason alone, ISE
needs careful and frequent ongoing attention so that best
practices and fundamental standards are established for
all web-based scholarship .
The layout of the IsE site provides four distinct sectors
- the foyer, the library, the theater, and the annex - to
organize the various materials. The Theater (see Internet,
"The Theatre") is designated to house a Performance
Materials Project . This component is now in the design
stage but, as with the editions of the plays and with collected scholarly essays (a new series is dedicated to
"Shakespeare around the globe"), it has sensibly started by
establishing guidelines "for the acquisition and use of performance materials" so that the collection will build both
historical materials and representative collections of recent
Shakespearean productions . Again, this site determines a
benchmark with its established policies for the complex
business of copyright .? ISE has the potential - and seemingly the desire - to become the clearing house, when
appropriate, for all the work this essay has previously previewed . Since sites disappear with the vagaries of employment and financing - a search engine directed me to an
address for the 2000 season of a Shakespeare by the Sea
company in Halifax, but the page no longer existed on its
server - a reviewed and maintained archive will ensure
that our Canadian Shakespeares are available through
time. When Katherine Armstrong and Graham Atkin suggested that "the learning process will become increasingly
interactive and intertextual in the lively future of multimedia Shakespeare, as dynamic and changing digital networks are used and contributed to by students around the
globe" (160), they anticipated just such a living archive
with all the necessary stability of preservation . What is
most exciting is the as yet under-exploited interactivity
that web-based archives can accommodate .
In any event, Canadian cyber-Shakespeares facilitate
multiple activities of different scale and ambition (checking a schedule, buying a ticket, researching a high school
report, locating auditions, comparing textual versions of
the plays, researching costume styles of contemporary productions and so on) . The potential for sustained scholarly
exploration and interrogation is patent. But it's important,
too, not to underestimate the sheer fun of encounters with
these Canadian Shakespeares . While very many of the
sites are explicit in their intent to have value as "education," some of these claims are, in the end, rather halfhearted persuasions that Shakespeare is accessible and
that (school) audiences should enjoy the plays . My final
25
Notes
1 This question has in the last year taken on a peculiarly
Canadian emphasis with the emergence of the Canadianowned Sanders portrait that, if authentic, would be the only
extant image of Shakespeare painted in his lifetime . See the
Internet Shakespeare Editions web site for a full discussion of this
debate (Internet, "A New Image") as well as for an archive of
stories from national newspapers, portraits of Shakespeare
(including the Sanders) and a link to the Canadian
Conservation web site for details of the testing done on the
portrait .
2 The Smyth document is taken from Evans, Frontier Theatre .
The Stratford Festival web site isn't all about buying a ticket and finding a hotel .
It also points "beyond the stage ."
USED BY PERMISSION
example unashamedly sits at the nexus of education and
fun.
Muriel Morris, a teacher at Chilliwack Senior
Secondary School in British Columbia, has built a site to
showcase the Dachshund Shakespeare Cartoon Players
(see Shakespeare Goes to the Dogs) . Her cartoon creations are
intended to convey the plots of Shakespeare's plays to her
students so that they can grasp the basics before going to
see live theatre . Timon of Athens, Merry Wives of Windsor,
Titus Andronicus and As You Like It are all available online. 8 Morris's own witty title to her site is Shakespeare Goes
to the Dogs, and what's really important is her sense of
pleasure and delight . These virtual Shakespearean dachshunds reach an audience far beyond her Canadian high
school classroom and how they interact with other sites in
the fast-growing e-arena of Shakespearean adaptation is
limited only by our imagination . None of us should be surprised that the new economy of electronic media should be
any less interested in or suitable for adapting the Bard, nor
that the Web has quickly become a significant contributor
to the long and distinguished history of Shakespearean
adaptation . Canadian-sourced cyber-Shakespeares provide a particularly rich array of examples and collectively
suggest that the artist of the millennium will appear in
ever more varied forms in the centuries ahead . CTR
3 The Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia is explicitly a living document . Each page gives a time and date for its last update and
users are invited to nominate plays, people and institutions for
inclusion . The guidelines for submission can be found at
http : / /www.canadiantheatre .com/nominate.html .
4 The images show a couple shopping for household items, an
elaborate half mask, a woman contemplating an outdoor art
exhibit, a young woman photographing her three friends, two
people walking by the river and two young audience members
looking up in rapt attention at something outside the camera's
frame .
5 The research for this article came primarily via three search
engines: Macintosh's "Sherlock 2," www.google .com, and
www.ask.com (better known as "Ask Jeeves") . It's hard not to
notice the infiltration of English cultural icons on web nomenclature) .
6 Canadian universities are prolific contributors to Shakespeare on
the Web, ranging from sites for scholarly research projects (see,
for example, The Shakespeare in Performance Research Group
at McGill, (http ://www.shakespeare .mcgill .ca/) , course
descriptions (see, for example, the distance learning course
delivered via audio cassette at the University of New
Brunswick,
(http : / /www.unb .ca/coned/distance/oengl2303 .html),
resources for university students (see, for example, the
Shakespeare entry on Malaspina's Great Books site,
( h ttp ://www.mala .bc .ca/-mcneil/tshake.htm) and the results
of student projects (see, for example, a project by film studies
students at Queen's, Shakespeare for Cinephiles,
(http : / / www.film .queensu .ca/Projects/Shakespeare/festo .ht
m) . Publishers also populate the Web to market their
Shakespeare product for school and college use (see, for example, the Harcourt School Canada site ( http ://www.harcourtcanada.com/school/english/shakes .htm) .
7 Questions of copyright beset the development of Internetbased scholarship and are already complex, of course, for theatre in general . Ownership of production photographs, for
example, involves not only the photographer but the actors
whose images are represented . Control over those rights for
web-housed images is often seen as compromised at best and
relinquished at worst ; the Internet Shakespeare Editions policy
can be found at
http : / / w eb.uvic .ca/shakespeare/Foyer / PerfGuide .html#toc7.
The ISE policy suggests that photographic materials must be
scanned at 72 dpi, a resolution that provides good quality on
an Internet platform but which is far too low for high-quality
print reproduction . This technical feature, in effect, goes a long
way toward protecting against illegal and inappropriate use .
Shakespeare goes to the dogs : "Orlando and Charles wrestle and Orlando wins . He
is not rewarded as he had hoped, for Duke Frederick rejects him when he finds out
that Orlando is the son of a supporter of the old Duke . Rosalind is thrilled ."
( http ://www.chill .org/users/mmorris/webpage .htm )
26
CTR 111
8 What Morris herself describes as "the mainstream plays" are
not available in Internet editions since they are copyrighted to
her publisher J . Weston Walch . The book, Shakespeare Made
Easy : An Illustrated Approach contains dachshund versions of
Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and Julius Caesar .
Works Cited
A Company of Fools Dot Com . June 2002 . Available :
http :/ / www.acompanyoffools .com /
"Allen's Company of Comedians ." Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia .
11 February 2000 . Available :
http : / / w ww.canadiantheatre .com/a / allenscompanyofcomedians .html
Armstrong, Katherine and Graham Atkin . Studying Shakespeare:
A Practical Guide. Hemel Hempsted, Hertfordshire : Prentice
Hall Europe, 1998 .
Bard on the Beach . 2002 Season . January 2002 . Available :
http : / / b ard .faximum.co m /
- .2002 Season . "Archives ." January 2002. Available :
http : / / b ard .faximum.com/2archives .html
"Beyond the Stage ." The Stratford Festival of Canada . January
2002 . Available:
http : / / www.stratfordfestival .ca/2002/beyondthestage/beyo n
dintro .cfm
Bristol, Michael . Big Time Shakespeare . London : Routledge, 1996.
CBC News Indepth: Shakespeare, Artist of the Millennium . "Act I ."
January 2002. Available :
http : / / www.cbc .ca/news /indepth/shakespeare / acttwo.html
- . "Act II." January 2002 . Available:
http : / / www.cbc .ca /news/indepth/ shakespeare /actone .html
- . "Links ." January 2002 . Available :
http : / / www.cbc .ca /news/indepth/ shakespeare/links .html
"Dishing it up with Iambic Pentameter ." North Shore News . 6
November 2000 . Available:
http :/ /www.nsnews .com/issues00/w110600/entertainment/ f
ood/lancaster.html
Evans, Chad . Frontier Theatre . Victoria, BC : Sono Nis Press, 1983 .
Free Will Players Home Page. January 2002 . Available:
http : / /web .alberta .com /web /freewillplayers/
Gants, David L. "Peer Review for Cyberspace : Evaluating
Scholarly Web Sites." The Chronicle of Higher Education 9 April
1999 : B8 .
Hamilton Urban Theatre . January 2002 . Available :
http : / / www.hwcn.org/link/huta /
"Interesting Documents from the History of Canadian Theatre ."
Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia . 11 September 2000. Available :
http :/ / www.canadiantheatre .com/documents.htm l
Internet Shakespeare Editions . January 2002 . Available :
http : / / w eb .uvic .ca/shakespeare /
-. "The Theatre ." January 2002. Available :
http: / / w eb .uvic .ca/shakespeare/Theater/index .html
-. "A New Image of Shakespeare?" January 2002 . Available:
http : / / w eb .uvic .ca / shakespeare/Annex /Articles/ sanders .ht
ml
SUMMER 2002
Pro Coro Canada. Recordings . June 2002 . Available :
http :/ / www.procoro.ab .ca/cont .htm l
Repercussion Theatre - Shakespeare in the Park . January 2002 .
Available :
http :/ / w ww.clikstudio .com/repercussion/index .html
Resurgence Theatre Company . January 2002 . Available :
http :/ / w ww.resurgence .on .ca/ .
"Shakespeare ." Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia . 2 October 2001 .
Available:
http : / / www.canadiantheatre .com / s/shakespeare .html
Shakespeare by the Sea Festival . January 2002 . Available :
http :/ / www.nfld .com/-sbts/menu .html
- ."The Prospero's Challenge Grant." January 2002 . Available :
http : / / www.nfld .com / -sbts/prosp .html
Shakespeare Goes to the Dogs . June 2002 . Available:
h ttp://www.chill.org/csss/eng/dachintro.html
Shakespeare in Action . January 2002 . Available : h ttp ://www.modworld .com/sia /
-. "Teacher Training ." January 2002. Available :
http : / / www.modworld .com/sia/teachertraining .html
Shakespeare in the Park . January 2002 . Available:
http :/ / www.mtroyal .ab .ca/programs/conserv/sitp /
Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan . Festival Sponsors . January 2002 .
Available :
http: / / www .shakespeareonthesaskatchewan .com / sponsors/i
ndex .php3
"Stratford Express ." The Stratford Festival of Canada . January 2002 .
Available :
http:/ / www.stratfordfestival.ca/2002/beyondthestage/stratfordexpress.cfm
SVP Productions/S VP graphics . January 2002 . Available :
http: / / w ww.svpproductions .com /
Theatre Inconnu . "Shakespeare." January 2002 . Available:
http :/ / w ww.islandnet .com/-tinconnu/shakespeare .html
- . "One Man Hamlet ." January 2002 . Available :
http ://www.islandnet .com/ .tinconnu/hamlet.html
The Stratford Festival of Canada. January 2002 . Available :
http : / / w ww.stratfordfestival .ca/2002/index .cfm
Susan Bennett is author of Performing Nostalgia : Shifting
Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past .
27
Adapting the
Bard : A Virtua
Guide
Canadian Shakespeare festival web
sites bring the Bard to media-savvy
audiences .
by JENNIFER AILLES
USED BY PERMISSION
Home Page
Adaptations of Shakespeare's works occur in a variety
of locations, one of the primary being the theatrical festivals dedicated to the Bard . Situated across Canada, these
festivals - from Bard on the Beach in Vancouver to the
Shakespeare by the Sea Festival in St . John's - provide a
variety of audiences with access to live performances of
versions of Shakespeare's works. To keep up with and
attract media-savvy audiences, the festivals have had to
create web sites to help advertise their productions . These
web sites range from simplistic, low-graphic virtual
"posters" to highly detailed sites with animation and
extensive menus linking to numerous sub-pages . These
web sites, though, are not just advertisements for theatre .
With common features such as links to merchandise, memberships, and local tourist attractions mixed in among
company histories, play summaries, and production photos, the festival web sites go beyond advertising and raise
questions about the role(s) of the Web in relation to the
production and reception of Shakespearean adaptations in
Canada . Specifically, the overall construction of the festival
web sites, particularly their opening home pages, frame
the image of each festival as a locus of more or less authentic "Shakespeare ." The sites, as a whole, stress that they are
bringing the cultural capital of the Bard to their audiences .
What the virtual ads do not always express, to the same
degree, is the adaptive nature of the Shakespearean product on offer and that the Bard, even in a traditional staging,
is never presented unmediated . Since it is impossible to
recreate a Shakespearean text as it was originally presented, any performance of Shakespeare's works, however
slightly altered, is necessarily an adaptation .
Through the conjunction of commercial and theatrical rhetoric, along with on-line imagery, the festival sites
depict the kind of Shakespeare that they perform and the
extent to which they deem their work to be adaptive . The
web sites classify an assortment of adaptive presentations
ranging from loose interpretations and radical rewritings
to strict stagings that alter little of Shakespeare's words
and presumed settings . Furthermore, each web site reinforces the reality that the web is an adaptive performative
28
space of its own that adds a critical dimension to the festival productions . Arguably, the performances of the
Shakespearean adaptations, for those who come to the festivals via their web sites, begin not on the stage but on-line .
In the remainder of this paper I will surf through the
various web sites of the Canadian Shakespearean festivals,
briefly examining the Shakespearean product put forward
and the extent to which the festivals embrace their adaptive natures, as well as noting some of the ways they initiate their seasonal performances on-line .
Victoria Shakespeare Festival
Run by Theatre Inconnu, Victoria Shakespeare
Festival is situated in Victoria, British Columbia . Led by
artistic director Clayton Jevne, the Festival's emphasis on
adaptations of Shakespeare is clearly established on the
festival's web site, which states that the festival's mandate
"is to offer accessible and affordable renditions of
Shakespeare's plays and other classics to audiences of all
ages!"' Accessibility to the Bard and other playwrights is
extended beyond the stage to the virtual audience through
the simple, uncluttered web site .
Though there are no summaries of the plays offered
in the 2002 season on the web site, the forthcoming performances are nonetheless initiated on-line by the overall
framing of the company as "Victoria's longest surviving
alternative theatre company." Classifying the Festival as
an "alternative" space where the audience is forewarned
and/or promised an experience void of "international
stars . . . massive sets [or] special effects," the on-line audience's expectations of the adaptations to be presented are
contrasted with their previous experiences of the Bard .
Often these previous encounters are tied to studying the
plays formally in high school and are frequently accompanied by watching big-budget cinematic adaptations
and/or traditional stagings led by canonical stars who
have solidified their names by performing Shakespeare on
and off stage (the names of Sir Alec Guinness, Kenneth
Branagh and Christopher Plummer, among many others,
come to mind) .
CTR III
The audience's expectations of the performative
experience are further constructed by the site's rhetoric,
which draws the isolated patron at their computer into the
regional community of the province, city and the theatre
itself where they have,
in keeping with the charm of British Columbia's
historic capital city . . . been quietly entertaining
tens of thousands of theatre lovers . . . who return
year after year to re-experience this most unpretentious and exciting experience of the greatest drama
and comedy in the English language .
While stressing the "unpretentious[ness]" of the
experience, the Festival's web site also avoids alienating
anyone who is after a seemingly more traditional projection of Shakespeare by emphasizing the Festival's
,, quiet[ness] ."
Bard on the Beach
Also on the West Coast of Canada, and run a bit more
noisily than the Victoria Shakespeare Festival, is
Vancouver's Bard on the Beach . Run by artistic director
Christopher Gaze, the festival's highly detailed web site,
with extensive links to production photos and performance synopses, negates any overt notion that the performances are adaptations . There is no explicit adaptive rhetoric that names the festival as an "alternative" space .
Instead, the "Brief History" of the festival included on the
web site states that the festival "was established in 1990
with a mandate to provide Vancouver residents and
tourists with affordable, accessible Shakespearean productions of the finest quality." The Shakespeare on offer
twelve years later, though, seems to be concerned with
attracting audience numbers more than enhancing "quality" ; the home page lauds its attendance numbers in bold :
"Over 65,000 attended performances in 2001 . Thank you
for the best season ever!" The competitive tone is reinforced and extended to the on-line audience as web-users
are reminded several times to "order [their] tickets early"
so that they can be included in the growing number of
attendees - possibly beating the "record-breaking 97 .3% of
capacity" achieved by the 2001 audience .
In order to draw more people to the 2002 season,
Bard on the Beach decidedly begins its performances online . Each of the plays is provided with graphical representations, brief summaries and production details that
posit a particular reading of the adaptation . For example,
under Henry V, along with visual images, the festival
includes a map of "The Battle of Agincourt" and the lyrics
to "The Agincourt Carol ." Providing these details is more
akin to the information provided in scholarly editions of
the plays, which similarly ground the Web audience in a
more specific reading of these productions long before
they venture to the festival itself . Even if the on-line audience never attends Bard on the Beach they will still have
an initial understanding of the quality of the adaptations
presented . The festival's performances are structured further through the inclusion of "Archives" that list all past
performances . Though at the time of my visit it was still
under construction, this section of the site will eventually
SUMMER 2002
provide the on-line audience with detailed production
information from past seasons that will further frame the
current and future performances by showing the range of
adaptations presented at the festival .
Beyond the number-crunching and the performative
on-line shaping of the plays, Bard on the Beach features
the most explicit example of the Web as an adaptive performative space . Following a link on the site to "Special
Events," the on-line audience can "Preview the Bard
Fireworks Special ." Complete with sound effects, the preview displays computerized fireworks exploding over a
multicoloured version of the festival's multicoloured tent
logo . This on-line production hints at the Web's potential
to be an extension and/or replacement of the traditional
stage environment - in effect, it becomes an adaptive performance "space" that supplants or challenges the dominance of more traditional theatrical spaces .
Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan Festival
The cartoon-tent graphic of the Bard on the Beach online logo transforms into a photograph of real performance
tents on the home page of "The Award Winning
Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan Festival," whose artistic
director is Mark von Eschen . The emphasis on the "award
winning Shakespeare" presented at the Festival draws on
the prestige and elitism that awards often invoke . The
sense of prestige is echoed in the Festival's web site
through its "Executive Summary and History" and its
exclusiveness as "Saskatchewan's only professional summer theatre organization ." The Festival has also earned the
nation-building stamp of approval from Attractions
Canada, which names Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan
as "one of Attraction's Canada's 'Just Stay Home' contest
destinations ."
The evocation of elite culture is quickly tempered by
the site's explicit statement that "the Shakespeare on the
Saskatchewan Festival is not museum piece theatre ."
Furthermore, the site exclaims that
the productions throb with life . Sometimes the setting is Elizabethan, sometimes not. Hamlet, for
example, was presented in a world of the future in
which violence was the language of politics and
Hamlet's isolation was plain to see. On the other
hand, The Tempest was in a customary Elizabethan
setting . We try to present the plays in the setting
that will most vividly bring them to life . Every
summer, the Festival tents rise upon the banks of
the South Saskatchewan River . There is beauty and
joy. Spontaneity of a passionate evening awaits the
audience .
The "passion" and "spontaneity" that make the
Festival's adaptations of Shakespeare's works "throb with
life" is also graphically inscribed into their web site via
USED BY PERMISSION
29
the cartoon icons of the menu and the Festival's logo,
which present a black and white Bard wearing sunglasses
against a vibrant red background and Festival title . The
Shakespeare presented at this Festival is cool, hip and
fully adaptive to multiple settings .
Demonstrating success in a variety of locations, the
Festival's awards reveal its ability to bring Shakespeare to
both on-site and on-line audiences . According to the
award listings, which make no distinction between awards
for the web site and those given to the Festival, the Festival
received a "Best of the Web Gold Award," and was named
"A Netwired Webcenter APPROVED site" and a
"Saskatchewan TouRnet Approved Web Site ." The site also
boasts a " JAYDE Gold Diamond Award" that states that the
festival
houses the most exciting Shakespeare company
anywhere . . . [sic] the company puts on the most
original productions of Shakespeare's works in
North America, putting the Bard's works in contemporary settings and situations .
The amalgamation of praise for both the web site and
for the festival demonstrates the slipperiness of the line
between virtual and actual performative spaces and their
growing interdependence in contemporary Canadian culture .
York Shakespeare Festival
The performative authenticity evoked by the photo
of the tents in the Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan
Festival home page is emphasized to an even greater
extent on the web site for the newest Shakespearean festival in the country: the York Shakespeare Festival .
Proclaiming itself "[t]he only Shakespeare-in-a-Tent
Experience in Ontario," the festival is located in
Newmarket, Ontario, and is run by the Resurgence
Theatre Company (the RTC as opposed to the RSC) under
the artistic direction of Lee Wilson . The mandate of the
"professional, non-profit theatre company . . . is to resurge
the classics and ignite new and contemporary works
while utilizing the surging energy of young and established artists alike ."
This belief that Shakespeare's works are in need of
"resurg[ing]" with the "energy of youth," echoed on several of the other festival web sites, is given particular institutional support on the York Shakespeare Festival's site .
The initial details for the 2002 season listed on the site proclaim that the festival has just been "awarded a four year
operating grant in the amount of $180,000 from the
Ontario Trillium Foundation to expand the Festival from
one production over four weeks to two productions over
six weeks ." The growth and performative development
that the Ontario government's sponsorship allows is replicated on the Festival's web site, which is under construction. The home page features the photo of a brightly costumed fool and links to an older version of the site, which
contains extensive production details of the initial seasons .
As with the other festival web sites, the archival information sets up the on-line audience's performative expectations of the current and future season's adaptations .
30
"Under construction" : the homepage of Canada's newest Shakespeare Festival .
USED BY PERMISSION
A Company of Fools
Though not strictly a festival, A Company of Fools
features more Shakespearean content than many of the
self-proclaimed festivals (as Jessica Schagerl's essay in
this issue of CTR shows) . Led by artistic director Scott
Florence, the company's web site calls the Fools
"Ottawa's Premiere Shakespearean Performance
Company." The web site shares a similar structure with
the Shakespearean festival sites, but the Fools' selfacknowledged adaptive "Foolishness" effuses much
more explicitly throughout the tongue-in-cheek site,
which also offers "Fool-o-Grams!" and a "Shakespearean
Sonnet Delivery for all occasions!" The web site extends
this performative playfulness to embrace the "dot-com"
frenzy by including a link to the "Last Page" on the
Internet where they give the on-line audience instructions to "turn off [their] computer and go outside and
play ;" thereby ending the virtual performance.
Following the Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan
Festival, the Fools do not produce "museum piece theatre ." The rhetoric of the company's web site goes beyond
Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan and the York
Shakespeare Festival's "resurg[ing] of the classics" to forefront its adaptive focus even more blatantly . The site states
that
for more than thirteen years . . . A Company of
Fools has been performing the works of William
Shakespeare like you've never seen them before .
Fun, fast and furious, the Fools brand of physical
theatre brings the bard to life . Whether you'd consider yourself a Shakespeare snob or even if you
despise the very name of Shakespeare, you'll find
something to like about the unique style of the
Fools as we move the bard off the page and into
your hearts .
CTR 111
Directly addressing an issue at the heart of adaptive
theory, the discourse underlying the explicit need to
"bring the bard to life" through performative reformations calls upon an authoritative, original Shakespeare
that can be "move[d] . . . off the page ." This need for a
solidified Bard is also implicit in the assumption that the
on-line audience has had past experiences with
Shakespearean productions that have left him far away
from their "hearts ." The Fools' attempt to counter webusers' preconceived notions of Shakespearean adaptations begins with the company's web site, which is always
already performing even when the company's actors are
at rest .
USED BY PERMISSION
Shakespeare by the Sea Festival
The initial home page of the Shakespeare by the Sea
Festival, whose artistic director is Jennifer Deon, reveals a
photo of the festival's St . John's Cabot 500 Theatre .
Directly below this opening image is a web counter that
lists the cumulative number of visitors to the page (over
7,300 since July 1999) . The web counter is reminiscent of
Bard on the Beach's exclamations of their overwhelming
2001 attendance and the Victoria Shakespeare Festival's
more subtle counting of their "tens of thousands of theatre
lovers ." With each visit, the virtual audience members are
tracked as if they had purchased a ticket to the virtual performance.
The performative expectations of the on-line audience are thoroughly shaped by the web site's primary subpage to centre on the local and ecological adaptations of
Shakespeare's works . Topped by a black and white image
of deep waves rolling over the festival logo, the sub-page
exclaims that this is "North America's most easterly
Shakespeare festival ." The graphic, along with archival
production photos, visually emphasizes the Festival's
mandate "to be inspired by and maintain the integrity of
the natural and/or pre-existing surroundings" of "unique
Newfoundland venues in and around the St. John's area ."
Echoing both the York and the Victoria Shakespeare
Festivals, the web site states that the Festival
do[es] not boast a roster of international stars or
massive sets and special effects . What [they] do
have to offer is a local troupe of talented, volunteer
artists whose love for their work is as boundless as
the energy with which they present it!
The Festival's connection to the local community is
underscored through menu links to "Local Artistic
Groups," "Local Arts Organizations," "Local and National
Festivals," to "Tourism Resources" and through the
"Message From The Artistic Director," which notes that
the Festival's "perseverance in the face of fair weather and
SUMMER 2002
foul (both literally and figuratively) has made us a solid
fixture in the community ." The Web enlarges this local
community to include the virtual audience, some of whom
acknowledge their reciprocal participation by signing the
on-line "Guestbook ." This extension of the audience to the
web-user refigures traditional notions of what constitutes
an audience, and by extension, what constitutes a theatrical festival, as one must no longer necessarily physically
visit the festival to experience the adaptations being performed .
The Stratford Festival of Canada
In direct contrast to the local and community-specific
Shakespearean adaptations produced by the Shakespeare
on the Sea Festival, the Stratford Festival of Canada, celebrating its fiftieth season in 2002, is posited as the most
canonical, seemingly most authentic and universal locus
of Shakespearean production in Canada . The Festival's
web site, though, reveals that Shakespeare is not the
Festival's primary concern . The semiotics of the site tend
to negate the festival's connection to the Bard, let alone
acknowledge the adaptive nature of the productions on
the multiple theatre stages . Going to the Stratford Festival,
according to the web site, is about going to Stratford rather
than going to see Shakespeare . Most tellingly, it is artistic
director Richard Monette's name that is a part of the everpresent logo emblazoned at the top left corner of the web
site, not Shakespeare's .
Representing less than half the Festival's productions,
the Shakespearean adaptations offered are initiated online . In conjunction with the detailed descriptions of the
Festival, Avon, Tom Patterson and the new Studio
Theatres, the plays' summaries solidify the Stratford
Festival as the producer of "museum piece theatre" that
does "boast a roster of international stars . . . massive sets
and special effects ." As a Shakespearean festival, the
Stratford Festival is the unacknowledged original that the
majority of the other Shakespearean festivals work to subvert through their blatantly altered adaptations and the
rhetoric of their representations .
Further Links
While the Stratford Festival of Canada web site seems
to be actively de-stressing the performance of
Shakespeare, the other Shakespearean festival web sites,
including A Company of Fools, actively promote the production of Shakespearean adaptations in Canada . As these
on-line advertisements are accessible worldwide, the
varying adaptive rhetorics, as well as the often unspoken
energies that inform them, reach well beyond the geographic boundaries of the country. As the performative
space of the Web is embraced and explored, the festival
web sites will have the opportunity to move beyond the
on-line framing and initiating of their stage productions in
order to use the Web as a primary performative space in
conjunction with and/or as a replacement of the traditional theatrical spaces .
The downside of this broadening reliance on the Web
to advertise, draw tourists, promote communities, perform and contextualize adaptations is the amount of energy and capital it takes to sustain the web sites and keep
them up to date and on-line . Several of the festivals rely on
31
the goodwill of volunteer webmasters to maintain their
sites and cannot afford the significant investment of
resources needed to fully engage in the technological and
innovative performative possibilities of the Web . At risk,
too (when a web site is down) is the festival's on-line audience, who may only know or have access to the festival
through the performative space of the site . As a case in
point, a discussion of the festival web site for Shakespeare
by the Sea, in Halifax, Nova Scotia - which is alive and
well - is noticeably missing from this paper, as their web
site was off-line for a significant amount of time in the fall
of 2001 through to the end of this study .
The Web is a transient space . Once information that
was originally posted on a site goes off-line, or is significantly updated, it is lost in the same manner that
Shakespeare's original stage productions are gone forever .
In that sense, the Web is truly a performative and adaptive
space since all we are left with are fleeting alterations to a
once original performative posting . CTR
Note
1 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations in a particular section
are from the corresponding festival's web site. All web sites
visited - with URLs and dates of access - are listed below in
the Works Cited .
Works Cited
A Company of Fools . Dec . 2001 and Jan . 2002. Available :
http : / / w ww.cyberus .ca /-fools
Bard on the Beach . Dec. 2001 and Jan . 2002 . Available :
www.bardonthebeach .org
Resurgence Theatre Company. Dec. 2001 and Jan . 2002. Available :
http :/ / w ww.resurgence .on .ca
Shakespeare by the Sea Festival . Dec. 2001 and Jan. 2002 . Available :
http : / / www.nfld .com/-sbt s
Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan Festival . Dec . 2001 and Jan . 2002 .
Available :
http : / / w ww.shakespeareonthesaskatchewan.com
Stratford Festival of Canada . Dec . 2001 and Jan. 2002 . Available :
http : / / www.stratfordfestival.c a
Victoria Shakespeare Festival (Theatre Inconnu) . Dec . 2001 and Jan.
2002 . Available: h ttp ://www.islandnet.com/-tinconn u
Jennifer Ailles is a PhD candidate in Renaissance literature,
gender theory, PREA, and cultural studies at the University of
Rochester. She is also the Project Manager of the Canadian
Adaptations of Shakespeare project, directed by Daniel
Fischlin at the University of Guelph .
32
CTR 111
A Midsummer
Night's
Mash-up
Adapting Shakespeare as a
Canada Day Dance Party
by MARK MCCUTCHEON
n 1 July 2000, Toronto's Opera House became
the unlikely set for a passing strange adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's
Dream . Serenity Industries, a Toronto dance
party promotion company, hired the Queen
Street East Theatre turned concert hall to host A
Midsummer Night's Dream - a Canada Day rave .
O
Theorizing the Theatricality of the Dance Party
Clearly, some preliminary explanations are required to
discuss a rave as a theatrical adaptation of Shakespeare . It
is worth noting at the outset that this party belongs to an
identifiable genre of rave adaptations of Shakespeare . On
24 June 1989, the seminal London acid house party company Sunrise hosted A Midsummer Night's Dream (see Fig .
1) . More recently, film has become a genre in which rave
aesthetics join Shakespearean scripts : Baz Luhrmanri s
William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet suggested that
Romeo's star-crossed love was catalyzed when he ate a
pill at a party, while a full-throttle feature called Rave
MacBeth hit German cinemas in November 2001 .
In the summer 2000 issue of CTR, Beverly May
argued that house and techno dance events are a form of
COURTESY SUNRISE AND
W W WH YPERREAL .OR G
"participatory theatre" (8) wherein the dance floor "serves
as the stage for . . . transformative experiences" (9) . By
transformative experiences, May means a process whereby successful dance parties join the individual dancers
and DJs in a collectivity whose transcendent vibe can be
palpable, despite - or even because of - the event's
ephemeral transience : "The evening's direction remains
unknown until the participants engage with it" (10) .
However, "transforming" is also a specific DJ technique
for mixing the beats of two records . The resulting double
entendre suggests the myriad ways in which performance
is at the heart of the rave experience : a cultural continuum
(a discontinuum, if you will) collaboratively produced by
the explicitly theatrical performances of the DJs and MCs,
as well as the carnival of performances taking place
among party goers, promoters and everyone else in attendance.
DJ performances at Toronto parties tend, more often
than not, to be emphatically staged so that the dancers can
watch the DJs work (if they want to) more easily than they
can at venues where the DJ occupies a booth removed
from, or invisible to, the dance floor . Some parties - such
as the Serenity party in question - organize the DJs' performances as "battles" that Rebecca Brown notes are "fundamentally theatrical in nature" (5) . The DJ battle, one of
rave culture's many appropriations of hip hop, brings two
(or more) DJs together on stage to jam - and sometimes
even compete with each other - by mixing and cutting
between their respective records through the use of four
turntables and two mixers .
Meanwhile, the performances on the dance floor can
often provide as much as or more "eye candy" than the
spectacle on stage, with dancers contributing a spectrum
of styles, costumes, positions, poses, gestures and motions
to the scene . There are "light shows," in which partygoers
manipulate glow sticks (whether adeptly or clumsily) for
visual effects, as well as a variety of self-consciously performative dance styles, ranging from the hip hop styles of
break-dancing to the fluid moves of white-gloved "liquid
dancers ." It is possible to see everything from tai chi to
capoeira being performed on the dance floor at raves .
Figure I
SUMMER 2002
33
In this context, we find a parallel between the postmodern rave and the early modern theatre in its formative
stages . Of the commercial theatre's origins in "traditional
community-based pageantry," Michael Bristol writes that
"playing in this context is a particularly vivid and engaging form of social participation, a 'pastime' used for purposes of conviviality and the expression of shared social
meaning" (34) . Here, dancing constitutes a kind of play,
and DJing a kind of playing . Still, a crowd of partygoers at
first might seem more like the "shifting and anonymous
public rather than a community" identified by Bristol as a
typical audience for theatre productions in early modern
London (50) . But despite the technically public accessibility of this and most parties to anyone who buys a ticket,
raves like Serenity's, which cater to hardcore musical
tastes (as we will see), can filter out more passive followings' and become virtually exclusive events attended by a
clientele that is there first and foremost to engage with the
challenging musical context set by the DJs (Gaillot 100) - a
clientele there to dance . Serenity's rave adapted
Shakespeare's reve chiefly for its atmospheric pastoral
effects (as detailed below) and for its seasonal timeliness,
but it also unwittingly staged this adaptation in a participatory context not unlike the early modern mise en scene
described by Bristol .
The term "rave" has actually fallen out of favour with
Toronto ravers, in direct proportion to its leverage by the
mass media as a useful word with which to sensationalize
the youth-driven industry of electronic music and the allnight dance parties that remain vital forums not only for
its popular appreciation but also for its myriad aesthetic
developments. With reference to the British advent of
"raving" as we know it, Simon Reynolds writes :
In 1988 the word "rave" was in common parlance,
but mostly only as a verb, e .g ., "I'm going out raving tonight ." By 1989 "rave" was a fully fledged
noun and "raver" was, for many, a derogatory
stereotype, an insult . While "raving" came from
black British dance culture, and originally from
Jamaica, "raver" plugged into a different etymology. The Daily Mail had used the word in 1961 to
condemn the boorish antics of "trad jazz" fans at
the Beaulieu Jazz Festival . A few years later a TV
documentary employed "raver" to evoke the
nymphomaniac hysteria of teen girl fans and
groupies . There had also been an "All Night Rave"
at the Roundhouse in October 1966, a psychotropic
spectacular featuring Pink Floyd and the Soft
Machine. All these connotations-frenzied behaviour, extreme enthusiasm, psychedelic delirium, the
black British idea of letting off steam on the weekend-made "raving" the perfect word to describe
the acid house scene's out-of-control dancing . (77)
"Rave" harbours additional etymological resonances
- with revelry and (as a word for delirious speech derived
from Old Northern French) with le reve - that all come into
play in considering Serenity's dance party as an adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream . But in
order to set the scene for this party, it is worth noting how
"rave" has become headline-friendly shorthand whereby a
broad spectrum of youth-related issues - from unsafe sex
to organized crime - are sensationalized in order to sell
34
papers, while the unfamiliar aesthetics and entrepreneurial economics of the dance events themselves go more or
less unnoticed . In Canada, the media furore over raves
peaked in the summer of 2000, following three pivotal
events that continue to exert lasting impact on Toronto's
rave culture .
The (new) Politics of (no) Dancing
First was Toronto Police Chief Julian Fantino's infamous press conference, held on 14 March 2000, where the
freshly-appointed chief posed behind a table of seized
guns and other weapons to declare that Toronto would no
longer tolerate the "dens of drugs and guns" represented
by illegal after-hours clubs and raves ("FWD: the Fatal Blow
in Toronto") . Conflating raves with after-hours boozecans,
the Chief became an instant laughingstock among Toronto
ravers ; during a subsequent discussion forum broadcast
by MuchMusic, a police spokesperson was forced to admit
that guns had never been seized at raves, while raver
activists representing the Party People Project (PPP) waved
placards outside the studio that read "The only guns you
find at raves are squirt guns ."
During this discussion, novelist and pundit Russell
Smith observed how the mass media's coverage of raves
was "cynical" and ignored the more interesting but "more
difficult" story of techno as the aesthetic core of the dance
events themselves . Typifying this kind of coverage was the
Macleans cover story "Rave Fever" (Oh), which raised the
"moral panic" (Jenkins) over raves to a national level just
one week before the second pivotal event: the Ontario
Coroner's inquest into the 10 October 1999 death of Allan
Ho, a Ryerson student who died after taking ecstasy at a
rave that was held in "the basement of a former shoe factory" (Ellis) . (The ironic fact that the venue was literally
underground has not helped the general public to understand the term, or its relation to raves, in its sub-cultural
sense .)
The third event was Toronto City Council's decision at which it arrived between 9 and 11 May 2000, barely one
week after the Ho inquest began - "immediately [to] suspend the leasing of any City-owned facility for the purpose of holding Rave parties" ("Minutes of the Council of
the City of Toronto" 111) . Mayor Mel Lastman was anxious
to keep the financially fraught city from facing liability in
the event of anyone dying at a party held on city-owned
venues such as the CNE's Better Living Centre. Ironically,
the Ho inquest jury's second of nineteen concluding recommendations advised the city to lift this ban, arguing
that the absence of safe and legal venues providing amenities like free running water would drive promoters to hold
events at unsafe, underground venues and thus put partygoers at risk ("Rave Recommendations") .
Although the city did finally lift the ban on 3 August
2000 (Rusk), raves have for the most part stayed away
from city-owned venues on account of the steadily
increasing number of paid-duty officers required (Abbate),
under Fantino's leadership, to staff parties held on public
property. For example, in 1998, the annual Halloween
party Freakin' was held on CNE (i.e ., city-owned) grounds;
the Lifeforce consortium of promoters organizing the
event was required to hire one sergeant and eight officers
CTR III
to patrol a party that was attended by an estimated 10,000
people . An April 2000 event attended by an estimated
8,100 people, however, was required to hire two sergeants,
two staff sergeants, and fifty officers . Freakin' 2000, the
first event held at the CNE after the city lifted its ban,
included a conspicuous police operation that was led by
one Sergeant Ewing, who informed me directly that he had
"no idea" how many officers were on site that night
(McCutcheon) . Most tellingly, there was no Freakin' held
in 2001 . Ignoring not only the inquest jury's recommendations but also the extant guidelines of the Toronto Dance
Safety Committee (a committee of party promoters, city
councillors and police representatives originally organized
by Kim Stanford to impose reasonable safety standards on
electronic dance events), Fantino continues to direct the
Toronto police force in targeting the Toronto rave scene
with exorbitant and intimidating police operations
(Stanford and McCutcheon 10) .
Albeit a very rough sketch of some very complicated
politics, the above remarks should show that tensions
among Toronto's promoters, police, policy-makers and
partygoers were at an all-time high in the summer of 2000,
when Serenity Industries, a relative newcomer to the
Toronto scene, was busy organizing its Midsummer Night's
Dream Canada Day celebration. Founded in early 2000,
Serenity Industries is a dance party promotion business
consisting of Brad Ferris, veteran Toronto DJ X (a .k.a .
Willar Tang), decor specialist Michelle Harding, Chris 0 .
and Neil Ng (Tang) . Serenity had thrown its first party,
Welcome to the Family, on 8 April 2000, following that up
with a party called Payback, held on 15 April, the very next
weekend ; while Payback demonstrated Serenity's organizational skills, it inadvertently embroiled the fledgling
company in controversy. The internationally popular
Hullabaloo promotion company, whose parties regularly
sold out in advance, had been planning to host a massive
event, Through the Looking Glass, that weekend, but lastminute negotiations with Toronto police fell through and
Hullabaloo had to cancel its party. Serenity - alongside
other lower-profile promoters like Small Society - moved
quickly to capitalize on, the sudden market opportunity ;
however, another company called Funhouse, operated by
friends of Hullabaloo owner Chris "Anabolic Frolic"
Samojlenko, was simultaneously scheduling the DJs that
Hullabaloo had booked to play an alternate party, the proceeds from which went to pay the DJ fees originally promised by Hullabaloo (Michelle) . Thus, the smaller promoters
drew some community criticism for acting opportunistically; according to Peter "Subsonic Chronic" Elkerbout,
the Funhouse Hullabaloo fundraiser was not as well
attended as it might have been in the absence of other competition (Elkerbout) .
Hard Bargains, Hardcore, Hard House
This commentary provides some political and economic background for a more detailed discussion of
Serenity Industry's third party, A Midsummer Night's
Dream; it also reveals another unexpected parallel between
Toronto's dance party industry and the nascent "underground economy" of early modern London theatre, as historicized by Bristol . Tracing the early modern commodifi-
SUMMER 2002
cation of performance and print products that would eventually turn Shakespeare into a cultural institution, Bristol
notes that
in the formation of this early modern entertainment
industry . . . the first stage corresponds to the emergence of a number of more or less permanent repertory companies that provided a decent livelihood
for their members by performing in rented spaces .
(31)
Although Toronto's biggest and best-known party
promotion companies (e.g . Hullabaloo, Destiny, Liquid
Adrenaline) can claim, at best, a dubious permanence in
the current political climate, there is a striking similarity
between their operations and those of the early modem
repertory companies in renting spaces for performance .
Moreover, the second and third stages Bristol describes, in
which "capital investment in permanent infrastructure"
yields first the construction of "purpose-built playhouses"
and then "vertical integration as the members of the repertory companies themselves invest in theater buildings"
(31) arguably correspond to the strategic deals that some
promoters and DJs have made with nightclubs (e .g .,
Lifeforce's relationship with Turbo or Industry founder
Matt C's ownership of the Queen street "dance pub"
NASA) .
A major difference between dance culture in Toronto
today and the early modern entertainment industry
described by Bristol is that the three stages he describes as
a sequence in the latter context are, in the former, concurrent and often overlapping . As the police paid-duty officer
protocol has effectively kept city-owned venues well out
of promoters' price ranges, more promoters have turned to
the clubs to sustain their business . In addition, Elkerbout
asserts that owners of private, non-club venues recognized, in the media furore over dance parties, an opportunity for increased profit :
As soon as all this attention got brought to the rave
scene . . . the venue owners were all of a sudden like
"Oh, we can make so much money off this," because
they just kept testing the waters, and the promoters
were still willing to pay more and more for the venues to the point where now almost every venue is
overpriced. . . . Lighting and sound as far as I know
have gone up, DJs aren't really charging that much
more . . . . For instance, the Opera House : we had
thrown a party, the DiY party . . . a few years ago [on
New Year's Eve 19981 and it cost us something like
$1,500 to rent out the Opera House and now it's
closer to something like $7,000 or $8,000 . . . the venue
owners have just been hiking up the prices .
(Elkerbout)
Serenity member Tang agrees that "the quest for new
venues is endless right now" - not only for Serenity but for
most other Toronto promoters - adding that "authorities
aren't making things any easier for us" (Tang) . What has
enabled non-club venue owners to inflate their rental
prices is the fact that while more reasonable deals could be
made with nightclubs for promoters of house, techno,
garage and other "progressive" or cross-over genres, clubs
are simply not an option for promoters who specialize in
35
those music genres whose "subcultural intransigence"
keeps them firmly in the "rave" camp delineated by
Reynolds as "hardcore" :
Whenever I hear the word "hardcore" (or synonyms
like "dark," "cheesy") used to malign a scene or
sound, my ears prick up . Conversely, terms like
"progressive" or "intelligent" trigger alarm bells;
when an underground scene starts talking this talk,
it's usually a sign that it's gearing up to play the
media game as a prequel to buying into the traditional music industry structure of auteur-stars, concept albums, and long-term careers . .. . Hardcore
scenes are strongest when they remain remote from
all of that and thrive instead as anonymous collectives, subcultural machines . (6-7)
Hullabaloo is Toronto's best-known hardcore bastion .
Since its first event on 21 June 1997, Hullabaloo has made
happy hardcore (180 beats per minute (BPM), adult-contemporary remixes, no apologies) the main musical event
at all its parties, and it has deservedly won a fiercely
devoted core of followers for this reason . There is no sitting on the fence with happy hardcore - with its frenetic
tempo and campy diva vocals, you have to love it or hate
it . Since its inception, Serenity has attempted to stake a
similarly specialized claim in the relatively novel genre of
UK hard house . UK hard house DJ Madame Zu headlined
Serenity's first event and co-headlined a more recent event
on 4 August 2001 alongside Mohawk label owner Chris C .
- who also headlined A Midsummer Night's Dream .
Elkerbout, who has played four of the seven parties
Serenity has hosted to date, is one of a handful of Toronto
DJs who specialize in this genre .
UK hard house is a genre afflicted by a localized identity crisis . First, there is the need in Toronto for a national
prefix to distinguish the UK sound from the Chicago hard
house of labels like Underground Construction, IHR and
Abstract, played by Toronto DJs like Kamikaze and
Decepticon . Chicago hard house re-activates the alien
abrasiveness with which the original Chicago house tracks
first greeted listeners . Chicago hard house clips along at
roughly the same 140-150 BPM tempo of UK hard house,
but whereas the American sound is raw and spare, stressing distorted kick drums, squeaking riffs, pealing sirens
and stomping arpeggios of snares and claps, UK hard
house is a rich swirl of bouncy basslines, Roland 303
"acid" loops and - as its signature sound - endless modulations of the baleful synth sample introduced by Joey
Beltram's 1991 track "Mentasm," and subsequently popularized by countless hardcore tracks as the "hoover"
sound . Reynolds describes the "hoover" as follows :
The monstrous "mentasm" sound-a killer-bee
drone derived from the Roland Juno Alpha synthesizer, a seething cyclone hiss that sends ripples of
shuddery rapture over your entire body surfacespread through rave culture like a virus . . . The
"mentasm stab"-which took the sound and gave it
a convulsive riff pattern-was hardcore's great unifier, guaranteed to activate the E-rush . The
"Mentasm" noise has a manic yet dirgelike quality
36
similar to the down-tuned guitar sound used by
Black Sabbath and their doom-metal ilk. It's no coincidence : Beltram was consciously aiming to re-create the vibe of Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, his
teenage faves . (123)
For Elkerbout, the tempo, basslines and staccato
"hoover" sequences of UK hard house clearly distinguish
it from a genre alongside which it is frequently found in
the repertoires of local DJs like AT-AT or the Therapist :
trance . Trance tends to be slower (e .g ., 130 BPM), more
melodic and often punctuated by beatless breakdowns in
which dance floor momentum gives way to vistas of ambient, "cinematic" sound (Reynolds 202) . By contrast, breakdowns in UK hard house tracks more often include breakbeats, usually of the bass-heavy variety, that lend the
sound a junglistic flavour . With its trenchant reliance on
the "hoover," its propulsive tempo, and a myriad other
musical references to capital-R rave anthems from the
early 1990s, UK hard house adapts and redeploys the
"oldskool" or "'ardcore" techno of Beltram and other seminal producers like Timebase and Slipmatt (DiPietro) .
Like most other promoters - including Hullabaloo Serenity's party line-ups include representatives from a
variety of popular electronic genres . While their headliners have been UK hard house acts, their inclusion of local
DJs playing house, trance, jungle and breaks (Tang's own
specialty, an uptempo grab-bag of hip hop samples, syncopated drums and basslines that also engages the legacy
of early 1990s "oldskool") demonstrates a market-savvy
recognition that more variety means potentially more
business .
Ambivalently Adapting Shakespeare
Having sketched some of the theoretical, political, economic and aesthetic contexts in which Serenity's A
Midsummer Night's Dream took place, we can turn our
attention to the specific ways in which the party adapted
its nominal Shakespearean source .
Describing the theatrical dimension of raves, May
writes that "a unified, cohesive sense of artistic planning
should be effected" in order to "craft a successful event"
(9) . Tang tells me that "the idea behind Serenity was to
throw quality events with a focus on . . . detail in visuals
and of course quality music" (Interview) . Elkerbout concurs, noting that the Serenity crew "take[s] that extra step
with decorations" (Interview) . Because the visual apparatus of A Midsummer Night's Dream provides some intriguing evidence for the party's Shakespearean adaptations,
we might as well begin where most ravers would - with a
look at the flyer (Figs . 2 and 3) .
"Saturday July 1st the Serenity crew returns," the
flyer states, "bringing with them a night destined to
enchant . . . . Prepare to dream . . . ." Keenly aware of heightened public scrutiny, and in keeping with ravers' own
constant tendency towards "collective disappearance"
(Reynolds 239), the Serenity crew used Shakespeare's play
to advertise its event by displacing typical raverspeak
(which is already a displaced "street" discourse that seeks
CTR III
to resist public understanding through the use of defamiliarizing language) onto a high-cultural milieu . "To
dream," perchance, "to go mental" or "to dance your ass
off" is what partygoers are actually being encouraged to
do. In this flyer, "to dream" is "to rave" - without actually
having to say so . If the Serenity crew had dropped their
Shakespeare citation after this point, we might well ask,
"What's in a name?" But both the flyer and, more importantly, the party play further with the source text's plot,
characters and setting .
As if his bride DJ X weren't skittish enough at the
approach of their party, Serenity is obliged to listen
to the complaints of opposing sides in a dispute
over arranged DJ battles : Big League Chu vs. Marty
McFly, as well as Subsonic Chronic vs . Satori &
Popsicle Pete vs . Entity.
Ordered by Sean Miller to obey, all the DJ's [sic]
agree, using a new fangled invention . . . 4-decks
[four turntables]!! But D-Minus' best friend
Popsicle Pete who is playing at the party as well,
warns him of their plot to administer some kick ass
sets. That night, when the DJ's [sic] flee into the forest to join the festival, Chris C . takes after them on
his own bike, with a determined DJ X pedalling in
hot pursuit, never knowing that Jason Marshall was
watching for them when they arrived .
When they do arrive, DJ X turns to D-Minus and
says, "Tonight will be like a dream D-Minus."
"Not just a dream DJ X, but a midsummer night's
dream . . . " (Serenity Industries)
The front of the flyer (above) for the Serenity Midsummer Night's Dream establishes the
sylvan faerie theme and details ticket availability and contact information, while the back
(below) details the DJ lineup (right) as well as a synoptic parody of the source of the play
(left) .
COURTESY SERENITY INDUSTRIES
On the verso of the flyer's title page is printed an
odd, synoptic parody of A Midsummer Night's Dream in
which the promoter "Serenity" assumes the role of
Theseus, DJ X (who is male) assumes that of Hippolyta
(here described as already wed to Theseus), and other
DJs collectively assume the role of Egeus in their "complaints" :
In the piazza before a grand festival house in
Toronto, Canada, preparations are underway for the
Serenity crew's party . Unremarked, two small figures mingle with the townspeople, collecting odd
treasures to be carried off to some unknown destination . . .
SUMMER 2002
What first marks this text as unusual is its very verbosity : most flyers do not waste half as many words to
hype their parties . And hyping the anticipated party is
arguably the function of this text, which is hardly poetic
and which unfolds according to a nonsensical but logicalsounding rhetoric not unlike that found in television commercials (e .g . Popsicle Pete's "warning" rhetorically
opposes but conceptually supports the DJs' agreement
reached in the prior sentence) . This flyer is to its genre
what Polonius is to Hamlet, or what Shakespeare too
often is to a high school classroom - so much sound and
fury, signifying nothing .
But if this text works merely as advertising, why
bother repeating information - concerning the line-up of
DJs and how they are paired for battle - on the facing
page, in the quick-reading list format that ravers read first
when browsing for parties? Whereas other promoters
might fill extra flyer space with psychedelic graphics, the
Serenity crew opted here to reiterate the party's planned
entertainment in a brief Shakespearean parody, one
fraught with multiple ironies . For one, the story signals but only to others who have read Shakespeare's play that the Serenity crew knows its Shakespeare (or knows it
well enough, at any rate, to have read more than the
play's title) . The spare, elliptical references (e .g . the complaints, the forest) thus enable the Serenity crew to cannily navigate the minefield of "cool" (mapped by Burt [11])
that must be traversed when a sub-cultural player wants
to cite Shakespeare in its production (even just as marketing leverage) without compromising its underground
cachet . Another irony lies in how the story queers its
source by casting Tang (DJ X) as Serenity's "bride ." On
one level, this casting can be read as a humorous reference
to Serenity's business organization; on another level, it
conjures the male transvestite casting practises according
to which the play would have been originally staged .
(Further queering of this sort may be inferred from the
flyer's - and, as we will see, the venue decorators' - use of
37
"fairy" images .) Further irony may be read in the threat to
"administer some kick ass sets ." Administration is an
oddly clinical-sounding departure from more conventional synonyms for DJing ( "throwing down," "rinsing out"
or "pimping") . But in light of the fact that raverspeak frequently re(e)fers to virtuoso DJ practice as the best narcotic (e.g ., Pete Elkerbout's handle as "Subsonic Chronic"
plays with this convention in its roundabout hip hop reference to cannabis), the word "administer" assumes a
pharmaceutical resonance that also suggests, almost as the
text's unconscious, the alternative economy of dangerous
supplements organized around and within the scene of the
dance party. A further subtextual suggestion of "administration" reveals how this Shakespearean adaptation takes
place not only between bodies but also within them : the
"love juice" (Shakespeare 3 .2 .37) Puck administers to
Lysander and Demetrius finds a non-fictional, modern
analogue in ecstasy as a chemical catalyst for love - albeit
of a more empathic than amorous kind (Reynolds 83) .
While Tang says the flyer story was directly based on
the play ("we just replaced the names and some of the text
to keep it in theme with our party") he denies any more
significant connection between the play and the party. "We
wanted a name that would best fit the season we were in
- summer - and we wanted to give the party a warm and
welcoming feel" (Interview) . Tang's comment reveals one
of the most striking features of Serenity's party in the context of adaptation: here is a scene of cultural production
that leverages Shakespearean references not as markers of
high cultural excellence but instead as signifiers (mostly
empty ones at that) of sub-cultural expenditure . In the
promoters' explicit ambivalence toward the source text,
we find a validation of Fischlin and Fortier's claim that
"Shakespeare is adapted in large part simply because he is
a major author" (6) .
ly for the occasion, was mounted behind the DJ stage (Fig .
5, below) . Lit wooden torches (a dramatic, if arguably dangerous, decorative addition) were placed around the
room . As well, Elkerbout recollects that vine-entwined
arches had been placed over each of the two stairways
leading down from the Opera House bar area to the dance
floor. "It was one of the nicer looking parties of that year . . .
it had a very natural, magical-forest feel to it" (Interview) .
This framing of the dance floor as the forest dramatizes
May's sense of the dance floor as a site of carnivalesque
fantasy and transformation (8) . The forest decor also
adapts the specifically pastoral aesthetic that has become
one of rave culture's many embedded discourses (Gilbert
and Pearson 30) . Like pastoral writing, a rave is an "urban
and sophisticated" (Alpers 35) production of an otiose
Arcady away from the workaday, a potentially subversive
site for "games and musical contests" (179) . It is possible
that Serenity (whose very name has a somewhat pastoral
ring) was taking another cue from Hullabaloo, which on
17 April 1999 hosted Foreverland, a Peter Pan-themed party
where the dance floor was decorated with several live potted trees (Samojlenko, "Foreverland") . In any case,
Serenity's decorators made the interesting choice to interpret the forest setting of A Midsummer Night's Dream primarily as a pastoral effect; in so doing, they dramatized
how every rave aspires to become an urban locus amoenus .
Figure 5 : Breaks DJs Big League Chu (left) and Marty McFly (second from right), and
in the background, the mural .
PHOTO COURTESY SERENITY INDUSTRIES
Figure 4 : Fairy doll decorations .
PHOTO COURTESY OF JOEL KRONENBERG/ PURERAVE .CO M
Turning from the flyer to the scene of the party, the
Serenity crew developed the Midsummer Night's Dream
theme in decorating the venue where it would be staged .
The Opera House was festooned with fairies (Fig . 4 above)
and flowers, while a sylvan fairy mural, painted especial-
38
One aspect of the evening's musical program is worth
noting in the context of adapting A Midsummer Night's
Dream (more could probably be said concerning other
details of the sets and playlists, but the DJs' performances
were unfortunately not recorded that night) . Elkerbout
recalls that one track played that night by headliner Chris
C . (Fig . 6, p . 39) was his own new remix of Ian M .'s Tidy
Trax release "The Dreamer ." According to a colonially
inherited cultural flow as familiar to scholars of Canadian
Shakespeare receptions as it is lucrative to the myriad
Toronto DJs who habitually look to the UK for potential
floor-fillers (or the Toronto promoters who habitually look
CTR 111
to the UK for headliners), C . came to the party armed with
promotional copies of new material, some of which he
gave to Elkerbout, including the "Dreamer" track in question (Elkerbout , Interview) .
Although this track's title suited Serenity's party
theme perfectly, the vocal sample that gave the record its
name has an entirely different source . "Behold, here
cometh the dreamer," intones a sombre male voice (in the
remix, the sample is time-stretched to give it a hallucinatory quality) . This sample quotes the first few words of
Genesis 37 :19 (Metzger), in which Joseph's brothers, fed
up with the dreamer's visions of grandeur, plot to kill him .
(I do not know what sound or film recording the sample is
taken from, but it was previously sampled a decade ago by
Dave Angel's "Nightmare mix" of the Eurythmics' "Sweet
dreams" [RCA 1989] .) An isolated excerpt on the record,
the phrase assumes a more general, annunciatory sense,
accompanying a drum roll that segues to an anthemic
sequence of kinetic "hoover" stabs that echo "oldskool"
hooks like those heard on Outlander's 1991 "Vamp" or
Rufige Cru's 1993 "Terminator II ."
Patriotism and Parody
Another notable distinction in that night's festivities was
the opportunity taken by the promoters to stop the music,
drop balloons on the Serenity massive, and lead everyone
in a rendition of "0 Canada ." It was a Canada Day party,
after all; even the police on duty seemed to be digging the
vibe (Fig . 7) . Sparklers were shared, flared and waved
about as the crowd sang the national anthem . In doing so,
the Serenity massive embodied a displaced, deconstructed
and decentred performance of Shakespeare, the polyphonic unison of which, no less than the Dream in High Park or
government-sponsored research, dramatized the continuing function of Shakespeare in the process of nation-building (Fischlin and Fortier 11) . It is worth adding that
Shakespearean adaptations of the kind undertaken by
Serenity go forward without any official recognition that
the activity is even cultural at all, let alone culture worth
funding.
Figure 7 :The life of every party.
PHOTO COURTESY JOEL KRONENBERG/ P URERAVE .COM
The dance crowd brought its own creative performances to the patriotic occasion ; Elkerbout recollects that,
although not many people were out in full-on "candyraver" costume (e.g ., fun fur, bright colours and toys as
fashion accessories), he did see a few people accessorizing
with Canadian flags (Fig . 8) .
Figure 6: Headliner Chris C .
PHOTO COURTESY SERENITY INDUSTRIES
Figure 8 : Patriotism or parody? At right, a raver drapes himself with
the flag .
PHOTO COURTESY SERENITY INDUSTRIES
SUMMER 2002
39
But if a raver is using the flag for a towel, is it patriotism or parody? Considering rave culture's troubled relationship with the media, the same image could easily be
used for either Olivia Chow's youth advocacy or Police
Chief Fantino's crackdown . Immersed in and fuelled by
the postmodern and post-punk aesthetics of pastiche,
raver style (if there is such a thing, even provisionally)
makes it possible to assimilate or represent national
emblems as kitsch . I personally know a raver who has
gained free entry to parties just by dressing in red and
white, with a maple leaf on his hat and the flag as a cape
on his back . As mentioned above, this kind of do-it-yourself costume play is a celebrated part of rave performativity. But it is also ironic and deeply ambivalent - just like
Serenity's use of the Shakespearean text . As an exaggerated dramatization of the way in which many (if not all)
Canadians look forward to Canada Day mostly for the free
time, the party in question starts to look increasingly carnivalesque : the symbols of official culture can be parodied
- but only within the frame of officially sanctioned, and
increasingly policed, "free" time (Stallybrass and White
13) .
After the event, a raver identified only as
"pb4ugo2bed," posted an on-line review of the party that
called it "certainly a dream come true" (9) . His review was
a literal rave, bigging up the selections and skills of DJs
like Tang, Squirt and Satori in particular . This reviewer's
suggestion that Serenity's party was "a dream come true"
opens our understanding to another way the party as such
adapted the very plot of the source play . Escaping the quotidian world's regulations and threats to find refuge for a
night in a "haunted grove" where normal identities are
mistaken, new ones assumed, talking asses abound and a
kind of dream logic pervades the whole scene, mediated
through music and chemistry - according to this synopsis
of the play, what rave is not an adaptation of A Midsummer
Night's Dream?
Tang and Elkerbout both recall that the crowd attending A Midsummer Night's Dream was diverse, perhaps relatively young, though many people were of legal drinking
age . Interestingly, there were generally more women than
men; Tang says this is typical for Serenity parties
(Interview) . What is not typical - for any Toronto party - is
for women to perform as MCs : it is thus worth noting that
a young MC calling herself Blade took the mic and spat
some rhymes to accompany the jungle set that DJ
Doublecross threw down (Fig . 9) . It is an ironic bit of early
modem history repeating itself that Blade's performance
was the one aspect of the party that "pb4ugo2bed" criticized - specifically because, the reviewer felt, female
vocals were inappropriate for jungle music (9) .
Unwittingly echoing the sentiments of John Northbrooke
(Cerasano and Wynne-Davies 161) or William Prynne
(171), such comments are symptomatic of the objectionable - but not unchallenged (Pyle) - sexism with which
late-modern DJ culture also unfortunately resembles the
early modern theatre .
40
Figure 9 : MC Blade on the mic - a
rare female presence on the hypermacho jungle stage .
PHOTO COURTESY SERENITY INDUSTRIES
The fact that the party was held on Canada Day
accounted, in Tang's estimation, for a "relatively low turnout" (Interview) . Serenity had to compete with other parties being held not only on that Saturday but also on the
Sunday of the long weekend as well as with nightclubs
like Industry and System Soundbar boasting local
favourites and international headliners . Oddly enough,
while Serenity's operations are currently on hold (Tang,
Interview), it appears as though clubs may take precedence over raves in Serenity's future plans .
Acknowledging Serenity's founding stakes in UK hard
house, trance and breaks, Tang suggests that the crew will
in future turn its attention to a "more mature crowd . . .
with the best there is to offer in house and breaks"
(Interview) . As the genre in which Tang (Fig . 10, p . 41) has
long specialized, breaks will remain an obvious constant
in Serenity's business, and it is a genre that has made decisive inroads at Toronto clubs in the last two years .
Elkerbout echoes Tang's anxiety about the altered
state of Toronto's electronic music industry . Although he
states a definite preference for spinning at one-off parties,
he is clearly frustrated that UK hard house has yet to cross
over, like breaks, trance, drum 'n' bass or techno before it,
into clubland popularity:
[Hard house] hasn't really caught on in Canada and
the US like it has in the UK, and in Australia, and
pretty much everywhere else except here-it's still
definitely more of a party music than club music . . ..
I definitely prefer spinning parties but as the parties
are dwindling and as the clubs are getting bigger it's
CTR 111
becoming a bit of a challenge . We're trying really
hard to promote the music and trying to get it into
clubs . . . There's really never any club that regularly
features any out-of-town NRG [hard house] talent.
(Interview)
1996 .
Brown, Rebecca . "A Ghost Group Manifesto ." Canadian Theatre
Review 103 (2000) : 5-7 .
Burt, Richard . Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares : Queer Theory and
American Kiddie Culture . New York: St. Martin's, 1998 .
Cerasano, S .P., and Marion Wynne-Davies . Renaissance Drama by
Women: Texts and Documents. New York : Routledge, 1996.
City of Toronto . Minutes of the Council of the City of Toronto . 9-11
May 2000 . Toronto : Clerk's office . 110-20 . 2 June 2000 .
Available :<http : / / w ww.city.toronto .on.c a /legdocs/2000/minutes/council/cc000509 .pdf>
DiPietro, Dene [Spoony D] . Personal interview. 27 Dec. 2001 .
Elkerbout, Peter [Subsonic Chronic] . Personal interview. 8 Nov.
2001 .
Ellis, Suzanne. "Cops, Province to Battle Raves ." Toronto Sun 12
Oct. 1999 . (no pagination.)
Eurythmics . "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) ." Dave Angel's
Nightmare remix. London : RCA, 1989 .
Fischlin, Daniel, and Mark Fortier, eds . Introduction . Adaptations
of Shakespeare : A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth
Century to the Present. New York : Routledge, 2000 . 1-22 .
The Fatal Blow in Toronto ." E-mail to Concrete Pride
Mailing List. 15 Mar. 2000.
Available: <http :/ /www.interlog.com/-3 1 second/> .
Gaillot, Michel . Multiple Meaning: Techno, an Artistic and Political
Laboratory of the Present . Trans . Warren Niesluchowski . Paris :
Editions Dis Voir, 1998 .
Gilbert, Jeremy, and Pearson, Ewan . Discographies : Dance Music,
Culture and the Politics of Sound . London : Routledge, 1999 .
Jenkins, Philip . Synthetic Panics : The Symbolic Politics of Designer
Drugs . New York: New York UP, 1999.
M., Ian . "The Dreamer" (Chris C . remix) . Rotherham, UK: Tidy
Trax, 2000 .
May, Beverly. "Participatory Theatre : The Experiential Construct
of House and Techno Music Events ." Canadian Theatre Review
103 (2000) : 9-13.
McCutcheon, Mark. "So Much for Police in Pink Uniforms ."
Neksis .com . 17 Nov. 2000 . Available :< http ://www.neksis .com>
Metzger, Bruce M ., and Murphy, Roland E ., eds . The New Oxford
Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha (New Revised Standard
Version) . New York: Oxford UP, 1991 .
"Michelle ." "Fun House presents 'GROUP HUG."' Online message
forum . Hullabaloo! The Official Web Site. 15 Apr. 2000. Available
(13 Dec . 2001) :< http ://www.hullabalooraves.com/showthread .php?s=06262f4f0195c8c2aa2dee072a9a f
c3c&threadid=610&perpage=25&pagenumber=4>
Oh, Susan . "Rave Fever ." Macleans 24 Apr. 2000 .
Available :<http : / / w ww.macleans .ca/pubdoc/2000/04/24/Cover/33786 .shtml>
Outlander. "The Vamp ." Ghent, Belgium : R & S Records, 1991 .
"Pb4ugo2bed ." "Midsummer Night's Dream ." Tribe 71 (2000) : 9 .
Pyle, Don . "The Ladies' Room : Female DJs Join Together to Take
Back the Decks ." Eye 24 (2000) . 2 Feb . 2002 . Available :
<http ://www.eye .net/eye/issue / issue 08 .24 .00/thebeat/dec
"FWD :
Figure 10 : D] X (a.k .a.WillarTang) flexes the decks .
PHOTO COURTESY JOEL KRONENBERG/ P URERAVE.COM
Both Elkerbout's clubland aspirations and Serenity's
anticipated turn toward a "more mature" clientele - signalled by Tang's reference to house as a "mature" genre
(presumably excluding hard house) - are symptoms of the
uncertain yet tenacious status of hardcore dance music in
Toronto . As Reynolds argues, hardcore scenes may be
those that work hardest to develop new sounds and styles,
but they tend to be scenes characterized more by expenditure than profit . In a city where even big, hardcore-oriented companies like Hullabaloo often barely break even on
the parties they throw (Samojlenko, "Discuss"), it is not
uncommon for smaller companies to operate at a loss . In
this economic context, it becomes important to reiterate
that for Toronto rave promoters, Shakespeare cannot be
leveraged as a marker of cultural excellence or exploited to
turn a sure profit . Notwithstanding Serenity's Dream - or
more conventionally theatrical productions like Matthew
MacFadzean's acclaimed fringe play
richardthesecond - it is
unlikely that rave culture's ambivalent adaptations of
Shakespeare will foster either musical innovations or
appreciative support from a public that tends more often
to vilify this culture as a teen drug orgy, rather than recognize it as a complex - and recently endangered - nexus of
diversified cultural production and performance . CTR
Note
1 See Samojlenko, "Anabolic Doesn't Care ."
Works Cited
Abbate, Gay . "Raves Should be Allowed, City Committee
Urges." Globe and Mail 14 July 2000 : A17.
Alpers, Paul. What is Pastoral? Chicago : U of Chicago P, 1996 .
Beltram, Joey [Second Phase] . "Mentasm." Ghent, Belgium : R &
S Records, 1991 .
Bristol, Michael D . Big-time Shakespeare . New York : Routledge,
SUMMER 2002
ks .html>
"Rave Recommendations ." Pulse24.com News . Chum City TV,
Toronto . 1 June 2000 Available :<http ://www.cp24 .com/newstories/june0100-recsl .asp>
Reynolds, Simon. Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and
Rave Culture. New York : Little, Brown, 1998 .
richardthesecond: a nightmare . By Matthew MacFadzean. Dir .
Rebecca Brown . Perf . Matthew MacFadzean. Artword Theatre,
Toronto . 2 Aug. 2001 .
Rufige Cru . "Terminator II ." London, UK: Reinforced, 1993.
Rusk, James . "New Dawn for Ravers as Deal Reached on
Toronto Venues ." Globe and Mail 4 Aug. 2000 : A2 .
Samojlenko, Chris [Anabolic Frolic] . "Anabolic Doesn't Care ."
41
Neksis .com . 8 Dec . 2000 . Available (15 Dec .
2001) :<http : / / www .anabolic-frolic.com/articles/neksisinterview.html >
-. "Discuss : The End of Big Parties in Toronto?" Online message
forum . Hullabaloo! The Official Web Site. 23 Oct. 2001 . Available (2
Feb . 2002) :<http : / /www.hullabaloor aves .com/showthread .php?s=3a0eaod3ef214f4fcdeb38e4d9db99
64&threadid=4152>
-. Foreverland [web archive] . Hullabaloo! The Official Web Site . 14
.Dec. 2001 Available :< http ://www.hullabalooraves .com/archivelO .html>
Serenity Industries . A Midsummer Night's Dream [web archive] . 12
Oct. 2001 .
Available:< http ://www.serenityindustries .com/amsnd event_
info.htm>
Shakespeare, William . A Midsummer Night's Dream . Ed. Wolfgang
Clemen. New York : Penguin, 1986 .
Smith, Russell. Interview with Master T. "Raving & Ranting : The
Future of Rave Culture ." TooMuch4Much. MuchMusic, 1 June
2000.
Stallybrass, Allon, and Peter White . The Politics and Poetics of
Transgression . Ithaca : Cornell UP, 1986 .
Stanford, Kim, and Mark McCutcheon . "TDSC in Limbo ." Neksis
1 .1 (2001) :10 .
Tang, Willar [DJ X] . E-mail interview. 2 Dec. 2001 .
Mark McCutcheon is a doctoral candidate in the joint PhD
Program in Literary Studies and Theatre Studies in English at
the University of Guelph and Wilfrid Laurier University . As
DJ "Dr.Teeth" (representing Leisuresociety .com), Mark won
Rockstargamesupload .com's 2001 Online Media Award for
best DJ mix .
42
CTR 111
Dancing With Shakespeare
Tom Stroud and Winnipeg's Contemporary Dancers
by MARK FORTIER
Stroud fought against Hamlet's misogyny by allowing Gertrude (Nina Battison, below) and Ophelia spaces to express themselves .
PHOTO BY IAN MCCAUSLAND
The written word has always been a source o f
inspiration for my choreography . I am particularly
fascinated with the work o f Shakespeare . His
dense, multi-layered text provides a perfect catalyst for the image-rich world o f dance . In The
Garden, although there is a definite relationship
to the play it was not our intention to follow the
narrative in any linear fashion . Rather we've used
Hamlet as the departure point for the exploration
o f the visual metaphors, ideas, emotions and character perspective embedded in the play.
Tom Stroud, Programme notes for The Garden
In 2001, Tom Stroud celebrated his tenth anniversary as artistic director of Winnipeg's Contemporary Dancers . In that
period he has created a number of performances in which dance and theatre intertwine in the use of verbal text as inspiration for dance movement . As a choreographer, Stroud is often dissatisfied with "pure dance," in which movement has
no context or connection to ideas . For him, text makes movement specific and adds a psychological dimension to dance,
while dance embodies ideas and allows access to the emotional heart of the textual material . His approach to text and theatre is not so much narrative as "poetic" : his dance presents a series of images around a set of themes that arise in the chosen text . In this way, dance "makes a statement," but this statement is in the oracular form of images that allow for audience members to make their own contemplative connections . Stroud invokes Pina Bausch as one of his precursors who
have united theatre and dance . In a Canadian context it is easy to be reminded of Montreal's Carbone 14 .
Among the textual material from which Stroud has drawn inspiration are the plays of Shakespeare : Romeo rntd Juliet,
for R & J . . . 21 scenes for Ronteo and Juliet, which was performed around Canada from 1994 to 1998, and Hamlet, for The
SUMMER 2002
43
Garden, staged at the Gas Station theatre in Winnipeg in
2001 . Stroud finds a number of extremely useful aspects in
Shakespeare's work for dance : images that resonate and
unfold in complex patterns ; high emotional drama ; large
language that corresponds with the large gestures of
dance ; and a clear sense of structure . On this last point,
although Stroud's Shakespearean works do not follow the
story line, they do follow the general chronology of the
plays . The story is there in the background, its events resonating with the images and emotions . In his approach to
Shakespeare, Stroud draws upon Peter Brook's idea that
Shakespeare's work presents codified theatrical impulses,
so that the choreographer's job is to translate those
impulses, verbalized in Shakespeare, into movement .
Stroud took the verbal closeness of Romeo and Juliet and the way they seem to
complete each others movements and created a duet where they rolled over top
of each other on the floor, completing each other's movements .
PHOTO BY LYDIA PAWELAK
R & J focused its attention on the ideal love the play
presents, asking such questions as "Would you die for
love?" and exploring the complexities, for a late twentiethcentury audience, of an invocation to trust in your heart .
To this end it combined lines and speeches from
Shakespeare (Queen Mab, of course, made her inevitable
appearance) with texts both written by Stroud and director
Chris Pinker-Gerrard and arising from the performers'
improvisations . Sometimes excerpts from Shakespeare
stood alone, sometimes they bandied back and forth with
the new. Here the text was dispersed to all the dancers,
who sometimes had to dance and speak lines simultaneously, and a sense of multiple points-of-view, often in conflict, was created .
The text of R & J was sometimes spoken live by the
actors while they moved or while they stood in front of
microphones, and sometimes it was part of a pre-recorded
soundtrack. Stroud found various ways to embody
Shakespeare's words in movement . In one scene, Romeo's
44
passion was played with frenetic movement in contrast to
the sceptical and relaxed gestures of Mercutio . Also,
Stroud took the verbal closeness of Romeo and Juliet, (the
way they seem to complete each other's sentences, for
instance), and created a duet in which they rolled over top
of each other on the floor, completing each other's movements . Although the scenes of the dance gave relatively little of the plot of Shakespeare's play, the chronology was
visible underneath, and the performance began and ended
with the sonnets of induction and epilogue as in
Shakespeare .
The Garden, Stroud's more recent, Hamlet-inspired
work, takes as its themes a number of ideas from
Shakespeare . On one level, the theme is destiny and the
statement is the need to trust in destiny. This is not exactly
a happy trust, however, since another major theme is
decay. The most striking aspect of The Garden is that it was
performed on a stage covered in dirt - Hamlet's unweeded
garden, the graveyard, the quintessence of dust . The
dancers moved in a particular way because they were
dancing on dirt, and they were most often low and close to
the ground, like Claudius's thoughts that cannot to heaven go . The dirt was scooped, kicked, hurled, wallowed in .
It filled the scene with a murky light . The air was so heavy
and thick you could cut it with a bare bodkin . The Garden
ended with the dancers slowly decaying, falling languidly
limb by limb down and into the earth for a few final
twitches of life .
Unlike R & J, The Garden uses no text outside of
Shakespeare, drawing all its verbal language from Hamlet.
Shakespeare's text is presented here like arias, and the text
has the feel of listening to a recording of highlights from an
opera . The speeches used are high-profile and familiar:
So oft it chances in particular men [ . . .]
That it should come to this [ . . .]
What a piece of work is a man [ . . .]
What's he to Hecuba [ . . .]
To be or not to be [ .. .]
Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners [ . . .]
Doubt thou the stars are fire [ . . .]
My offence is rank [ . . .]
Mother, you have my father much offended [ . . .J
The readiness is all [ . . .]
The rest is silence .
All the text, except for one speech ("My offence is
rank," of course, is spoken by Claudius) are Hamlet's
words and most of the text in the performance is spoken
by Hamlet in grand and emotive style, not as an actor
would deliver the lines, but as a singer might if he were
speaking the way he sings .
The speeches from Hamlet are all more or less truncated. What is of interest for Stroud are the grand philosophical statements rather than the particulars of circumstance .
Like R & J, The Garden does not present the details of
Shakespeare's plot, although the movements and words
follow in general the chronology of Hamlet .
So, in The Garden we are strictly limited to
Shakespeare's texts and to the words of one character . For
Stroud, this is because Hamlet dominates Shakespeare's
play, and because Dan Wild, the dancer playing Hamlet,
was hobbled by a knee injury that kept him from doing
CTR III
much dancing . The result, for reasons of vicissitude and
theme, was that the other characters danced around
Hamlet as he spoke, reacting to his words and attacks,
sometimes going over his words for themselves . Hamlet's
arias set a tone, an energy, a rhythm (often in counterpoint)
for the dancers . Certain movements occured over and over
again - for instance, outstretched arms frequently ended in
clasped hands, which for Stroud combines gestures of
praying and swordplay. There was, in multiple ways, a
sense of being trapped, inside Shakespeare's play, inside
Hamlet's words and psyche .
In his collaborators, Stroud found other ways of materializing Shakespeare's theatrical impulses . The music of
Greg Lowe, with its overlapping time signatures, is for
Stroud an embodiment of Shakespeare's notion of time
being "out of joint ." Props and costumes were designed by
the visual artist Diana Thorneycroft, well-known for her
controversial show Monstrance, which featured the carcasses of rabbits, and The Body, its Lesson and Camouflage,
which featured photographs of herself with objects and
costumes drawn from childhood, medicine and surgery,
sexuality, torture and death . Stroud saw these photographs when they were exhibited at the Winnipeg Art
Gallery and immediately said to himself, "That's Hamlet ."
What Stroud and Thorneycroft saw as the connection
between her work and Hamlet was a fascination with
moral and physical destruction and decay, which was reinforced when Thorneycroft came across a scholarly article
on Hamlet and the grotesque . Thorneycroft turned to films
of Hamlet for inspiration, but found them all period-piece
costume dramas, which is not her style . Her photographs,
especially on the poster for The Garden, do bear a resemblance to the black and white cinematography of Laurence
Olivier's Hamlet, and she did borrow the idea of Ophelia's
straightjacket from Kenneth Branagh's film . Mostly, however, Thorneycroft turned to elements from her own work.
The back of the set became adorned with fox skulls, animal
traps painted gold, military harnesses and a scythe . She
decorated a chair used prominently in the performance
with fabric sewn on with an autopsy stitch . Animal bones
and rabbit fur were sewn over the dancers' costumes .
Crucifixes took over the prominence previously given to
monstrances in her work . Masks marked with crucifixes sit
half buried in the dirt . Both Gertrude and Claudius wear a
modified woman's bodice . Dolls are used at several
moments . Thorneycroft also crafted devices to restrict the
dancers in their basic drives . Gertrude's sexual need to
touch and nurture is thwarted by two long cone-shaped
prostheses which she wears on her arms ; Claudius wears a
bridle-like mouthpiece which turns his face into a snarl
and curbs his appetite and ability to speak .
With its anguished Hamlet, its dirt, its murky light, its
laden movements, bones, traps and prostheses, The Garden
is inevitably a dark piece of work . Stroud did what he
could to temper this tone . The performance opened with
destiny comically playing out the murder of Hamlet's
father with action figures, and at one point in the
rehearsals a set of key words, derived from Shakespeare,
was used to focus the performance : shame, elation, betrayal, revenge, whore, rage . These words brought out the passion in Hamlet, and Stroud was especially interested in elation or ecstasy, which he sees arising in the excitement of
Hamlet's monologues . Stroud also fought against the
misogyny the dancers felt in Hamlet's tirades by allowing
Gertrude and Ophelia space to express themselves, if not
in language then in movement .
Stroud realizes that the kind of hybrid performance in
The Garden runs the risk of disappointing both those who
come for dance and those who come for theatre . For the
aficionado of theatre, for instance, the delivery of the lines
was not always satisfying - for instance when "wantonness" sounded like "wonton-ness ." Much of the production rode on Dan Wild's Hamlet, and he didn't speak the
lines like a good actor would, with the subtlety of a rich
and complex character . It should be noted, however, that
an actor's delivery is not what the production calls for .
Rather, an operatic approach, however unsatisfying as acting, provides the kind of high tone that the dancing
requires . All in all, the production was well received by
local critics - csc arts correspondent Robert Enright gave it
a rave review. The success of the show has inspired Tom
Stroud to continue his work with text-based dance . His
next work will feature twenty-four singers whose text will
come from the poems of Octavio Paz . Down the line he is
thinking of working with Othello.
There is a long history of adapting Shakespeare's
works and specifically of setting them to music and dance .
One thinks of Verdi's Otello and Falstaff and Prokofiev's
Romeo and Juliet. The Winnipeg Contemporary Dancers
have added to that history in their own specific ways,
Canadian and contemporary, continuing the work of
remaking Shakespeare across genres, generations and
geographies . In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T.S .
Eliot sees culture as a set of monuments that are continually added to and changed by new artists . Certainly
Shakespeare is such a monument .
Acknowledgement
I wish to thank Tom Stroud and Diana Thorneycroft for talking
with me about The Garden .
most striking aspect of Stroud's Hamlet-inspired The Garden, featuring Dan Wild as
mlet,is that it is performed on a stage covered in dirt .
Mark Fortier is a member of the English Department at the
University of Winnipeg and co-edited the Routledge anthology Adaptations of Shakespeare with Daniel Fischlin .
1 110 BY IAN MCCAUSLAND
SUMMER 2002
45
Shakespeare
in a Blender
Ottawa's Company of Fools
by JESSICA SCHAGERL
s a collective with four to six members at any
one time, A Company of Fools' mandate is to
create innovative and accessible pieces based on
the works of William Shakespeare. The company, which currently consists of core members
Margo MacDonald, Scott Florence, Elizabeth Logue,
Stefanie Seguin and Al Connors, interprets this mandate
two ways : as full-length shows performed with their own
spin (most often using elements of clown) and as
"Shakespeare in a blender" (a collage piece, a show made
up of a collection of themes from Shakespeare or
Shakespeare rewritten with improvisational elements
involved .) In both instances, the result is generally irreverent - a function of the very physical, presentational and
interactive style of the players . Described variously as a
Shakespeare comedy troupe, an antidote to boring, conventional Shakespeare, and (by one of the members) as
what happens when "the Marx Brothers make coffee for
the Monty Python gang at a slumber party where everyone is watching Bugs Bunny" (Florence, Interview),
Ottawa's A Company of Fools has maintained its entertaining, exuberant take on Shakespeare by not taking their
source material too seriously . Through their adaptations of
Shakespeare, especially the re-workings of scenes in new
contexts with unexpected twists, the Fools - as they are
commonly called in Ottawa - seem to epitomize a most
Canadian attribute : their cultural productions do not disrupt Shakespeare as a dominant cultural figure but playfully adapt his writing and situations for their own
comedic ends .
A
Caesar (Sean Tucker) is stabbed in Foolius Caesar by (I-r) Elizabeth Logue, Amy
Cunningham, and Scott Florence.
PHOTO BY DAVID WHITELY
The now-recognizable adaptive style of the Fools,
marked by elements of clown, rapid-fire dialogue, and a
constant reworking of the script (often through improv),
evolved from of the need to keep a crowd on the street . In
1990, the company's first year, the members would perform on the streets of downtown Ottawa in the summer,
usually by the former location of the Terry Fox Memorial
at the corner of Rideau Street and Sussex Drive . Initially,
the company, consisting of founding members Margo
MacDonald and Heather Jopling together with dozens of
other performers, would perform marathon shows with a
hat out - and would have to encourage people to toss coins
in - but they soon began to realize that the more they did
the sword play and fighting scenes, the more people were
intrigued. In the second year, with the addition of new
core members, the company began to perform shorter, discrete shows of thirty to forty-five minutes, in hopes of getting people to stay rather than just walk by or watch one
scene and then walk away. What ended up happening was
larger, faster, zanier Shakespeare designed to appeal to the
passerby - an audience, they quickly realized, with a large
proportion of people who were quick to point out that they
hated Shakespeare, that "Shakespeare is hard to understand" (Florence) . To hold the attention of these spectators,
as well as the more appreciative in the crowd, the Fools
began to use more improv :
On the street you never know what's going to happen . You get someone wandering in, suddenly being
part of the scene or, at the really super dramatic
moment, the Snowbirds [Canada's aerial formation
team] fly over in full formation . All sorts of things
happen to break the drama, the intensity and we
could either deal with that, work it into the act, and
have the audience love it, or have the show fall apart
because the audience became more interested in
something else, like the Snowbirds flying by.
(Florence)
A Company of Fools performs Shakespeare's Dead: (I-r) Elizabeth
Logue,Amy Cunningham, audience participant, Scott Florence
Catrione Leger, Sean Tucker
PHOTO BY DAVID WHITELY
46
The exigencies of street performance have had various
effects on the Fools' adaptations . Performing on the streets
of Ottawa, according to current artistic director Scott
Florence,
CTR 111
required us to really start playing around with
Shakespeare - and not just with Shakespeare either,
but with theatre more broadly - because people are
used to stopping on the street when they see someone juggling a million things, especially fire, or eating fire or doing stunts and tricks . That's the kind of
stuff we were doing: street theatre, theatre on the
street .
Shakespeare, however, was not secondary to the attention-grabbing stunts, quick movement, solicitations of
audience participation and broader cultural references - if
these attracted audiences, the sense of fun, physical
humour, verbal play, irreverence, new insights, and comfort with the Shakespearean text certainly went a long way
in holding the crowd .
To hear Florence tell it, the adaptations performed by
A Company of Fools are not parody, since their intention is
never to mock. (At my suggestion that parody occasionally also can be affectionate, Florence, in a very good Bugs
Bunny voice, opines "There you go : we're the snuggle
bunnies of parody, the affectionate aficionados .") Rather,
he says, they are heavily influenced by Shakespeare, by the
instinctive actions and reactions of clown, and by aspects
of commedia .
Although the clowns might seem to be an intentional
misrepresentation - the introduction of a marginal element
from Shakespeare given undue prominence - the impulsedriven world of clowns seems to mitigate the highbrow
nature of Shakespeare for some and show new angles of
interpretation for others .
Red-nosed clowns have become something of a staple
in the Fools' shows, often the focus for the adaptation of
Shakespeare . Beyond using elements of clown - like large
physical expression, purity of discovery, emotional motivation and impromptu and impulsive actions - A
Heavily influenced by
Shakespeare, clown and
commedia, Scott Florence
plays Touchstone with a
red nose .
Company of Fools has also experimented with letting the
clowns tell Shakespeare's story : Romeo and Juliet : The
Comedy (1996) had six red-nosed clowns perform
Shakespeare's tragedy. Using Shakespeare's text, circus
and theatrical clowning, slapstick, eccentric props and a
doll, Romeo and Juliet: The Comedy was the first full-length
foray by the Fools into the world of clown . The piece was
performed with very few cuts to the text and no additional writing - save the occasional ad lib by a clown - a decision that meant the clowns' stories and relationships, as
well as the comedy, were emphasized . Initially, this adaptive practice meant that, for the audience, the meaning of
the Shakespearean text was changed with the appearance
of the clowns; although the theatre script was ostensibly
the original, the introduction of the clowns in conditions
new to both them and the audience made for a more theatrical adaptation . With the clowns, the comedy in the play
was exaggerated without mitigating the force of the
tragedy. As capricious creatures, however, getting the
clowns to speak the text assigned was often a trying experience for the actors and so, when A Company of Fools
decided to tackle Shakespeare again with red-nosed
clowns in The Danish Play (2001), the clowns told more of
their story instead of Shakespeare's .
The Danish Play follows the fortunes of a troupe of
clowns who attempt to perform Shakespeare's cursed
play. In the Fools' adaptation, however, it is not Macbeth
that is cursed, it is Hamlet . The play's ghostly haunting
drives what happens onstage, allowing the clowns' relationships to be first and foremost, but it also highlights the
relationships between Shakespeare's characters through
the clowns . In this production, the full speech of the Ghost
asking Hamlet to revenge his murder establishes the
premise of the play; this scene and the coronation scene
serve as signposts for a production that relies on visual,
not verbal, cues to link it to Shakespeare's Hamlet .
The Danish Play adapted many conventions of
Shakespeare performance and of the performers of
Shakespeare . Within the first five minutes, the clowns had
sworn a pox on Kenneth Branagh, mocked the length of
most productions, and introduced a digitized three-metretall ghost. Polonius's advice to Laertes was done vaudeville style; there was an interactive "To thine ownself be
true ." "To be or not to be," the most well-known of
Hamlet's soliloquies, was done as penance for disagreeing
with Pommes Frites, the lead clown . Ophelia's remembrances were begun in pantomime but the scene quickly
dissolved into farce as the two clowns vying for the role of
Ophelia threw Hamlet out of the way in order that they
might have centre stage ; Ophelia's mad scene, in contrast,
did not stray away from mime, though water was thrown
instead of flowers . Because the play's name cannot be spoken due to the curse, the clowns must not pronounce the
name of the lead character either : throughout the production several clowns get banished offstage for saying
"Hamlet ." At the end of the play, which the clowns have
decided to do without a Hamlet, Hamlet is called
"Hamless," "Hamster," "Hamhahaha," "Hamburger,"
"Ham on Rye," "Hamalamadingdong " ; Gertrude invari-
PHOTO BY DAVID WHITELY
SUMMER 2002
47
ably calls Hamlet "Piglet" throughout the course of the
production . Although the Fools might not have set out to
introduce popular culture into their adaptations, there certainly was plenty of spontaneous introduction of material
"relevant" to summer 2001 (when I saw the production),
such as a Charlie's Angels tableau, and the comment "little
kids always see dead people," a reference to the film The
Sixth Sense . In fact, this production was noticeably lively
thanks to children in the audience, andthe ability of the
Fools to play off their comments ("Are you a judge? Then
why are you trying my patience?") .
No gizmos, gadgets or special effects here : generally,
the Fools use the same basic sets and costumes with variations depending on the performance piece and the per-
Catrione Leger has things well in hand as Anthony in Foolius Caesar .
PHOTO BY DAVID WHITELY
formance style . The standard costumes are tights,
"pouffy" pants, shifts of a vaguely Elizabethan nature
(anything from a replica of an Elizabethan shirt to
Guatemalan cotton shirts purchased in Ottawa's By Ward
Market), vests, runners and patches, lots of patches . The
Fools pride themselves on keeping the audience's attention
without the use of a stage cluttered with props; the set is
thus kept quite bare, save their trunk, curtains and select
other props as the piece demands . In both Romeo and Juliet:
The Comedy (1996) and Everything Shakespeare Ever Wrote
(1997), boxes were used to great effect; the collage piece
Foolius Caesar (1999) highlighted a puppet named
"Luscious ."
Ottawa might have the National Arts Centre, but it
does not have a large independent theatre scene and it certainly has less radical and experimental theatre
("Winnipeg's independent scene is much better," says
Florence) . Part of the problem is venues : even with the
opening of the Fourth Stage at the National Arts Centre the Centre's new performance space is dedicated to performing groups from the Ottawa-Carleton region - there is
little space for independent companies to produce . The
Fringe Festival in Ottawa, in which A Company of Fools
has participated since the Festival's inception in 1997, has
helped to develop the independent theatre scene in
Ottawa by providing another outlet for independent theatre companies . This commitment to the experience of live
theatre and their beginnings in street theatre made A
Company of Fools a natural selection for the Fringe
Festival. For its inaugural season, the Fools presented
Everything Shakespeare Ever Wrote, excerpts from each of
Shakespeare's plays . In this production, William
Shakespeare is a young man hounded by his eventual creations . At the second Ottawa Fringe Festival, the Fools
performed Shakespeare Does the Seven Deadly Sins, a humorous look at everything wicked in the world . Shakespeare's
Dead, the sequel to Shakespeare's Interactive Circus, premiered at the Ottawa Fringe Festival in 2000 and was later
staged alongside Foolius Caesar as Double Bill: Shakespeare's
Dead & Foolius Caesar. The Fools have had continued success at the Ottawa Fringe Festival and have set box office
records for their performances . Moreover, in 2001, The
Danish Play was named Outstanding Production by the
Ottawa Fringe Festival.
It is somewhat telling and ironic that the third-largest
theatre in Ottawa is the Ottawa Little Theatre, an amateur
company maintained by subscription : Ottawa does not
really have a large theatre-going public and does not seem
to have one willing to support the kind of avant-garde
experimental theatre so vital to cities like Toronto,
Montreal and Winnipeg . A Company of Fools, then, also
has as one of its goals to encourage people who never really go to the theatre - and especially those who do not
enjoy the theatre because they associate it with (archaic)
Shakespeare - to realize that if they enjoyed a performance
of Shakespeare by the Fools, then maybe contemporary
theatre might also be of interest . Through adaptations that
are humorous without distorting Shakespeare, the Fools
implicitly undermine the assumption that Shakespeare is
necessarily hard to follow . Certainly, the Fools have done
their part to mentor up-and-coming companies in the
Ottawa area . At events like the annual Twelfth Night celebrations (now staged at the Fourth Stage of the National
Arts Centre) and the annual Theatre Challenge, as well as
through the Fringe Festival, the Fools have shown a commitment to fostering new talent, much of which is also
concerned with the adaptation of Shakespeare . The Fools,
for instance, sponsor the Ottawa Theatre Challenge for
The Fools pride themselves on keeping the ;.idience's attention . (1-r) Amy Cunninghi
Elizabeth Logue, Scott Florence, Catrione Leger .
PHOTO BY DAVID WHITELY
48
CTR 111
independent theatre companies in Ottawa. On the first
weekend in April, twelve theatre companies from the
Ottawa-Carleton region are given a prop, a newspaper
headline, a line of dialogue from Shakespeare, and fortyeight hours in a challenge of creation . The event is judged
by three local playwrights, the proceeds go to charity and
the winner is awarded bragging rights and the Rubber
Chicken Award!
For the 2002-2003 season, A Company of Fools plans
two new productions, both experimental in their own
way. Summer 2002 will see another full-length production,
The Two Noble Kinsmen, written by William Shakespeare
and John Fletcher and directed by founding member
Margo MacDonald . The production will be presented in
parks across Ottawa, outdoors with torches and lanterns
and will incorporate puppets, mask work and morris
dancing . More ambitiously, perhaps, the Fools have
planned a two-week workshop in November 2002 with a
guest clown teacher, where they will learn the style of
bouffon - evil clowns - a rehearsal and performance style
used to break actors out of their habits and encourage
them to explore their passions . A Company of Fools have
already experimented with bouffon in Shakespeare's Dead
(2000) in their adaptation of the murder of Clarence in
Richard III. They will extend their treatment of both bouffon
and Richard III in a production tentatively called Dickie's
Divine Discontents Cabaret (2002) .
In a city more known for its civil service and hightechnology sectors, Ottawa's A Company of Fools is doing
its part to shake up the idea that the only theatre worth
seeing is commercial theatre with ample funding . Begun
as a street theatre company, the Fools bring the same energy and vibrancy that marked their earliest adaptations of
Shakespeare to their indoor performances . Their affectionate adaptations rarely lose sight of the Shakespearean text,
instead drawing the audience's attention to the margins of
these texts, where traditionally comic figures like clowns
are given license to adapt and rework the Shakespearean
script in new contexts . CTR
Jessica Schagerl is a doctoral candidate in English Literature
at the University of Western Ontario.
Work Cited
Florence, Scott. Personal interview . 27 Dec . 2001 .
SUMMER 2002
Kate Lynch's
All-Woman Dream
The director ofTheatre Passe Muraille's stellar
all-woman production of A Midsummer Night's
Dream discusses gender, doubling and dreaming
in a wide-ranging interview.
byTANNER MIRRLEES
Kate Lynch, director of Theatre Passe Muraille's all-female
A Midsummer Night's Dream .
PHOTO BY CYLLAVONTIEDEMANN
n November 2001, I had the pleasure of seeing director Kate Lynch's highly energetic production of
Theatre Passe Muraille's A Midsummer Night's Dream .
Lynch turned the performance convention of the
Elizabethan stage (where men typically "played" women)
upside down by staging her production of Shakespeare's
romantic comedy with a highly talented all-woman group
of actors including Catherine Fitch, Diane Flacks, Ruth
Madoc-Jones, Karen Robinsoon, Waneta Storms, Camille
Stubel and Kristen Thompson.
Shakespeare's plays have a long historical relation to
the way in which audiences - past and present - imagine
gendered identities.' The following critical interview with
Kate Lynch not only highlights the adaptive way in which
gender is imagined, but also draws attention to the adaptive nature of spectatorship and theatrical production. The
interview underscores the plurality of ways in which an
all-women performance of Dream can elucidate previously
unexplored nuances in the text . Moreover, the interview
may provoke us to envisage the social identities traditionally associated with Shakespeare's canon in new and different ways .2
J
KL : No . But I did do a workshop with the concept several
years ago with twelve actors . It worked great. We
rehearsed for a couple of weeks with the concept and then
presented it in order to smooth out some ideas . But I knew
that no theatre was going to . . . you know, I am a new
director, I have been in the theatre for several years but I
am only starting to direct . I knew that theatre was my tool
. . . so I started to think about how Dream could be done
with the smallest number of actors . So I didn't think about
the fifth act and then decided that I could do the play with
seven actors . Given what I wanted to explore in the play, I
thought it might be more interesting to do it with only
seven actors .
TM : Multiple characters were played by one actor at a
time?
KL: Yes - if the idea was that Amazon women were doing
the play for themselves, then there didn't need to be distinct actors for every role . The minimal amount of actors
actually made the show more interesting . The audience
got a real kick out of watching actors switch and overlap
parts so frequently .
TM . I was amazed at how smoothly and quickly the
Tanner Mirrlees: I was reading theatre reviews about
your production, and one critic stated that the idea of
directing an all-female version of Dream had been on
your mind for a few years .3 I'm interested in hearing
about the origin of your desire to adapt Dream. Can you
elaborate on your attraction to Shakespeare's text and
your choice to direct an all-woman version of Dream?
Kate Lynch : There's a bit of overplay on the notion that I
have wanted to do Dream with an all-woman cast for
years . I understand why Passe Muraille put that idea out
there ; they needed to find marketing hooks .
TM : So the production has not been a master plan in the
works for eons or anything?
50
actors could transform themselves from character to
character and stage various "gender types" within seconds . Cross-dressing was a fad among women in the
Elizabethan period 4 and performances of Shakespeare's
plays have historically featured a large element of crossdressing; his texts involve women disguising themselves
as men5 and the stage conventions of the past required
that men perform female characters . Is the fact that
Shakespeare's canon facilitates "gender bending" what
initially attracted you to the idea of producing Dream
with an all-woman cast?
KL : No, I actually just wanted to do A Midsummer Night's
Dream . That's the play I wanted to do because I hadn't yet
seen it the way I have always wanted to . I've seen a lot of
great productions, but not the one that I wanted to see .
CTR 111
TM : Many reviews have suggested the performance
dynamic of an all-woman cast brought to the fore
moments in Shakespeare's text that a cross-gendered cast
could not . 6 Do you agree with this? Was there a specific
message in Shakespeare's text that could be better transmitted by an all-woman cast?
But, just because she's made a deal with Theseus doesn't
mean she's really happy.
TM : And as evidenced in your production, she doesn't
need to be played as happily complicit with Theseus'
marriage deal either, does she?
KL: Oh, sure, that was the whole point . I didn't just decide
KL : No . But I didn't want her to be played as a victim
that I liked working with girl actors better or anything. No,
there was an absolute point . I hadn't yet seen the play
interpreted in a way that I think is there, in front of my
eyes . I wasn't trying to impose something on the text .
Meaning is always already there in the text .? Our production has a lot to do with the fact that male characters are
somewhat funnier when played by women because they
can appear more flawed. If you consider Oberon's raging
jealousy, I think that accounts for why he is acting so horribly. I am almost quoting Michele Landsberg's review of
the play here, but she said, "if he [Oberon] is played as just
a calm and rational man, then the things he does to Titania
are hateful and inappropriate in a comedy ." I was thrilled
that she took that message from the production because
that was precisely what I wanted someone to take away
from it. If Oberon is really calm, cool and rational and
played as a sexy leading man, the implications of his casting a spell on his wife so that she will have sex with a beast
are glossed over.
either. Too often in these adaptations of Shakespeare's
texts, the women end up as helpless victims . Not interesting . Victims are not funny!
TM : When played as a kind of sexy hero, Oberon's abu-
sive actions aren't as clear.
KL : Oberon's behaviour is hideous and hateful . But if his
jealousy is out of control, the audience gives him a little
more leeway; maybe they even begin to empathize with
him . I always imagine Oberon as one of those cartoon
characters with steam coming out of his ears when he gets
too angry. Oberon is madly in love with Titania, and the
fact that he casts a spell on her to make her fall in love with
an ass, I don't know . . .
TM : You rarely see Oberon presented as a weak charac-
ter, a jealous character, a ridiculous character . I think
your production's portrayal of Oberon provided an interesting alternative, and quite a funny presentation of the
character.
KL: Dream is ultimately a comedy. It was written as a comedy by Shakespeare . My feeling is that Oberon is always
played as a "manly man ." I think that presentation of
Oberon is dull . The same goes for Theseus . The thing that's
interesting about Theseus is how he makes all these
assumptions about what Hippolyta wants . Does
Hippolyta really want to marry him? I mean, come on, he
put a sword to her throat! Is she thrilled about giving up
all the Amazon girls and being a King's Queen?
TM : While I think it's important to point out how women
may have been historically subjugated by various systems of patriarchy and how Shakespeare often played
into the affirmation of those patriarchal systems, I do
think that an adaptation of Shakespeare is much more
interesting when it presents the women characters with
agency, actively making choices .
KL : For sure . But the representation can also go too far the
other way. If the women are not played as victims they're
often played as super-strong heroines . That's too simple,
much too two-dimensional and uncomplicated as well .
TM : Finding a representational balance is the tricky part.
Can you tell me a bit more about the rehearsal process?
Did you approach the production with a specific directorial notion of what you wanted to do with Dream, a picture of how you wanted the show to look, or did the picture materialize for you during a more collaborative
rehearsal process?
KL: You come to rehearsal and to a production with a map
of the road you want to travel . You make that road as clear
as possible for the actors . Then the directors, the actors and
the production team begin moving down that road together.
TM : So you knew from day one what you wanted to do
with the show?
KL : Yes, you have to . If you don't, everyone ends up doing
their own version of the text. That kind of approach to a
production is fine, but when show time comes, it often
looks as though members of the cast are acting in a different play. The world of the play has to be consistent in the
mind of the cast.
TM : But there's always a degree to which actors adapt
characters and adapt text according to their personal
understanding of it . Doesn't the director's vision of a text
always inevitably change when interpreted by an actor?
KL: Yes . I came to the rehearsal process with a strong idea
me or die ."
of what I wanted to explore and who I thought certain
characters were . But then, once the seven brilliant actors
began engaging with the text . . .
KL: Absolutely. My feeling is that Hippolyta is acting prag-
TM : The earlier vision began to change?
TM : The ultimatum Theseus gives Hippolyta is "Marry
matically. She says, "Hey, you know, I don't want to die ."
SUMMER 2002
51
KL : Things deepened and they got more interesting . I was
happy with how the production took shape during the
rehearsal process. It turned out to be the production I had
envisioned from the start, but clearer. There are times,
though, when an actor just does not see it the way you see
it . Maybe they never will . That's okay. You have to shrug,
make a few compromises and make your way and their
way work together .
KL: Yes . The use of props just slows things down . Diane
TM : Were there any particular compromises made during the rehearsal process for your production of Dream?
KL : Sure. I don't know if I have much to say about the subject, but go ahead .
KL: No, not really. Everyone was thrilled to go tearing
down the same road with me . What the actors brought to
that road was infinitely richer than I could have ever done
by myself .
TM : One reviewer states, "the gender switching of roles
TM : Would you say then that every production involves
some degree of adapting text and elements of production
collaboratively?
KL: Yes, every work of theatre is ultimately collaborative .
Directors can attempt to dictate the course of a production's action, but that usually makes for a miserable group
of people .
TM : Speaking of the way a group of people worked
together, how were production choices made? In the
early-modem period, Shakespeare's plays were staged
with minimal use of set and costume . Did the
Shakespearean stage tradition influence your production's minimal use of costumes and props and the sleek
set design?
Flacks's performance of the moon by simply puffing out
her cheeks and holding a lantern was much more efficient
than using a bunch of props to signify the moment .
TM : You know, your production has caused for quite a
stir with its presentation of gender . Can we talk about
the gender politics of your show for a moment?
serves to emphasize what fools all we mortals be in
assuming male or female traits according to dominant
representations and expectations" (Berger 1) .
Considering that your all-woman cast performs both
male and female roles in Dream, your production plays
on and with gender stereotypes while simultaneously
drawing attention to how gender is socially constructed,
a performance of sorts . 8 Was this a particular statement
that you intended with all the gender play in you show?
KL : You know, I don't know enough about gender theory
to really answer that question . I don't profess to know
where "gender" comes from or what it is . All that I was
concerned with was that the characters be easily recognizable : I wanted the male characters to be identifiable . You
can't put a character up on stage that the audience can't
relate to . Every character that Shakespeare wrote has to be
potentially a "real" person who could be walking around
on Queen Street right now. Shakespeare's characters are
large; they play in extreme situations, just as people we
think we know.
KL: Shakespeare's text doesn't need very much in its pro-
duction . The most enjoyable productions I've seen have
been minimal. I say this in hindsight . From the first
moment I envisioned this production, Steve Lucas and I
thought to set Dream in a forest - like most productions .
But, considering that the Amazons lived on islands, the
setting of a beach appealed to me . As far as the costumes
are concerned, well, if the production involves a gang of
Amazon women doing a Shakespeare play, why would
they change? Now, I did want Titania and Oberon to signify slightly more magically, hence the choice to adorn
them with robes .
TM : But why is it that we identify certain notions of
what is essentially "male" and "female" according to certain physical or "outer" presentations of gender? How
did you and your actors approach the performance and
adaptation of gender identities?
KL: Because the performance involved women playing
men, we worked with certain physical gestures and postures. However, the intention was never to mock, you
know, "the gender that I am not."
TM : That's an important point to make considering that
TM : Your production involved minimal use of props as
well .
KL : Yes . We initially planned to use a lot of props . But our
early rehearsals did not involve the use of many props . As
we continued to rehearse, the actors did clever things and
the use of props became much less necessary . At the end of
every rehearsal, the stage manager kept cutting props until
by tech week, props were virtually non-existent in the production .
TM : So the extent to which actors can adapt their bodies
a few reviewers criticized your production as intentionally bashing men.
KL: I was taken aback by those comments . I'm glad that
those were minority opinions, but they took me aback
nonetheless . I thought our show's representation of men
was actually quite gentle . We were poking fun at representations of women just as much as we were poking fun
at images of men. The characters were played as extremes .
The play is a comedy! The most marvellous comedy occurs
when we observe, when we recognize human foibles and
identities that hit close to home .
to accommodate for certain textual moments often determines whether a prop is used?
52
CTR 111
TM : Exactly - we all perform identities and social roles
to some extent, and that is something to laugh it .
terms of it being a comedy. What we did with Dream was
to present a comedy. We wanted it to be funny.
KL : Yes . Take Theseus, for example . He is considered one
of the greatest leaders and intellectuals in history, and he
has an air of macho self-conceit throughout Dream. I
thought it was easier, and funnier, to illustrate those traits
by having a woman play him . If you see a woman swaggering in a stereotypically "male" fashion, it inevitably
draws attention to itself . You then perhaps begin to look at
the character in a new way .
TM : So you weren't interested in advertising the play as
anything but a comedy?
TM : So, in a sense, your production's gender-role performance and reversals defamiliarizes typical ways of
perceiving gender?
KL: Yes - you come to a production of Dream expecting to
see Theseus performed by a swaggering male, but when a
women plays the swagger, something more interesting
happens .
TM : Some critics have suggested that your production's
presentation of gender stereotypes (the male swagger for
example) undermines the nuances of sexuality and gender in Shakespeare's text. 9 Having said that, was your
production an attempt to parody those gender and sexual nuances?
KL: Well, I wasn't interested in parody. If parody snuck
into our production, it was not intentional .
TM : Parody is not a negative dramatic technique,
KL: No, absolutely not . Pushing a political agenda on our
interviewers or attaching a "political" message to our
show is very poor marketing. Nobody wants to come and
see that . Besides, I did not have a political agenda . I simply wanted to work with Shakespeare's text in a way that
was interesting. I thought the production was true . I was
not trying to bend the play . I was just doing Shakespeare's
A Midsummer Night's Dream . I thought that there were
aspects in the text that made me laugh, and I wanted to
show that humour to audiences using an all-woman cast .
I was not convinced that I could show the things in the
play that make me laugh without having women doing it .
An all-woman cast provides a different view of the play.
By having women do it, it automatically puts the audience
in a new headspace where they are expecting something
different, and that makes them more open .
TM : So the very choice to produce Dream with an allwoman cast is always already political, without having
to announce or advertise it as such?
KL: I guess, but I am being completely honest when I say
that there was not a political agenda . There just wasn't
one . I just wanted to do A Midsummer Night's Dream . I
thought that I could show the humour of Shakespeare's
text with all-woman cast ." That is it.
though.10
KL: Absolutely. Parody is marvellous . However, it was not
my intention in this particular production .
TM : Nevertheless, your play elicited a tremendous
amount of laughter from the audience as a result of your
cast's performance of male/female characters . Do you
feel there is a relationship between laughter and social
change?
KL: Well, I like laughter, don't you, Tanner? I suppose
everything can be an aid to social change or enacts social
change in some way, laughter included .
TM : Would you agree that a production of Dream with
an all-woman cast is atypical, considering that most
audiences are accustomed to seeing cross-gendered performances of the text?
TM : Interesting . Would it frustrate you if I attached
political meanings to your production or read your production in a way that you may have not intended?
KL : No, not at all . Once my cast and I have presented a
text it is out there in the world . People can grab it any way
they want . That is what theatre does . What you take from
my show does not have to be what I take from it or put
into it. As a director, as an actor, you just put a performance out there . . . and then everyone has a field-day praising it or criticizing it - saying it does or doesn't do something or other - or just laughing at it and then forgetting
all about it . A production is always out there . The job of
directors and actors is to speak the words of a text, to find
the truth in a text .
TM : As audience members, as readers, we always subjectively adapt a production's meanings . We make a performance make sense to us, for us .
KL: Yes .
TM : Would you say then that your production encourages audiences to read Shakespeare's text differently, or
to think through the sexual politics of Shakespeare's text
in a new way?
KL: Okay. In the pre-show interviews both myself and the
cast were very careful to talk about our production in
SUMMER 2002
KL: Absolutely. Some people have written about the production, and their interpretation of it has been very similar to mine . Some people have taken other things from the
show that never occurred to me .
TM : In the Elizabethan period, all-male theatre companies produced Shakespeare's plays . Whether intentionally or not, your all-woman adaptation explodes that
53
patriarchal framework, turns it upside down, and alters
the stage conventions of the past, making them more
suited to the sexual politics of the present. Was the historical significance of your adaptation apparent right
from the get-go? Did you foresee the production having
such a timely social undercurrent?
KL : Not necessarily. You know, a lot of people talk about
how the Elizabethan stage was solely inhabited by men,
and how in my production, the stage was solely inhabited
by women. But just like Passe Muraille, I imagine that theatre companies in the Elizabethan period were simply trying to tell stories, to communicate with the audience. I am
sure there are thousands of books written about the sexual politics of the Elizabethan stage . In the end, though,
Shakespeare was telling stories about humans . I don't
think Shakespeare, Elizabethan theatre troupes, and their
audiences would have got their knickers in a twist about
sexual politics . For me, that stuff is not as interesting . . . I
want to be careful about that statement though . Every
social relation is defined by class, race, gender and power.
I know that. I am not dismissing the importance of that . At
the bottom of all of that, though, there are human beings,
trying to live .
TM : So we simply attach politics, we attach categories of
difference to human relations in order to live?
KL : We have to . How could we not? We have to live by categories, otherwise we would be free-floating through
chaos .
TM : What would we do without categories?
KL : It would be lovely if we could approach the world free
of categories, and that seems to be the goal . I think categories provide a starting point that we always try to get
beyond . We have to start somewhere though . I don't know
if that makes sense .
TM : Considering that there is a gap between how one
reads a text literally and how one sees it in performance,
were there any specific textual moments or themes in
Dream that you were particularly interested in playing
with, adapting or critiquing?
KL : One of the things I was looking forward to was getting
hold of parts of the play that for me tend to just be dealt
with as poetry, as opposed to pure speech. I can't stand it
when I see Shakespeare's texts being played purely as
poetry. When that happens, the play grinds to a halt : the
actor and their character indulge in a lovely poem together and it is boring. I never understand that approach to
Shakespeare . I have to admit that there were many
moments in Dream where I didn't fully understand why
characters were saying certain things . I was really looking
forward to working the text with a bunch of highly intelligent actors, figuring out why characters in Shakespeare's
text say certain things .
TM : I enjoyed the shared delivery of the final Puck
monologue at the end of the production . It was a convincing way of highlighting both the ensemble work of
the cast and the solidarity of the Amazons as well .
KL: Well, again, in our production we needed to get back
to the Amazons . The end of the play involves multiple closures . The Mechanicals end their play and say goodbye .
Theseus and Hippolyta say goodbye . Oberon and Titania
say goodbye. But then Puck, the character, the actor, steps
out and bids the audience goodnight . After the characters
said goodbye, our cast had one more thing to do . We had
to return to the Amazon frame and close that as well . The
sharing of Puck's final monologue served as a kind of
transition that brought both the cast and the characters
they play, together .
TM : The beginning and end of your production of
Dream was framed by the story of the Amazonians' battle with the Athenians . In the opening of the production,
before entering into Shakespeare's text, the Amazons
returned home from a victorious battle with Athenian
men . After the Amazonians bring Shakespeare's play to
a close by sharing Puck's final monologue, their story
continues when they are summoned by a guard into
another battle . Was the story of Theseus' enslavement of
the Amazon Hippolyta your inspiration for framing
your production of Dream using the historical intertext
of Amazons?
KL: I wanted the audience to read Dream through
Hippolyta's eyes . I wanted the audience to see, not just
Shakespeare's comedy, but the story of the Amazon
Hippolyta : the story of the woman who was conquered in
battle and had to make a deal with a man or be put to
death. I wanted the audience to see it through her eyes .
TM : Your production highlighted the historical plight of
the Amazons and drew attention to the story of
Hippolyta as well .12 I left the theatre acknowledging
how history had ultimately unfolded, but wishing the
story had been different, thinking of it differently.
KL : Well, if you want to talk about gender politics, there it
is, in the story of Hippolyta . The point is, in Greek
mythology, fact or fiction, the Amazons were conquered
by Athenian men - or invented by men to be conquered .
TM : I remember reading in the director's note of the program for your production a quote from Harold Bloom,
who states something to the effect that "all productions
of Dream have been disasters ."
KL: Yeah, old grumpy Harold Bloom . You know I love
him, but he sure is grumpy.
TM : Then why did you include his statement in the program note?
KL: They asked me to do a director's note . They gave me
a deadline . I collected a series of quotes from
Shakespeare's critics on Dream, and then I wrote a direc-
54
CTR 111
tor's note . Theatre Passe Muraille called me in and
showed me a prototype for the program . The space for the
director's note could only hold about two lines of type! I
looked at it and practically burst into tears! A little later I
was talking to my partner, Michael Healey, and I suggested that I just give Passe Muraille the Harold Bloom quote .
He said : "Yes, you have to!" That is how Harold Bloom's
statement got into Dream's program.
trick on Titania by suggesting that accidents happen . He
states : "Oberon himself, angry as he is with the caprices
of his queen, does not anticipate any such object of her
charmed affections as the weaver/ass" (99) . Furthermore,
in 1839, critic G . G. Gervinus blames the conflict
between Titania and Oberon on the former's failure to
act properly and initiate a scene of reconciliation with
her husband .
TM : Hmmm . . . I opted to read your inclusion of Bloom
KL : I've read that stuff too, and the criticism insinuates
that Dream is all about men restoring the so-called "natural patriarchal order" because the women are supposedly
unruly, misbehaving and need to be put under the thumb
of the men .
as a commentary on how the Shakespearean criticism
industry has historically been dominated by men, most
of them bringing certain standards of aesthetic perfection to their readings, critiquing culture through a screen
of patriarchal privilege and self-aggrandizement.13 You
know, much criticism on Shakespeare has often been
loaded with the discourse of misogyny and conservative
rhetoric pertaining to "proper" sexual and gender roles
in society?
KL: I have read some of that criticism . It is terrible .
TM : So how do you feel about those kind of patriarchal
readings of Dream?
KL: I read that kind of criticism to the entire Passe
Muraille Theatre Company on the first day of rehearsal to
get everyone cranked for what we were about to do with
the show.
TM : Yes, nasty stuff! Anyway, a great deal of the patriar-
chal underpinnings of Shakespearean criticism remains
to be dug up, critiqued and challenged . In order to
underscore your reading and stage adaptation of Dream
a little further, I thought we could engage in a kind of
dialogue with the past . I'll read to you a few selections
of pre-twentieth-century critics' understanding of
Dream's text, and if you like, you can respond with your
understanding of the same textual moments or how you
adapted them in your production .
TM: I was wondering about that because in your pro-
duction, Titania did not appear to be entirely complicit
(or pleased) with Oberon's malicious treatment .
KL : I don't think that many of us feel that there is some
KL: Sounds good .
naturally ordained social order that places men at the top
of the pile. I'm not convinced that is how Shakespeare felt
about social relations either . Now that is a dangerous thing
to say. I mean, he certainly was an Elizabethan man, but I
think he gave male/female social relations a much more
complex reading than that .
TM : In 1812, Samuel Taylor Coleridge read the relation-
TM : Likewise, I don't know if it was intentional or not,
ship between Helena and Hermia as betrayal, stating,
"Helena is guilty of ungrateful treachery" (90).
but I felt that your production was resistant to that kind
uncomplicated reading of "natural" sexual orders where
privileged men are justified in their domination of
women.
KL: Well, she is. She gives away a secret . Hermia is her
best friend and they are running away from the possibility of being put to death . Helena rats on Hermia .
KL: Helena rats because she is in love with Demetrius .
Haven't you ever had friends who've done stupid things
because they were in love? Haven't you ever done stupid
things while in love?
KL : Oh, it was intentional, because that is not how I perceive the world . How we interpret Shakespeare's plays suggests who we are. I can't read Dream as simply a play about
men re-subjugating women according to some natural
order, because in my world, that is not the natural order . I
cannot see the world that way . It is not fun to see the world
that way, especially when you are trying to stage a comedy. I can see in Oberon and Titania, a man and a woman,
in an intensely heated sexual relationship, scrapping it
out, trying to win.
TM : Yes, maybe . . . a couple of times .
TM : Is the prize the Indian child?
KL: I thought so . So when Helena "betrays" Hermia, we
are already far into Dream's comedy. We are into the land
of comedy, and I don't think we are encouraged to think so
much about her betrayal as her putting her friend in danger.
KL: Maybe .
TM : But why do you think that Helena "rats" and why
does Coleridge refer to her "ratting" as "guilty treachery"?
TM : William Maginn, an Anglo-English critic writing in
TM : C . L . Barber reads Titania's giving over of the Indian
child to Oberon as a natural occurrence, stating that the
exchange of the child from Titania to Oberon symbolizes
how the latter is "now ready for the man's world" (137)
while affirming that "nature will have its way" (131) .
1837, excuses Oberon's malicious and humiliating magic
SUMMER 2002
55
KL : I don't necessarily disagree with that . We're talking
about a boy in Athenian society, and in that context, there's
a proper_ time for a boy to be initiated into the "male
world."
and gain new imaginative ways of "seeing" (Dream in
Shakespeare 59-87) while another critic suggests that the
lovers in the forest conquer irrational passion and find
their way back to rationality .
TM : I think that points to the importance of remembering the historical context in which Shakespeare was
writing . Remembering - when critiquing, reading or
even adapting Dream - that the cultural values and standards that Shakespeare experienced, that he was working with while composing his text, are very different
from our own .
KL : I think that Shakespeare often uses the imaginative
space of nature as a way of allowing his characters to
shake off the strictures of society and do a little experimenting .
KL: Yes, but Titania is neither a role model nor a saint . And
I don't see her as a victim either. The same goes for
Hippolyta. Titania and Hippolyta can hold their own . To
some degree, the characters in Dream are all passionately
nuts! We are all nuts! Have you ever met a couple that is
not nuts?
TM : Depends on what "nuts" implies, but I know what
you mean. Often, literary criticism, the theatre industry,
and people in general turn Shakespeare's characters into
symbolic heroes whom we're expected to emulate in the
present .
KL: Or turn Shakespeare's characters into role models .
Spare me - who the hell wants to play a Shakespearean
role model? Where are the role models in Shakspeare's
texts? I don't know, that's what Nancy Drew is for .
TM : Hah! Okay, I want to get back to the "nutty" theme
of love in Dream and how it has been interpreted. In
1956, a critic named Bonnard read the union between
Theseus and Hippolyta at the end of the play as "the
depiction of ideal love, shorn of any romantic nonsense." He states, "theirs is a wholly sane view of life . . .
because Hippolyta will know how to keep her place, as
her silence proves when Theseus discusses Hermia's
marriage with Egeus" (269-70) .
KL : Yeah, right. I read that one too . He conquered her . . .
TM : (Sarcastic) Sounds entirely sane to me . . .
KL : (Sarcastic) That's ideal love for you . "Woman . . .
quiet ."
TM : I'd like to move the conversation into a more general discussion concerning Shakespeare and the Canadian
theatre industry. I noticed in the playbill that your production was advertised as "Theatre Passe Muraille's A
Midsummer Night's Dream" rather than Shakespeare's .
Was the choice to leave Shakespeare's name out of the
advertising images for your production a deliberate
choice made by you and the company?
KL : I'll tell you a little story about how that happened .
When I approached Layne Coleman, the artistic director of
Theatre .Passe Muraille, about my wish to produce Dream
with an all-woman cast, I said, "Come on, Layne - every
fifteen years or so, this theatre company has to do a
Shakespeare ." When he agreed to include our show in the
season line-up, I said, "Let's do it as Passe Muraille's A
Midsummer Night's Dream," because it would inform the
audience . . .
TM : . . . that they would be paying for something a little
bit different than your conventional Shakespeare production or Stratford Shakespeare?
KL : That's right . I mean, of course, we're doing a
Shakespeare play, but it is Passe Muraille's adaptation of A
Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare . It was
a way of tipping the audience off from the beginning that
the production would involve something different and as
a kind of homage to a theatre company that I love very
much .
TM : Considering that Passe Muraille is for the most part
associated with alternative, experimental or more radical
Canadian theatre, were there any institutional pressures
or expectations placed upon your production of Dream to
make it different, considering the text has such an enormous canonical status?
TM : So Shakespeare's Dream is saturated with sexual
politics .
KL: No, none . I think that there is a hunger, a desire on the
part of the audience to see Shakespeare produced in smaller theatres, in a more intimate space . I think people enjoy
KL: A lot of people read into the relationship between
Theseus and Hippolyta . What I see in those scenes is
Theseus constantly lecturing her . He lectures her about
leadership, reason and even love . Hippolyta is a leader ;
she doesn't need to be lectured .
that .
TM : I don't think so either. Marjorie Garber, in 1974,
suggested that metamorphosis is a major subject of the
play, and that entering the forest is like dreaming in that
the characters - and the audience - perceive differently
56
TM : Has your production caused for any anxieties
among the traditionalist or purist Shakespeare critics?
KL: Yeah, from Richard Ouzounian . He didn't like anything about our production . He represents a kind of attitude that intimates, you know, "You can't do that to
Master Shakespeare's text."
CTR Ill
TM : Yeah, I read his article.14 Get over it, Richard!
Moving on, then, in the context of the Canadian theatre
industry, the word Shakespeare has often been synonymous with the Stratford Festival in Ontario . At the same
time, Stratford's self-aggrandizing discourses of
Canadian national identity often rely on the symbolic
currency of Shakespeare for its cultural power and
affect's By advertising your production without direct
recourse to Shakespeare, you seem to have displaced the
authority of the author and possibly the necessity of
explicitly associating your work and Theatre Passe
Muraille with his name . Do you feel that in some ways
the mainstream Shakespeare industry undermines alternative artistic creativity and independent theatrical
work, contributes to its growth, or both?
That's a difficult question to answer, Tanner, because
you have to consider the difficult economics of the theatre
industry in Canada . I can't speak for Shakespeare and
Canadian theatre because I live in Toronto and I see theatre
at the Stratford Festival and the Shaw Festival . I am glad
that there is a Stratford. Of course, I have some quibbles
with it, but, at any given time in history, we all have quibbles . There is no perfect system.
KL:
TM : Stratford provides actors, directors and designers
with work.
Not only that, but it gives audiences a chance to see
Shakespeare . Shakespeare is expensive . Shakespeare costs
money to produce - Passe Murraille, Buddies in Bad
Times, Factory Theatre, they just can't afford to do it .
KL:
the only way alternative theatre and adaptations
of Shakespeare's texts can get out into the social world,
through a series of compromises that are contingent
upon the actual economic situation in Canada?
TM : Is
KL : Yes .
The only way that I was able to get an all-woman
Dream produced - paid for - was because I only needed
seven actors to do it . Now, I'm not advocating doing all
Shakespeare with seven actors, but I was advocating doing
this particular show with seven actors . The point is that
Canadian theatre companies are looking for one-person or
two-person shows because no one has any money .
One critic suggested something to the effect that
your production was "put to the service of the Bard"
(Kaplan n. pag .) . I want to reverse that statement and
suggest that your production "put the Bard to its service ."
TM :
God love you, Tanner, but let's hope it worked both
ways .
KL:
TM : Shakespeare is cultural capital for many people and
institutions : you, me, CTR, Canada and even corporate
capitalism . How do you feel about the cultural authority
of Shakespeare and the ever-expanding Shakespeare
industry itself?
KL : I think you would have to consider how Shakespeare
is being adapted, production by production, in order to
answer that question .
it possible to disrupt or subvert the textual and
cultural authority of Shakespeare through an adaptation
of his text without reaffirming the cultural value of his
work?16 Can Shakespeare's texts be adapted for social
change?
TM : Is
KL: Sure,
if you can do it . It is not a style with which I am
particularly familiar. I don't know about approaching a
production of Shakespeare's plays with hopes of communicating a political message . The danger is that you are
imposing a framework of meaning onto a play that it does
not want or facilitate .'? The idea of going against a playwright's text, against their intention, does not attract me . 1 8
You can bring a lot of political sensibilities and ideas to any
given production, but in the end, if the play is any good, it
will tell you something all by itself .
by working with Shakespeare's text rather than
against it, the politics, the meanings, will emerge either
way?
TM : So
KL:
Yes.
Okay, one last bit. What would you say if I said :
"Shakespeare's canon is not to be meddled with, especially such a delightful, lovely comedy about romantic
love such as Dream . Such alternative adaptations and
interpretations of
Shakespeare only
corrupt
Shakespeare's poetic mastery, soil his textual brilliance
and bring shame to British national history and identity."
TM :
Diane Flacks (left) plays Titania to Waneta Storms as Oberon in Kate Lynch's
all-woman production of A Midsummer Night's Dream .
PHOTO : DAVID KINSMEN
SUMMER 2002
57
KL : I would say that I couldn't agree with you more! Play
the text . Respect the text.
TM : Why pay ultimate tribute to Shakespeare? Why
should we respect the acclaimed "authority" and the
"poetic genius" of the dead author when there are so
many present-day issues and possibilities for creative
engagement?
KL: Well, I'm also being slightly facetious in my previous
comment . Go ahead, do Shakespeare any way you want .
There aren't any Canadian theatre police to throw you in
theatre jail for adapting Shakespeare . The judge and interpreter of any production is the audience . And for me, it's
important that the audience enjoys the evening, and enjoyment can mean many different things to different people . I
want a production to inspire the audience to return to the
theatre . CTR
Notes
1 For more on the way in which gender is a product of various
"social technologies," see de Lauretis .
2 For a thoughtful introduction to the theory and politics of
Shakespearean adaptation, see Fischlin and Fortier, from
whom I have used information in formulating my interview
questions.
3 Geise states that "the play had been on the mind of director
and actor Kate Lynch, when, four years ago, she attended a
theatre event that, she says, 'was full of all these brilliant gorgeous lesbians"' (n . pag .) .
4 See Loomba for a discussion of cross-dressing and history . She
suggests that the cross-dressing fad among women was bound
up with the theatre : in the early modern period, "female crossdressing functions as a version of theatricality that extends disguise from the playhouse to the social space while the public
controversy over gender was being increasingly theatricized"
(132) .
5 See The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, and As You Like It for
plots that involve women characters playing men characters .
The performance dynamic of this "gender bending" is further
complicated since the Elizabethan audience was "seeing" men
in performance masquerading as women, who were crossdressing as men .
6 In Caldwell's article, Lynch states that "with an all female cast,
when you have women playing men, they can push it [the
text] farther" (D12) . Giese points out that "while the characters
themselves remain both male and female, having them played
by women underscores Dream's often overlooked darker
aspects" (n. pag .) . In Kaplari s article, actor Catherine Fitch
says,
we see things in the play's male/female relationships that male actors wouldn't . The avenues of
how to connect and the tactics of dealing with
someone in an intimate way have a different kind
of clarity for us . (n. pag .)
Michele Landsberg writes that Lynch's production of Dream
is a "womanly reading of the play that simply made it more
rounded and accessible" (F10) . Studholme suggests that Lynch's
adaptation "takes on the Bard as only woman can - with soul . The
58
adaptation is lighter, sweeter tasting and lacking the harshness
that might be brought on by a male influence" (n . pag .) .
I agree that the life experiences of men and women are and
can be different, and that a woman playing a man may effectively
underscore both the real and constructed nature of that difference .
However, I am leery about a few of the above comments that reinscribe sexual difference according to cliched gender stereotypes
and ostensibly intimate that gender is something essentially
linked to sexuality and vice versa . The meta-narrative of a few of
the above comments too quickly assumes that women essentially
and unproblematically have understandings of social relations,
experiences and identities diametrically opposed to men's .
Further, that same meta-narrative forgets to take into consideration how our behaviours and our conceptions of self are learned
in historical contexts and are driven by social conditions that are
not simply innate, natural or biologically pre-determined .
7 Garber concurs with Lynch's sentiment that meaning is always
provided by the text and does not need to be imposed upon it
when she states :
the capacity for realization on stage lies within the
text; that it is not imposed from outside, as unwelcome, or overly ingenious overlay . 'Man' and
'Woman' are already constructed within the drama
. . . the imaginative possibilities of a critique of gender in and through representation are already
encoded in a system of signification. (23)
8 See Butler for an elaboration on the performativity of gender .
Butler writes :
gender is a performance that produces the illusion
of an inner sex ; it produces on the skin, through the
gesture, the move, the gait, the illusion of an inner
depth" and that "the sex of gender ought to be
played and replayed as a site of insistent political
play. (94)
9 Ouzounian and Breon have both offered critical reviews of
Lynch's production . Ouzounian purports that "subtlety is banished" in the actors' gender performances (F12) while Breon
suggests that Lynch's production has gender "possibilities that
just were not fully realized" (2) .
10 See Hutcheon for a discussion of the politics of parody .
Hutcheon states that "parody can be a revolutionary position ;
the point is that it need not be" (75) .
11 For more on the notion that the "humour" of Shakespeare's
texts is associated with notions of sexual liberation, freedom,
and transgression, see Gay, who writes :
Shakespeare's comedies, more than any other
group of his plays, offer the actress the potential to
put forth this extraordinary energy, to assume
power, whatever the ultimate containing pattern of
the play might be. In particular, these plays are fascinated by the possibilities of sexual transgression,
which is euphemized as temporary transgression of
the codes of gender. (15)
12 Shepherd discusses how the period in which Shakespeare was
writing his plays was also a historical moment at which there
was widespread cultural fascination with Amazon women . His
text helps to point at why Shakespeare adapted the story of
Hippolyta as an intertext for Dream.
13 Aston provides a detailed discussion of how historically, the
critical apparatus surrounding the canon and the definition of
"great" or "classic" literature was part of the patriarchal value
system governing society and its cultural production .
Furthermore, she illustrates how the patriarchal definition of
CTR III
greatness relied on or appealed to the universal male figure the "everyman" - and how that "everyman" is inextricably
linked to a notion of Shakespeare's genius .
14 There is a very interesting contradiction in Ouzouniari s article . On one hand, he disparages Lynch's production for not
pushing her adaptation of Shakespeare's Dream far enough to
"explore new notions of sexuality, turn patriarchy on its head,
or examine a universe of gender stereotypes ." On the other
hand, Ouzounian seems equally frustrated because Lynch has
pushed her adaptation of Shakespeare too far, stating that
What's missing the most is poetry. This is a play
that exults the mystic power of the natural world
and Shakespeare conveys those feelings in some of
his most shimmering speeches . Alas, none of them
are delivered here with any respect for their beauty .
I am unsure what kind of Shakespearean "poetry" or what
"mystic power of the natural world" or exactly what kind of
"beauty" Ouzounian so melancholically mourns the loss of, but
such melodramatic comments remind me of an aging form of
Shakespearean criticism that fails to take into consideration the
canon's present and future possibilities . Ironically however,
Ouzounian seems aware of this "old" - and I might add intellectually dated - appreciation for Shakespeare's poetic mastery in his
criticism that Lynch's Dream does not explore "new" ideas . While
I appreciate ambivalent criticism, Ouzounian seems quite content
to contain any and every positive thing about Lynch's Dream in a
straitjacket of confused negativity.
15 See Knowles for a more detailed account of the political economy of the Stratford Festival .
16 It is important to point out here that even when Shakespeare's
texts - when the idea of Shakespeare itself - is adapted, the
adapter always re-affirms the cultural power and the canonical
precedence of the Bard .
17 Solomon makes a similar comment :
we, as radical critics [and adapters] dealing with
Shakespeare, can easily fall into the very totalizing
trap we are striding over . . . when we read against
the grain we expect Shakespeare to be everything,
to contain everything . (43-44)
18 In Kamal's article, Lynch expresses a similar disdain toward
the imposition of reductive political frameworks on theatrical
performance : "Theatre is at its best when people abandon
themselves to the story . When the audience is allowed to witness people who are not cleverly trying to suck you in with
their concepts" (43) .
Middleton Raysor. New York : Dutton, 1960 .
de Lauretis, Teresa . Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film,
and Fiction . Bloomington : Indiana UP, 1987.
Fischlin, Daniel, and Fortier, Mark, eds . Introduction . Adaptations
of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth
Century to the Present. New York : Routledge, 2000 . 1-22.
Garber, Marjorie . Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to
Metamorphosis . New York : Yale UP, 1974 .
-. Vested Interests : Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New
York: Routledge, 1997 .
Gay, Penny. As She Likes It: Shakespeare and Unruly Women .
London : Routledge, 1994 .
Geise, Rachel . "Calling Xena Fans ." XTRA! 1 Nov. 2001 : n . pag.
Gernvinus, G. G . Shakespeare Commentaries . Trans . F. E . Bunnett.
New York: AMS, 1971 .
Hutcheon, Linda . A Theory of Parody : The Teaching of 20th Century
Art Forms . New York: Methuen, 1988 .
Kamal, Al-Solaylee. "Dream Girls ." Eye 1 Nov. 2001 : 43 .
Kaplan, John . "All Female Dream Date." Now 17 Nov. 2001 : n .
pag .
Knowles, Ric . "From Nationalist to Multinationalist : The
Stratford Festival, Free Trade and the Discourses of
Intercultural Tourism ." Theatre journal 47.1 (1995) : 19-41 .
Landsberg, Michelle . "Play with all-female cast is a Dream come
true ." Toronto Star 10 Nov. 2001 : F10 .
Loomba, Ania . Gender, Race, and Renaissance Drama . Manchester :
Manchester UP, 1989 .
Maginn, William. The Shakespeare Papers of the Late William
Maginn. Ed . Shelton Mackenzie . New York : Redfield, 1856 .
Ouzounian, Richard. "All Female 'Dream' Wears Out its
Welcome ." Toronto Star 2 Nov. 2001 : F12.
Shepherd, Sam . Amazons and Warrior Women : Varieties of Feminism
in Seventeenth-Century Drama. Brighton : Harvester, 1989 .
Solomon, Alisa . Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theatre and
Gender . New York : Routledge, 1997.
Studholme, Dawn . "Love Makes Fools of Us All ." 23 Nov. 2001 .
Available:<http :/ / www.torontostage .com/reviews/midsummer.html>
Tanner Mirrlees is an enthusiastic MA student in English at
the University of Guelph . In his free time he writes in his
journal and daydreams about owning a kitten .
Works Cited
Barber, C . L . Shakespeare's Festive Comedy : A Study of Dramatic
Form and its Relation to Social Custom . Princeton, NJ : Princeton
UP, 1972 .
Berger, Jeniva . "A Midsummer Night's Dream." 23 Nov. 2001 .
Available : http ://www.scenechanges.com/review/midsummer.html
Bonnard, George . "Shakespeare's Purpose in Midsummer
Night's Dream." Shakespeare Jahrbuch 92 (1956) : 268-79 .
Breon, Robin. "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Aisle 23 (2001) :
2-3 .
Butler, Judith. "Imitation and Gender Subordination ." Inside/Out :
Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories . Ed . Diana Fuss . New York:
Routledge, 1991 .
Caldwell, Rebecca . "The Artist's Life : Kate Lynch ." Globe and
Mail 17 Nov. 2001 : D12 .
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Shakespearean Criticism . Ed . Thomas
SUMMER 2002
59
Acclaimed Canadian Celtic bard Loreena McKennitt discusses the m
2001 Stratford Festival production of The Merchant o f Venice .
of that terrible
isiness and corn
es Water Safet
long
posed for the
McKennitt (first woman from right) moved to Stratford in 1981 to perform in the chorus of HMS Pinafore, directed by Leon Major. "I was one of the sisters and
aunts ."
ROBERT C . RAGSDALE, COURTESY THE STRATFORD FESTIVAL ARCHIVES
of the Celts, who were in mid-Europe from 500 BC .
I have been using Celtic history as a creative
springboard and this era is within the oral fabric
that I draw on . Venice was a repository of eastern
influences and not too tar from where I was musicall',.
The result is a mixture of themes that remind us of
snakes writhing out of baskets and gypsies dancing sinuously through the streets . Apart from a short flurry of
masks and costumes and the prow of a gondola appearing at the end of an aisle, it was McKennitt's music that
SUMMER 2002
gave this production its exotic flavour. She reminded us
musically that we were visiting Renaissance Venice : a
melting-pot trading port with ties to India, Mexico,
Barbary and Lisbon, not some English market place or
mansion . The few anglicized themes and songs demanded by the text seemed unremarkable in comparison .
Composition of a theatrical score is very different
from conventional song-writing . It must dovetail with
production needs . "The music is primarily very short
cues," McKennitt explains .
The Shvlock theme is a motif that doesn't ever
develop . The two other Middle Eastern themes
could be developed to stand alone but last about
61
line .
To this end, she made use of several instruments
authentic to Renaissance Venice - the esraj, the dumbec
and the kanoun .
Apart from Italian and middle-eastern influences, the
prominence of Shylock gave McKennitt an opportunity to
dabble in Jewish music .
I had already been tracing the trajectory of Jewish
communities who left Spain and traveled across to
Venice and Turkey. I've visited the Jewish Ghetto in
Venice - the place where the word ghetto was
coined. The gates are locked after eight at night .
There were some groups who cohabited with the
Muslims and Christians . Their music blended in, so
that the Jewish music is very Middle Eastern too . It
can swing a few ways .
The presentation of the Shylock character is perhaps
the greatest challenge for the director . A modern audience's perception of Jews is very different from the attitudes of Shakespeare's day. It is impossible to come to the
play without a knowledge of all that has happened to the
European Jewish population since then, in part because of
a long history of racist representations . When first written,
Shylock was a caricature of evil played in a comic style,
but such racial lampooning is no longer acceptable . In the
In 1984 McKennitt composed and performed the music for the
Stratford Festival production of The Two Gentlemen ofVerona, directed
by Leon Rubin . I-r :William Dunlop asThurio, Laurence Russo as First
Outlaw and Loreena McKennit as Musician .
PHOTO BY DAVID COOPER COURTESY THE STRATFORD FESTIVAL ARCHIVES
She also used subliminal notes and tremolos to highlight moments of cunning and intrigue, revealing an
intense interest in the dramatic shape of the play itself.
Sitting in on an analysis of Shakespeare is unbelievably interesting. They should describe this play as a
basket of moral and ethical dilemmas . Almost every
scene has one . When Bassanio talks of Portia for the
first time, there's the question of being attracted to
people who are rich . There's Lancelot's dilemma of
working for a Jew when he wants to work for a
Christian . There's the moral dilemma of the rings
and of the caskets - a kind of Sufi principle that
Shakespeare would have been exposed to even if he
didn't understand it completely : the idea that things
are not necessarily what they seem to be .
McKennitt doesn't pretend that her score is pure to
Elizabethan or Venetian period or place .
It's not an academic kind of document . It's an
impressionistic
musical
response . Richard
[Monettel pointed out that there are lots of inconsistencies in Shakespeare's text. He played around and
flirted with various approaches, so the music didn't
have to be fundamental. I tried to infuse the music
with eastern influences and not just in the melodic
62
contemporary theatre the character tends to be more sympathetic, more humane and the music accompanying the
character must necessarily adapt . Instead of comic emphasis, it must present the character with a degree of dignity
and humanity that the director and actor, in the case of the
Stratford production, intended . In writing "Shylock's
theme," McKennitt avoided overtly comic, stereotypically
"Jewish" sounds while still evoking the distinctive culture
and ethnicity of the character through the use of a lively
Jewish motif.
The credibility factor of McKennitt's music is helped
by her extensive research . "I use certain information I gain
from traveling, and I draw upon reading for inspiration ."
She was in Venice in the summer of 1998, when "all hell
broke loose" in her own life . Now that she has returned to
creative work she plans more travel . In fact, she calls her
composing style "travel writing ." She points to what she
calls her "tickle trunk" - a box of research, threads of history and subjects she hasn't had time to study that she
takes with her on her travels . She laughs that she could
end up anywhere . A Professor of Archeology from
Arizona has invited her to a dig in Tuscany . A Christian
Monk living in caves by the Dead Sea has invited her to
stay. Someone else wants to show her an island off Turkey.
"It's all quite tempting ."
It will be no surprise if Loreena McKennitt's musical
journey brings her back to Shakespeare in future projects .
She possesses a rare ability to induce an imaginative
adjustment in her audience, and to suture what
Shakespeare wrote with what we want to hear . CTR
Judy Van Rhijn is an Australian solicitor and freelance writer
living in Kitchener, Ontario .
CTR ill
Adapting Shakespea l e,
an Outdoor
Canadian Prai 'e
Reality
Is Shakespeare a Prairie playwright .
by STEPHEN HEATLEY
"Adaptation" is the act of fitting one thing to another, modifying and altering something and in so doing, making it
more suitable for a particular purpose . The question I am
addressing here is "can we consider interpretation to be
adaptation?" Is the simple act of placing a play in a setting
or using the performance space in a unique way an act of
adaptation? Can we consider the production of a
Shakespearean play specifically in a Canadian spatial and
cultural context to be an "adaptation"? I would say "yes,"
and to examine this question, I'll introduce you to the
work of Edmonton's summer Shakespeare company, the
Free Will Players .
But first, a little historical discussion . . .
In Canadian theatrical circles, it has been the joke for
years that our national playwright is, in fact, British .
Canada's largest, most widely known and arguably, most
influential theatre is centred, not on the works of Kent
Stetson, Michel Tremblay or Judith Thompson, but on the
works of William Shakespeare . It is a monumental development for Canadian theatre that in its fiftieth season in
2002 the Stratford Festival is opening a new space devoted
to the Canadian playwright . But if we cast back to 1953, it
was Shakespeare that was central to founder Tom
Pattersori s dream, and a British director who was invited
to realise it .
Cast forward fifty years . Since the establishment of the
Stratford Festival, and especially since 1967, a theatrical
tidal wave has washed across the country so that the
English Canadian voice is now heard loudly and clearly
on stages in every region . It has been the dedicated passion of an entire generation of Canadian theatre artists to
guarantee that the Canadian sensibility is front-and-centre
in our theatrical endeavours . In 2002, we have a phalanx of
Canadian artists who have spent their careers striving to
understand and interpret the Canadian voice . Because of
this, one might presume that we would no longer be
reliant on the Bard of Avon to feed our theatrical souls . Yet
over the last decade a new network of Canadian outdoor
festivals has developed in which Britain's leading play-
SUMMER 2002
The Free Will Players' 2001 budget topped $325,000, and that year's productions of As You Like It (directed by Geoffrey Brumlik), and Richard III (directed
Kim McCaw) broke all attendance and box office records . John Ulyatt is shoe
here as Richard III .
PHOTO BY IAN JACKSON
wright is featured - from Vancouver's Bard on the Beach
to Halifax's Shakespeare by the Sea, with stops along the
way at Sylvan Lake, Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg,
Toronto, Montreal and Edmonton . Clearly, Shakespeare
still has a huge appeal for Canadian audiences . I would
argue that the interest is generated because the audience's
engagement with Shakespeare is a direct result of the
plays being adapted to fit a Canadian sensibility by a
Canadian theatre aesthetic . At productions by
Edmonton's Free Will Players, for example, the plays are
presented in a specific spatial and cultural context that
makes the English language's greatest playwright feel as
if he is speaking locally. These works are no longer being
presented to a Canadian audience from a British aesthetic .
They are now being directed by theatre artists who have
grown up theatrically with the Canadian voice at the forefront of our consciousness or have developed in a theatrical environment that has always had access to that
Canadian voice . The approach to and perspective of these
productions is Canadian. One might argue that these
shows are not adaptations, in that the text itself is not necessarily altered, but in fact the works are adapted to fit surprisingly and comfortably into a Canadian spatial awareness and a Canadian image system . As a result,
Shakespeare no longer feels foreign . To illustrate, let me
describe the work of the Free Will Players.
It is July 2001 and a glorious summer evening in the beautiful North Saskatchewan River Valley in Edmonton,
Alberta . A performance of Shakespeare's As You Like It is
about to begin in the outdoor setting in Hawrelak Park .
Over 1600 people have jammed their way into the
Heritage Amphitheatre, filling the 1100 seats and spilling
over on to the grassy surround to drink beer, eat popcorn
and experience Shakespeare . The Free Will Players have
just set a new single-performance attendance record . The
company has come a long way since 1989 when Anisette
Loiselle dreamed of producing one of Shakespeare's plays
63
outdoors . She and her University of Alberta acting classmates were about to graduate, acting work was scarce in
the summer in Edmonton, there was an amphitheatre in
Hawrelak Park that sat empty for most of June, July and
August and the city was festival-crazy . Why not start a
Shakespeare Festival? I happened to be directing this
group in their final university production and saw them
madly filling out forms one day. "We're applying for summer employment grants to start a Shakespeare-in-the-Park
Company and we're all going to get jobs and act in it this
summer," they told me . Sceptical isn't really a strong
enough word to describe my reaction . But they did it.
None of them made any money that summer, but they
scraped together enough money to hire director Susan
Cox and produce a wonderfully energetic, clown-esque
version of The Comedy of Errors . The Free Will Players Cooperative was born .
"For some reason, as soon as a character appears in doublet and hose, all
possible understanding goes up in smoke" Pictured here are John Ulyatt as
Richard III and Tara Hughes as Lady Anne, in Kim McCaw's 2001 production
of Richard III, with no doublet or hose in sight .
PHOTO BY IAN JACKSON
From those humble beginnings as an Artists' Co-Op,
The Free Will Players have evolved into a formal theatrical
structure that supports a repertory company of eighteen
actors, plus designers, directors and production and
administrative personnel. In 1998, the company morphed
into the The River City Shakespeare Festival and began
producing two plays in rep annually as well as holding
Camp Shakespeare, two very successful camps for young
people . The 2001 budget topped $325,000 and the productions of As You Like It, directed by Geoffrey Brumlik, the
company's recently appointed Artistic Director, and
Richard III, directed by Kim McCaw, broke all attendance
and box office records .
What has made this theatrical phenomenon come to
pass? What induces over 12,000 people to traipse into
Edmonton's River Valley to watch plays by a four-hundred-year-old British playwright who writes in a language
that is difficult at best and obscure at worst? (And there is
no subscription base : these are essentially one-off ticket
64
buyers .) What entices them to partake of this seemingly
"high culture" experience in an outdoor setting that,
frankly, provides endless distractions? The shows and
their audiences do battle with mosquitoes and other
wildlife ; the Richardson's ground squirrels are very fond
of the popcorn droppings ; and dive-bombing sparrows
nest inside the top of the huge white "sail" that covers the
seating and stage . The audience may have to put up with
the capricious Prairie weather, and at the most delicate
moment in the play, the 9 :10 flight from Yellowknife, or a
stray hot-air balloon, may pass overhead, entirely drowning out the actors . How has this company captured the
imagination of Edmontonians? How has their style of production made Shakespeare an ostensibly Albertan playwright?
One of the answers might simply be found in the cultural persuasion of Edmontonians . The citizenry is theatre-mad, and the city has for years boasted the most theatres per capita in the country. Edmonton is also known as
the "Festival City," with no fewer than nine festivals
between late June and late August . Another answer might
be the setting itself. Canada's Prairie provinces have short
but intense summers . Prairie people have a deep appreciation for the fleeting nature of these summer months, so
any event that plans for success must include an outdoor
component . The setting of the Heritage Amphitheatre is a
natural wonder. Theatre-crazed Edmontonians can have
their theatre fix and enjoy an evening outdoors in a gorgeous natural setting : one complete with breathtaking
sunsets (assuming a wild prairie thunder storm has not
rolled in) . A theatre experience that can take advantage of
an outdoor setting is a natural crowd-pleaser, especially if
you call it a festival .
But there must be more to this phenomenon than a
festival outdoors . Why Shakespeare? The same thing has
not occurred with other popular classic playwrights like
Moliere or Shaw or Chekov or Wilde . I would contend it is
because Shakespeare is readily adaptable to a different
cultural context (Canadian) and an outdoor environment .
Shakespeare is one of the few playwrights still regularly
performed who wrote plays to be staged in the open air.
Liz Nicholls, theatre critic for the Edmonton Journal, puts it
this way: "because it's outside the bolder strokes are not
only required but rewarded ." Shakespeare's plays
improve with a largeness of gesture . According to Free
Will Artistic Associate Julien Arnold, on the night that
1600 spectators showed up, "the play just kind of expanded in size . As an actor, you had to open your heart and
open up physically. The action on the stage just seemed
brighter, the colours were brighter ." Artistic Director
Geoffrey Brumlik's take is that
it's about playing them [the plays] the way they
were intended . As you put them out in the air,
there's a size and support that's demanded . This
material allows you to be full and rich and honest .
If the character is in love, he can be totally in love . I
think that is the playing style .
Anyone who hails from the Prairies will tell you that
the defining features of that geography are the expansive
space and the quality of light . For any play to be truly satisfying in such an outdoor context, it needs a dramaturgy
CTR 111
"pay-what-you-will" (thus the "Free" in the name) . With
the advent of the festival format, ticket prices became
fixed, but today the tickets are only $10 and $12, and there
is always one "pay-what-you-will" performance per
week . On top of that, parking is free, children under
twelve are admitted free and you can bring your children
with no fear of disturbing others .
Liz Nicholls claims that the Free Will experience is
the perfect intersection of high and pop culture ; it's
outside and immediate, and while you're clutching
a beer . . . you know the guy (on stage) is basically
talking to you . In a culture that prides itself on the
division between high and low culture, it seems like
the perfect point of union, and there is great fun to
be had at that point.
"Bolder strokes are not only required, but rewarded ." Eric Nyland as Orlando,Tara
Hughes as Celia and Alexandra Smith as Rosalind in the Free Will Players' 2001 production of As You Like It .
PHOTO BY IAN JACKSON
as big as the prairie sky, as vast as the horizon, as poetic as
the forest surround and as stunning as the prairie sunset .
This is a very large theatrical canvas . Liz Nicholls argues
that "any time you don't take into account your context,
both sociological and spatial, you're probably asking for
trouble ." She attributes a large part of the company's popularity to their "accommodation to the outdoors . They
make bold, vivid choices that are playable at that distance
under those conditions ." The setting, nestled in the scenic
Edmonton River Valley, is a virtual metaphor for this
prairie appreciation of space . The Globe Theatre in
London is open to the outdoors but is crowded into the
middle of a metropolis . The theatre had to be built up,
placing tiers of seating one on top of the other . In the
Heritage Amphitheatre the space spreads outward, in
keeping with the Prairie panorama . It does not hurt that
the audience faces the setting sun so those extraordinary
prairie sunsets become part of the visual splendour of the
show. The understanding and use of this panorama has
always been a signature of the company's style .
A major tenet in the adaptation of Shakespeare to the
Canadian Prairie sensibility is accessibility . Since its inception, Free Will has always kept accessibility at the forefront
of its aesthetic, and this has been the driving force behind
adapting the plays to the sensibilities of its audience . For
some, as soon as a character appears in doublet and hose
or a dress with a train as long as VIA Rail, all possible
understanding goes up in smoke . There is "brassandglassophobia" - the fear of palaces of culture where the afflicted are certain they will not dress appropriately, will not
applaud in the correct places and will not get the jokes that
everyone else is laughing at . And finally, there is the "cost
related to pleasure" issue . There is a fear among many
potential audience members that, after paying $80 for a
pair of tickets and shelling out for parking and babysitting, they will come away feeling like their only real experience was in stimulating the economy.
In a way, the Free Will Company has adapted the
entire experience of attending Shakespeare to address
such fears . They have always made attending their productions easy. In the early years attendance was "free" or
SUMMER 2002
Since the productions are housed outdoors, there is
little need to worry about a dress code, as long as the audience is dressed warmly enough on some evenings . The
company has never set a production prior to the twentieth
century and many productions have been contemporary.
When it comes to the language, meaning and clarity are
paramount in the rehearsal process. Often audience members will ask if the play was rewritten because they cannot
believe that they understood things so clearly. Artistic
Associate Annette Loiselle claims that "when the paywhat-you-will audiences get the jokes, they laugh way
harder than the other audiences because they're going `I
get it, I get Shakespeare, I'm laughing!"'
The keys to the Free Will Players' success have come
both from embracing an informality that would mirror
that of Shakespeare's own outdoor theatre and making a
conscious effort to build the productions around the
strengths of its own time and place . Again, we are talking
about adapting : fitting one thing to another. One could
compare the ancillary activity in the amphitheatre in
Edmonton to that of a three-ring circus, but the so-called
distractions and potential discomforts actually seem to
put the audience at ease . The wildlife, the restless children
playing on the grassy surround and the sudden changes in
A performance of As You Like It by the Free Will Players, directed by Geoffrey
Brumlik sets a single performance attendance record of over 1600 people in
Edmonton's Hawrelak Park in July, 2001 .
PHOTO BY BRETTA GERECKE
65
weather seem to take the highbrow sting out of the experience . On those nights when it was really bad weather during the Scottish play, the veterans who had been there
before and know how cold it gets would show up wearing
exactly the clothes they would wear to an Edmonton
Eskimos football game . To enhance the circus atmosphere,
off-stage techniques have been developed to take advantage of the amphitheatre's expanse . As there is no proscenium arch, the activity in the "wings" is quite visible and
out-scenes have become part of the company's presentation style . We watch the Princess of France and her friends
in Love's Labours Lost pitch a tent out on the lawn when
denied access to Navarre's cloister . The high stakes game
of hide-and-seek played by Helena, Hermia, Demetrius
and Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream moves into
focus when appropriate, but continues on in the distant
woods otherwise . We see Rosalind, Celia and Touchstone
in As You Like It sneak away from the palace along the
amphitheatre fence, each carrying a suitcase, heading for
the Forest of Arden, only to reappear several scenes later
from a different direction with Touchstone carrying all the
suitcases and Celia as well . The audience finds itself in the
middle of the action . There is a true delight when one
audience member notices something off-stage and can
draw friends' attention to it. Shakespeare's play has been
modified - adapted - to take advantage of its surroundings .
The company has also developed as a theatrical technique what might be termed the "long shot," achievable
because of the expansive space. Entrances and exits are
long by definition, and the company has made such endless exits and entrances a strength . When Titania orders the
fairies to carry Bottom to her bower in A Midsummer
Night's Dream, we can watch them run, not only off the
stage proper, but for another thirty metres thereafter until
they all disappear over the hill, Bottom hee-hawing all the
way. The exit immediately connects the audience to their
prairie appreciation of space .
Images that are highly recognisable to a contemporary
prairie audience are also used for the purposes of immediacy, adapting "Shakespeare" to the audience's experience .
As Liz Nicholls puts it, "they take a short cut to contemporaneity by being visibly contemporary in some way ." In
The Taming of the Shrew Petruchio arrives for his wedding
in an old beater car, screeching to a halt near the stage in a
cloud of dust . In As You Like It Charles the Wrestler arrives
with Duke Frederick on the back of a golf cart . The young
men in Love's Labour's Lost disguise themselves as Russians
by donning "ccci" hockey sweaters . Antipholus and
Angelo in The Comedy of Errors arrive on stage in a rickshaw such as one might hail downtown in any prairie city
in the summer. Lord Capulet's party in Romeo and Juliet is
a Prairie wiener roast . Much Ado About Nothing's Dogberry
is a rent-a-cop . A Midsummer Night's Dream's Bottom
sports cowboy boots and a cat hat .
The Free Will Players is a company with roots deep in
the Edmonton theatrical landscape . The artists live and
work in the city and bring their love of place to their work .
Although the company no longer operates as a co-op it still
has five of its founders as Artistic Associates who advise
the Artistic Director (AD), and both former AD James
66
MacDonald and current AD Geoffrey Brumlik were part of
the founding group . The company's initiating impulse - to
produce Shakespeare for a broad-based prairie audience
by allowing Shakespeare to look, sound and feel as though
his work belongs to the Prairies - continues to guide it .
Their interpretations are filled with familiar images that
bring the characters closer to the audience's sensibility.
These are not British characters representing foreign values ; they are as Canadian as the Prairies themselves . The
audience is not left in the Prairie dust, wondering what the
actors are saying or trying to figure out how the characters
get out of those strange duds to go to the bathroom . The
experience of attending a Shakespeare play has been
adapted to one purpose - the entertainment in the summer
of the audience in Edmonton, Alberta .
Works Cited
Arnold, Julien . Personal Interview . December, 2001 .
Brumlik, Geoffrey . Personal Interview . December, 2001 .
Loiselle, Annette . Personal Interview . December, 2001 .
McCaw, Kim. Personal Interview . December, 2001 .
Nicholls, Liz . Personal Interview . December, 2001 .
Stephen Heatley directed Free Will Players' productions from
1991-95 . He is a former Artistic Director of Edmonton's
Theatre Network and former Associate Artistic Director of
the Citadel Theatre, and is currently on the faculty of the
Theatre Programme at the University of British Columbia.
CTR 111
Theatrical Adaptations of
Shakespeare in Canada :
A Working Bibliography
by DANIEL FISCHLIN
his bibliography represents a first attempt to
document, in as comprehensive a manner as
possible, theatrical adaptations of Shakespeare's
works in Canada . The list, far from complete
and very much still in progress, has been produced by the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare project housed at the University of Guelph, directed by myself
and funded by a Premier's Research Excellence Award
(PREA) through the Ontario Ministry of Energy, Science
and Technology. The award has permitted the project to
establish itself as a significant archival research project in
Canadian theatre and performance history. The bibliography began in 1998 as part of the background research for
Adaptations of Shakespeare : A Critical Anthology of Plays
From the Seventeenth Century to the Present (Routledge,
2000) co-edited by myself and Mark Fortier. As a result of
work done on that project it became apparent that
Shakespearean adaptation in a variety of national sites
was not only a vastly understudied phenomenon but also
a useful index of the myriad ways in which theatrical culture comments on issues of national identity formation .
The latter topic is of especial importance to spaces in
which colonial incursions (often heavily reliant on the
transference of values imported by settler culture) have
played an important role both in constructing a sense,
however illusory, of coherent national identity and in critiquing the ways in which national identity formation
(almost) always occurs at the expense of sustaining significant cultural differences .
T
SUMMER 2002
Beyond the generation of the bibliography, the primary work of the project is the production of the first
anthology of adaptations by Canadians of Shakespeare
that will range chronologically from the earliest known
adaptations to the present and the production of a critical
book examining the nature of Canadian adaptive practices
in relation not only to Canada's theatrical history but also,
importantly, in relation to Canada's emergence as a nation
state . A further goal of the project, and one of its cornerstones, is the number of graduate and postdoctoral students from a variety of institutions being trained in bibliographic and theatrical research skills . This training will
leave, I hope, a legacy in Canadian scholarship in the
humanities well beyond the realm of Shakespearean adaptation. The research team that has been assembled to gather the information and make it accessible for a variety of
scholarly, pedagogical and performance purposes, has
worked collaboratively to gather an astonishing array of
materials associated with this archive . Beside the ongoing
efforts of project manager Jennifer Ailles, who has made a
major contribution to the project from its inception, a significant number of people have contributed their efforts to
the early phases of research, including Dorothy Hadfield,
Benjamin Lefebvre, Gordon Lester, Mark McCutcheon,
Donald Moore, Martha Nandorfy and Jessica Schagerl .
The working bibliography, published here for the first
time, marks the first anniversary of the PREA-funded work
of the project. The past year has been spent setting up the
67
project office at the University of Guelph, deciding what
information and materials to collect and how best to catalogue them, developing various templates and protocols
for handling the astonishing range of materials that have
poured in and amassing and collating primary and secondary materials from the variety of public and private
theatrical archives across the country - work we will be
continuing through the next several years . No archive
exists in a vacuum and this one has been built upon substantial work done in The Brock Bibliography of Published
Canadian Plays in English 1766-1978, edited by Anton
Wagner; From Around the World & at Home : Translations and
Adaptations in Canadian Theatre, edited by Glen F. Nichols ;
and Theatre quebecois : 146 auteurs, 1067 pieces resumees . In
addition, the generous suggestions and material donations
from various theatre companies, festivals, academics,
archivists and from playwrights themselves (both published and unpublished), have been extremely valuable . I
would note that the on-line communities of the CANLIT,
CANDRAMA and sI-IAKSPER listserv discussion groups have
been particularly helpful in suggesting new leads for the
project team to track and we look forward to further input
from these valuable resources and their participants .
There are 161 adaptations listed in this initial bibliography, though we have several hundred plays not included in this version of the bibliography that may well merit
inclusion on the list as further research unfolds - not to
mention numerous potential leads and other plays that
remain unknown to us at this time. Of the plays included
in this working bibliography, 106 have been published,
with thirty-eight works alone coming from the extraordinary five-volume 38, a project exemplary of the kind of
ongoing interest in adaptive theatrical practices being
explored in various communities throughout Canada . As a
Quebecois project undertaken in 1996 at the initiative of
Theatre Urbi et Orbi in conjunction with Theatre
d'Aujourd'hui and performed on the stage of Theatre
d'Aujourd'hui in Montreal, 38 took the thirty-eight plays
attributed to Shakespeare and had thirty-eight authors
under the age of thirty-eight draw play titles from a hat
and then produce a short piece of theatre based on the
Shakespeare title each drew. Authors were free to do what
they wished with the title they received and were also
expected to direct a staged production of what they wrote .
The experiment in adaptation sought to address the problem of how to write after Shakespeare, or as the cover
blurb to the subsequent publication of the works produced
by the thirty-eight authors puts it, "tous les dramaturges
depuis Shakespeare subissent son oeuvre comme un caillou dans leur soulier" ["all dramaturges after Shakespeare
experience the effects of his work like a stone in the shoe"] .
But more than this, the experiment provided an important
forum in which the confirmation of the vitality of the
Quebecois theatrical scene was at stake, one in which new
voices could be discovered and promoted, and older, more
familiar voices rediscovered in new ways . Here, adaptation (and its varied practices) lays claim not only to the creative forces that allow for establishing one's own identity
and authenticity in the shadow of Shakespeare's enormous
influence, but also identifies a distinctive theatrical tradition that, in this case, has profound ties with a sense of dis-
68
tinct cultural identity . Claude Champagen's take on Henry
IV Part 1, Les aut'mots, with its extensive use of joual,
explicitly rescripts Shakespeare's notion that there are "des
mots qui vivent" ["words that live"], suggesting in its concluding lines that "Faut pas laisser les aut'mots prendre
toute la place" ["we mustn't let other words take up all the
space"] . The message is clear : joual is alive and a language
worthy of the theatre and the play thus confirms the
important link between distinctive language practices
(particular to Quebec) and the sense of cultural vitality
that 38's wide variety of takes on Shakespeare uniquely
shows off .
Other adaptations in this version of the bibliography
range from the anonymous Locals, published in 1882, to
David Whiteley's Hot Spur!, produced in 2001 . The vast
majority of adaptations were created after the 1951 Massey
Report and the creation of the Stratford Festival of Canada
in 1953 . Though there are five adaptations listed as pre1900, there is a significant lack of titles between Sister
Mary Agnes's 1915 A Shakespeare Pageant: Dialogue for
Commencement Day (published in its entirety in this issue)
and Patricia Joudry's 1953 Teach Me How to Cry: A Drama in
Three Acts . This lack may be the result of lost or incomplete
performance records or, more likely, is the product of the
frequent invisibility of Shakespearean adaptations, which
may share the same title as the original source play and
thus are conflated with stagings that seemingly vary little
from the Shakespearean source text . A related problem
occurs in identifying works whose titles bear little or no
connection to Shakespeare's (The Maltese Bodkin, Cruel
Tears, Chief Shaking Spear Rides Again, Harlem Duet) and
which become known as adaptations through their content, citational practices, direct or indirect invocation of
Shakespeare's cultural capital, advertising (in which
Shakespeare is foregrounded) and subsequent reviews
that establish or comment on Shakespearean linkages . The
rise of on-line playbills and dedicated theatre and festival
web sites has made the identification process much easier
for works produced in the last decade (see both Jennifer
Ailles's and Susan Bennett's essays in this volume for
more on on-line sources) . The project, for better or worse,
is working with an extremely broad definition of what
constitutes a Shakespearean adaptation and of what makes
a playwright or an adaptation Canadian, with the intent to
be, at least initially, more inclusive than exclusive. The
boundaries of the project are under constant re-negotiation
as we learn more about these adaptations and the questions they raise regarding nationhood, Shakespearean
canonicity and the ways in which different degrees and
modes of adaptation reflect on Canadian culture generally .
All of Shakespeare's works are represented in this
working version of the bibliography, most substantially
through the all-inclusive 38. Beyond that collection, the
most popularly adapted plays are Hamlet, Macbeth and
Romeo and Juliet, followed by A Midsummer Night's Dream,
Merchant of Venice and The Tempest; then Twelfth Night, King
Lear, Richard III, As You Like It, Taming of the Shrew and
Othello . The energies of these Shakespearean texts seem
particularly resonant with Canadian dramatists (and audiences) . Multiple issues are addressed in these adaptations :
nationalism, French-English relations, colonialism
CTR 111
(including issues pertaining to the treatment of indigenous
cultures), the legacy of specific characters as transmuted
through the adaptive process, race and ethnicity, religion,
regionalism, sexual orientation, theatricality and critique
or revision of canonical Shakespeare, not to mention the
reinscription of Shakespeare as a marker of cultural "excellence ." Many of the adaptations where the source text is
listed as "unknown" use Shakespeare, the author, as a
topic and/or character (as in Acadian author Antonine
Maillet's William S) . Such a listing of issues only partially
addresses the richness of content, performance practice
and historical context associated with this archive .
The bibliography presented below shows the range of
adaptations that have been produced and is in no way, as
stated earlier, a finalized or complete list . Organized
alphabetically according to author, the bibliography
includes listings by author, title, year of first production (if
known) and the primary Shakespearean work(s) adapted .
Publication details are listed directly below the primary
entry. New plays are being located and catalogued all the
time . The publication of this initial bibliography - besides
being an effort to make the early results of the project
accessible to as wide a range of theatre practitioners and
scholars as possible - is also a direct appeal to CTR readers
to contribute their knowledge and resources to the work
we have undertaken. CTR
Toronto : Playwrights Press
Canada, 1997 .
Albert, Lyle Victor. Cut! 1985 . (Hamlet)
-. Cut! Toronto : Playwrights Union of Canada, n .d .
Allen, Michelle . Le Marchand de Venise . 1993 . (Merchant of
-. Shakedown Shakespeare .
Venice)
-. Le Songe d'une nuit d'ete . 1988 . (A Midsummer Night's
Dream)
-. Le Songe d'une nuit d'ete. Ottawa : Lemeac, 1990.
Amoni, Emmanuelle . Timon d'Athenes . 1996 . (Timon of
Athens)
-. "Timon d'Athenes" . 38 A . Montreal: Dramaturges,
1996.51-57 .
Archambault, Francois . La Vie inimitable de Cleopatre . 1996 .
(Antony and Cleopatra)
-. "La Vie inimitable de Cleopatre ." 38 O . Montreal :
Dramaturges, 1996 . 7-18 .
Belke, David . The Maltese Bodkin . 1991 . (Hamlet; 1 Henry
IV; 2 Henry IV,, Henry V; Macbeth, Merchant of Venice ;
Merry Wives of Windsor; A Midsummer Night's Dream ;
Othello; Richard III; Romeo and Juliet; The Tempest; Twelfth
Night)
- . The Maltese Bodkin . Toronto: Playwrights Union of
Please send comments, corrections and suggestions for
new leads to :
Canada, 1991 .
Bengough, John Wilson . Hecuba; or Hamlet's Father's
Deceased Wife's Sister: A Comic Opera in 2 Acts . 1885 .
(Hamlet)
- . Hecuba; or Hamlet's Father's Deceased Wife's Sister ; A
Comic Opera in 2 Acts . Milwaukee: F. F. Siddall, 1885 .
Berton, Pierre. Shakespeare Revises a Play. n.d . (Hamlet)
-. "Shakespeare Revises a Play." Fast Fast Fast Relief.
Toronto : McClelland and Stewart, 1962 .160-63 .
Betts, Jim, and Lezley Havard . On a Summer's Night . 1979 .
Project e-mail
[email protected] (attn. Jennifer Ailles,
Project Manager)
(A Midsummer Night's Dream)
Bienvenue, Yvan. 38 Metiers 38 Megeres . 1996 . (Taming of
the Shrew)
-. "38 Metiers 38 Megeres ." 38 A . Montreal :
Daniel Fischlin has published extensively in various areas of
cultural criticism and is the first winner of a PREA award in
the Arts and Humanities .
Project Office
Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare
School of Literatures and Performance Studies
University of Guelph
Guelph, Ontario
N1G 2W1
Canada
Project Phone
519-824-4120 x3230
Theatrical Adaptations of Shakespeare in
Canada:AWorking Bibliography
Author unknown. Hysterica Passio : A Free Adaptation of
King Lear. 2000. (King Lear)
Author unknown. Locals . 1882 . (Source text unknown)
- . "Locals ." Acta Victoriana 5 .2 (1882) : n . pag .
Ackerman, Marianne . Measure for Measure. 1993 . (Measure
Dramaturges, 1996 . 7-20 .
Boissinot, Helene . Souvenirs d'une Auteure malade. 1996 .
(Two Gentlemen of Verona)
-. "Souvenirs d'une Auteure malade ." 38 1. Montreal:
Dramaturges, 1996 . 19-29 .
Boisvert, Nathalie . Les Deux Nobles Cousins . 1996 . (Two
Noble Kinsmen)
-. "Les Deux Nobles Cousins ." 38 O . Montreal :
Dramaturges, 1996 . 19-28 .
Boulay, Francois . Titus Andronicus . 1996. (Titus
Andronicus)
- . "Titus Andronicus ." 38 E . Montreal : Dramaturges,
1996 .31-39 .
Brassard, Andre . La Nuit des rois . 1975 . (Twelfth Night)
- . Pericles . 1982 . (Pericles, Prince of Tyre)
Brassard, Marie, and Robert Lepage . Polygraph . 1990 .
(Hamlet)
- . "Polygraph." Trans . Gillian Raby. Canadian Theatre
Review 64 (Fall 1990) : 49-65 . Rpt . in Alan Filewod, ed . The
CTR Anthology : Fifteen Plays from Canadian Theatre Review .
for Measure)
Toronto : U of Toronto P, 1993 . 647-83 .
Brullemans, Pascal . Comment vous plairait-il? 1996 . (As You
Adams, Philip, and Yvette Nolan . Shakedown Shakespeare .
1997 . (Hamlet; King Lear, Macbeth; Romeo and Juliet)
Like It)
- . "Comment vous plairait-il?" 38 O . Montreal :
SUMMER 2002
69
Dramaturges, 1996 . 85-94 .
Burdett, Lois . A Child's Portrait of Shakespeare . n .d . (Source
text unknown)
. A Child's Portrait of Shakespeare. Windsor, ON : Black
Moss, 1995 .
- . Hamlet for Kids . 2000 . (Hamlet)
- . Hamlet For Kids . Willowdale, ON : Firefly, 2000 .
- . Macbeth for Kids . 1996 . (Macbeth)
- . Macbeth For Kids . Windsor, ON: Black Moss, 1996 .
- . A Midsummer Night's Dream for Kids . 1997 . (A
Midsummer Night's Dream)
- . A Midsummer Night's Dream For Kids . Willowdale, ON :
Firefly, 1999 .
- . Romeo and Juliet for Kids . 1998 . (Romeo and Juliet)
- . Romeo and Juliet For Kids . Willowdale, ON : Firefly,
1998 .
- . The Tempest for Kids . 1999 . (The Tempest)
- . The Tempest For Kids . Willowdale, ON : Firefly, 1999 .
Burdett, Lois, and Christine Coburn . Twelfth Night for
Kids . 1994 . (Twelfth Night)
-. Twelfth Night For Kids . Willowdale, ON : Firefly, 1997.
Bush, Steven, and Richard McKenna . Richard Thirdtime .
1973 . (Richard III, • 3 Henry VI)
-. Richard Thirdtime . 1973 . Toronto : Playwrights Press
Canada, 1983 .
Cadieux, Chantal . Martine versus Richard II . 1996. (Richard
II)
-. "Martine versus Richard II ." 38 A . Montreal :
Dramaturges, 1996 . 67-76 .
Champagne, Claude . Les aut' Mots . 1996 . (1 Henry VI)
-. "Les aut' Mots ." 38 I . Montreal: Dramaturges, 1996 .
7-18 .
Champagne, Dominic . La Mort de Falstaff. 1996 . (Merry
Wives of Windsor)
-. "La Mort de Falstaff." 38 A . Montreal : Dramaturges,
1996 .59-66 .
Chariton, Morris. Conversations with Shakespeare . 1969 .
(Source text unknown)
Charpentier, Erik . Measure for Measure . 1996 . (Measure for
Measure)
- . "Measure for Measure ." 38 U . Montreal : Dramaturges,
1996 .53-58 .
Chaurette, Normand . Comme it vous plaira . 1994 . (As You
Like It)
- . Les Joyeueses Commeres de Windsor . 2000 . (Merry Wives
of Windsor)
- . Les Reines . 1991 . (Richard III)
- . Les Reines . Montreal : Lemeae, 1991 .
- . The Queens . Trans . Linda Gaboriau. Toronto : Coach
House, 1992 .
- . The Queens . Trans . Linda Gaboriau . 1992. Burnaby :
Talonbooks, 1998 .
-. Romeo et Juliette . 1999 . (Romeo and Juliet)
- . Le Songe d'une Nuit d'ete . 1995 . (A Midsummer Night's
Dramaturges, 1996 . 21-33 .
Chouinard, Denis . Titre provisoire : Romeo et Juliette . 1984 .
(Romeo and Juliet)
Clarke, Margaret (Helen M . Buss) . Gertrude and Ophelia .
1992 . (Hamlet)
- . "Gertrude and Ophelia." Theatrum 33 (1993) : S1-S15 .
Dafoe, Christopher. The Frog Galliard . 1977. (Source text
unknown)
- . The Frog Galliard. 1978. Toronto : Playwrights Co-op,
1979 .
Davies, Robertson . A Masque of Mr. Punch . 1962 . (Hamlet)
- . A Masque of Mr. Punch . Toronto : Oxford UP, 1963 .
de Vasconcelos, Paula . Le Making of de Macbeth . 1996 .
(Macbeth)
Dixon, Fredrick Augustus . The Episode of the Quarrel
Between Titania and Oberon from Shakespeare's A Midsummer
Night's Dream . 1898 . (A Midsummer Night's Dream)
-. The Episode of the Quarrel Between Titania and Oberon
from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream . Ottawa :
Durie, 1898 .
Doyon, Martin . Richard III, pauvre Chou . 1996 . (Richard III)
-. "Richard III, pauvre Chou ." 38 1 . Montreal :
Dramaturges, 1996 . 67-76 .
Drover, Stephen . The Bond. n.d . (Merchant of Venice)
Dubois, Rene-Daniel . Pericles, Prince of Tyre by William
Shakespeare . 1987 . (Pericles, Prince of Tyre)
Ducharme, Helene . Le Fils amer . 1996 . (Coriolanus)
- . "Le Fils amere ." 38 O . Montreal : Dramaturges, 1996 .
75-84 .
Duchesne, Michel . Romeo et Juliette tel que vecu par
Rosaline, "cette pale fille au coeur de pierre ." 1996 . (Romeo
and Juliet)
- . "Romeo et Juliette tel que vecu par Rosaline, 'cette
pale fille au coeur de pierre ."' 38 1. Montreal :
Dramaturges, 1996 . 39-50 .
Egervari, Tibor. Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in
Auschwitz . 1998 . (Merchant of Venice)
Farnsworth, David . After Macbeth . 1974 . (Macbeth)
- . The King, the Sword, and the Dragon . 1972 . (Macbeth)
- . The King, the Sword, and the Dragon . 1972 . Toronto :
Playwrights Co-op, 1975 .
Finlay, Suzanne . Queenie O'Leary. 1989 . (King Lear)
Foster, Norm . The Pitch . n .d . (Hamlet)
-. "The Pitch ." Instant Applause Vol. II: Thirty Very Short
Complete Plays . Winnipeg : Blizzard, 1996. 50-63 .
Freund, Philip . Prince Hamlet . n .d . (Hamlet)
-. Prince Hamlet . New York: Bookman Associates, 1953 .
Gagnon, Marie-Eve . Les Joyeuses Commeres . 1988 . (Merry
Wives of Windsor)
Garneau, Michel . Coriolan . 1989 . (Coriolanus)
-. Coriolan . Montreal : VLB, 1989 .
- . Macbeth. 1978 . (Macbeth)
- . Macbeth . Illus . Maureen Maxwell . Montreal : VLB,
Chaurette, Normand, and Joel Jouanneau . La Tragedie de
Coriolan . 1998 . (Coriolanus)
Choiniere, Olivier. Lady Percy's Grande Traitrise . 1996 . (1
1978 .
- . La Tempete . 1989 . (The Tempest)
- . La Tempete . Montreal: VLB, 1989 .
Gass, Ken . Claudius . 1993 . (Hamlet)
- . Claudius . Toronto : Playwrights Press Canada, 1995 .
Gaudreau, Jean . Henry IV deuxieme partie . 1996 . (2 Henry
Henry IV)
- . "Lady Percy's Grande Traitrise ." 38 A . Montreal:
IV)
- . "Henry IV deuxieme partie ." 38 A . Montreal :
Dream)
- . La Tempete . 1998 . (The Tempest)
70
CTR 111
Dramaturges, 1996 . 35-43 .
Gaudreault, Jean-Rock . Le Juif. 1996 . (Merchant of Venice)
-. Me Juif." 38 E. Montreal : Dramaturges, 1996 . 75-81 .
Germain, Christine . La Vierge . 1996 . (All's Well That Ends
Well)
-. "La Vierge ."
38 U . Montreal : Dramaturges, 1996 .
43-52 .
Gilbert, Sky. Ten Ruminations on an Elegy Attributed to
William Shakespeare . 1996 . (Source text unknown)
-. Ten Ruminations on an Elegy Attributed to William
Shakespeare. Toronto: Playwrights Union of Canada, 1997 .
Girard, Jacques, and Reynald Robinson . Romeo et Julien .
1980 . (Romeo and Juliet)
- . Romeo et Julien. Quebec : Theatre de la Bordee, 1982 .
Graves, Warren . Chief Shaking Spear Rides Again, or, The
Taming of the Sioux . 1974 . (Taming of the Shrew)
- . Chief Shaking Spear Rides Again, or, The Taming of the
Sioux . Toronto : Playwrights Co-op, 1975 .
Gurik, Robert . Hamlet, Prince du Quebec . 1968 . (Hamlet)
- . Hamlet, Prince du Quebec . Montreal : Editions de
l'Homme, 1968 .
- . Hamlet, Prince of Quebec . Trans . Marc F. Gelinas .
Toronto : Playwrights Union of Canada, 1968 .
Herbert, John . Fortune and Men's Eyes . 1967. (Source text
unknown)
-. Fortune and Men's Eyes . NY: Grove, 1967 . Also published in Jerry Wasserman's Modern Canadian Plays,
fourth ed ., Vancouver : Talonbooks, 2000 . Vol . 1, 65-94 .
Hubert, Isabelle . La Comedic des Meprises . 1996 . (The
Comedy of Errors)
-. "La Comedie des Meprises ." 38 U . Montreal:
Dramaturges, 1996 . 33-42 .
Humphreys, Chris . Glimpses of the Moon . 1996. (Hamlet)
Johnstone, Keith. The Loose Moose Hamlet. 1980. (Hamlet)
Jones, Cliff . Kronborg: 1582 . 1974 . (Hamlet)
Joudry Patricia . Teach Me How to Cry : A Drama in Three
Acts . 1953 . (Romeo and Juliet)
- . Teach Me How to Cry . New York: Dramatists Play
Service, 1955 .
- . "Teach Me How To Cry : A Drama in Three Acts ."
Canada's Lost Plays Vol . 2 : Women Pioneers . Ed . Anton
Wagner. Toronto : Canadian Theatre Review, 1979 . 205-67 .
Kisseliov, Oleg. Le Songe d'une Nuit d'ete . 1998 . (A
Midsummer Night's Dream)
Knight, Albert Ernest (A . E. de Garcia) . Canada, Fair
Canada . 1902 . (A Midsummer Night's Dream ; Romeo and
Juliet)
- . Canada, Fair Canada . Montreal : Montreal Shorthand
Institute and Business College, 1902 .
Labbe, Jer6me . Othello . 1996 . (Othello)
- . "Othello ." 38 O . Montreal : Dramaturges, 1996 . 29-39 .
Laporte, Stephane . Le Beau Jardin secret de
Jean-Stephane . 1996 . (Winter's Tale)
-. "Le Beau Jardin secret de Jean-Stephane ." 38 U.
Montreal : Dramaturges, 1996 . 65-79 .
Legault, Anne . Henry V. 1996 . (Henry V)
- . "Henry V " 38 E . Montreal : Dramaturges, 1996 . 41-49 .
Leiren-Young, Mark. Shylock. 1996. (Merchant of Venice)
- . Shylock . Vancouver : Anvil, 1996 .
Leiren-Young, Mark, and Kate Johnston. The Oprah
Donahue Show (Talks about "Fatal Attractions," with Special
SUMMER 2002
Guests Juliet, the Shrew, Lady Macbeth, and Hamlet's Mom) .
1988 . (Hamlet ; Macbeth; Romeo and Juliet ; Taming of the
Shrew)
- . The Oprah Donahue Show (Talks About "Fatal
Attractions" With Special Guests Juliet, the Shrew, Lady
Macbeth, and Hamlet's Mom) . Toronto: Playwrights Union
of Canada, 1988 .
Lemieux, Jean-Marie . La Megere apprivoisee . 1983 . (Taming
of the Shrew)
Lemieux, Pierre-Yves. Anne Boleyn . 1996 . (Henry VIII)
- . "Anne Boleyn." 38 U. Montreal : Dramaturges, 1996 .
59-64 .
Lemieux, Pierre-Yves. A propos de Romeo et Juliette . 1989 .
(Romeo and Juliet)
Lepage, Robert . Elsineur . 1995 . (Hamlet)
Lepage, Robert, and Gordon McCall . Romeo and Juliette .
1989 . (Romeo and Juliet)
Leroux, Patrick . Milford Haven . 1996 . (Cymbeline)
-. "Milford Haven ." 38 1 . Montreal: Dramaturges, 1996 .
57-65 .
Liitoja, Hillar. Hamlet . 1988-89 . (Hamlet)
Longley, Ernest G . A Modern Romeo and Juliet . n .d . (Romeo
and Juliet)
-. A Modern Romeo and Juliet. Brockville, ON : Gazette
Printing, n .d .
MacDonald, Ann-Marie . Goodnight Desdemona (Good
Morning Juliet) . 1988. (Othello; Romeo and Juliet)
- . Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) . Toronto :
Coach House, 1990 .
MacFadzean, Matthew . Richard the Second: A Nightmare .
2001 . (Richard II)
MacFadzeon, Matthew, and Amy Price-Francis .
Danes potting . 1997 . (Hamlet)
Maillet, Antonine . Hamlet . 1999 . (Hamlet)
- . La Nuit des Rois . 1993 . (Twelfth Night)
- . La Nuit des Rois . Montreal : Lemeac, 1993 .
- . Richard III . 1989 . (Richard III)
- . Richard III . Montreal : Lemeac, 1989 .
- . La Tempete . 1997. (The Tempest)
- . La Tempete . Montreal : Lemeac, 1997.
-. William S . 1991 . (Hamlet ; 1 Henry VI; 2 Henry IV; King
Lear, Macbeth; Merchant of Venice; Romeo and Juliet)
-. William S . Montreal : Lemeac, 1991 .
Marsolais, Gilles . Macbeth . n.d . (Macbeth)
Martin, Alexis. Pericles . 1996 . (Pericles, Prince of Tyre)
-. "Pericles ." 38 O . Montreal : Dramaturges, 1996 . 41-52.
Mary Agnes, Sister (Mary Ives) . A Shakespeare Pageant:
Dialogue for Commencement Day. 1915 . (As You Like It ; A
Midsummer Night's Dream ; Hamlet; King Lear; Macbeth ;
Merchant of Venice ; The Tempest)
- . "A Shakespeare Pageant : Dialogue for
Commencement Day." The Queen of Sheba and Other
Dramas . Winnipeg : St. Mary's Academy, 1915 . n .pag .
McNair, Rick. Shoe Fly Blues . n .d . (Source text unknown)
-. "Shoe Fly Blues." Instant Applause Vol . II: Thirty Very
Short Complete Plays . Winnipeg : Blizzard, 1996 . 238-46 .
Micone, Marco . La Megere de Padova . 1995 . (Taming of the
Shrew)
Miller, Rick . MacHomer. 1995 . (Macbeth)
Mitchell, Ken, and Humphrey & the Dumptrucks . Cruel
Tears . 1975 . (Othello)
71
-. Cruel Tears . Regina : Pile of Bones, 1976 .
- . Cruel Tears . 1976 . Vancouver : Talonbooks, 1984 .
Monty, Francis . La Nuit d'un roi . 1996 . (Twelfth Night)
- . "La Nuit d'un roi ." 38 O . Montreal : Dramaturges,
1996 .59-74 .
Monty, Michel . Taxi Actor. 1996 . (Much Ado About Nothing)
- . "Taxi Actor." 38 E . Montreal : Dramaturges, 1996 .
59-74 .
Moses, Daniel David . Brebeuf's Ghost : A Tale of Horror in
Three Acts . 1996. (Macbeth)
- . Brebeuf's Ghost: A Tale of Horror in Three Acts . Toronto :
Exile, 2000 .
Mouawad, Wajdi . Le Songe. 1996 . (A Midsummer Night's
Dream)
-. "Le Songe ." 38 E . Montreal: Dramaturges, 1996 . 7-13 .
Moyse, Charles Ebeneezer [Belgrave Titmarsh] .
Shakspere's Skull and Falstaff's Nose : A Fancy in Three Acts .
n.d . (Source text unknown)
- . Shakspere's Skull and Falstaff's Nose : A Fancy in Three
Acts . London : Elliot Stock, 1889 .
Murphy, Johanna . Jules Cesar . 1996 . (Julius Caesar)
-. "Jules Cesar." 38 U. Montreal : Dramaturges, 1996.
23-32 .
Murrell, John. The Faerie Queen . 2000 . (A Midsummer
Night's Dream)
-. New World : A Comedy . 1984 . (The Tempest)
-. "New World : A Comedy." Farther West, New World .
Toronto : Coach House, 1985 . 95-172 .
O'Brien, Michael . Mad Boy Chronicle . 1995 . (Hamlet)
-. Mad Boy Chronicle. 1995 . Toronto : Playwrights Press
Canada, 1996 .
Osborne, Hubert . The Good Men Do : An Indecorous
Epilogue . n .d . (Source text unknown)
- . King Richard III, Altered a Little . n.d . (Richard III)
- . Macbeth, Altered a Little . n .d. (Macbeth)
Osborne, Hubert Benjamin, and Laurence Eyre. The
Shakespeare Play : A Drama in Rhythmic Prose . n .d . (Source
text unknown)
Palmer, John L . M. Romeo and Juliet Are, in Verona, Dead ; In
Mantua, Alive, or Every When : A Play . n .d . (Romeo and
Juliet)
Pare, Francois. Tempete . 1996 . (The Tempest)
- . "Tempete." 38 U. Montreal : Dramaturges, 1996 . 7-21 .
Parenteau-Lebeuf, Dominick . Hamlette . 1996 . (Hamlet)
- . "Hamlette ." 38 E . Montreal: Dramaturges, 1996 .15-30 .
Payne, Richard, and Brian Shein . Alfed Jarry's Circus
Ludicrous Presents "Boss Ubu" : A Full-Length Clown Play
Celebrating Jarry's "Ubu Roi" of 1896 in the Spirit of the
1980s . 1977 . (Hamlet; Macbeth)
- . Alfed Jarry's Circus Ludicrous Presents "Boss Ubu" : A
Full-Length Clown Play Celebrating Jarry's "Ubu Roi" of
1896 in the Spirit of the 1980s . Toronto : Playwrights Union
of Canada, n.d .
Pelletier, Benoit . Polyxena . 1996 . (Troilus and Cressida)
-. "Polyxena ." 38 O . Montreal : Dramaturges, 1996 .
53-58 .
Pelletier, Jean . Macbeth . 1996 . (Macbeth)
-. "Macbeth ." 38 A . Montreal: Dramaturges, 1996 . 45-49 .
Peterson, Leonard . The Great Hunger . 1960 . (Hamlet;
Macbeth)
-. The Great Hunger. 1958 . Agincourt : Book Society of
72
Canada, 1967 .
Plourde, Josee . Peines d'amour perdues . 1996 . (Love's
Labour's Lost)
- . "Peines d'amour perdues ." 38 U . Montreal:
Dramaturges, 1996 . 81-90 .
Pody, David . Lord, What Fools! : A Play for High School
Audiences . 1982 . (A Midsummer Night's Dream)
- . Lord, What Fools!: A Play For High School Audiences .
Toronto : Playwrights Press Canada, 1982 .
- . Twelfth Inning . 1986 . (Twelfth Night)
Rafie, Pascale . Le Reve d'Albert Levert . 1996 . (2 Henry VI)
- . "Le Reve d'Albert Levert ." 38 I. Montreal :
Dramaturges, 1996 . 31-38 .
Roberge, Francoy. Hamlet. 1982 . (Hamlet)
Ronfard, Alice, and Marie Cardinal . La Tempete . 1988 . (The
Tempest)
Ronfard, Jean-Pierre . Lear . 1977 . (King Lear)
- . "Lear ." Trac, Texte 1 du Theatre experimental . Montreal :
N .p ., 1977.
- . Vie et Mort du Roi Boiteux . 1981 . (Source text unknown)
- . Vie et Mort du Roi Boiteux . 2 vols . Ottawa :
Lemeac,1981 .
Rosen, Sheldon . Ned and lack . 1977 . (Hamlet)
- . Ned and Jack . Toronto : Playwrights Press Canada, 1979 .
Roux, Jean-Louis . Hamlet . 1970 . (Hamlet)
-. La Nuit des Rois . 1968 . (Twelfth Night)
-. Othello . 1986. (Othello)
-. Le Roi Lear. 1992. (King Lear)
-. Romeo et Juliette . 1989 . (Romeo and Juliet)
-The Tragedie of Julius Caesar / Le Drame de Jules Cesar de
Shakespeare . 1972 . (Julius Caesar)
-. The Tragedie of / Le Drame de Julius Caesar . Montreal:
Editions du Jour, 1973 .
. The Nutshell . 1988 . (Hamlet)
Rowe, Paul
Roy, Emmanuelle . Sur Deux Colonnes . 1996 . (King John)
-. "Sur Deux Colonises ." 38 A . Montreal : Dramaturges,
1996 .77-85 .
Roy, Maurice . Peines d'amour perdues . 2000 . (Love's Labour's
Lost)
Scott, Munroe. Shylock's Treasure (A Reconciliation) : A
Comedy in Three Acts . 1978 . (Merchant of Venice)
- . Shylock's Treasure (A Reconciliation) : A Comedy in Three
Acts . 1978 . Toronto : Playwrights Press Canada, 1982 .
Sears, Djanet . Harlem Duet . 1997 . (Othello)
- . Harlem Duet . 1996. Toronto: Scirocco, 1997 .
-. Harlem Duet. Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical
Anthology of Plays From the Seventeenth Century to the
Present. Ed . Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier. London :
Routledge, 2000 . 281-313 .
Selody, Kim . Lovers and Liars . n .d . (Hamlet; Macbeth; A
Midsummer Night's Dream ; Romeo and Juliet; Taming of the
Shrew; Twelfth Night)
- . Lovers and Liars . Toronto : Playwrights Union of
Canada, 1992.
- . Suddenly Shakespeare. n.d . (Macbeth; Romeo and Juliet;
The Tempest ; Twelfth Night)
- . Suddenly Shakespeare. Toronto : Playwrights Press
Canada, 1988 .
Sherman, Jason . The Merchant of Showboat . 1993 . (Merchant
of Venice)
-. "The Merchant of Showboat ." Instant Applause Vol . II:
CTR 111
Thirty Very Short Complete Plays . Winnipeg : Blizzard, 1996 .
Sinclair, Lister. All the World's a Stage . n .d . (As You Like It)
-. All the World's a Stage . Ways of Mankind : Thirteen
Dramas of Peoples of the World and How They Live . Ed .
Walter Goldschmidt . Boston: Beacon, 1954 .141-50 .
-. Museum of Man . n .d. (As You Like It; Hamlet ; Richard
III)
-. Museum of Man . Ways of Mankind : Thirteen Dramas of
Peoples of the World and How They Live . Ed . Walter
Goldschmidt . Boston : Beacon, 1954 . 180-85 .
Thivierge, Isabelle . Erreur. 1996 . (King Lear)
- . "Erreur." 38 E. Montreal : Dramaturges, 1996 . 51-58 .
Thompson, Judith. Lion in the Streets . 1990 . (Hamlet)
- . Lion in the Streets . Toronto : Coach House, 1992 .
Villeneuve, Raymond . Comme Henri . 1996 . (3 Henry VI)
- . "Comme Henri ." 38 I. Montreal : Dramaturges, 1996 .
51-55 .
-. Squat . 1988 . (As You Like It)
Villeneuve, Rodrigue . Macbeth . 1993 . (Macbeth)
Weiss, Peter Eliot . The Haunted House Hamlet: An
Adaptation of Shakespeare's Classic. 1986 . (Hamlet)
-. The Haunted House Hamlet : An Adaptation of
Shakespeare's Classic . Toronto: Playwrights Union of
Canada, 1986 .
Whiteley, David. Hot Spur! 2001 . (1 Henry IV)
- . Much Ado About Nothing . 1999 . (Much Ado About
Nothing; Romeo and Juliet)
Wylie, Betty Jane . Androgyne . 1995 . (Source text
unknown)
- . Androgyne. Toronto: Playwrights Union of Canada,
1997.
SUMMER 2002
73
Adaptation as Rite of Passage :
A Shakespeare Pageant
by DANIEL FISCHLIN
Shakespeare Pageant was written by Sister Mary
Agnes, who was born Mary Ives in a well-to-do
Boston family in 1861, and died in 1939 . Sister
M . Agnes, as she was known, taught English
from 1909 to 1928 at St Mary's Academy
(founded in 1874), an all-girls private Catholic high school
in Winnipeg . The work, subtitled "A Dialogue for
Commencement Day" and first published by St . Mary's
Academy in 1915, was located as part of the "Canadian
Adaptations of Shakespeare" research project funded by
the Premier's Research Excellence Awards (PREA) in
Ontario . The project's purpose is to recuperate the vast
archive of "Canadian" theatrical practices associated with
adaptations of Shakespeare . A significant unwritten history exists with regard to how Canadian society used theatre
in a multitude of contexts . Here I refer to theatre in its
broadest contexts, beyond mainstream, urban and high
culture - including theatre produced and performed by
marginalized communities, workers' theatre, theatre performed in high schools and community centres and private homes, to list only a few. The "Canadian Adaptations
of Shakespeare" project intends, through identification
and study of the archive, to come to some clearer understanding of the myriad ways in which adaptations of
Shakespeare address ideas of Canadian nationhood as it
was reflected in various theatrical practices at different
stages in Canadian history . To the long-troubled (and troubling) question of how to identify what it means to "be
Canadian," such an archive posits all sorts of theoretical
and practical solutions that emerge from the very diversity of writing and performance practices associated with
this particular archive . Adaptation here is a useful marker
of the extent to which divergence from an iconic cultural
referent and performance practice (like Shakespeare and
Shakespearean theatre) also signals new cultural formations and thus new subjectivities as mediated (and produced) by the adaptive process .
A Shakespeare Pageant is instructive from this perspective . As the product of an American-born Canadian (a fascinating woman who wrote some fifty-seven published
plays and who played an active, if unremembered, role in
Canadian letters at the turn of the twentieth century), it
reflects on the cultural influences at work in Canada at its
moment of composition .' In fact, a perceptible pattern
emerging from the archival research for the PREA award
indicates that a significant proportion of the earliest theatrical adaptations of Shakespeare produced in Canada
A
74
(perhaps not surprisingly given Canada's colonial status)
were written by emigrants from the United States and from
England . How the values transmitted through these early
adaptations came to influence the broader theatrical formations in Canada is a question well worth asking .
A Shakespeare Pageant is also the product of a particular
pedagogical environment (an all-girls, private Catholic
high school) that marked the practice of graduating its students with theatrical spectacles . These spectacles were
explicitly intended to transmit and reinforce cultural values, lessons and attitudes, and thus to serve as a kind of
didactic entertainment . In fact, this latter dimension of the
play is worth noting in relation to the mission statement of
St . Mary's Academy, which describes itself thus :
A Catholic school, in the tradition of the Sisters of
the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, St . Mary's
Academy promotes the dignity of each person and
challenges each member of the school community to
act justly. (St. Mary's Academy)
The connection between this mission statement and
the play's intent, which directly addresses in its first lines
the historical context of the "European War" (World War I)
is crucial to understanding this work's place in the production of a form of theatrical community in the local environs of Winnipeg . Eleanor, a character in the play, puts the
matter clearly when she states
I have often thought that a lovely garland of maxims
for the young could be gathered from the writings of
our great dramatist [Shakespeare], and from the stories of his heroines, most valuable lessons for young
girls entering the broader fields of life .
No doubt the commencement exercises, in which an
audience of parents and friends drawn from the broader
community would be present to witness the graduates taking their places in the "the broader fields of life," marked
an important rite of passage, one that merited reference to
Shakespeare synonymous with "lessons" to be learnt.
Interestingly, that rite of passage is given theatrical shape
in A Shakespeare Pageant and is sanctioned by the institutional practices of St. Mary's . The play, then, in its specific
local contexts and in its adaptive relationship to
Shakespeare (it is after all a reading of Shakespeare's most
famous heroines insofar as they can teach the audience
something), indicates the importance of theatrical representations . Here, those representations clearly link corn-
CTR 111
munity formation and the appropriate initiatory rites
geared toward carrying on the traditions of that community.
The desire to form people who promote dignity and
act justly cannot be dissociated, in this context, from the
theatrical staging of the enacted wisdom that the new
graduates will carry into their community after the commencement ceremony. Shakespeare's influence here is
paramount as an emblem of those values associated with
dignity and justice . These latter values are transmitted
through the exemplary female characters that the play
summons forth : Miranda, from The Tempest, as an example
of the ability to make the best of a "her narrow sphere" ;
Celia and Rosalind, from As You Like It, as examples of the
"strength and tenderness of female friendship" ; Lady
Macbeth, from Macbeth, as "an example of the evils resulting from soaring pride and lawless ambition" ; and
Cordelia, from King Lear, as an example of filial affection
and resistance to hypocrisy. As well, Portia, the rich heiress
of Belmont from The Merchant of Venice, makes a brief
appearance in the Pageant to remind us "That in the course
of justice, none of us / Should see salvation ; we do pray
for mercy" - an explicit expression of the Christian notion
that "mercy seasons justice"; and though Titania, from A
Midsummer Night's Dream, does not speak while on stage,
she appears in tableau, her presence exemplifying "light
and joy and beauty" (presumably virtues that graduates
were expected to embody) ; finally, Ophelia, from Hamlet,
is called forth as a potential remedy to Hamlet's distracted
state, only to be judged "A poor broken reed ; but too frail
a support for the tortured Prince of Denmark ."
In the specific contexts of World War I, this last comment may have been a canny appeal to the women on
stage and in the audience to be supportive of the Hamletlike men fighting in the war. Unlike Ophelia, these women
are enjoined to stand strong in the service of their men - a
good example of how local theatrical events speak to larger issues in ways that instruct, critique and shape lived,
quotidian experience . The pageant of the play thus stages
Shakespearean characters insofar as they are types of specific and desirable virtues and values associated with a
girl's education at St . Mary's:
Note
1 There is some confusion about how much Sister Mary Agnes
actually wrote. An obituary states :
A devoted teacher, Sister M. Agnes was also a writer
of great ability, her plays, founded upon Holy
Scripture, for presentation in colleges and schools
being in great demand, not only in our own country,
but also from points overseas - Australia, Philippine
Islands, England, etc . Sixty-eight of her compositions were printed and scarcely a day passed without bringing her an order to fill . Sister also wrote
cum permissu superiorum for various magazines . . .
(Chronicles)
Works Cited
Chronicles of St . Mary's Academy and College 1936-1956 .
Winnipeg : St. Mary's Academy, n .d . :123-25 .
St. Mary's Academy . Mission Statement. Jun . 2002 .
Available : <http : / /www.stmarysacademy.mb .c a>
Daniel Fischlin has published extensively in various areas of
cultural criticism and is the first winner of a PREA award in
the Arts and Humanities .
Instructed by the lessons drawn from the lives of
Shakespeare's women, they are no doubt fitted to
grace the career to which Fortune may call them ;
and now let them receive their well-merited laurels .
The obvious pastiche of the play (in a pageant context), its conglomeration of Shakespearean sources, its
specificity as an event celebrating an important community rite of passage, its focus on women heroines, its use of
cross-dressing (an all-female cast playing several male
characters en travesti), its alignment of Scriptural wisdom
(in a Catholic context) with Shakespearean characters and
its provenance from a prolific but little-known playwright,
all make it worthy of further attention . A Shakespeare
Pageant exemplifies the material relations that exist
between theatrical formations in Canada and the larger
social structures in which these are simultaneously at play
and at stake . CTR
SUMMER 2002
75
A
Shakespeare
Pageant
Dialogue for Commencement Day
by
S. M . A .
Copyright, 1915,
by
ST. MARY'S ACADEMY,
Winnipeg, Man .
TITLE PAGES OF THE ORIGINAL PUBLICATION, IN A VOLUME ENTITLED THE QUEEN OF SHEBA AND OTHER DRAMAS BY SISTER MARY
AGNES, PUBLISHED BY ST MARY'S ACADEMY WINNIPEG, IN 1915 .
CTR 111
~
16fjake5peare pageant
CHARACTERS .
RUTH
ANGELA
MABEL
ELEANOR
Graduates.
Any number of other Graduates, who may share the
parts with the preceding speakers .
MILDRED, a school friend. ("PROSPERO.")
PROSPERO '
MIRANDA
ARIEL
DUKE FREDERICK
ROSALIND
CELIA
LADY MACBETH
GENTLEWOMAN
KING LEAR
CORDELIA
KENT
PORTIA .
TITANIA
PUCK
ELVES
FAIRIES
OPHELIA,
SUMMER 2002
The Tempest.
As You Like It .
t.
Macbeth.
King Lear.
Merchant of Venice .
Midsummer-Night's Dream .
Hamlet.
77
A Shakespeare Pageant :
Dialogue for Commencement
Day
by
S . M . A . [SISTER MARY AGNES]
Caution : Copyright 1915, St . Mary's Academy, Winnipeg, MB . This script is protected under the copyright laws of Canada
and all other countries of the Copyright Union . Changes to the script are forbidden without the written consent oI the copyright holder. Rights to produce, film or record in any medium, in any language, by any group, are retained by the copyright
holder. The moral right of the author has been asserted . For performance rights, contact St . Mary's Academy, 550 Wellington
Crescent, Winnipeg, MB R3M OC1 . http •/ /www stmarvsacademy nib ca/
Note
This version of the play is based upon the 1915 edition, which has been slightly emended here to correct obvious typographical errors .
Characters
RUTH, ANGELA, MABEL, ELEANOR, graduates .
Any number of other GRADUATES, Soho rua_ul sluore the parts with the preceding speakers .
MILDRED, a school friend. ("PROSPERO")
PROSPERO, MIRANDA, ARIEL (The Tempest)
DUKE FREDERICK, ROSALIND, CELIA (As You Like It)
LADY MACBETH, GENTLEWOMAN (Macbeth)
KING LEAR, CORDELIA, KENT (King Lear)
TITANIA, PUCK, ELVES, FAIRIES (Midsummer Night's Dream)
OPHELIA (Hamlet)
CTR
A simple parlour interior . A bust of Shakespeare occupies
a conspicuous position.
Some GRADUATES enter, talking together.
RUTH : The long-awaited day has arrived, and we are
about to receive our coveted honours .
ANGELA : Yes; past labours are now forgotten in the joy of
present rest, assured reward . Well has the poet said 'Tis sweet to think of labours past,
When now the haven's gained at last .
RUTH: And sweetest of all is the pleasure of placing our
hard-earned laurels in the hands of our dear parents (Bows
to the audience), and seeing their smiles of approbation,
their joy in our triumph .
MABEL: Yes, and other friends (Bowing to the audience) will
assemble to see us receive our diplomas . What shall we do
to entertain them?
ELEANOR: True; we must endeavour to make them
spend a pleasant evening; so that they as well as we may
remember it as a golden day in this year's calendar .
ANGELA : Can you suggest any plan by which we may
entertain our kind audience?
RUTH : If some boys were considering that question, they
would probably propose a debate on some interesting subject; do you think we girls could make it a success?
ANGELA : I doubt it, but what subject would you choose?
RUTH : It would have to be some current topic of general
interest.
MABEL : There is only one topic that attracts the attention
of every one today - the European War.' If we debate on
that subject, some of us would have to defend the allies
and the others, take the part of their enemies . That would
be putting our valuable lives in danger . I don't want to be
arrested as a German spy!
ELEANOR : Well, perhaps literature or history would furnish us with a suitable subject . Of course, it has to be something profound and dignified . How would this do "Whether philosophers or poets have had greater influence on mankind?"
ANGELA: I haven't the slightest idea ; so we will consider
that debate as closed .
RUTH: I fear we shall have difficulty in forming our literary society. Yet, though we may have but a limited knowledge of the great masters who have been kings in the
realms of intellect, who have raised our own thoughts to
loftier things, could we say nothing about them to which
an indulgent audience would be willing to listen?
SUMMER 2002
ANGELA: Nothing, I fear, which has not been said many
times before and much better than we could say it . And
yet, (Looking at the bust of Shakespeare) the image of our
great, our beloved Shakespeare rises persistently before
me, claiming a passing tribute, seeming to suggest lessons
of wisdom which even a young schoolgirl can appreciate .
MILDRED enters unperceived.
ELEANOR : True, I have often thought that a lovely garland of maxims for the young could be gathered from the
writings of our great dramatist, and, from the stories of his
heroines, most valuable lessons for young girls entering
the broader fields of life .
MILDRED advances .
MILDRED : Having overheard your last remarks, my
friends, I am encouraged to hope that you will approve a
little plan which your school friends have devised to honour your graduation evening . Leave to us the pleasant task
of entertaining both you and your invited guests . You shall
be the honoured ones this evening . Be seated in these armchairs we have provided for you, while we summon from
the realms of poetry and drama the shades of
Shakespeare's women, to yield up the secrets of their lives,
and give you the lessons of wisdom you desire .
THE GRADUATES seat themselves .
RUTH : We are happy to accept so gracious an invitation,
dear Mildred, and will listen with the most profound
respect to the words of wisdom that fall from your lips .
MILDRED : Not from mine, dear friend, but from
Shakespeare's .
ANGELA : That great name always commands respect .
But tell us in what form his message will be communicated to us . We feel both interest and eager curiosity .
MILDRED : See! I shroud myself in the folds of this great
mantle and grasp the magic wand that symbolizes my
mystic powers . Now I am ready to play my part, and summon the spirits of Shakespeare's women . Do you recognize me?
RUTH : 0 yes; I think I see before me the exiled Duke of
Milan, Prospero, the good magician, who used his supernatural powers only for noble purposes .
MILDRED : As I shall do . But that you may have faith in
my powers, I must first assure you that this is the veritable
wand used by Prospero on his enchanted isle . You smile
incredulously. Recall the conclusion of Shakespeare's
charming play and you will remember that Miranda's
father signalized the end of his reign on the mysterious isle
as also the resignation of his supernatural powers by burying his wand "certain fathoms in the earth ." (Smiling.)
Permit me to continue the fairy-tale and inform you that
some romantic sea-roving ancestor of mine, like the
renowned personages who figure in The Tempest, suffered
shipwreck on this enchanted isle and finding Prospero's
magic wand, transmitted it to me with all its marvellous
powers .
79
PROSPERO : That is what I purpose to do . Like the original Prospero, I shall make use of the delicate Ariel to be the
minister of my will. (Waves his wand.) Approach, my Ariel,
come!
passion for the unfortunate and her hearty forgiveness of
those who wronged her. Knowing no sorrows herself, the
first tears she ever shed were those of compassion, "suffering with those that she saw suffer ."
You know the fearful "Tempest" raised by my arts, by
which my treacherous brother and his wicked accomplice,
the King of Naples, with their mariners, were shipwrecked
on my shores, and how my daughter pleaded for their
lives .
Enter ARIEL .
Enter MIRANDA .
ARIEL : All hail, great master! grave Sir, hail! I come
• answer thy best pleasure ; be't to fly,
• swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
On the curl'd clouds ; to thy strong bidding, task
Ariel and all his quality.
MIRANDA: If by your art, my dearest father, you have
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them .
0, I have suffered
With those that I saw suffer ; a brave vessel,
Which had, no doubt, some noble creature in her,
Dashed all to pieces . 0, the cry did knock
Against my very heart . Poor souls, they perished .
Had I been any god of power, I would
Have sunk the sea within the earth or ere
It should the good ship so have swallowed and
The fraughting souls within her .
MABEL : (Smiling.) As we have not lost our youthful fancy
for fairy-tales, we will accept your statement . But to
strengthen our faith, hasten to display the magic power
residing in your potent wand .
PROSPERO : The time 'twixt six and now
Must by us both be spent most preciously .
ARIEL : (Reluctant .)
Is there more toil? Since thou dost give me tasks,
Let me remember thee what thou hast promised,
Which is not yet performed me .
PROSPERO : How now? moody?
What is't thou canst demand?
PROSPERO : Be collected :
No more amazement; tell your piteous heart
There's no harm done .
MIRANDA : 0, woe the day!
ARIEL: My liberty.
PROSPERO: Before the time be out? no more!
ARIEL: I prithee
Remember I have done thee worthy service ;
Told thee no lies, made thee no mistakings, served
Without or grudge or grumblings : thou didst promise
• bate me a full year.
PROSPERO : Dost thou forget
From what a torment I did free thee?
ARIEL : Pardon, master;
I will be correspondent to command
And do my spiriting gently.
PROSPERO : Do so, and after two days,
I will discharge thee .
ARIEL : (Joyfully.) That's my noble master!
What shall I do? say what ; what shall I do?
PROSPERO : Summon hither my daughter Miranda. (Exit
ARIEL .) (To GRADUATES .) Perhaps you wonder what lesson my sweet Miranda can give you - a simple child of
nature, uninstructed in the ways of men, ignorant of all
arts but those that nature or her father taught her ; yet she
remains contented with her lot, innocent and happy in her
narrow sphere . That is already a lesson for the eager, restless maidens of this later century . But with the virtues that
adorn true womanhood, my gentle Miranda is richly
endowed . I will give you an instance of her sweet com-
80
PROSPERO : No harm .
I have done nothing but in care of thee,
Of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter, who
Art ignorant of what thou art, nought knowing
Of whence I am, nor that I am more better
Than Prospero, master of a full poor cell,
And thy no greater father.
MIRANDA : More to know
Did never meddle with my thoughts .
PROSPERO : The king of Naples, being an enemy
To me inveterate, hearkens my brother's suit ;
Which was, that he, in lieu o' the premises
Of homage and I know not how much tribute,
Should presently extirpate me and mine
Out of the dukedom, and confer fair Milan
With all the honours on my brother : whereon,
A treacherous army levied, one midnight
Fated to the purpose, did Antonio open
The gates of Milan, and i' the dead of darkness,
The ministers for the purpose hurried thence
Me and thy crying self .
MIRANDA : Alack, for pity!
I, not remembering how I cried out then,
Will cry it o'er again; it is a hint
That wrings mine eyes to 't .
PROSPERO : Hear a little further.
Here in this island we arrived ; and here
Have I, thy schoolmaster, made thee more profit
Than other princesses can that have more time
For vainer hours and tutors not so careful .
CTR 111
MIRANDA: Heavens thank you for 't! And now, I pray
you, Sir,
For still 'tis beating in my mind, your reason
For raising this sea-storm?
ROSALIND : Dear Celia, I show more mirth than I am
mistress of ; and would you yet I were merrier? Unless you
could teach me to forget a banished father, you must not
learn me how to remember any extraordinary pleasure .
PROSPERO : Know thus far forth :
By accident most strange, bountiful Fortune,
Now my dear lady, hath mine enemies
Brought to this shore . - Here cease more questions;
Thou are inclined to sleep : 'tis a good dullness,
And give it way : I know thou canst not choose .
CELIA : Herein I see thou lovest me not with the full
weight that I love thee . If my uncle, thy banished father,
had banished thy uncle, the duke my father, so thou hadst
been still with me, I could have taught my love to take thy
father for mine : so wouldst thou, if the truth of thy love to
me were so righteously tempered as mine is to thee .
PROSPERO waves his wand and MIRANDA slowly retires .
RUTH : Sweet Miranda! she is as kind and compassionate
as she is fair.
ANGELA : Yet, Prospero, perhaps the contentment felt by
your gentle daughter with her simple island home and
pastoral life results from her ignorance of any other . What
young girl familiar with the usages of civilized life or with
the pleasures of a royal court would willingly renounce
them for a "return to nature" such as philosophers teach or
poets dream?
PROSPERO: Even such examples can be found among the
heroines of Shakespeare . I will bring before you two noble
ladies who shall themselves tell you the cause of their
renunciation of a court and their preference for the charms
of rural life . Can you guess their names?
RUTH : Perhaps you refer to the lovely Rosalind and her
loyal cousin Celia, whose adventures in the Forest of
Arden arouse universal interest and sympathy. Am I right?
PROSPERO : Yes, my young friend . They shall speak for
themselves . - Ho! my dainty Ariel! Appear!
Enter ARIEL
ARIEL : What would my potent master? here I am .
PROSPERO : Fly to the land of spirits, and bring hither the
fair daughter of the banished Duke with Celia, her faithful
cousin .
ARIEL : (Gaily.) I go, I go . (Exit .)
PROSPERO : Another beautiful lesson may be drawn
from the self-imposed exile of these noble ladies - the
strength and tenderness of female friendship . It has been
falsely asserted by those who cast aspersions on the socalled "weaker sex," that women are incapable of true and
lasting friendship . Our great dramatic poet thought otherwise, and has given us, in As You Like It, this beautiful
example of unselfish, loyal friendship .
Enter ROSALIND and CELIA .
PROSPERO : See! The sweet friends are in earnest converse; but we may be permitted to overhear their confidences .
CELIA: I pray thee, Rosalind, sweet my coz, be merry .
ROSALIND : Well, I will forget the condition of my estate,
to rejoice in yours.
CELIA: You know my father hath no child but me ; and,
truly, when he dies, thou shalt be his heir, for what he hath
taken away from thy father perforce, I will render thee
again in affection; by mine honour, I will ; and when I
break that oath, let me turn monster : therefore, my sweet
Rose, my dear Rose, be merry.
ROSALIND : From henceforth I will, coz, and devise
sports . Let me see ; what think you of falling in love?
CELIA : Marry, I prithee, do, to make sport withal ; but love
no man in good earnest; nor no further in sport neither
than with safety of a pure blush thou mayest in honour
come off again .
ROSALIND : What shall be our sport, then?
CELIA: Let us sit and mock the good housewife Fortune
from her wheel, that her gifts may henceforth be bestowed
equally.
ROSALIND : I would we could do so, for her benefits are
mightily misplaced, and the bountiful blind woman cloth
most mistake in her gifts to women. - Look! here comes
the duke .
CELIA : With his eyes full of anger.
Enter DUKE FREDERICK.
DUKE : Mistress, dispatch you with your safest haste
And get you from our court.
ROSALIND : Me, uncle?
DUKE : You, cousin :
Within these ten days if that thou be'st found
So near our public court as twenty miles,
Thou diest for it.
ROSALIND : I do beseech your grace,
Let me the knowledge of my fault bear with me ;
If with myself I hold intelligence
Or have acquaintance with mine own desires,
If that I do not dream or be not frantic As I do trust I am not - then, dear uncle,
Never so much as in a thought unborn
Did I offend your highness .
DUKE : Thus do all traitors :
SUMMER 2002
If their purgation did consist in words,
They are as innocent as grace itself:
Let it suffice thee that I trust thee not .
ROSALIND : Yet your mistrust cannot make me a traitor :
Tell me whereon the likelihood depends .
DUKE : Thou art thy father's daughter ; there's enough.
ROSALIND: So was I when your highness took his dukedom;
So was I when your highness banish'd him :
Treason is not inherited, my lord ;
Or, if we did derive it from our friends,
What's that to me? my father was no traitor :
Then, good my liege, mistake me not so much
To think my poverty is treacherous .
CELIA : No, hath not? Rosalind lacks then the love
Which teacheth thee that thou and I are one:
Shall we be sunder'd? shall we part, sweet girl?
No : let my father seek another heir.
Therefore devise with me how we may fly,
Whither to go and what to bear with us ;
And do not seek to take your change upon you,
• bear your griefs yourself and leave me out ;
For, by this heaven, now at our sorrows pale,
Say what thou canst, I'll go along with thee .
ROSALIND : Why, whither shall we go?
CELIA: To seek my uncle in the forest of Arden .
ROSALIND : Alas, what danger will it be to us,
Maids as we are, to travel forth so far!
Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold .
CELIA : Dear sovereign, hear me speak .
DUKE : Ay, Celia; we stay'd her for your sake,
Else had she with her father ranged along .
CELIA : I did not then entreat tc have her stay ;
It was your pleasure and your own remorse :
I was too young that time to value her ;
But now I know her : if she be a traitor,
Why so am I; we still have slept together,
Rose at an instant, learn'd, play'd, eat together,
And wheresoe'er we went, like Juno's swans,
Still we went coupled and inseparable .
DUKE : She is too subtle for thee; and her smoothness,
Her very silence and her patience
Speak to the people, and they pity her .
Thou art a fool: she robs thee of thy name;
And thou wilt show more bright and seem more virtuous,
When she is gone . Then open not thy lips :
Firm and irrevocable is my doom
Which I have pass'd upon her; she is banish'd .
CELIA : Pronounce that sentence then on me, my liege .
I cannot live out of her company.
DUKE : You are a fool . You, niece, provide yourself:
If you outstay the time, upon mine honour,
And in the greatness of my word, you die .
Exit DUKE FREDERICK .
CELIA : 0 my poor Rosalind, whither wilt thou go?
Wilt thou change fathers? I will give thee mine .
I charge thee, be not thou more grieved than I am .
ROSALIND: I have more cause .
CELIA : Thou hast not, cousin:
Prithee, be cheerful: know'st thou not, the duke
Hath banish'd me, his daughter?
ROSALIND: That he hath not .
82
CELIA: I'll put myself in poor and mean attire
And with a kind of umber smirch my face ;
The like do you: so shall we pass along
And never stir assailants .
ROSALIND : Were it not better,
Because that I am more than common tall,
That I did suit me all points like a man?
A gallant curtle-axe upon my thigh,
A boar-spear in my hand ; and - in my heart
Lie there what hidden woman's fear there will We'll have a swashing and a martial outside,
As many other mannish cowards here
That do outface it with their semblances .
CELIA : Let's away,
And get our jewels and our wealth together,
Devise the fittest time and safest way
• hide us from pursuit that will be made
After my flight. Now go we in content
• liberty and not to banishment .
Exeunt .
PROSPERO : You know the rest of the story, and how true
to each other in banishment were these sweet friends ; also,
how they found peace and happiness in the sylvan retreats
of Arden Forest, where, in the words of the banished Duke,
they found
Life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp; . . . the woods
More free from peril than the envious court ;
Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything .
MABEL : You have indeed convinced us, Prospero, that
contentment depends upon our own dispositions rather
than upon outward circumstances .
PROSPERO : It is a valuable truth to learn, my young
friends . Should you require an example of the evils resulting from soaring pride and lawless ambition, listen to the
unconscious self-revelation of Macbeth's hapless queen .
CTR III
(Looking aside.) I see her slowly approaching, as, in her
uneasy slumbers, her mind communes with itself and
recoils in horror from the deed of murder which her
"vaulting ambition" wrought .
The lights are lowered .
GENTLEWOMAN enters, followed by LADY MACBETH
walking slowly in sleep, and carrying a lighted candle .
GENTLEWOMAN : Lo, here she comes! and, upon my life,
fast asleep . - Her eyes are open, but their sense is shut . Look how she rubs her hands, as if washing them .
LADY MACBETH : Yet here's the spot GENTLEWOMAN : Hark! she speaks .
LADY MACBETH : Out, damned spot! out, I say! (Clock
strikes two .) (Starts .) One, two : why, then 'tis time to do it . Hell is murky! - Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier and afraid?
What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our
power to account? - Yet who would have thought the old
man had so much blood in him?
GENTLEWOMAN: Do you mark that?
LADY MACBETH : The Thane of Fife had a wife ; where is
she now? - What, will these hands ne'er be clean? - No
more o' that, my lord, no more o' that : you mar all with
this starting .
GENTLEWOMAN : (Aside .) She has spoke what she
should not, I am sure of that .
PROSPERO : Let us turn to the picture of one who was the
victim of others' evil passions rather than a sufferer from
her own, King Lear's faithful child, Cordelia .
RUTH : She is indeed a lovely character, a true and devoted daughter. But do you deem her wholly guiltless of the
disasters that wrecked her hapless father's life and finally
her own?
PROSPERO : You are referring, I suppose, to the assertions
of her filial affection, so brief and blunt as to offend her
unreasoning father. But the sincerity of her nature revolted
at the base hypocrisy of her false sisters, and drove her into
an excess of sincerity. But nobly did she later reveal her
true character, and display the tender love which finally
restored to reason the poor, distracted king, the brokenhearted Lear.
Let me once more use my magic power, that the touching
scene may be enacted before your eyes .
The lights are lowered . Soft music plays, preferably the violin . A
screen is withdrawn, and LEAR is seen asleep on a couch, the
faithful KENT standing near him . CORDELIA enters, and
kneels beside the couch .
CORDELIA : The king still sleeps . 0 you kind gods,
Cure this great breach in his abused nature!
The untuned and jarring senses, 0 wind up
Of this child-changed father!
KENT So please your majesty,
That we may wake the king : he hath slept long .
I doubt not of his temperance .
CORDELIA : Very well .
LADY MACBETH: Here's the smell of the blood still : all
the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand . Oh, Oh, Oh!
KENT: Please you, draw near. - Louder the music there!
GENTLEWOMAN : What a sigh is there! The heart is sorely charged .
CORDELIA: 0 my dear father! Restoration hang
Thy medicine on my lips ; and let this kiss
Repair those violent harms that my two sisters
Have in thy reverence made! (Stands .)
LADY MACBETH : Wash your hands, put on your nightgown; look not so pale : - I tell you yet again, Banquo's
buried ; he cannot come out of his grave .
KENT: Kind and dear princess!
GENTLEWOMAN : Even so!
LADY MACBETH : To bed, to bed ; there's knocking at the
gate! Come, come, come, come ; give me your hand . What's
done, cannot be undone; to bed, to bed, to bed .
She crosses the stage, and goes out, followed by GENTLEWOMAN. The lights are turned on .
PROSPERO: Well may her doctor say, "Infected minds
To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets :
More needs she the divine than the physician ."
ELEANOR : And I would repeat, with her Gentlewoman in
the same scene "I would not have such a heart in my bosom, for the dignity of the whole body."
SUMMER 2002
CORDELIA : Had you not been their father, these white
flakes
Had challenged pity of them . Was this a face
• be opposed against the warring winds?
• stand against the deep dread-bolted thunder?
In the most terrible and nimble stroke
Of quick cross-lightning? to watch - poor perdu! With this thin helm? Mine enemy's dog,
Though he had bit me, should have stood that night
Against my fire . (Kneels .) And wast thou fain, poor father,
• hovel thee with swine, and rogues forlorn,
In short and musty straw? Alack, alack!
'Tis wonder, that thy life and wits at once
Had not concluded all . - He wakes ; speak to him .
KENT: Madam, do you ; 'tis fittest . (Music ceases .)
83
CORDELIA : How does my royal lord? How fares your
majesty?
LEAR : (Slowly.) You do me wrong, to take me out o' the
grave : Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead .
You see, is killed in him.
LEAR : Bear with me .
Pray you now, forget and forgive : I am old and foolish .
Exeunt LEAR, CORDELIA, and KENT.
The lights are raised.
CORDELIA: Sir, do you know me?
RUTH: It is a sight to wring tears from the hardest nature .
LEAR: You are a spirit, I know. When did you die?
CORDELIA: (Stands .) Still, still, far wide .
KENT: He's scarce awake : let him alone awhile .
LEAR: Where have I been! Where am I? Fair daylight? I am mightily abused . - I should even die with pity,
To see another thus . - I know not what to say. I will not swear these are my hands : - let's see ;
I feel this pin prick . Would I were assured
Of my condition .
CORDELIA : (Kneels .) 0, look upon me, sir,
And hold your hands in benediction o'er me . LEAR attempts to rise .
No, sir, you must not kneel .
LEAR: Pray, do not mock me :
I am a very foolish, fond old man,
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less ;
And, to deal plainly,
I fear, I am not in my perfect mind .
Methinks I should know you, and know this man ;
Yet I am doubtful, for I am mainly ignorant
What place is this ; and all the skill I have
Remembers not these garments ; nor I know not
Where I did lodge last night . Do not laugh at me ;
For, as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia .
ANGELA : How pitiful that so often the innocent must suffer with the guilty. If King Lear's unnatural daughters,
Goneril and Regan, alone suffered the penalty of their evil
schemes, we should feel that the claims of justice had been
satisfied .
Enter PORTIA, in her robes as Doctor of Law .
PROSPERO : What says the noble Portia?
PORTIA: Though justice be thy plea, consider this . That in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation ; we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer cloth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy .
It is twice bless'd .
It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes .
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest ; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown :
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings ;
But mercy seasons justice.
PROSPERO : In the words of another, let me say :
0 wise young judge, how I do honour thee!
CORDELIA : And so I am, I am .
PORTIA withdraws .
(Looking aside.) Whom do I see approaching? Surely, my
delicate Ariel has found some fairy spirits like himself, and
is conducting them hither, to grace our evening entertainment .
LEAR : Be your tears wet? Yes, faith . I pray, weep not ;
If you have poison for me, I will drink it .
I know you do not love me; for your sisters
Have, as I remember, done me wrong :
You have some cause, they have not .
Enter TITANIA in a little flower-decked carriage drawn by two
elves and preceded by Puck skipping and dancing, and blowing
from time to time on a small trumpet . A number of little fairies
follow, while soft music plays ; others may enter from different
sides .)
CORDELIA: No cause, no cause . (Both rise.)
LEAR: Am I in France?
KENT: In your own kingdom, sir .
LEAR : Do not abuse me .
KENT: Be comforted, good madam : the great rage,
84
PROSPERO : All hail, Titania, queen of fairies, beauteous
sovereign of the land of dreams . Like the sweet flowers of
your own fairy-land, you bring light and joy and beauty
with you .
The fairies, lightly dancing back and forth, and around their
queen, sing the following words :2
Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire,
CTR Ill
We do wander everywhere
Swifter than the moon's sphere ;
And we serve the fairy queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green .
The cowslips tall her pensioners be;
In their gold coats spots you see ;
Those be rubies, fairy favours,
In those freckles live their savours .
RUTH : (Standing .) We are honoured, fair Titania, by your
presence at our graduation festival . Stay, we pray you, to
grace it to the end.
PUCK : What! a play toward! I'll be an auditor ;
An actor, too, perhaps, if I see cause.
ANGELA : (Standing.) You are most welcome, little Puck .
You shall not only witness our evening revels, but take
part in them, too, if so it please you . Your merry pranks
will be an added charm .
PUCK: I'll follow you, I'll lead you about a round,
Through bog, through bush, through brake, through brier!
Sometimes a horse I'll be, sometimes a hound,
A hog, a headless bear, sometimes a fire ;
And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn,
Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn .
MABEL: But attempt not here, mischief-loving sprite, the
merry tricks you played one Midsummer Night in the forest near Athens, dropping the magic juice of flowers in the
eyes of distracted lovers .
PUCK: Ah! those things do best please me,
That befall preposterously .
The GRADUATES resume their seats .
PROSPERO : (To Puck.) Now, little elf, display the power
residing in your magic flower, and waft into dreamland
these fairy sprites.
PUCK skips from one to another, beginning with TITANIA,
touching their eyelids with a poppy ; whereupon, all the elves and
fairies sink to the ground and fall asleep .
PROSPERO : (Looking aside .) Here comes a gentle maiden,
whose mind is wandering, from the shock of a father's
sudden death and the sorrows of unhappy love . Here is a
case for your elfin arts, my little Puck . All persons would
approve, should you drop the juice of Oberori s magic herb
on the sleeping eyelids of the Prince of Denmark, and turn
his affections towards the unhappy Ophelia .
PUCK: (Gaily.) Shall we their fond pageants see? Lord, what fools these mortals be!
Withdraws among the fairies. OPHELIA enters slowly, carrying
a basket offlowers .
thoughts . There's rue for you ; and here's some for me : we
may call it herb-grace o' Sundays . 0, you must wear your
rue with a difference. There's a daisy: I would give you
some violets, but they withered all, when my father died.
They say he made a good end -
(Sings .) He is dead and gone, lady,
He is dead and gone;
At his head a grass-green turf,
At his heels a stone .
Pray you, mark!
White his shroud as the mountain snow,
White his shroud as the mountain snow,
Larded with sweet flowers;
Which bewept to the grave did go
With true-love showers . 3
I hope all will be well . We must be patient; but I cannot
choose but weep, to think they should lay him i' the cold
ground . My brother shall know of it; and so I thank you for
your good counsel . Come, my coach! Good-night, ladies ;
good night, sweet ladies! good night, good night . (Goes out
slowly backward, throwing kisses to the audience .)
RUTH : Poor innocent Ophelia! I could join the Danish
Queen in scattering flowers o'er her bier, and murmur,
"Sweets to the sweet; Farewell!"
PROSPERO : A poor broken reed; but too frail a support
for the tortured Prince of Denmark .
ANGELA : The shades of Shakespeare's women have
shown themselves obedient to your summons, Prospero,
and well has your faithful Ariel performed his task ; is it
not time to grant him his freedom?
PROSPERO : Yes, if he is not playing some malicious trick
on his arch-enemy, Caliban - (Calls .)
Ho, Ariel; ethereal spirit, here!
ARIEL appears .
ARIEL : Thy thoughts I cleave to . What's thy pleasure?
PROSPERO : Why, that's my dainty Ariel! I shall miss thee,
But yet thou shalt have freedom : - so, so, so .
ARIEL prances with delight.
Behold these fairy sprites, in nature kindred to thine own .
Arouse them from their magic slumbers, and when thou
hast led them safe to their forest home, amid the waving
trees and fragrant flowers, thou, too, shalt have thy liberty .
ARIEL: (Joyfully .) I drink the air before me, and return
Or ere your pulse twice beat .
Sings gaily as he wakes each elf and fairy with a touch of his
wand or flower.
(Sings) Where the bee sucks, there suck I ;
OPHELIA : There's rosemary, that's for remembrance ;
pray, love, remember ; and there is pansies, that's for
SUMMER 2002
In a cowslip's bell I lie ;
There I couch when owls do cry .
On the bat's back I do fly.
After summer, merrily .
Merrily, merrily, shall I live now,
85
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough .4
4 Music by Dr. Thomas A . Arne; published by G. Schirmer, New
York. [Note in original]
PROSPERO : (To the audience .) In conclusion, let me quote
the words of Shakespeare's Prospero after the pageant he
had presented to entertain Prince Ferdinand :
Our revels now are ended . These our actors.
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air :
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces .
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve .
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind . We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with sleep .
May that sleep bring pleasant dreams to each one here
present.
Now I will lay aside the magician's robe with my
potent wand, and leave the stage to the heroines of the
evening . (Bows to the GRADUATES .) Instructed by the lessons drawn from the lives of Shakespeare's women, they
are no doubt fitted to grace the career to which Fortune
may call them; and now let them receive their well-merited laurels . (Bows to the GRADUATES, then to the audience,
and withdraws .)
THE END
Notes
1 Any other reference may be made to current events . [Note in
original]
2 "Amoroso," by Andrew J . Boex. In The Capital Collection of TwoPart Songs, published by The John Church Co ., Chicago or New
York. [Note in original]
3 Music in Werner's Readings and Recitations, No. 27, published by
Edgar S. Werner & Co ., New York. [Note in original]
86
CTR 111
Reading Elsinore: The Ghost
and the Machine
by RIC KNOWLES
Is Lepage the Ghost in the machine? He is pictured here, as Hamlet, on the backstage side of the computer-operated hydraulic circle (with its rectangular gateway)
that was the centrepiece of the set for Elsinore.
PHOTO BY CLAUDEL HUOT
ublishing or reading Elsinore, "written and directed by Robert Lepage," according to the show's program, seems
misguided . The play's claim to fame is its inventive computer-controlled hydraulic staging rather than its text,
p after all, and not a word of the script is in tact "written" by Robert Lepage - at least not as writing is conventionally understood . In one sense, to read the play is to be reminded of the old joke about a student's dismissal of
ally
Shakespeare's Hamlet itself as nothing but a pastiche of familiar quotations . And Lepage's adaptation of Hamlet for a solo
performer (doubled) only exacerbates the problem : as in his other somewhat obsessive forays into Hamlet (in the various
extant versions Lc Pol r~ r rpli, for example, or even in his acting role in Denys Arcand's 1989 film, Jesus of Montreal), he focuses in Elsinore on what may come to have been understood as the play's cliches . These include most notably the "to be or
not to be" soliloquy, which, against the original Hamlet's narrative logic, introduces and frames the version of Elsinore published here as an eschatological (or perhaps ontological) meditation . And like many whose contact with Hnnrlet is indirect
or distant, Lepage seems to get the scenes all mixed up and in the wrong order .
But it may not be stretching things to suggest in an issue on Shakespearean adaptation that Lepage in Elsinore is less
concerned with adapting, interpreting or producing Hamlet - or Shakespeare in the contemporary world - than with
Hamlet's, or Shakespeare's, own production of that world, and the extent to which, "Willy-nilly," we speak Slurkespeare ; or at
least, in the ways that the play's words and iconography have entered contemporary discourse, we speak of "Hamlet's
SUMMER 2002
87
greatest hits ." One indication of this interest may be the
fact that, in its French-language version, Elsineur, Lepage
eschewed the new or Quebecois translations that he has
used in his other French-language productions of
Shakespeare in favour of the canonical Victor Hugo translation, the one through which Hamlet has entered (and
shaped) dominant discourse in the francophone world .
Another would be the fact that in some versions, at least,
of Le Polygraph, Lepage yokes together the play's most
familiar moments by having the "To be or not to be" soliloquy spoken by an actor holding a skull (presumably
Yorick's), which Shakespeare's Hamlet does in a different
scene entirely. Seen in this way, what at first seems in
Elsinore to be a radical de- and re-conceptualization of
Hamlet's greatest hits may begin to seem like a meditation
on the fragmentary, disjointed and decontextualized
process of Hamlet writing "us" into (our contemporary
version of) existence.
Is Hamlet, then, the ghost in the machine, and the ideology that unconsciously informs and naturalizes the technologies through which we understand ourselves?
Certainly Lepage's version as staged takes its place among
a plethora of postmodern "Hamletmachines," from the
eponymous Heiner Muller version to variations by everyone from Sigmund Freud to Arnold Schwarzenegger (in
Last Action Hero) . In production, the reader needs to know
in this otherwise opaque publication, Elsinore was realized
through (and contained within) an immense and complex
multimedia stage machine, unrepresentable here except
through always inadequate photographs, its set consisting
of modular flats manipulated by a computer-controlled
hydraulic system that produced breathtaking and transformational visual images. All of the flats could be performed or projected upon, using slides, video and a complex lighting plot, and the central flat housed a large circular section that could spin or tilt independently, within
which a cut-out rectangle could open or close, serving as a
doorway, windo ship's hatch or grave . This resulted in a
physically transformational dramaturgy that enabled and
underscored the solo actor's shifts from character to character, gender to gender, role to role . Scenes involving
Claudius and Gertrude were presented with projected
King and Queen playing cards ; Hamlet's debate with
Claudius was accomplished with the aid of a revolving
table, his duel with Laertes through the aid of a body double and foils equipped with tiny video cameras ; and the
"what a piece of work is man" was covered by a projection
of Da Vinci's geometrical/anatomical sketch of "man,"
contextualizing the speech not within Hamlet's narrative
logic but within the formative history of Western humanism .
How all this worked, and why it is not possible in a
print publication to render the full experience of the production through stage directions, is perhaps best indicated
by a description of one transformational sequence among
the many that made up the show : the one that represented Ophelia's death. (It is worth noting that, in spite of a
childhood illness that left Lepage hairless, he performed
Elsinore, including the women's roles, with a false beard
88
and a wig, and that, when the English-language performances were taken over by Peter Darling, the actor did not
use a wig to disguise his encroaching baldness, even in the
women's roles . This show deliberately performed rather
than embodied gender.) The actor entered as Gertrude,
stage right, in a stiff, gilded dress, and delivered
Gertrude's speech from act four, scene four of Hamlet
"straight" and effectively in front of the curtain . At the end
of the speech, the dress broke away from the actor like the
encrustation from a pupa, and Ophelia emerged embryonic in a flimsy white elasticized undergown, partially
open at the front to reveal the male body beneath, evoking
an effective androgyny that was reinforced by the falsetto
singing of a medley of the standard early-modern settings
of Ophelia's songs from the subsequent scene . At this
point, the actor-as-Ophelia crossed to centre stage - the
curtain had risen - and lay down on a vast blue cloth,
his/her arms crossed at the chest, as the stage mechanism
rose - all but a rectangular, coffin-shaped opening at its
centre, into which the body seemed to sink, engulfed by
the watery drapery that slid into the grave-like opening to
enshroud her. Ae the machinery lifted, however, the same
actor, as Hamlet, emerged from beneath it to soliloquize,
completing a breathtaking - and economical - series of
metamorphoses .
Is Elsinore an independent play? A production of
Shakespeare's play? An adaptation? A collage? Lepage
himself, in a program note to the play in production,
argued that "you can't make a Hamlet without breaking a
few eggs," signalling in the yoke joke both his intention to
"make a Hamlet" - this was, in his mind, at least in part, a
production of Shakespeare's play - and the radical disruption that "making a Hamlet" now involves . But his joke
also indicates that to make either a meal or a chicken of an
egg - to realize its potential, one way or another - the shell
must be broken : it must cease to be an egg . CTR
Ric Knowles is editor of Modern Drama and author of The
Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning: Contemporary
Canadian Dramaturgies .
CTR 111
Elsinore
BASED ON HAMLET BY WILLIAM
SHAKESPEARE
ADAPTED BY ROBERT LEPAGE
PRODUCED BY EX MACHINA
Peter Darling as Claudius in the touring English-language version of Elsinore .
PHOTO BY CLAUDEL HUOT
Caution : Copyright Robert Lepage . This script is fully protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all countries of
the Copyright Union . Changes to the script are forbidden without the written consent of the author . Rights to produce, film
or record in any medium, in any language, by any group, are retained by the author . For information regarding production
rights, contact Ex Machina, 103 rue Dalhousie, Quebec City, PQ, G1K 4B8 .
Production History
Elsinore, created and performed by Robert Lepage in English and French versions, previewed in French at the Monument
Nationale, Montreal, in November 1995, co-produced with Ex Machina, the National Arts Centre, Centre Culturel de 1'universite de Sherbrooke, Corporation du Centre Culturel de Drummondville, Robert Lepage Inc ., Philippe Sikdevuka, MarieSoleil St-Michel, Les Productions d'Albert Inc ., Production Specta, Le Menage-Scene Nationale de Maugeuge, La Maison des
Arts de Cretail, Hebbel Theater Berlin, KunstenFESTIVAL des arts Bruxelles, Helinski Festival, Goteborg Dans & Theater
Festival, National Teatret Oslo, Aaarhus Festuge, Kampnagel Theatre Hamburg, Rotterdase Schouwburg, Festival
International des Francophones en Limousin/Theatre de l'Union-Centre dramatique de Limoges and Change Performing
Arts Milano . It previewed in English at the Athaneum Theatre in Chicago, 15-17 February 1996 and premiered in English
at the DuMaurier World Stage Festival, Toronto, 20 April 1996, written and directed by Robert Lepage, with set by Carl
Fillion, costumes by Yvan Gaudin, lighting by Alain Lortie and Nancy Mongrain, music by Robert Caux, fights by Jean
Francois Gagnon and multimedia by Jacques Collin, with Pierre Bernier as Hamlet's double and with Michael Mackenzie
as consultant on the English adaptation . The revised version published here premiered in Ottawa, 9 September 1997, and
was performed by Peter Darling, with set design by Robert Fillion, costume design by Yvan Gaudin, lighting design by
Alain Lortie and Nancy Mongrain, original music and keyboards by Robert Caux, multimedia by Jacques Collin and props
by Manon Desmarais .
SUMMER 2002
89
Playwright's Note :
All roles are performed by the same actor (plus a body
double) on a flexible hydraulic set, using projections,
video and multimedia . The text used is published here
without detailed stage directions indicating place or time,
since the production's extensive use of transformation
through movement, mechanics or costume made the
scenes and characters flow into one another without
breaks in the action. Indeed, the indications of "scene"
used below are included for convenience, but tend to mask
the fact that the transformations themselves constituted in
many cases the show's most interesting and significant
action .
PART ONE
SCENE ONE
HAMLET: To be, or not to be, that is the question :
Whether "'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die - to sleep,
No more ; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to . 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished . To die - to sleep .
To sleep - perchance to dream : ay, there's the rub!
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life .
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns - puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action .
GHOST: (off) I am thy father's spirit ;
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away.
'Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,
A serpent stung me ; but know, thou noble youth,
The serpent that did sting thy father's life
Now wears his crown .
Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole,
With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial,
And in the porches of my ears did pour
The leperous distilment, whose effect
Holds such an enmity with blood of man
That swift as quicksilver it courses through
The natural gates and alleys of the body,
Thus was I sleeping, by a brother's hand
Of life of crown of queen at once dispatched .
If thou has nature in thee bear it not
Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch of luxury and damned incest.
SCENE TWO
KING : Moreover that we much did long to see you,
The need we have to use you did provoke
Our hasty sending . Something have you heard
Of Hamlet's transformation . So I call it,
Sith nor the exterior nor the inward man
Resembles that it was . What it should be,
More than his father's death, that thus hath put him
So much from the understanding of himself,
I cannot dream of . I entreat you both
That, being of so young days brought up with him,
And since so neighboured to his youth and 'haviour,
That you vouchsafe your rest here in our court
Some little time; so by your companies
• draw him on to pleasures, and to gather
So much as from occasion you may glean,
Whether aught to us unknown afflicts him thus
That, opened, lies within our remedy .
QUEEN : Good gentlemen, he hath much talked of you,
And sure I am two men there are not living
• whom he more adheres . If it will please you
• show us so much gentry and good will
As to expend your time with us awhile
For the supply and profit of our hope,
Your visitation shall receive such thanks
As fits a king's remembrance .
KING :
Thanks, Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern .
QUEEN : Thanks, Guildenstern and gentle Rosencrantz .
And I beseech you instantly to visit
My too much changed son . Go, some of you,
And bring these gentlemen where Hamlet is .
Production credits projected on set, as they would be in a film.
90
CTR 111
moult no feather.
I have of late - but wherefore I know not - lost all my
mirth, forgone all custom of exercises ; and indeed, it goes
so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the
earth, seems to me a sterile promontory ; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire why, it appeareth no other thing to me than a foul and
pestilent congregation of vapours . What a piece of work is
a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In
form and moving how express and admirable, in action
how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The
beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to
me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me
- no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you
seem to say so . Why did you laugh, when I said "Man
delights not me"?
You are welcome . But my uncle - father and my aunt
- mother are deceived . I am but mad north-north-west.
When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.
Peter Darling as Hamlet.
PHOTO BY CLAUDEL HUOT
SCENE THREE
HAMLET: I have heard
That guilty creatures, sitting at a play,
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaimed their malefactions ;
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ . I'll have these players
Play something like the murder of my father
Before mine uncle . I'll observe his looks,
I'll tent him to the quick ; if he but blench,
I know my course . The spirit that I have seen
May be a devil; and the devil hath power
T'assume a pleasing shape ; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me . I'll have grounds
More relative than this . The play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King .
HAMLET: Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, my excellent good
friends, how art thou?
Denmark's a goodly prison in which there are many
confines, wards, and dungeons . What have you deserved
in the hand of fortune that she send you to prison thither?
Were you sent for? Is it your own inclining? Is it a free visitation? Come, come! Nay speak . Anything, but to the purpose . What make you at Elsinore? There is a kind of confession in your looks, which your modesties have not craft
enough to colour. You were sent for. The good King and
Queen have sent for you . Be even and direct with me,
whether you were sent for or no . My friends you were sent
for. I will tell you why, so shall my anticipation prevent
your discovery, and your secrecy to the King and Queen
SCENE FOUR
POLONIUS : My liege, and madam, to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night night, and time time,
Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time .
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief . Your noble son is mad .
Mad call I it; for, to define true madness,
What is't but to be nothing else but mad?
But let that go . Madam, I swear I use no art at all .
That he is mad, 'tis true, 'tis pity ; and pity 'tis 'tis true .
A foolish figure! Mad let us grant him then .
And now remains tThat we find out the cause of this
effect Or rather say, the cause of this defect,
For this effect defective comes by cause .
Thus it remains, and the remainder thus .
Perpend :
I have a daughter (have while she is mine),
Who in her duty and obedience, mark,
Hath given me this . Now gather, and surmise .
To the celestial, and my soul's idol, the most beautified Ophelia
- That's an ill phrase, a vile phrase ; "beautified" is a vile
phrase .
Doubt thou the stars are fire ;
Doubt that the sun doth move ;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love .
O dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers ;
I have not art to reckon my groans ; but that I love thee best,
O most best, believe it. Adieu .
Thine evermore, most dear lady, whilst this machine is to him,
Hamlet.
This, in obedience, hath my daughter shown me ;
SUMMER 2002
91
And more above, hath his solicitings,
As they fell out by time, by means, and place,
All given to mine ear. But what might you think,
When I had seen this hot love on the wing
(As I perceived it, I must tell you that,
Before my daughter told me), what might you,
Or my dear Majesty your queen here, think,
If I had played the desk or table book,
Or given my heart a winking, mute and dumb,
Or looked upon this love with idle sight?
What might you think? No, I went round to work
And my young mistress thus I did bespeak :
"Lord Hamlet is a prince, out of thy star .
This must not be ." And then I precepts gave her,
That she should lock herself from his resort,
Admit no messengers, receive no tokens,
Which done, she took the fruits of my advice,
And he, repulsed, a short tale to make,
Fell into a sadness, then into a fast,
Thence to a watch, thence into a weaknesss,
Thence to a lightness, and, by this declension,
Into the madness wherein now he raves,
And all we mourn for.
Hath there been such a time - I would fain know that That I have positively said "'Tis so,"
When it proved otherwise?
Take this from this, if it be otherwise.
If circumstances lead me, I will find
Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed
Within the centre .
SCENE FIVE
POLONIUS : How does my good lord, Hamlet?
HAMLET: (off) Well, God-a-mercy.
POLONIUS : Do you know me, my lord?
HAMLET: (off) Excellent, well, you are a fishmonger .
POLONIUS : Not I, my lord .
HAMLET: (off) Then I would you were so honest a man .
Have you a daughter?
POLONIUS : I have, my lord .
HAMLET : (off) Conception is a blessing, but not as your
daughter may conceive . Friend, look to't.
POLONIUS : How say you by that? Still harping on my
daughter. Yet he knew me not at first . He said I was a
fishmonger. He is far gone, far gone! And truly in my
youth I suff'red much extremity for love - very near this .
I'll speak to him again . - What do you read, my lord?
HAMLET : (off) Words, words, words .
that old men have grey beards; that their faces are wrinkled; their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum ;
and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with
most weak hams . All which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have
it thus set down; for you yourself, sir, should be old as I
am if, like a crab, you could go backward .
POLONIUS : Though this be madness yet there is
method in't . - How pregnant sometimes his replies are! A
happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and
sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of.
SCENE SIX
HAMLET:
(sings)
How should I your true love know
from another one
By his cockle hat and staff
And his sandal shoon
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That, from her working, all his visage warned,
Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing! No, not for a king,
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damned defeat was made .
(sings)
He is dead and gone lady
He is dead and gone
At his head a grass green turf
At his feet a stone.
White his shroud as the mountain snow
Larded with sweet flowers
Which bewept to the grave did go
With his true love showers .
Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face?
Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i' the throat
As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this, ha?
'Swounds, I should take it! for it cannot be
But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall
To make oppression bitter,
Or ere this I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave's offal . Bloody, bawdy villain!
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!
0, vengeance!
SCENE SEVEN
POLONIUS : What is the substance, my lord?
Ophelia in her closet, silently applies perfume, prepares .
HAMLET : Slanders, sir; for the satirical rogue says here
92
CTR 111
SCENE EIGHT
OPHELIA : My lord as I was sewing in my closet,
Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced,
No hat upon his head, his stockings, fouled,
Ungart'red, and downgyved to his ankle ;
Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other,
And with a look so piteous in purpoint
As if he had been loosed out of hell
To speak of horrors - he comes before me . . .
HAMLET : Ha, ha! Are you honest? Are you fair? If you
be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty. Get thee to a nunnery! Why
wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things
that it were better my mother had not borne me . What
should such fellows as I do, crawling between earth and
heaven? We are arrant knaves all ; believe none of us . Go
thy ways to a nunnery.
OPHELIA : He took me by the wrist and held me hard ;
Then goes he to the length of all his arm,
And with his other hand thus o'er his brow,
He falls to such perusal of my face
As he would draw it.
HAMLET : I have heard of your paintings too, well
enough . God hath given you one face, and you make
yourselves another. You jig, you amble, you lisp ; you
nickname God's creatures and make your wantonness
your ignorance . Go to, I'll no more on't! it hath made me
mad . . .
OPHELIA : He raised a sight so piteous and profound
As it did seem to shatter all his bulk,
And end his being. That done, he lets me go,
And with his head over his shoulder turned
He seemed to find his way without his eyes,
For out o'doors he went without their help
And to the last bended their light on me .
O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!
The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword,
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
The observed of all observers - quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That sucked the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh ;
That unmatched form and feature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy. 0, woe is me
T'have seen what I have seen, see what I see !
That no revenue hast but thy good spirits
To feed and clothe thee?
Why should the poor be flattered? No,
Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice
And could of men distinguish, her election
Hath sealed thee for herself. For thou hast been
As one, in suff'ring all, that suffers nothing ;
A man that Fortune's buffets and rewards
Hast ta'en with equal thanks ; and blest are those
Whose blood and judgement are so well commingled
That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger
To sound what stop she please . Give me that man
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core, ay in my heart of heart,
As I do thee . Something too much of this!
There is a play tonight before the King.
One scene of it comes near the circumstance,
Which I have told thee, of my father's death .
I prithee, when thou seest that act afoot,
Even with the very comment of thy soul
Observe my uncle . If his occulted guilt
Do not itself unkennel in one speech,
It is a damned ghost that we have seen,
And my imaginations are as foul
As Vulcan's smithy. Give him heedful note;
For I mine eyes will rivet to his face,
And after we will both our judgments join
In censure of his seeming .
SCENE TEN
HAMLET : Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced
it to you trippingly on the tongue . But if you mouth it, as
many of our players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke
my lines . Nor do not saw the air too much with your
hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent,
tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of your passion,
you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give
it smoothness . 0, it offends me to the soul to hear a
robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters,
to veery rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who
(for the most part) are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise . . . Pray you avoid it . Be not
too tame neither ; but let your own discretion be your
tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action ;
with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the
SCENE NINE
HAMLET : Horatio, thou art e'en as just a man
As e'er my conversation coped withal .
Nay, do not think I flatter ;
For what advancement may I hope from thee,
I
Robert Lepage as Claudius, one of Elsinore's many player kings .
PHOTO BY CLAUDEL HUOT
SUMMER 2002
93
modesty of nature: for anything so overdone is from the
purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now,
was and is, to hold as 'twere, the mirror up to nature ; to
show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and
the very age and body of the time his form and pressure .
Now this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make
the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve ;
the censure of the which one must in your allowance
o'erweigh a whole theatre of others . Go make you ready.
SCENE ELEVEN
HAMLET : My lord, you played once i' the university,
you say?
POLONIUS : That did I, my lord, and was accounted a
good actor.
KING : Faith, I must leave thee, love, and thy shortly too ;
My operant powers their functions leave to do :
And thou shalt live in this fair world behind,
Honoured belov'd ; and happily one as a kind
For husband shalt thou . . .
QUEEN : 0, confound the rest!
Such love must needs be treason in my brest :
In second husband but who killed the first .
A second time I kill my husband dead
When second husband kisses me in bed .
Both here and hence pursue me lasting strife,
If, once a window, I ever be a wife!
KING : 'Tis deeply sworn . Sweet, leave me here awhile ;
My spirits grow dull, and fain I would beguile
The tedious day with sleep .
HAMLET : What did you enact?
QUEEN : Sleep rock thy brain ;
And never come mischance between us twain!
POLONIUS : I did enact Julius Caesar ; I was killed i the
Capitol ;
Brutus killed me.
THE ACTOR: Exit the Queen. Enter the King's brother.
HAMLET: It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a
calf there . Be the players ready?
QUEEN : Come hither my dear Hamlet, sit by me.
HAMLET : No, good mother, here's metal more attractive .
Lady, shall I lie in your lap? I mean, my head upon your
lap?
Do you think I meant country matters?
LUCIANUS : Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit, and
time agreeing ;
Confederate season, else no creature seeing ;
Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected,
With Hecate's ban thrice blasted, thrice infected,
Thy natural magic and dire property
On wholesome life usurp immediately .
KING : Give me some light! Away!
OPHELIA : The King rises .
OPHELIA: I think nothing, my lord .
QUEEN : How fares my lord?
HAMLET : That's a fair thought to lie between maids'
legs .
POLONIUS : Give o'er the play.
HAMLET: What, frighted with false fire?
OPHELIA : You are merry, my lord .
SCENE TWELVE
HAMLET: 0 God, your only jig-maker! What should a
man do but be merry? For look you how cheerfully my
mother looks, and my father died within 's two hours .
KING : Have you heard the argument? Is there no offense
in't?
HAMLET : No, no! They do but jest, poison in jest ; no
offense i' the world .
KING : What do you call the play?
HAMLET : "The Mousetrap ."
The play starts
HAMLET: 'Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world . Now could I drink hot blood
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on . Soft! now to my mother!
O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever
The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom .
Let me be cruel, not unnatural ;
I will speak daggers to her, but use none .
My tongue and soul in this be hypocrites :
How in my words somever she be shent,
To give them seals never, my soul consent!
SCENE THIRTEEN
HAMLET : Mother, mother, mother!
THE ACTOR :
The KingThe Queen .
94
POLONIUS : He will come straight . Look you lay home
to him .
CTR 111
Tell him his pranks have been too broad to bear with,
And your grace has screened and stood between
Much heat and him. I'll silence me even here .
Pray you be round with him.
QUEEN : Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended .
HAMLET : Mother, you have my father much offended .
QUEEN : Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue .
HAMLET: Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue .
QUEEN : Have you forgot me?
HAMLET : No, by the rood, not so!
You are the Queen, your husband's brother's wife,
And - would it were not so - you are my mother.
QUEEN : Nay, then I'll set those to you that can speak .
HAMLET : Come, come, and sit you down, you shall not
budge!
You go not till I set you a glass
Where you may see the inmost part of you .
QUEEN : What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murder me?
Help, help, ho!
POLONIUS : What, ho! help, help, help!
HAMLET: How now? a rat?
Is it the king ? (Kills him)
Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!
I took thee for thy better. Take thy fortune .
Thou find'st to be too busy is some danger .
Leave wringing of your hands . Peace! sit you down
And let me wring your heart ; for so I shall
If it be made of penetrable stuff ;
If damned custom have not brazed it so
That it is proof and bulwark against sense .
QUEEN: What have I done that thou dar'st wag thy
tongue
In noise so rude against me?
HAMLET : Such an act
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty ;
Calls virtue hypocrite; takes off the rose
From the fair forehead of an innocent love,
And sets a blister there ; makes marriage vows
As false as dicers' oaths . 0, such a deed
As from the body of contraction plucks
The very soul, and sweet religion makes
A rhapsody of words! Heaven's face cloth glow;
Yea, this solidity and compound mass,
With tristful visage, as against the doom,
Is thought-sick at the act .
Look here upon this picture, and on this,
The counterfeit presentment of two brothers .
See what a grace was seated on this brow ;
SUMMER 2002
Hyperiori s curls; the front of Jove himself ;
An eye like Mars, to threaten and command ;
A station like the herald Mercury
New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill :
A combination and a form indeed
Where every god did seem to set his seal
To give the world assurance of a man .
This was your husband . Look you now what follows .
Here is your husband, like a mildewed ear
Blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes?
Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed,
And batten on this moor? Ha! have you eyes?
You cannot call it love ; for at your age
The heyday in the blood is tame, it's humble,
And waits upon the judgment; and what judgment
Would step from this to this? Sense sure you have,
Else could you not have motion ; but sure that sense
Is apoplexed; for madness would not err,
Nor sense to ecstasy was ne'er so thralled
But it reserved some quantity of choice
To serve in such a difference . What devil was't
That thus hath cozened you at hoodman-blind?
Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight,
Ears without hands or eyes, smelling sans all,
Or but a sickly part of one true sense
Could not so mope . 0 shame! where is thy blush?
Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty!
QUEEN: 0, speak to me no more!
These words like daggers enter in mine ears .
No more, sweet Hamlet!
HAMLET : A murderer and a villain!
A slave that is not twentieth part the tithe
Of your precedent lord; a vice of kings;
A cutpurse of the empire and the rule,
That from a shelf the precious diadem stole
And put it in his pocket! A king of shreds and patches!
GHOST : (off) : Do not forget
This visitation Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose .
But look, amazement on thy mother sits .
0, step between her and her fighting soul!
Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works .
Speak to her, Hamlet .
HAMLET : How is it with you, lady?
QUEEN : Alas, how is't with you,
That you do bend your eye on vacancy,
And with the incorporal air do hold discourse?
Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep;
And, as the sleeping soldiers in the alarm,
Your bedded hairs, like life in excrements,
Start up and stand on end . 0 gentle son,
Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper
Sprinkle cool patience! Whereon do you look?
95
HAMLET: Good night, mother .
SCENE FOURTEEN
KING : Now, Hamlet, where's Polonius?
HAMLET: At supper.
KING : At supper? Where?
Peter Darling as Ophelia .
PHOTO BY CLAUDEL HUOT
HAMLET : On him, on him!
Look you how pale he glares! Look how it steals away!
My father, in this habit as he lived!
QUEEN : This is the very coinage of your brain .
This bodiless creation ecstasy
Is very cunning in .
HAMLET: Ecstasy? My pulse as yours doth temperately
keep time
And makes as healthful music . It is not madness
That I have utt'red . Mother, for love of grace,
Lay not that flattering unction to your soul,
That not your trespass but my madness speaks .
It will but skin and film the ulcerous place,
Whilst rank corruption, mining all within,
Infects unseen. Good night - but go not to my uncle's
bed .
Assume a virtue, if you have it not . Refrain tonight,
And that shall lend a kind of easiness
To the next abstinence ; the next more easy;
With wonderous potency . Once more, good night ;
And when you are desirous to be blest,
I'll blessing beg of you, for this same lord, I do repent ;
But heaven hath pleased it so,
To punish me with this, and this with me,
That I must be their scourge and minister.
I will bestow him . So again, good night.
I must be cruel, only to be kind ;
Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind .
One word more, good lady . Not this, by no means, that I
bid you do :
Let the bloat King tempt you again to bed ;
Pinch wanton on your cheek; call you his mouse;
And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses,
Or paddling in your neck with his damned fingers,
Make you to ravel all this matter out,
That I essentially am not in madness,
But mad in craft . 'Twere good you let him know ;
For who that's but a queen, fair, sober, wise,
Would from a paddock, from a bat, a gib,
Such dear concernings hide? Who would do so? No . . .
QUEEN : Be thou assured, if words be made of breath,
And breath of life, I have no life to breathe
What thou hast said to me .
HAMLET: Not where he eats, but where he is eaten . A
certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him .
Your worm is your only emperor for diet . We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots .
Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service
- two dishes, but to one table . That's the end . A man may
fish with the worm that eat of a king, and eat of the fish
that hath fed of that worm .
KING : What dost thou mean by this?
HAMLET : Nothing but to show you how a king may go
a progress through the guts of a beggar .
KING : Where is Polonius?
HAMLET : In heaven. Send thither to see . If your messenger find him not there, seek him i' the other place yourself . But indeed, if you find him not within this month,
you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby .
KING : Go seek him there .
HAMLET : He will stay till you come .
KING : Hamlet, this deed, for thine especial safety,
Which we do tender as we dearly grieve
For that which thou hast done, must send thee hence
With fiery quickness . Therefore prepare thyself .
The bark is ready and the wind at help,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern tend, and everything is
bent . . .
HAMLET : For England?
KING : Ay, Hamlet.
HAMLET : Good .
KING : So is it, if thou knew'st our purposes .
HAMLET : I see a cherub that sees them . But come, for
England! Farewell, dear mother.
KING : Thy loving father, Hamlet .
HAMLET : My mother! Father and mother is man and
wife; man and wife is one flesh; and so, my mother.
Come, for England!
End of Act 1 .
96
CTR 111
House curtain comes in; projections of Hamlet's and Laertes's
travel.
PART TWO
SCENE ONE
Tomorrow is Saint Valentine's day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose and donn `d his clothes
and dupped the chamber door
Let in the maid that out a maid
never departed more.
THE QUEEN : (sings)
How should I your true love know
From another one?
By his cockle hat and staff
And his sandal shoon.
By Gis and by Saint Charity
alack and fie for shame
young men will do't if they come to't
by cock they are to blame .
He
He
At
At
Quoth she before you tumbled me
you promised me to wed
He answers:
So would I a done by younder sun
and thou hadst not come to my bed .
is dead and gone, lady,
is dead and gone;
his head a grass-green turf,
his heels a stone .
White his shroud as the mountain snow Larded with sweet flowers;
Which bewept to the grave did not go
With true-love showers
There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream .
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them .
There on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clamb'ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook . Her clothes spread wide
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up ;
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element . . .
(she sings)
And will he not come again?
And will he not come again?
No . no . he is dead ;
Go to thy death bed,
He will never come again .
His beard was white as snow
All flaxen was his poll,
He is gone, he is gone,
And we cast away moan:
God ha' mercy on his soul!
But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death .
(She sings)
SUMMER 2002
SCENE TWO
HAMLET : Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hold their
course for England .
Of them I have much to tell thee .
Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep . Up from my cabin,
My sea-gown scarfed about me, in the dark
Groped I to find out them ; had my desire,
Fingered their packet, and in fine withdrew
To mine own room again; making so bold
(My fears forgetting manners) to unseal
Their grand commission ; where I found, Horatio
(0 royal knavery!), an exact command,
Larded with many several sorts of reasons,
Importing Denmark's health, and England's too,
With, ho!! such bugs and goblins in my life,
That, on the supervise, no leisure bated,
No, not to stay the grinding of the axe,
My head should be struck off .
Being thus benetted round with villainies,
Ere I could make a prologue to my brains,
They had begun the play. I sat me down ;
Devised a new commission ; wrote it fair.
I once did hold it, as our statists do,
A baseness to write fair, and labored much
How to forget that learning; but, sir, now
It did me yeoman's service .
I wrote an earnest conjuration from the King,
As love between them like the palm might flourish,
As peace should still her wheaten garland wear
And stand a comma 'tween their amities,
And many such-like assis of great charge,
That, on the view and knowing of these contents,
Without debatement furthermore or less,
He should the bearers put to sudden death,
Not shriving time allowed . And this was sealed!
Why, even in that was heaven ordinant.
I had my father's signet in my purse,
Which was the model of that Danish seal ;
Folded the writ up in the form of the other,
97
Subscribed it, gave't the impression, placed it safely,
The changeling never known . Now, the next day
Was our sea-fight; a pirate of very warlike appointment gave us chase . Finding ourselves too slow of sail, we
put on a compelled valor, and in the grapple I boarded
them . So I alone became their prisoner . They have dealt
with me like thieves of mercy ; repair thou to me with as
much speed as thou wouldst fly death.
Farewell.
He that thou knowest thine,
Hamlet .
SCENE THREE
KING : Now Laertes, must your conscience my acquittance seal,
And you must put me in your heart for friend,
Sith you have heard, and with a knowing ear,
That he which hath your noble father slain pursu'd my
life .
LAERTES : But tell me
Why you proceeded not against these feats,
So crimeful and so capital in nature,
As by your safety, wisdom, all things else,
You were mainly stirred up .
KING : 0! for two special reasons ;
The queen his mother
Lives almost by his looks, and for myself,
My virtue or my plague, be it either which,
She's so conjunctive to my life and soul,
That, as the star moves not but in its sphere,
I could not but by her. The other motive,
Why to a public count I might not go,
Is the great love the general tender bear him ;
Who dipping all his faults in their affection,
Would, like the spring that turneth wood to stone,
Convert his gyves to graces ; so that my arrows,
Too slightly timber'd for so loud a wind,
Would have reverted to my bow again,
And not where I had aim'd them .
If he be now return'd,
As checking at his voyage, and that he means
No more to undertake it, I will work him
To an exploit, now ripe in my device,
Under the which he shall not choose but fall ;
Will you be ruled by me?
LAERTES : The rather, if you could devise it so
That I might be the organ .
KING : What would you undertake
To show yourself your father's son in deed
More than in words?
LAERTES : To cut his throat i the church.
KING : No place, indeed, should murder sanctuarize ;
Revenge should have no bounds . But, good Laertes,
Hamlet return'd shall know you are come home ;
98
We'll put on those shall praise your excellence,
Bring you, in fine, together,
And wager on your heads : he, being remiss,
Most generous and free from all contriving,
Will not peruse the foils ; so that, with ease
Or with a little shuffling, you may choose
A sword unbated, and, in a pass of practice
Requite him for your father.
LAERTES : I will do't;
And, for that purpose, I'll anoint my sword .
I bought an unction from a mountebank,
So mortal that, but dip a knife in it,
Where it draws blood no cataplasm so rare,
Collected from all simples that have virtue
Under the moon, can save the thing from death
That is but scratch'd withal ;
KING : When in your motion you are hot and dry As make your bouts more violent to that end And that he calls for drink, I'll have prepar'd him
A chalice for the nonce, whereon but sipping,
If he by chance escape your venom'd stuck,
Our purpose may hold there .
SCENE FOUR
HAMLET : Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio .
A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.
He hath borne me on his back a thousand times .
And now how abhorred in my imagination it is!
My gorge rises at it . Here hung those lips
That I have kissed I know not how oft .
Where be your gibes now? your gambols?
Your songs? your flashes of merriment
That were wont to send the table on a roar?
Not one now, to mock your grinning?
Quite chapfall'n?
I lov'd Ophelia : forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum . What wilt thou do for her?
Woo't weep? woo't fight? woo't fast? woo't tear thyself?
Woo't drink up eisel? eat a crocodile?
I'll do't . Dost thou come here to whine,
To outface me with leaping in her grave?
Be buried quick with her, and so will I .
If it be now, 'tis not to come,
If it be not to come, it will be now;
If it be not now, yet it will come :
The readiness is all . Let be .
SCENE FIVE
HAMLET : Give me your pardon sir . I have done you
wrong;
But pardon't, as you are a gentleman .
This presence know, and you must needs have heard,
How I am punished with sore distraction .
What I have done that might your nature, honour, and
exception
Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness .
CTR III
Wasn't Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet .
If Hamlet from himself is ta'en away,
And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it .
Who does it then? His madness . If't be so,
Hamlet is of the faction that is wronged ;
His madness is poor Hamlet's enemy .
Sir, in this audience,
Let my disclaiming from a purposed evil
Free me so far in your most generous thoughts
That I have shot my arrow o'er the house
And hurt my brother.
LAERTES : I am satisfied in nature,
Whose motive in this case should stir me most
To my revenge . But in my terms of honour
I will stand aloof, and will no reconcilement
Till by some elder masters of known honour,
I have a voice and precedent of peace,
To keep my name ungor'd .
But till that time, I do receive your offer'd love like love
And will not wrong it .
KING : (off) Gertrude, do not drink.
QUEEN : I will my lord ; I pray you, pardon me .
Hamlet, take my napkin, rub thy brows .
No, no, the drink, the drink, - 0 my dear Hamlet!
The drink, the drink ; I am poison'd .
HAMLET : I am dead, Horatio . . . Wretched queen, adieu!
O good Horatio, what a wounded name
Shall live behind me?
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story. 0, I die Horatio!
The potent poison quite o'ercrows my spirit .
The rest is silence .
THE END
KING : If Hamlet give the first or second hit,
Or quit in answer of the third exchange,
Let all the battlements their ordnance fire :
The king shall drink to Hamlet's better breath ;
And in the cup an union shall he throw,
Richer than that which four successive kings
In Denmark's crown have worn.
And let the kettle to the trumpet speak,
The trumpet to the cannoneer without,
The cannons to the heaven, the heavens to the earth,
"Now drinks the king to Hamlet!" Come, begin ;
And you, the judges, bear a wary eye .
LAERTES : This is too heavy; let me see another. (they
fight)
HAMLET : (off) One .
LAERTES : (off) No .
HAMLET : (off) Judgement .
OSRIC : (off) : A hit, a very palpable hit .
LAERTES : (off) Well ; again .
KING : Stay; give me drink . Hamlet, this pearl is thine ;
Give him the cup .
HAMLET : (off) I'll play this bout first ; set it by a while .
Come . (they fight)
HAMLET : (off) Another hit ; what say you?
LAERTES : (off) A touch, a touch, I do confess .
QUEEN : Our son shall win . He's fat and scant of breath.
Here . . . The queen carouses to thy fortune, Hamlet .
SUMMER 2002
99
Views
Reviews
by REVIEW EDITOR CATHERINE GRAHAM
It is impossible to discuss the role of Shakespeare in this country - or any other country, for that matter - without discussing
questions of cultural authority and institutional privilege . So,
when Matthew Hays approached CTR about a invitation he had
received to cover the second anniversary of the Mirvish production of Mamma Mia!, this seemed like a logical fit for an issue
about Shakespeare. Hays, as you will see, is not enamoured of
the production, but more important than his critique are the
questions he raises about the organization of theatrical life in
our country. While the battles around the creation of a truly
Canadian theatre that led to the creation of CTR in 1974 were
largely around Stratford's promotion of Shakespeare as
Canada's national playwright, Hays raises the possibility that the
revenue generating mega-musical may be the new financially
privileged form of Canadian theatre . Even the Stratford Festival
now offers a mega-musical every year and does so largely, we
may well suspect, for its revenue-generating possibilities . Hays'
opinion piece on what this may mean for Canadian theatre
seems timely, especially in an issue of the review devoted to the
works of a playwright who is inarguably one of the most important inventors of commercial theatre in the English-speaking
world .The two reviews that follow deal more directly with the
theme of the issue . Christie Carson's review of Daniel Fischlin
and Mark Fortier's collection of adaptations based on
Shakespeare's plays applauds the effort to make these varied
works more generally available while asking questions about the
values driving the editors' choice of these particular works . My
own review of Diana Brydon and Irena R . Makaryk's collection
of essays, Shakespeare in Canada:A World Elsewhere?, is an unusual choice for CTR because the book will not be generally available until several months after this issue reaches our readers .
On seeing the manuscript for this work, however, we felt that its
relation to the theme of the issue and its breadth of coverage
made it an important work to review in CTR I I I . Taken together, these three contributions demonstrate the complexity and
range of issues Canadian theatre and Canadian theatre scholarship face in grappling with the problem of cultural authority and
the role of theatre in the development of our ability to define
what it means to be Canadian . CG
Two-Tier Theatre?
What does the Mirvishes' success
mean for Canadian theatre?
Commentary by Matthew Hays
Some two years into its run, the Abba-inspired musical Mamma Mia! continues to pack the house ; no small feat,
as it's playing at the Royal Alexandra Theatre . What does
the Mirvishes' success mean for Canadian theatre?
Allow me to step off the bandwagon for a minute .
Though Mamma Mia!, the massively successful musical
100
theatre production based on twenty-two Abba hits, has
bowled over audiences and critics in both London and
Toronto, I didn't really like it . Shocking, no? What many
describe as fun and lighthearted, I found lazy and rather
dimwitted . And though I love the Abba songs upon which
the show is based (as a teen I owned every Abba album,
ever), the music is really the only thing the show has going
for it. The comedic setups are goofy, obvious and trying .
The choreography was nothing to write about, some of it
resembling glorified aerobics . And even though the show
I caught (at the invitation of the Mirvishes, who are celebrating the second birthday of the show) was close to two
years into the run, there appeared to be technical problems
with the microphones, something inexcusable for a show
of this budget which has run this long .
Most critics, however, reacted favourably to Mamma
Mia! And perhaps it is I who should stand corrected . But I
suspect, in my heart of hearts, that critics were responding
with their gut in a sense of fear - fear that people will label
them as snobs if they didn't buckle under and praise the
heck out of this . After all, audiences do laugh, clap and
sing along when they sit through Mamma Mia! What's not
to like? Not cerebral enough for you? This, I suspect, happens in a bizarre, internalized backlash instinct with many
critics . Too afraid of seeming overly critical, they praise the
show so as not to seem elitist . The friend I dragged along
to the show was horrified .
Abba songs have been used to great effect in cinema,
most notably Muriel's Wedding and The Adventures of
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert ; there are ways to employ the
music without the entire show riding desperately on the
Swedish pop group's coattails . Everything about the nowdefunct group's melodies were somehow sweet and
endearing in their simplicity. Everything about Catherine
Johnson's writing (she wrote the story which ties the tunes
together), on the other hand, feels exploitative and cheap .
That critics would laud work like this is alarming . It
suggests a reaction to the fear of seeming outdated or out
of step with the common people (whoever they are), and
of erring on the side of caution, rather than reacting
responsibly to a stage work. This fear on the part of critics
is felt quite severely by film critics (my day job), and manifests itself currently as something resembling panic. Last
year, Cineaste, the American political film journal, polled
virtually every major film critic in the us for their reflections on the art of film criticism today ; virtually all had
negative things to say about its current state . Theatre critics, I assume, feel similarly about what may well feel like
an impending extinction . In any case, I have trouble
believing one Toronto critic expected to be taken seriously
when he described Mamma Mia! as "an exuberant hoot ." It
makes for great soundbite, but after seeing the show,
strains credulity.
CTR 111
But for the theatre community, and for any critics in
the audience, the overwhelming success of Mamma Mia!
should raise further potentially troubling questions . First,
it raises the rather horrifying specter of imitation (that natural offshoot of any commercial success) . Think about it: if
a hit musical can be had by concocting a weak story
around a bunch of already-proven pop songs from a
divorced 1970s musical group, what's next? A musical
based on the hits of REO Speedwagon? Foreigner? Or, in the
spirit of Cancon, Trooper? Stay tuned . I suspect things
could get even more dire . As with dystopic books, plays
and films that predicted a nasty future in sharp social
satire (think Network or Rollerball), when caught up with,
the future has turned out to be even worse than imagined ;
indeed, if a Simpsons episode hadn't already imagined it as
a gag, wouldn't a musical based on Planet of the Apes have
happened by now?
Having said all of this, the Mirvishes, the legendary
theatre impresarios who put on Mamma Mia! do deserve
praise for their endeavours . Yes, that was Mel Brooks at
their press conference earlier this season, announcing that
his smash Broadway hit, The Producers, the stage version of
his classic 1970s film comedy, would have its Toronto premiere as part of the 2002-03 season line-up . Less duly
noted by journalists was the placement of the Montreal hit
Mambo Italiano, a light comedy about two young Italian
gay men, a couple, attempting to come out amid the
strains of dealing with a fairly traditional (and thus homophobic) Italian immigrant community . If the Mirvishes can
be accused of being crass, we-can-get-it-for-you-wholesale
businessmen, they must also be praised for using their
megahit box-office successes to bolster other homegrown
Canuck fare .
Gallucio's play did extremely well in Montreal, breaking the box-office record at the Centaur, being held over
five times . (The previous record was held by David
Fennario's deeply political bilingual play Balconville .)
Mambo Italiano had also had a hugely successful run in
French, translated by none other than Quebec literary godfather Michel Tremblay. For all its success, however, it is
worth noting that Mambo Italiano was also hugely controversial on its home turf . Though not universal, there was a
loud and distinct faction of critics who let it be known they
thought Gallucio's show was brainless and filled to the
brim with lame and simplistic stereotypes . Gallucio, for his
part, was not closeted about his influences, citing such staples of prime-time 1970s rv as Maude, The Mary Tyler Moore
Show and Rhoda as his overriding influences (merely confirming what critics have long charged, that in the past two
decades live theatre in the English language has been "sitcomized," effectively dumbed down by the deleterious
effects of the idiot box) . Though Mambo Italiano certainly
has more to merit it than Mamma Mia!, I would quite sadly
say that a number of the same adjectives apply . It feels
lazy It's inconsistent, one moment being quite clever and
witty, at other times resembling the writing in a sub-par
high school play . It's frustrating by its sheer lack of discipline as a theatrical work . The Mirvishes will invest in
Canuck theatre, it seems, as long as that work conforms to
their rather narrow vision of what it should be .
SUMMER 2002
Independent Canadian theatre producers have long
complained to me about the government grant system that
fuels much of the theatre in this country . The second you
get too commercially successful, they contend, government funders (and, by extension, the smaller and midsized theatres they support) will no longer touch you . Stay
small, stay relatively unknown, and, in terms of government grants, you're better off . (Many of these producers
have complained very, very loudly in public places about
this phenomenon, but have declined my repeated requests
to speak on the record about it, saying that doing so would
effectively threaten their ability to get more grants . I recognize it's often very difficult to take people who refuse to
speak on the record on their word, but I've heard so many
with the same complaint that it's extremely difficult to
write them all off.) What appears to be emerging, then, is
a Canadian theatre with two solitudes of a different sort .
And this is something we should lament . We are left either
with small, experimental theatre of very little public
appeal (and thus no commercial value) or massive,
overblown, abrasively commercial mega-musicals . It
would be to the benefit of the culture of Canadian theatre
to have some middle ground ; something which, if we had
ever had it, is now evaporating . Mamma mia, indeed CTR
Matthew Hays is a film critic at the Montreal Mirror and occasional contributor to the Globe and Mail .
An Eclectic Collection of
Adaptations
A Review of Adaptations
of Shakespeare:
A Critical Anthology o f Plays from the
Seventeenth Century to the Present edited
by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier
London and New York : Routledge, 2001 .
328 pp . $39 .95
Review by Christie Carson
Creating collections of material that relate to Shakespeare
in performance is a bit of an obsession of mine . This
anthology of plays draws attention to many of the issues
that I struggle with on a daily basis . My own work
involves the creation of large databases of digital information for the study of performance history . This anthology
also deals with the issues that arise when one looks at the
question of what has gone on in the dialogue between
Shakespeare's plays and the theatre world at different
periods in history. It is a fine collection of plays precisely
because it raises more questions than it answers and sets
out a challenge to others to create similar kinds of collections in the future . These are academic aims that I
applaud, however; I do have some reservations regarding
the execution of those aims and in particular the choices
that have been made .
101
The editors of this collection address a wide range of
important issues in their introduction . How we name
plays that are in some way a response to Shakespeare's
work is a good example of the dangers of this business .
Translation, adaptation, alteration, imitation, inspiration,
parody and pastiche are just a few of the possible terms
available, and each of them inevitably makes some assertions about the relationship between the original and the
new work . Of course Shakespeare's works were not themselves original in terms of plot so there is a strange fixing
of authenticity with Shakespeare which is both false and
culturally undeniable . Shakespeare's plays are now seen
as original and anything that came before was just there to
feed the mind of the master creator . This is an interesting
place to begin the discussion .
On the notion of Shakespeare as fiber-author, the editors argue that the working practices of authors have
changed rather radically since Shakespeare's time because
of cultural shifts and also because of copyright legislation .
Shakespeare's relationship to his predecessors was that of
the apprentice to the master, the editors point out . Older
works were copied for their style as well as their content as
exercises in developing the craft . More contemporary writers engage with Shakespeare's work in an entirely different way. There is an engagement with the works themselves but also with the tradition of performance and
scholarship that has grown up around Shakespeare . The
writing business, like other businesses, now works on a
different model than it once did, or so the argument of the
editors goes . I am not actually disagreeing with any of the
points made by the editors in their very intelligently written introduction . Rather, I see this introduction trying to
give rather more coherence and breadth to the collection
than I think it naturally contains . The point they make, that
authors are now working in a very different climate and
under different economic conditions, is not disputed . This
rather general statement, however, must be seen to apply
rather differently to Tate writing in 1681 in England,
Welcome Msomi writing in South Africa in 1969 and Paula
Vogel writing in the United States in 1987 .
This collection of adaptations is by design eclectic . It is
a smorgasbord rather than a five-course dinner and there
is certainly merit in that . What I find somewhat awkward
in the presentation of the collection, however, are the occasional attempts to draw the collection together as a whole
from the point of view of authorial intent when it is clearly designed to show differences rather than similarities .
The editors have tried to show a range of responses to
Shakespeare across time and also across cultures .
According to the editors, political recontextualisation of
Shakespeare's work is a common goal for many of these
adaptations . They are careful to spread the collection
across as many political view points as possible, making a
collection policy based on what seems to me to be the politics of representation . There are two adaptations by Black
playwrights and three adaptations by women; since one of
the plays, Harlem Duet by Djanet Sears, is by a Black
woman, four plays of a total of twelve represent these
points of view. I point this out only because it seems to be
important to the editors . Two of Shakespeare's plays are
represented with more than one adaptation : King Lear and
102
Othello . Again, I believe this can be seen as significant
because these two plays deal specifically with patriarchal
power and race .
To explain my reservations in greater detail I will discuss the material I know best . As co-editor of The
Cambridge King Lear CD-ROM : Text and Performance Archive
I spent five years looking at every possible variation on the
theme of King Lear. I feel that the two plays represented
here, Tate's (reworked so that it has a happy ending [16811)
and Elaine Feinstein and the Women's Theatre Group's
Lear's Daughters (1987) give a rather strange view of that
history of adaptation . The introduction of a love story
between Edgar and Cordelia in Tate's version, and also the
removal of the Fool and the tragic ending, were all
responses to the audience tastes of the time . I still find it
both amusing and distressing that while the audience
found the death of Cordelia far too sad to watch, the introduction of an attempted rape by Edmund and his ruffians
was entirely acceptable to the ladies in attendance . In
Lear's Daughters the Women's Theatre Group is clearly
interested in filling out the details of a domestic tale . By
looking at the psychology of Lear's children the play suggests that Lear, like any parent, could be seen as the source
of his daughters' behaviour and therefore the engineer of
his own demise . Both of these adaptations clearly point
their audience in a particular direction in terms of interpreting the original play. They also were both created for
very specific and well-defined audiences . There is a threehundred-year gap between these plays, but since they
were written in the same country, some interesting points
could be made about the development of that society over
time . These are, however, just two of many, many adaptations of this particular play. I do not deny the importance
of either of these plays but their juxtaposition seems odd
when so many adaptations of this play exist . What I am
searching for is some justification of the choices made .
The editors point out that adaptation is a form of interpretation and critique . If I am to look at this collection as a
series of essays on the work of Shakespeare I again find
myself questioning the seeming desire to cover so much
territory and so many possible themes and directions .
While there is mention made in the introduction of the
joining of Shakespeare with other theatre traditions, namely Kathakali, Noh and Kabuki, these experiments are not
included in the collection . The use of Shakespeare as a
means of imposing British imperial identity and values is
raised but not fully explored . The belief system that is
propagated by Shakespeare's plays goes fairly unquestioned by the selection of plays chosen . While the editors
argue that Shakespeare has been used to support a range
of ideological positions, they have nonetheless included a
very Western group of texts . The one exception, perhaps, is
the South African adaptation of Macbeth, uMabatha.
However, given the colonial history of this country it
seems to fit nicely into a pattern of rebellious post-colonial
experiments . In fact, the plays that seem to work together
as a group most successfully are those that engage most
directly with questions of the power, both cultural and
political, which Shakespeare's plays hold .
The two adaptations that seem out of place in this collection are Lorca's The Public and Muller's Hamletmachine.
CTR 111
These two plays come out of theatrical traditions that are
quite different from the imperial British tradition . Their
use of Shakespeare as an inspiration seems more incidental than central to these adaptations . Brecht's The Resistable
Rise of Arturo Ui, on the other hand, because it was written
for an American audience, engages more directly with the
expectations and preoccupations of a colonially created
country. In this play Brecht, I would argue, is trying to
explain the German situation to an American audience .
Had the editors openly claimed their bias for textbased colonially inspired plays with a particular interest in
class, gender and racial politics, I think that the collection
would have been much stronger . Instead, by trying to
claim to be all things to all people it fails to pull together as
a coherent collection. This anthology is perhaps better suited to the North America survey approach to teaching
undergraduate students than the more focused British
approach . Another choice that I think shows the assumptions of the editors in terms of their teaching practice is
their decision to separate the work of the Women's Theatre
Company from Gay Sweatshop author Philip Osment,
both of whom were writing in Thatcher's Britain in 1987 .
These two plays are separated by Paula Vogel's adaptation
of Othello with its rather ludicrous pseudo-English dialogue . Clearly identity based on gender is more important
here than cultural identity or common social experience .
The definition of what is an adaptation of Shakespeare
is again a tricky business . In a sense, like all of the playwrights brought together in this collection, answering this
question says a great deal more about the respondent than
it does about Shakespeare . At present I am trying to determine which live performances of Shakespeare are to be
included in a large database about Shakespearean design .
The original intention was to include only those productions that used the original text and were performed in
Stratford or London between 1960 and 2000 . My research
assistant created a large file of adaptations in which she
placed everything about which she was not sure . In it were
two of the plays which appear in this anthology, Welcome
Msomi's uMabatha and Charles Marowitz's Measure for
Measure . In the end I have included both in our database .
The first because it follows the plot and structure of the
original so closely, the second because it uses the text so
faithfully even if lines have been rearranged and reassigned . This raises a question about whether being faithful
to Shakespeare is mostly about plot and structure or mostly about the verse . I concluded it could be either. Both
these plays are recognizably Shakespearean . But there was
another important issue about the performance of these
two plays in London during the period under discussion :
in terms of performance style both of these plays were
unusual, and had a marked influence on the performance
of mainstream Shakespeare in Britain . If an adaptation is
an attempt to enter into a dialogue with the reigning cultural powers and the contemporary audiences, then
whether or not those powers take note must also be taken
into account .
This anthology is extremely ambitious in its aims . This
is admirable, but in a sense it sets out a task that is unattainable in a single volume . While I applaud the attempt I
cannot help but have reservations about the execution .
Like the editors themselves, I hope that this volume will
SUMMER 2002
spawn more collections along these lines . However, as I
am keenly aware in my own work, it is virtually impossible not to expose one's own prejudices and preconceptions
when creating collections of this kind . This is why it is so
important to justify the choices that have been made .
Openly stating the rationale for selection can increase the
usefulness of the collection of work . If, however, these
choices are hidden under the guise of being representative
or giving an overview, I fear that there will always be
those, like myself, who will draw attention to the unspoken bias . The editors say of Marowitz that he, like many of
the playwrights they include, "is driven by the desire to
reduce Shakespearean ambiguities and regulate the text
into clarity" (189) . This seems to be a criticism and it is an
interesting one. It is essential in the interpretation of a text
for performance on stage to form an opinion about the
work . Why do playwrights want to remove the ambiguities in Shakespeare? It is an interesting question . But an
equally interesting question is : Why do the editors of this
anthology not see their own work as the presentation of
one particular interpretation of the history of
Shakespearean adaptation? It seems to me that the editors
have answered rather nicely Denis Salter's call for an
"anthology of postcolonial adaptations and complete
reworkings of Shakespeare undertaken by those contemporary playwrights . . . who have had the courage to interrogate their own imperialist legacy" (19) . The project has
great merit; I only wish that the editors had been a bit more
self-reflexive about their own imperial influences CTR
Christie Carson is a Canadian scholar currently working as a
research fellow at Royal Holloway University of London,
England.
Seeing Canada through
Shakespeare
A Review of Shakespeare in Canada :A
World Elsewhere?
Ed . Diana Brydon and Irena R . Makaryk
University of Toronto Press, forthcoming
November 2002 .454 pp . $65
Review by Catherine Graham
Diana Brydon and Irena Makaryk's Shakespeare in Canada is
a book that anyone interested in Canadian theatre will
surely want to own, whether they are interested in
Shakespeare or not . This text, which CTR has reviewed in
manuscript form, is not only a magisterial history of
Shakespeare production in Canada, but a very engaging
discussion of the history of Canadian theatre institutions
and audiences in their evolution from eighteenth-century
garrison entertainments to contemporary questionings of
cultural colonialism and institutional policies .
Shakespeare in Canada's strength is exemplified in its
structure. The seventeen essays that comprise the central
section of the book are framed by an introduction and
103
afterword, written by Makaryk and Brydon respectively,
that contextualize current debates about Canadian theatre
and Shakespeare's role within it by pointing both to the
past and to the future . As Makaryk suggests in her lengthy
introduction to the work, the study of Shakespeare is here
largely a prism through which the editors bring us an
extended reflection on the intersection of theatre, literature, value, politics and nation . This is an extremely
worthwhile exercise, not least because, as Makaryk notes,
many British and American critics either ignore Canadian
contributions or collapse them into a discussion of
American production and criticism of the Bard, while most
Canadians seem unaware of the long and complex history
of Shakespeare production in our own country . Makaryk
starts to correct this gap in our sense of Canada's cultural
history by taking us on a rapid historical tour of
Shakespeare production from the garrison productions
through tours by Kean and Irving, to the new critical tradition launched by Northrop Frye, right up to contemporary iconclastic uses of Shakespeare such as the Evenement
38 at Montreal's Theatre d'Aujourd'hui and Rick Miller's
MacHomer: The Simpson's Do Macbeth .
At the other end of the book Diana Brydon asks us to
look towards the future, putting Canadian performance
and criticism of Shakespeare firmly in the context of other
post-colonial grapples with his work . This has the great
merit of demonstrating what Bryden herself identifies as
the emancipatory potential of reworkings of Shakespeare
that respond to the needs of specific communities . As the
title of her afterword, "Relocating Shakespeare, Redefining
Canada" suggests, this investigation of the processes
through which Shakespeare is made to work in Canadian
contexts goes a long way to helping us understand the
changing nature not only of what we take to constitute
Shakespeare but of what we take to constitute Canada
itself . The push to continue this process of investigation
and recontextualization is admirably captured in an
appendix written by Jessica Schagerl and entitled
"Research Opportunities in Canadian Shakespeare ." This
important pointer towards future work identifies both
archives that have yet to be thoroughly investigated and
themes, like attitudes towards Shakespeare and the
involvement of women in Shakespeare production, that
offer significant research opportunities . In adding such an
appendix the editors make admirably clear their view that
this work, despite its exceptional breadth, should not be
taken to be the last word on the subject of Shakespeare in
Canada . Further, the thierty-seven-page bibliography at
the end of this collection is a gold mine of information
about the development of theatre in Canada and an even
stronger invitation to continue the important task the
book's several contributors have undertaken .
The core of Shakespeare in Canada is divided into four
sections whose contents sometimes seem a bit idiosyncratic but, taken together, do shed light on the wide variety of
ways in which Shakespeare has been used in this country .
For
instance,
the
first
section,
"Beginnings :
Institutionalizing Shakespeare," deals with material ranging from the Reverend Henry Scadding's Shakespeare
Display at the Toronto Industrial Exhibition, to CsC's
broadcasts of the plays, to examinations of staging choices
1 04
at the Stratford Festival . All of these have their value,
though the link between them is not necessarily crystalclear. Heather Murray's discussion of the Scadding
exhibits and Karen Bamford's examination of the activities
of the Shakespeare Society of Toronto play an important
role in demonstrating the ways in which lay persons, and
especially women, engaged with Shakespeare as a cultural standard in the days before Shakespeare performance
and criticism came to be dominated by the professional
theatre artist or scholar . Marta Straznicky's exposition of
the ways in which the CBc drama department's broadcasts
of Shakespeare's plays created a new audience for theatre,
helped develop a corps of professional actors in this country and pre-empted airtime that had been used for original
Canadian works reminds us of the critical role the CBC
played in the development of Canadian theatre in the period after WWII . This is followed by Margaret Groome's
very important discussion of the discourses of cultural
respectability, international recognition and entertainment
value that marked the founding of the Stratford Festival
and seem to have ever since influenced not only its production choices, but more general debates about what a
national theatre might look like . C .E . McGee and Jessica
Schagerl's reflections on the ways in which Stratford productions over the years have tried to "Canadianize"
Shakespeare offer important insights into the values driving our sense of professionalism in Canadian theatre, even
when, in McGee's view, these practices succeed mainly in
diminishing the significance of any Canadian reference
even as it is evoked . Interestingly, one point returns regularly in all three of these essays about Stratford production :
the ways in which lavish spectacles tend to obscure or
even replace substance in "mainstream" productions of
Shakespeare's plays .
The following section, "Shakespeare on Stage," opens
up similar questions in different ways by examining productions of Shakespeare's plays that have taken place outside of mainstream English-Canadian institutions . It is
much to the credit of the editors that they have included an
important essay by Leanore Lieblein, "Le Re-making of le
Grand Will: Shakespeare in Francophone Quebec," in
which Lieblein relates much about recent Shakespeare production in Quebec that will be unfamiliar to Englishspeaking students of Canadian theatre . Lieblein uses productions
like
Garneau's
1978
Macbeth,
the
Micone/Beaulne production of Taming of the Shrew at the
Theatre du Nouveau Monde in 1995 and Pigeons
International's 1996 production, Le Making of de Macbeth to
trace the shift in attitude that has seen Shakespeare move
from a symbol of an oppressive colonial culture to a familiar figure around whose works debates about Quebecois
theatricality can take place . This is a welcome addition to
English-language understandings of the shifting climate in
Quebec society, as much as in Quebec theatre . Peter Ayers
contribution on Shakespeare in Newfoundland is most
interesting for the ways in which it problematizes the
seemingly inevitable association of professionalism, quality and economic viability in evaluations of Canadian theatre practices . Ayers' suggestion that the demands of funding agencies sometimes work against the development of
insightful performances is one that merits serious consid-
CTR 111
eration, as much for its implications for the broader development of Canadian theatre as for its impact on
Shakespeare production . A similar issue of the gap
between intention and result is taken up again in Michael
McKinnie's discussion of Necessary Angels' 1995 production of King Lear, in which director Richard Rose cast Janet
Wright as Lear, Diana Belshaw as Kent and David Jansen
as Goneril . McKinnie's article offers an engaging, if looseknit, analysis of how Rose's invocation of liberal humanist
values of merit-based social promotion ran aground on the
shoals of an equally liberal humanist desire to equate actor
and character in the theatre . McKinnie suggests that it was
the very particularity of the situation in which Angel's Lear
was produced that caused most of the damage, but his
argument here assumes a narrow view of social motivation. McKinnie suggests that critics read the play through
the lens of the debates around employment equity legislation in 1990s Ontario and so were unable to see the broader theatrical implications of Rose's bold casting move . One
has to wonder however, if the critics' interest in this parallel was not in part a recognition that the shift in social values that led to this legislation, led also to Rose's rebellion
against using gender as the primary predictor of casting
choices .
Questions of criticism occupy Part Three of Shakespeare
in Canada, where four articles investigate the ways in
which we might define "Canadianness" by looking at
specifically Canadian contributions to a variety of critical
debates . The opening essay by Anthony B . Dawson uses
two productions of Shakespeare's plays at the University
of British Columbia to draw attention to the tension
between traditions of literary analysis and actor training in
Shakespeare studies . He suggests that the core of this tension is situated in differing approaches to the problem of
character, approaches that in turn lead to differences in the
way the local/universal dichotomy in interpretation of the
plays is treated . Dawson refuses to take one side or the
other in this debate, preferring to maintain a kind of
dialectical tension between both the local and the universal and between the actor's insistence on the primacy of
character and the materialist critic's concern with historical context . Ultimately he proposes that the way Canada is
situated between two historical empires and our "immigrant alertness to the interplay between local and international" may provide a particularly suitable context for
developing a kind of dialectical approach to acting in
which the actor is encouraged to become a self-aware
interpreter of texts . Dawson's analysis is followed by the
most amusing title in the book : "Canadian Bacon," a reference to both the assertion that Sir Francis Bacon actually
wrote Shakespeare's plays and to American Delia Bacon's
nineteenth-century launching of the authorship controversy (not to mention an authentically Canadian breakfast
food) . Here Paul Yachnin and Brent Whitted trace the
development of Canadian anti-Stratfordianism from nineteenth-century attempts to claim ground for a uniquely
Canadian appreciation of culture in face of both British
and American approaches to more contemporary attacks
on university scholarship by proponents of the Earl of
Oxford . Ultimately, they assert, this debate has been consigned to a popular culture of intellectual trivia largely
SUMMER 2002
because the crusade against Shakespeare is no longer a significant force in defining our national culture . On the other
hand, they argue, Governor General's award winning fiction like Leon Rooke's novel Shakespeare's Dog and AnneMarie MacDonald's Goodnight Desdemona, Goodmorning
Juliet, which use humour to assert a positive postcolonial
sense of identity, can use the controversy to develop a
sense of national identity whose centre is not an icon of
colonial culture . The section finishes with two essays that
take up Northrop Frye's influence on Canadian thinking
about Shakespeare . Alexander Leggatt's use of
Shakespeare's Cymbeline to work through an argument
about an increasingly multicultural sense of Canadian
identity, is a particularly elegant illustration of one of the
most traditional uses of Shakespeare's plays as metaphors
that allow us to answer Frye's question about the position
from which we read . L .M . Findlay's "Frye's Shakespeare,
Frye's Canada" pursues a different tack, discussing Frye's
Shakespeare criticism directly and setting up what the editors describe as an implicit dialogue with Leggatt's contribution . Findlay asserts that Frye's legacy cannot be left to
the tender mercies of liberal humanists . He goes on to
argue that Frye's interest in comedy is as much about his
sense of Canada as a liberal democracy as about the commitment to Christianity with which it is most often associated . The core of Findlay's argument is, however, a critique
of Frye's insistence on the separation of things symbolic
and political and his condescension toward women,
French Quebec, aboriginal peoples and Canadian
Marxists . This critique leads not to a complete dismissal
but to the suggestion that Frye's work, like Shakespeare's,
is important enough to be taught in the context of a conscious grappling with the problems of ideology that Frye
himself rejected .
Part Four of Shakespeare in Canada studies four contemporary examples of Shakespeare production that illustrate the ways in which the issues raised in the preceding
three chapters affect theatrical performance in Canada .
Daniel Fischlin problematizes the notion of authenticity,
especially as it is used to define the identities of
"Shakespeare" and of "Canada" through a discussion of
several adaptations of Shakespeare's works in Canada . He
concludes that the continual deformation of Shakespeare
in Canadian theatre both appeals to a sense of the authenticity of the original works and creates a new sense of
authentic identity by using Shakespeare as an index of the
authority of identity itself . Mark Fortier's essay on adaptation follows in a similar vein, arguing that Shakespeare is
ultimately unknowable and that our relationship to these
works is a kind of confrontation that is also a collaboration
with our own theatrical and social pasts . For Fortier, both
"Canadian" and "Shakespeare" are representable only
insofar as representation also evokes an absence, a sense of
an "elsewhere" with which the present must negotiate its
own meanings .
The two final essays in the book concentrate on particular productions . The placement of Lois Sherlow's discussion of Norman Chaurette's Les Reines after Fischlin
and Fortier's essays on adaptation is particularly apt, since
this is an example of a play that falls between the categories of adaptation and original text . Chaurette's play,
105
which had its origins in a translation Chaurette abandoned, imagines the story of Richard III through the eyes of
the female figures in the text, yet owes as much to Ionesco
as to Shakespeare . Sherlow suggests that this is an alchemical text that can be read on both personal and historical
levels in which the repetition of phrases from the past is a
kind of act of mourning exercised in a world in which the
tragic is too often seen as simply absurd . In the final essay
of the main section of the book, Ric Knowles takes up the
question of adaptation more directly with a discussion of
three versions of the Othello story: Cruel Tears by Ken
Mitchell and Humphrey and the Dumptrucks, Goodnight
Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) by Ann-Marie MacDonald
and Harlem Duet by Djanet Sears . Knowles sees each of
these productions as representative of particular trends in
Canadian theatre in each of the three decades in which
they were produced and discusses them accordingly . It is a
discussion that reveals just how much liberal humanism
influences even the most radical revisionings of
Shakespeare to this day, while simultaneously reminding
us to what degree even the recent past is firmly in the past
in terms of Canadian theatrical practices . Knowles is at
pains to point out, for instance, how Cruel Tears, which was
first produced in 1975, establishes a regional voice in
Canadian theatre in part by reifying traditional gender,
class and ethnic positionings in the name of popular culture . He identifies MacDonald's Goodnight Desdemona as
1 06
treading the same ground between intervention in and
complicity with the dominant culture in the late 1980s,
though he speaks approvingly of the play's creation of a
space for an authoritative female readerly voice . As
Knowles points out however, by the time Djanet Sears premiered her Harlem Duet at the Tarragon in 1997, the idea of
doing a version of Othello that didn't address the question
of race was unthinkable and Sears play forged new
ground by bringing Black culture onto Canadian stages in
a form that bridged tragedy and jazz, high Western and
Black culture in a story that takes place largely in New
York's Harlem . This, as Knowles points out, would have
been impossible in the 1970s, but as Canadianness has
become more accepted in Canadian theatres, Canada's
theatre artists are more free to explore extra-regional
themes as they work to explore complex new Canadian
subjectivities . CTR
Catherine Graham is Review Editor of Canadian Theatre
Review and Assistant Professor ofTheatre and Film Studies in
the School of the Arts at McMaster University .
CTR 111
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Each issue is filled with insightful reviews of books & plays, constructive thought &
commentaries and a complete playscript, all centred in the examination of a key theme
of current interest in the Theatre community.
Your Ticket To Canadian Theatre
Published quarterly, annual subscriptions to CTR are available for :
Individual $35
Student $30
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e mail : journals@utpress .utoronto .ca www .utpjournals .co m
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Canadian Theatre Review
Each issue is filled with insightful reviews of books & plays, constructive thought &
ommentaries and a complete playscript, all centred in the examination of a key theme
of current interest in the Theatre community.
Your Ticket To Canadian Theatre
Published quarterly, annual subscriptions to CTR are available for:
Student $30
Institutional $78
Individual $35
1.
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Call, fax, write or email your CTR subscription to :
The University of Toronto Press -journals Division
5201 Dufferin Street Toronto, Ontario M3H 5T8 Tel : (416) 667-7810 Fax : (416) 667-7881
Toll Free Fax : (800) 221-9985 e mail :journals@utpress .utoronto .c a w ww .utpjournals.com
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Shakespeare in Canada
A WORLD ELSEWHERE?
s there a distinctly Canadian Shakespeare? What is
the status and function of Shakespeare in various
locations within the nation : at Stratford, on CBC
radio, in regional and university theatres, in Canadian
drama and popular culture? Shakespeare in Canada
brings insights from a little explored but extensive
archive to contemporary debates about the cultural
uses of Shakespeare and what it means to be Canadian .
J
Canada's long history of Shakespeare productions and
reception, including adaptations, literary reworkings,
and parodies, is analysed and contextualized within the
four sections of the book . A timely addition to the
growing field that studies the transnational reach of
Shakespeare across cultures, this collection examines
the political and cultural agendas invoked not only by
Shakespeare's plays, but also by his very name . In part
a historical and regional survey of Shakespeare in
performance, adaptation, and criticism, this is the first
work to engage Shakespeare with distinctly Canadian
debates addressing nationalism, separatism, cultural
appropriation, cultural nationalism, feminism, and
postcolonialism .
Shakespeare in Canada :
A World Elsewhere?
Edited by by
Diana Brydon and Irena R. Makaryk
Available October 2002
448 pages 4 Cloth 0802036554 $65 .00
Preface - Diane Bryden and Irena R . Makaryk
Introduction: Shakespeare in Canada : 'a world elsewhere'?
- Irena R . Makaryk
Part One : Beginnings: Institutionalizing Shakespeare
Pioneer Shakespeare Culture : The Reverend Henry Scadding and
His Shakespeare Display at the 1892 Toronto Industrial Exhibition
- Heather Murray
The Imperial Theme : The Shakespeare Society of Toronto,
1928-1969 - Karen Bamford
'A Stage for the Word' : Shakespeare on CBC Radio, 1947-1955
- Marta Straznicky
Stratford and the Aspirations for a Canadian National Theatre
- Margaret Groome
Shakespeare Canadiens at the Stratford Festival - C . E . McGee
A National Hamlet? : Stratford's Legacy of Twentieth-Century
Productions - Jessica Schagerl
Part Two : Shakespeare On Stage
'Le Re-making' of le Grand Will : Shakespeare in Francophone
Quebec - Leanore Lieblein
Learning to Curse in Accurate lambics : Shakespeare in
Newfoundland - PeterAyers
Liberal Spectators and Illiberal Critiques : Necessary Angel's
King Lear - Michael McKinnie
Part Three : Critical Debates and Traditions
Continuity and Contradiction : University Actors Meet the Universal
Bard -Anthony B . Dawson
Canadian Bacon - Paul Yachnin and Brent E . Whitted
Canada, Negative Capability, and Cymbeline -Alexander Leggatt
Frye's Shakespeare, Frye's Canada - L .M . Findlay
Part Four Reimagining Shakespeare
Nation and/as Adaptation : Shakespeare, Canada, and Authenticity
- Daniel Fischlin
Undead and Unsafe : Adapting Shakespeare (in Canada)
- Mark Fortier
Normand Chaurette's Les Reines : Shakespeare and the Modern in
the Alchemical Oven - Lois Sherlow
Othello in Three Times - Ric Knowles
Afterword : Relocating Shakespeare, Redefining Canada
- Diana Brydon
Appendix: Research Opportunities in Canadian Shakespeare
-Jessica Schagerl
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
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publ,ishiwg except%owal, cawad%aw drahu,a si-v e X9 69
Twelve Opening Acts
Michel Tremblay
translated by Sheila
Fischman
Tremblay's newest memoir is
an account of his discovery of
the theatre and the
theatricality of life itself .
The Buz'Gem Blues
Drew Hayden Taylor
Just sit right back and you'll
hear a tale . . . . Another zany,
outrageous and farcical
examination of Native and
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ISBN 0 922
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ISBN 0-88922-459-5
5 .5 x 8 .5 ; 128pp
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Michael Cook
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Rex Deverell
David Fennario
Timothy Findley
David French
Michel Garneau
Jim Garrard
John Gray
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Tom Hendry
Margaret Hollingsworth
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Kevin Kerr
Rod Langley
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Bryden MacDonald
Daniel Maclvor
Joan MacLeod
Jovette Marchessault
Michael Mercer
Ken Mitchell
Mayor Moore
John Murrell
James W. Nichol
Robin Nichol
Morris Panych
Sharon Pollock
Barbara Pollard
James Reaney
Vittorio Rossi
George Ryga
Rick Salutin
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