Download The Spectre of Straight Shakespeare.

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 .
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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"
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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
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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
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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 .
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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
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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
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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 .
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