Download staple of news - vi - Shakespeare Genootschap

STAPLE OF NEWS - VI
UPDATE ON THE SHAKESPEARE INDUSTRY
Ton Hoenselaars and Paul Franssen
After last year’s controversy surrounding the award won by
theatre group Cosmic for its Romeo ’n Juliette: A Caribean
Xperienz (reviewed elsewhere in this issue of Folio), Cosmic
has again made the news with a Shakespeare adaptation. On
12 December 2003, NRC reported that Cosmic’s 1998 play OJ
Othello, which projects the plot of Othello on the real-life
story of the black American-football legend O. J. Simpson, has
been taken up in the United States under the title of
Orenthal, and has been selected for New York’s Downtown
Urban Theater Festival.
A rather different Shakespeare adaptation in the
Netherlands is that by comedian Joep Onderdelinden, whose
one-man show Joep is largely based on the plot of Hamlet.
Onderdelinden first appears to the audience sticking only his
head through the curtains, and complains to them that he has
never been selected to play the Danish prince. Much of the
remainder of the show consists of Onderdelinden making up
for this gap in his theatrical career by single-handedly
playing an abridged Hamlet, or rather, parody of Hamlet.
Particularly hilarious is his attempt to make the plot
understandable to the Dutch audience by casting the
members of the Dutch royal family in the roles of Shake-
speare’s tragedy: crown prince Willem-Alexander as Hamlet,
his wife Máxima as Ophelia, her father Jorge Zorreguita as
Polonius, Queen Beatrix as Gertrude, and her brother-in-law
Pieter van Vollenhove as Claudius. It “isn’t Shakespeare,” but
it does show how Shakespeare is also part of Dutch popular
culture.
That Shakespeare is part of American culture, too, may
appear from a recent news item issued by Associated Press
and summarized on Dutch Teletekst. On 15-16 February 2004,
the Wellesley College Shakespeare Society in Massachusets
was going to make a bid for a place in the Guinness Book of
Records by a marathon reading of all of Shakespeare’s
(canonized) works, to be completed within 24 hours. To
achieve this feat, the society had planned five parallel sessions devoted to different genres. They would begin, energetically, with Henry V, and end on a wearier note with Hamlet.
No news about the outcome of the venture has as yet been
announced.
The Spring 2003 issue of Shakespeare Quarterly (34:1)
contained a remarkable essay by Timothy Billings entitled
“Caterwauling Cataians: The Genealogy of the Gloss” (1-21).
In this essay, Billings studies the way in which Shakespearean actors have, over the centuries, glossed the terms
“cataian” and “Cataian” in The Merry Wives of Windsor and
Twelfth Night respectively. Billings’ is a rather stunning
account of the way in which editors of Shakespeare
erroneously came to conflate “Cataian” with “Chinese.”
During the eighteenth century, the term “Cataian,” which
originally denoted an “untrustworthy Christian European
who travels to and speaks about the East,” came to be
misunderstood as meaning “an untrustworthy native of the
East” (12). The ethnocentric projection of western vices onto
the Chinese intensified during the nineteenth century, with
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the two Opium Wars on the one hand, and, on the other the
slimming and consequent simplification of footnotes in
editions of Shakespeare not for scholarly use but for the
larger public.
Interestingly, Billings also studies such glossing in
connection with “translation” in the traditional sense of the
term,
and
illustrates
the
fortunes
of
the
“Cataians”/“Chinese” gloss in a broad range of translations,
including the German Schlegel/Tieck version and the
nineteenth-century prose rendering by François-Victor Hugo,
as well as the two major Chinese translations of the twentieth century by Zhu Shenghao and Liang Shiqui.
Billings further broadens our perspective (particularly
on Twelfth Night) by treating us to an account of the longneglected Angelica, the daughter of the Great Kahn of Cathay
in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, who may have appeared as a
stage character in the once popular but now lost play listed
in Henslowe’s Diary as “syr John mandevell.” Such a singular
story, it would appear, could find no place amidst the more
easily digestible stereotypical lore about Cathay.
Billings’concluding analysis of George Steevens’ 1773/8
note on the “Cataian” issue sheds a rather chastening light
on the Shakespeare industry and the ways in which the
banner of scholarship may hide inventions of an ethnocentric
kind that lack the benchmark of cultural relativism.
Last year also saw the publication of an important book
for Shakespeare studies. After years of painstaking research,
Alan H. Nelson published his Monstrous Adversary: The Life
of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2003). This is not an attempt to prove that
it was the Edward de Vere who wrote the work now
generally attributed to William Shakespeare. Instead, it
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records the life of the man in a factual manner, since, as
Nelson puts it, “It has become a matter of urgency to
measure the real Oxford against the myth created by partisan
apologists, and all too often employed without critical rigour
by the popular press – even by justices of the United States
Supreme Court” (1-2). Nelson only refers to Shakespeare in
connection with the so-called authorship question twice, and
on those occasions he does so only to comment on “matters
that would disallow Oxford’s candidacy,” as Thomas
Pendleton puts it in his very sane and commendable review
which appeared in The Shakespeare Newsletter 53:3 (Fall
2003).
On the occasion of the Dutch premiere of Rainer Werner
Fassbinder’s controversial stage play Het Vuil, de Stad en de
Dood at the Koninklijke Schouwburg of The Hague, de
Volkskrant (14 August 2003) published an interview with
theatre director Johan Doesburg, in which Shakespeare and
politics held centre stage. In the course of his conversation
with Karin Veraert, Doesburg speaks about his
Shakespearean achievements, including Troilus and Cressida
and King Lear. At the time he directed the Greek play, Veraert
reminds him, someone argued that it was a production about
the centre of Dutch political life, The Hague, and about then
contemporary politics. Doesburg acknowledges that he had
certainly not avoided the confrontation with Dutch political
culture through the odd allusion here and there, but he
stresses that as a director he prefers to proceed “by
indirection.” Of course it is easy in the theatre to update
Shakespeare and to make his plots and characters apply to
current affairs at any time. But do not think it was ever my
ambition, Doesburg adds, to say something about Dutch
politics in any serious manner. His ideas about theatre are
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perhaps best illustrated with reference to his production of
King Lear. Doesburg remembers how, after one performance,
he was told that King Lear must be suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Doesburg’s response: “That may well be the
case. He probably did suffer from Alzheimer; after all, he is
eighty in the play, a mythical age. But I don’t think it’s
interesting, for that particular reason, to present King Lear
as an obvious patient. I find it much more fascinating to
consider that he might not be an Alzheimer patient; in that
case, one appeals to the imagination to interpret Lear’s
incoherent behaviour, and explain the consequences of his
deeds. To use the stage to provide new insights into the Alzheimer phenomenon? No, thank you.”
How different in attitude from director Gerardjan
Rijnders, who directed Timon of Athens as Tim van Athene
(premiere De Shop, Rijnkaai, Antwerp, 6 November 2003),
offering a production more than 60% of which was based on
the flamboyant life and tragic death of the Dutch maverick
politician Pim Fortuyn. In an interview with Karin Veraert
(Volkskrant, 6 November 2003), Rijnders says that he looked
upon Fortuyn as “a histrionic and quarrelsome queer.” Also,
he was “a spoilt, neurotic narcissist” as well as “a very sad
individual” and “a fanatic whenever he was in love.” For
further information about this production, see Evert Rutgers’
detailed review in the theatre review section of this issue of
Folio.
The October 2003 issue of the Dutch Rail journal, Rails,
carried an interview with the celebrated Shakespearean
actor Pierre Bokma. In it, Bokma speaks about stage fright
and the ways in which the actor might master this. Among
other things, he tells of the time he played Iago, and felt he
could only tread the boards without fear if he could force
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himself first, without any errors, to speak all of the
character’s lines twice. The fact that he hardly ever succeeded should not be taken as a reflection on the actor’s art of
memory, but certainly confirms that no adequate means to
combat stage fright has as yet been discovered. The search
continues.