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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 32 FOLIO, JAARGANG 10 (2003), NR. 2 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 SHAKESPEARE-GENOOTSCHAP VAN NEDERLAND EN VLAANDEREN 33 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 34 FOLIO, JAARGANG 10 (2003), NR. 2 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 SHAKESPEARE-GENOOTSCHAP VAN NEDERLAND EN VLAANDEREN 35 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.