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Theses and Dissertations
2011
Possess His Books: Shakespeare, New Audiences,
and Twenty-First Century Performances of The
Tempest
Ann Marie Pleiss Morris
University of Iowa
Copyright 2011 Ann M. Pleiss Morris
This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4897
Recommended Citation
Pleiss Morris, Ann Marie. "Possess His Books: Shakespeare, New Audiences, and Twenty-First Century Performances of The
Tempest." PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) thesis, University of Iowa, 2011.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4897.
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POSSESS HIS BOOKS: SHAKESPEARE, NEW AUDIENCES, AND
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY PERFOMANCES OF THE TEMPEST
by
Ann Marie Pleiss Morris
An Abstract
Of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in English
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
July 2011
Thesis Supervisor: Professor Claire Sponsler
1
ABSTRACT
This dissertation examines how actors and directors are adapting and reimagining
Shakespeare’s plays so as to address the social concerns of their audiences at the
beginning of the twenty-first century. At the center of my study is this question: how and
why do the 400-year-old plays of a British writer speak to issues of class, race, gender,
transglobalism, violence, and isolation in contemporary America? My dissertation
answers this question by shifting the focus from established Anglo-American
Shakespearean companies to American regional and grassroots theater organizations in
order to consider how Shakespeare and his plays appear in unexpected places, serving
audiences who are new to Shakespearean texts. By focusing on productions of a single
Shakespearean play, The Tempest, I create a clearer sense of how various groups might
reshape a Shakespeare play to fulfill their institutional missions. Literary critics and
theater producers find the play’s themes particularly applicable to modern audiences. My
dissertation examines how these themes emerge in various critical modes of study:
Foucauldian ideas of power and self-identity, post-colonialism, feminism, and originalpractice theory. By pairing these approaches with performance studies, I reveal the ways
in which literary theories have been translated for and consumed by a greater public.
Included in this project are four case studies of American theater groups:
Shakespeare Behind Bars at the Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in LaGrange,
Kentucky and Hank Rogerson’s 2005 documentary that follows the group’s production of
The Tempest; Indiana University theater professor Murray McGibbon’s 2007 Tempest
project that joined together students from Bloomington with students from the University
of KwaZulu Natal in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa to stage a post-apartheid production
of the play; the Weird Sisters Women’s Theater Collective’s 2010 production of Sycorax,
a prequel to The Tempest written by the group’s founder Susan Gayle Todd; and the
2
American Shakespeare Center, an original-practice Shakespearean company, and the
2006 production of The Tempest at their reconstructed Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton,
Virginia.
Abstract Approved: ____________________________________
Thesis Supervisor
____________________________________
Title and Department
____________________________________
Date
POSSESS HIS BOOKS: SHAKESPEARE, NEW AUDIENCES, AND
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY PERFOMANCES OF THE TEMPEST
by
Ann Marie Pleiss Morris
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in English
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
July 2011
Thesis Supervisor: Professor Claire Sponsler
Copyright by
ANN MARIE PLEISS MORRIS
2011
All Rights Reserved
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
_______________________
PH.D. THESIS
_______________
This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of
Ann Marie Pleiss Morris
has been approved by the Examining Committee
for the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy
degree in English at the July 2011 graduation.
Thesis Committee: ___________________________________
Claire Sponsler, Thesis Supervisor
___________________________________
Miriam Gilbert
___________________________________
Adam Hooks
___________________________________
Blaine Greteman
___________________________________
Kim Marra
To Benjamin
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Like the performances I discuss in this dissertation, this project would not have
been possible without the collaboration of several communities. First and foremost, I
need to thank the theater practitioners and companies that opened their rehearsals,
performances, and archives to me: Curt Tofteland and Shakespeare Behind Bars, Murray
McGibbon and the members of Indiana University’s Tempest Project, Susan Gayle Todd
and Christa French and the Weird Sisters Women’s Theater Collective, and Ralph Alan
Cohen and the American Shakespeare Center. These individuals’ generosity is
unmatched, and I am grateful that this project allowed me the opportunity to meet them,
talk with them, and count them among my dear friends and mentors.
This project is also indebted to the insightful comments and advice of a wide
range of readers. Most especially, I would like to thank my advisor Claire Sponsler and
the other members of my committee: Miriam Gilbert, Adam Hooks, Blaine Greteman,
and Kim Marra. Also this project is deeply indebted to the encouragement of the late
Huston Diehl, who is remembered with admiration and fondness. I would also like to
express my appreciation to Teresa Mangum, Dave Redlawsk, and the members of the
2009 Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy for helping me
foster my ideas early on in the process. Also my thanks go to those who responded to the
portions of this project I presented at the 2009 Blackfriars Conference, the 2009 Midwest
Modern Language Association Conference, the 2010 Shakespeare Association of
America Conference, and the 2010 Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association
Conference.
During the course of this research, I undertook several research trips that were
made possible by financial assistance from the University of Iowa English Department
and Graduate College as well as the Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the
iii
Academy and the Sherman Paul/Prairie Lights Research Support Award. These trips were
also realized through the generous hospitality and assistance of my family and friends,
including Joe Fermino, Larry and Carolyn Gardner, Elaine Jones, Thomas and Michaele
Pleiss, Gary Morris, and Veronica Mraz.
Finally, immeasurable gratitude goes to my family and friends who saw me
through this process in a variety of ways. Special thanks go to all those “girls with
glasses” who were my support system through this process – Laura Capp, Judith
Coleman, Bridget Draxler, Stacy Erickson, Sarah Hagge, Joanne Nystrom Janssen,
Deborah Manion, Lindsey Row-Heyveld, and Anna Stenson. I also wish to express my
appreciation for those who served as readers and sounding boards for me including
Mindy Chrisman, Wesley Landry, Mary Pleiss, and all those I am certain I am forgetting.
I am grateful for the support of all my siblings and their families, but especially Mary
who introduced me to the possibility of an advance degree at a young age and has been
my constant cheerleader ever since. All my love and gratitude goes to my father, who
even though he says he cannot understand why I love Shakespeare can still recite
Macbeth’s “Tomorrow” speech by heart, and to my mother, who took me to my first
Shakespeare play at an outdoor festival on a cold, damp June night. Their support has
been constant, their love unfailing, and I could not have done this without them. But this
dissertation is dedicated to Ben, who in my first semester at the University of Iowa
recorded a documentary about prisoners performing Shakespeare that he thought I might
like. He has been with me on this journey ever since, and I will always be indebted to him
for his sacrifices, support, and love. To him and to our little family – Sully who lay next
to me for most of the composition of this document and Baby who joined us at the end of
process – I must say: “I love nothing in the world so well as you.”
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1
CHAPTER ONE. “WHO HADST DESERVED MORE THAN A PRISON”:
TRANSFORMING PRISONERS IN SHAKESPEARE BEHIND BARS .......19
Shakespeare in Prisons: A Historical Overview .............................................20
Shakespeare Behind Bars ...............................................................................27
Building Community ...............................................................................39
Going Public ............................................................................................45
Conclusion ......................................................................................................59
CHAPTER TWO. “’TWAS A SWEET MARRIAGE AND WE WILL PROSPER
WELL IN OUR RETURN”: CREATING AN INTERCULTURAL
SHAKESPEARE ............................................................................................60
Theatrical Colonialism in Early Modern England ..........................................68
Shakespeare in South Africa: An Overview ...................................................75
Janice Honeyman’s 2009 Tempest..................................................................82
Murray McGibbon’s Tempest Project ............................................................90
A Collaborative Experience ....................................................................91
Incorporating the Experience ..................................................................95
Performing the Experience ......................................................................98
Conclusion ....................................................................................................101
CHAPTER THREE. “IF YOU BE MAID OR NO”: SEEKING FEMININE
POWER IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS .....................................................103
Cross-Gender Casting and The Tempest .......................................................109
Tempest Adaptations .....................................................................................115
The Weird Sisters .........................................................................................122
Sycorax, Editorship, and Storytelling ....................................................132
All-Female Casting and Sycorax ...........................................................142
Addressing Violence and Creating Safety .............................................147
Conclusion ....................................................................................................153
CHAPTER FOUR. “WHAT’S PAST IS PROLOGUE”: BUILDING MODERN
COMMUNITIES WITH ORIGINAL PRACTICE PERFORMANCE .......155
History of Original Practices ........................................................................157
Original Practice Staging Today ...................................................................163
History of the American Shakespeare Center ...............................................169
The American Shakespeare Center’s 2006 Tempest ....................................180
Music .....................................................................................................186
v
Cross-Gender Casting ............................................................................190
Direct Audience Address .......................................................................194
Conclusion ....................................................................................................198
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................200
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................205
vi
1
INTRODUCTION
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode ―Emergence‖ (1994) starts with the
android, Data, performing Act V, scene i of The Tempest. With a sonorous, well-trained
voice, he delivers the speech in which Prospero relinquishes his power, only to interrupt
himself half-way through because he feels that the attention of this audience, Captain
Jean-Luc Picard (played by Patrick Stewart), is waning. In what follows, Picard helps
Data analyze Prospero:
PICARD. […] Shakespeare was witnessing the end of the
Renaissance and the birth of the modern era, and Prospero finds
himself in a world where his powers are no longer needed. So we
see him here about to perform one final creative act before giving
up his art forever.
DATA. There is certainly a tragic aspect to the character.
PICARD. Yes, but there‘s a certain expectancy, too – a
hopefulness about the future. You see, Shakespeare enjoyed
mixing opposites – the past and the future, hope and despair […].1
Picard‘s reading of Prospero acknowledges themes of finality present in the last act of
The Tempest, yet recognizes the hopefulness of the conclusion as well. As Prospero
proclaims that ―every third thought will be death‖ upon his return to Milan, his daughter
envisions the transition as a ―brave new world.‖ What is ―past‖ for some is ―prologue‖
for others.2
The opposites that Picard mentions are what preoccupy my research. Although the
universe of Next Generation exists in the twenty-fourth century, Picard‘s dialogue was
written in the waning days of the twentieth and urges its audience to contemplate its own
1 ―Emergence,‖ Star Trek: The Next Generation, directed by Cliff Bole, (1994; Hollywood, CA:
Paramount Pictures, 2002), DVD.
2 Star Trek creator Gene Rodenberry included several Shakespeare references throughout the
original Star Trek series, a tradition that was carried through to subsequent series and films in the franchise.
2
transition into a new world, which Americans, like Shakespeare, look toward with equal
parts anxiety and hope. As I have discovered in my research, some have found in the
centuries-old stories of Shakespeare a way to address the social anxieties of twenty-firstcentury America and, in some cases, to achieve the more ―hopeful‖ view that Picard sees
as conversant with the fears of a period in transition.
Addressing these issues, however, raises an important question for Shakespeare
studies. That is, to borrow a phrase from Caliban: who possesses Shakespeare‘s ―books‖?
In other words, to whom do Shakespeare and his texts belong? In our period, Shakespeare
is typically considered the property of the highly educated, and thus, by association, those
of wealth and privilege, individuals who, while they might think about issues of social
injustice, are not usually directly affected by them. Those who are directly affected by
such issues often have less exposure to Shakespeare or buy into cultural perceptions that
the plays are ―too difficult‖ or ―too irrelevant‖ for contemporary audiences.
Certainly, English teachers and theater professionals are the gatekeepers of
Shakespeare in our culture, the ones who understand his plays and, thus, need to explain
them to those less educated. The scene from ―Emergence,‖ in fact, illustrates this
assumption. Shakespeare is foreign to Data, and he quickly turns to his captain for help.
Taken metatheatrically, one must acknowledge that this captain is played by Stewart, one
of the foremost classical Shakespearean actors of our day. Data, therefore, must get help
from an authority figure and an (inferred) expert in order to fully understand the text; it is
not something he can comprehend on his own. This mentorship suggests that one must be
trained in Shakespeare to understand him. And fittingly enough, when Data tells Picard
that he does not understand ―this Prospero character,‖ he sets the large prop book he has
been carrying next to Stewart, seemingly relinquishing his ability to interpret the text
himself. I see this resignation over and over in ―Introduction to Literature‖ students who
tell me that Shakespeare is ―confusing,‖ ―boring,‖ and ―hard to understand because of all
that Old English,‖ and who argue that Shakespeare ―simply takes too much work.‖ I,
3
myself, remember being a junior high student who desperately wanted to read the works
of Shakespeare, but felt I had to be taught them, that they were not something I could
pick up and read on my own. Thus, there is a preconception that Shakespeare belongs to
the ―experts‖ – professional actors, scholars, and teachers – and a person must use one of
these resources in order gain access to his works.
As I have looked at groups who use Shakespeare to address social issues, I have
found that those who facilitate such programs do serve as textual ―mentors‖ for the
individuals they help, yet they also find ways to empower their participants to claim
Shakespeare as their own. This sort of empowerment often comes through a combination
of textual analysis and performance. Not only do participants come away from these
programs with a clearer understanding of Shakespeare, but they are also encouraged to
develop an understanding of the playwright that defies cultural perceptions of him and,
sometimes of themselves as well. Repeatedly as I pursued this project, I found that the
actors, crew members, and directors I worked with told me that the reason Shakespeare
works so well in their particular setting is because he is ―universal.‖ Yet after having
spent time with their innovative projects, I discovered that what these practitioners are
doing is making a seemingly universal Shakespeare ―foreign.‖ That is, they are finding
ways to distance their audiences from culturally-held perceptions of the playwright as
elitist, difficult, or canonical. This distancing happens in several ways – by creating
intense personal identifications with his characters, by re-setting the texts in new
geographic locations and then touring them internationally, by adapting his texts to create
new stories and performances, and by transporting audiences to an audience-based early
modern theater.
At the center of my study is this question: how and why can the 400-year-old
plays of a British writer speak to issues of class, race, gender, transglobalism, violence,
and isolation in contemporary America? My focus on American productions of
Shakespeare stems from a fascination with the integral place the playwright holds in a
4
country in which he never set foot. His works have appeared as part of minstrel shows, as
silent films, as Works Progress Administration theater projects, and as Broadway musical
adaptations. Today, Shakespeare performance is a multi-million dollar industry in the
United States. In the 1995 international guide to Shakespeare festivals, there were more
than one hundred American festivals and only fifteen in Britain.3 Currently, the
Shakespeare Theatre Association includes 148 theater companies, only eleven of which
are not American.4 Shakespearean texts remain a staple of the high-school and college
curriculum, and since 2003, the National Endowment for the Arts has dispensed millions
of dollars in grant money to the members of its Shakespeare in American Communities
initiative.5 The tagline of this initiative is ―A Great Nation Deserves Great Art.‖ The
irony, of course, is that the great art comes not from an American artist or an American
tradition. Instead, the country looks toward a British playwright for its ―great art.‖
In doing so, it follows a long tradition, since Shakespeare has a well-established
place in the cultural landscape in this country. George Washington, for example, took a
break from the 1787 Continental Congress to attend a performance of the DrydenDavenant adaptation of The Tempest, and throughout the century, visiting British actors
introduced Americans to several of the playwright‘s great plays.6 By the nineteenth
3 Virginia Mason Vaughan & Alden T. Vaughan, Shakespeare in American Life (Washington,
D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2007), 89.
4 It is worth noting, however, that this organization was originally the Shakespeare Theatre
Association of America, and the ―American‖ designation was dropped in 2011 to reflect the international
scope of its membership. Shakespeare Theatre Association Members, ―Member Index,‖ Shakespeare
Theatre Association, accessed May 9, 2011, http://stahome.org/memberindex.
5 Calculated from Shakespeare in American Communities, ―Program Overview,‖ National
Endowment for the Arts, accessed February 20, 2009, http://www.shakespeareinamericancommunities.org/
about/index.shtml.
6 Vaughan & Vaughan, Shakespeare in American Life, 19-20; see also Charles H. Shattuck,
Shakespeare on the American Stage: From the Hallams to Edwin Booth (Washington, D.C.: Folger
Shakespeare Library, 1976).
5
century, admiration for Shakespeare was widespread, even among the lower classes. In
the 1850‘s, a German visitor to the United States, Karl Knortz, wrote that:
there is no land on the whole earth in which Shakespeare and the
Bible are held in such high esteem […]; should one enter a
blockhouse situated in the far west, and should the dweller there
exhibit very definitely evidences of backwoods life, yet has he
nearly always furnished a small room in which to spend his few
leisure hours, in which the Bible and in most cases a cheap edition
of the works of the poet Shakespeare are nearly always found.7
From these backwoods rooms to women‘s Shakespeare societies in both urban areas and
the newly settled West to re-imaginings of Shakespeare‘s plots and characters on
vaudeville stages, ―Shakespeare was popular entertainment in the nineteenth century.‖8
In this period, individuals approached Shakespeare with little hesitation, making him an
integral part of American culture. In explaining this popularity, Alden T. and Virginia
Mason Vaughan endorse the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson‘s explanation for the
American nation‘s identification with the playwright, which is that what mattered to
Americans in his poetry was the ―ability to make new matter out of old. In this sense,
Shakespeare is American. Like native writers struggling to find their own voices in the
early republic, Shakespeare inherited a rich tradition but inflected it with new
resonances.‖9 Americans saw Shakespeare as transforming his inherited sources,
including history, mythology, and folk tales, and by doing so, creating a new literary
tradition, a method that could be emulated in the United States. Shakespeare‘s work,
then, became a way for Americans to associate with a larger past, but re-interpreting or
adapting his works gave them an opportunity to speak for their own emerging nation.
7 Vaughan & Vaughan, Shakespeare in American Life, 29.
8 Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America
(Cambridge: Havard University Press, 1988), 21. For more on America‘s relationship with Shakespeare as
it was established in the nineteenth century, see Kim Strugess, Shakespeare and the American Nation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
9 Vaughan & Vaughan, Shakespeare in American Life, 30.
6
When the American university system expanded in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries and Shakespeare curriculum along with it, Shakespeare lost some of
his accessibility to popular culture, becoming instead the property of those with
specialized literary and theatrical training. With the invention of photography, and
eventually cinematography, America moved to a visual culture. Aural entertainments –
political speeches, sermons, and debates – became less appealing, and Shakespeare‘s
plays, full of long speeches and intricate rhetoric, grew less appealing to audiences
delighted by new visual technologies.10 Companies produced his plays with less
frequency until, as A.C. Wheeler said in 1890, theater managers ―will tell you that the
intrinsic Shakespeare ‗spells failure.‘‖11 As the playwright ceded his place in American
popular theater, he began to dominate in academia and polite society. The first
Shakespeare course at a college or university was at the University of Virginia in 1855,
and in the late nineteenth century, academic and public libraries began acquiring large
collections of Shakespeare‘s works and scholarly commentaries.12 After 1865,
Shakespeare was gradually introduced in high school literature courses.13 During these
years, Shakespeare became ―the possession of the educated parts of society who
disseminated his plays for the average folk who were to swallow him not for their
entertainment but for their education,‖ and thus, the playwright earned a reputation for
being suited solely for enjoyment by elites.14
10 Levine, 46-47.
11 Quoted in Levine, 53.
12 James G. McManaway, ―Shakespeare in the United States,‖ PMLA 79, no. 5 (1964): 516-517.
13 Sturgess, 146.
14 Levine, 31.
7
Despite his increasing association with academia, Shakespeare has continued to
be embedded in American popular culture making appearances in films (Orson Welles‘s
Chimes at Midnight, Gil Junger‘s Ten Things I Hate About You, and Billy Morrissette‘s
Scotland, Pa.), novels (Jane Smiley‘s A Thousand Acres and John Steinbeck‘s Gertrude
and Claudius), poetry (Sylvia Plath‘s Ariel, Marvin Bell‘s Poems for a Midsummer‟s
Night, and David Starkey and Paul J. Willis‘s anthology In a Fine Frenzy), and television
(the episode titled ―Shakespeare‖ in the third season of The Cosby Show that includes a
rap about Julius Caesar, The Simpsons version of Hamlet, and, of course, numerous
references in Star Trek). These examples are a mere sampling of the references to and
adaptations of Shakespeare one can find in popular culture, and they show that the broad
appeal of Shakespeare did not disappear with the institutionalization of the playwright.
Shakespeare has continued to be a mainstay of American popular cultural in a variety of
ways.15
My study of contemporary performances that use Shakespeare to address social
issues and integrate new audiences fits with the traditional reception of the playwright in
the United States, focusing on grass-roots, academic, and regionally-based companies in
order to see how Shakespeare is being used, not just by elite theatrical venues, but also by
those that serve local audiences throughout the country, offering their patrons a wide
range of ticket prices and theatrical approaches. By doing so, I challenge assumptions
about the audiences for Shakespearean performances in this country. While sometimes
featured in research or reviews in smaller journals, the localized productions I study are
not often explored in book-length projects or major periodicals. For example, most of the
reviews included in Shakespeare Quarterly within the last decade are of the Royal
Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare‘s Globe in London, or other professional British
15 For more on Shakespeare and popular culture, see Douglas Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern
Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
8
companies, with few reviews of performances by American companies. Yet Shakespeare
companies are found in nearly every state and major city in this country. My dissertation
strives to explore the kind of work being done in these theaters.
Despite my desire to focus on primarily American productions, it is impossible to
ignore that Shakespeare in the twenty-first century is a global industry, alive on almost all
continents. Many international companies collaborate on productions of Shakespeare‘s
texts – sharing theater spaces, actors, and audiences – and this is particularly true of
Anglo-American companies. An example of such collaboration is Sam Mendes‘s recent
Bridge Project in which British actors from the Old Vic and American actors at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music collaborate on classical theater, including Shakespeare.16
Thus, in some ways it is difficult to talk about Shakespeare in a single country. Even the
opening anecdote I provide blurs these lines with an American television show featuring
a well-known British actor. Thus, while focusing on America, I allow my discussions to
move between continents, aiming to provide a nuanced view of contemporary
Shakespeare performance and to show how, in many ways, the playwright transcends
national boundaries.
Although my geographic scope is broad, I focus on productions of a single
Shakespearean play – The Tempest. Looking at one play allows me to examine how
diverse groups shape a single text to fulfill their institutional missions. The Tempest is
particularly well-suited to an exploration of primarily American performance because
many critics have long seen the play as a metaphor for the European settlement of the
Americas, citing accounts of the 1609 wreck of the Sea Venture off the coast of the
Bermudas as a source for the play (an assumption which I explore in my second chapter);
16 Jeff Lunden, ―A Bridge Built to Span Theatrical Worlds,‖ All Things Considered, NPR,
January 14, 2009, accessed May 10, 2011, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?
storyId=99353808.
9
this potential source makes the play particularly attractive to American critics as it allows
them an opportunity to establish a link between the playwright and their side of the
Atlantic. Post-colonialist and new historicists, in particular, find this play useful as they
explore the early colonization of the Americas. Moreover, The Tempest is especially
fruitful for an exploration of the use of Shakespeare‘s plays to investigate contemporary
social issues. In many ways The Tempest is the quintessential twenty-first century
American play. Through the stories of Prospero, Caliban, Ariel and Miranda,
contemporary audiences can see narratives of violence, discrimination, and isolation that
shape many contemporary lives. As our post-modern culture struggles to cope with the
effects of years of class, race, and gender struggle, Shakespeare‘s text brings life to those
issues, allowing theater professionals an opportunity to explore them in ways that
resonate with contemporary audiences.
Moreover, the fantastical elements of the play allow for these issues to be
explored in such a way that they are at once removed from and more attuned to
contemporary sensibilities. The invented world of Shakespeare‘s island and its
amorphous characters, such as Ariel and Caliban, allow for flexible staging and recontextualizing of the play. The island can be set in a wide variety of cultures, real and
imagined, and, thus, can be shaped to address a variety of social issues. At the same time,
these fantastical elements create a distance between the audience and the play, allowing
audience members to disassociate themselves from the dramatic narrative and, on some
level, look more objectively at the story told and its implications for our own cultural
struggles. Not unlike folk or fairy tales before it, The Tempest is rife with the possibilities
of allegorical exploration.
In a similar vein, The Tempest is also well suited for this project because it is a
play that is both familiar and unfamiliar to contemporary audiences. Although the play is
well-known as a part of the playwright‘s canon, it is not frequently taught in American
high schools nor has it spurred a well-known film production. Indeed, some of the best
10
known films associated with the play, including Wilcox‘s Forbidden Planet and
Greenaway‘s Prospero‟s Books, are loose adaptations of Shakespeare‘s text. Thus, The
Tempest, while known generally as a part of Shakespeare‘s canon, is also somewhat
unknown or known in altered forms. This tradition of adaptation makes the play more
accessible to groups who want to explore the text in new ways so as to address social
issues relevant to contemporary society. At the same time, the play‘s place in
Shakespeare‘s canon allows for these, sometimes subversive readings, to occur behind
the notion of traditional authority.
The first of these groups I explore is Shakespeare Behind Bars, the first North
American Shakespeare troupe located within a medium security prison and Hank
Rogerson‘s 2005 documentary about the group. Over the course of nine months, Curt
Tofteland and Matt Wallace of the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival work with the inmateactors, using Shakespeare‘s texts in an attempt to transform the prisoners‘ lives. Through
these early modern texts, the men explore their own violent pasts, broken families, and
need for redemption. I argue that the prisoners use early modern texts to question not
only their own self-perceptions but also the social assumptions about incarceration. The
emphasis of Shakespeare Behind Bars on truth, trust, and team building aims to create a
―band of brothers‖ among its participants, offering them a sense of community during
their prison stays. Although there are several Shakespeare-in-prison programs in this
country, the modest popularity of this documentary has made SBB and Tofteland
particularly well known and their work often provides a model for other such programs,
making them a good choice for exploring how Shakespeare is being implemented in
prisons. In addition, the documentary has allowed this isolated acting troupe to garner a
wider audience for its work. Focusing on the distribution of this independent film, I
examine how it has traveled to the places where its subjects cannot and gives voice both
to their own stories and to larger issues in the American criminal justice system. I explore
how and why Shakespearean performance becomes a common ground between
11
incarcerated men and those on the outside and why the public SBB productions are
continually sold out to audiences who come to LaGrange from around the country and the
world.
Moving from the insular world of the prison to a more global stage, I examine
Indiana University drama professor Murray McGibbon‘s 2007 Tempest project in the
second chapter. McGibbon developed a summer travel course to South Africa; theater
students from Bloomington joined students from the University of KwaZulu Natal in
Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, to stage a post-apartheid production of the play. The play
was subsequently performed in Pietermaritzburg and Bloomington, a travel model echoed
by Janice Honeyman‘s 2009 production of The Tempest for the Baxter Theatre and the
Royal Shakespeare Company. I argue that the production values of these shows and the
reactions of their international audiences reveal a good deal about the role of exoticism in
contemporary post-colonial productions. Although the South African location of these
productions seems an unlikely choice for this discussion of American performances, the
collaboration between McGibbon‘s students and their South African counterparts reveals
the global nature of Shakespeare in contemporary culture and tests the notion of The
Tempest as Shakespeare‘s American play. Moreover, both McGibbon and Honeyman‘s
productions reveal the contemporary desire to expose the exotic and to contain it; this
same desire was not wholly unknown in the early modern period, as one can see in a
sampling of early modern travel plays.
The idea of containment and marginalization is further explored in the third
chapter, which provides an overview of the ways in which theater productions have
sought to feminize The Tempest. Increasingly in twenty-first century performance, the
island‘s patriarch has become its matriarch. In 2000, Vanessa Redgrave played Prospero
in the London Globe‘s production of The Tempest. This production was followed by
numerous American productions which also included a ―Prospera‖ and Julie Taymor‘s
recent film version of the play, featuring Helen Mirren in the lead role. I consider how
12
this cross-gender casting seeks to empower women to perform and question modern
gender constructs, yet it is often unsuccessful in this task. Building on this discussion, I
turn my focus to The Weird Sisters Women‘s Theater Collective‘s 2010 production of
Sycorax, a prequel to The Tempest written by the group‘s founder Susan Gayle Todd.
Instead of imposing feminine power on the character of Prospero, this adaptation returns
to a time before Prospero‘s arrival when the female Sycorax ruled the island. This
production questions the marginalization of Sycorax and the violent language used
against feminine power and advocacy in The Tempest. The Weird Sisters offer the chance
to explore how a grassroots group may take liberties with a text when larger, better
established groups are sometimes more limited by the confines of canonical texts and a
standard repertoire. By examining the Weird Sisters, I demonstrate how a group that
attempts to give voice to those who are oppressed in early modern drama must sometimes
reconstruct the text in order to meet this goal.
I turn in the fourth chapter to the growing movement to produce historically
accurate Shakespearean productions at destination theaters. While Shakespeare‘s Globe
in London is, perhaps, the most recognizable of these institutions, I examine the
American Shakespeare Center and its reconstructed Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton,
Virginia. ASC advertises its theater as a laboratory, a location for the empirical
investigation of early modern theatrical practices. Its productions are sold to scholars and
theater tourists alike as ―authentic‖ Shakespearean performances. Yet my argument is
that the ASC selectively chooses the early modern theater conventions they use not to
create the most authentic Shakespeare performance but to attract larger and more diverse
audiences. And it is, perhaps, the company‘s position as a regional theater that allows it
to take these liberties with its original practices and create a production that is audiencecentered rather than historically accurate. Ultimately, their approach is more pedagogical
than scholarly as they seek to create an interactive theater experience for their audiences,
13
and thus, capture a sense of fellowship, which they believe was present in the early
modern theater.
In these grass-roots, academic, and regional performances, scholarly work is
being used, appropriated, or subverted. Through their performances, these groups both
demonstrate and grapple with the work of New Historicists, performance theorists,
gender theorists, post-colonists, and original-practice theorists. By incorporating
scholarly ideas into their performances, these small to mid-range theaters are exposing
new audiences to the theories and analyses that circulate in university arts and humanities
departments, providing a public forum for the work of the academy. In studying these
performances, one can see how the work of the academy is being packaged for general
audiences and how these audiences are reacting to that information.
As I have pursued this project, however, I have come to realize that viewing these
performances as manifestations of scholarship is not without controversy. At the end of a
paper session I participated in at the 2010 Shakespeare Association of America
Conference, discussion became intense when someone suggested that the work of literary
critics influences the work of theater artists. The theater artists in the room argued that
their work was a form of artistic expression alone and that the work of literary scholars
had little to no sway over their creative efforts. Nonetheless, some of the literary scholars
in the room held firm to their belief that scholarship had an influence on the theater.
Lynette Hunter and Peter Lichtenfelds term this impasse ―the fifth wall,‖ the invisible
boundary between scholars and theater practitioners who cannot understand each other‘s
work and what each contributes to the field of Shakespeare studies.17 My project
acknowledges the artistic efforts that go into a theater project, and at the same time,
17 See Lynette Hunter & Peter Lichtenfels, Shakespeare, Language and the Stage: The Fifth
Wall: Approaches to Shakespeare from Criticism, Performance and Theatre Studies (London: Arden
Shakespeare, 2005).
14
recognizes the impact of literary studies on theatrical productions. I attempt to clear the
fifth wall by bringing multiple perspectives into my study. I incorporate the theater
artists‘ points-of-view as much as possible by interviewing the directors, actors, and
production staff of these productions and observing rehearsals and multiple
performances.
This methodology, inevitably, led me to focus more on the actors‘ process of
creation than their audience‘s reaction to it. In my study, I discovered how the actors
become their own audience, processing the stories they had to tell, both as a group and as
individuals, through Shakespeare‘s texts. By being attentive to the actors‘ perceptions of
this experience, I can examine how these groups manipulated The Tempest to suit their
own needs and narratives. When possible, I also try to gesture toward audiences‘
perceptions of these performances. The discussion of the audiences‘ experiences receives
special emphasis in the last chapter on original practices and the American Shakespeare
Center. This emphasis is largely because that company sees its audiences as collaborators
in the production process and uses original practices to invite them into the performance.
There is a risk, however, of over generalizing the complex web of influences on
both the actors‘ and audiences‘ experience in the productions I examine. Making
generalizations about the intentions of the artists or the intellectual or emotional
responses of those involved in the production is a great temptation for those working in
performance theory, and on some level, such observations are necessary to draw critical
conclusions. J.L. Styan writes that ―[c]riticism is inevitably a generalizing activity,
whereas the theatre experience is always particular; criticism is reflective and docile,
whereas perceptions in the theatre are wild and immediate and alive.‖18 Although
Styan‘s conclusion that criticism is ―docile‖ discounts the exciting, inventive, and
18 J.L. Styan, Perspectives on Shakespeare in Performance (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 5.
15
intellectually stimulating work that is done by literary critics, his observations draw
attention to the fact that performance critics must be cognizant of theater performance
and literary criticism‘s varying approaches to discovering and assigning meaning.
Anthony B. Dawson makes a similar observation, arguing that performance critics
attempt to use language to articulate an experience that refuses to be defined by language;
he claims that theater instead denies meaning ―while opening up a range of physical,
emotional, and psychological responses.‖19 I agree with Dawson that there is an impasse
for the scholar who recognizes that a theatrical production is not stable but who,
nevertheless, attempts to assign descriptive language and definition to the experience of
the performance. Yet I also think that in recording the various influences and responses to
a performance, there is the opportunity to think about the communal, collaborative, and
social nature of not just theater, but all artistic endeavors, and to imagine how one might
consider the ways in which all acts of storytelling are open to the wide range of
―physical, emotional, and psychological responses‖ that Dawson describes. By putting
my critical emphasis on process, I can explore how these groups use Shakespeare and
The Tempest to define and describe these collaborative activities, and I will, at times,
highlight these groups‘ critical stances over my own the better to explore how they create
specific textual interpretations on stage.
In joining the ideas of theatrical creation of narrative and social issues, my work
engages with the ideas of trauma theory. This field merges Freudian psychoanalysis with
counseling techniques, and it posits that traumatic experience lives in memory and the
questions surrounding it, producing the narratives we tell. Shoshana Felman and Dori
Laub, leaders in the field, explain the preoccupations of the approach in this way:
19 Anthony B. Dawson, ―The Impasse Over the Stage,‖ English Literary Renaissance 21, no. 3
(1991): 326.
16
As readers, we are witnesses precisely to […] questions we do not
own and do not yet understand, but which summon and beseech us
from within the literary texts. What is the relation between
literature and testimony, between the writer and the witness? What
is the relation between the act of witnessing and testifying, and the
acts of writing and of reading, particularly in our era? […] What is,
furthermore, […] the relation between narrative and history,
between art and memory, between speech and survival?20
Particularly in the first three productions I look at, individuals use Shakespeare to process
trauma narratives, either their own or those of the marginalized voices they encounter.
Theater becomes a place to both speak the unspeakable and to have an audience witness
and respond. The performativity of theater makes for a particularly powerful way to
address issues of trauma. As Augusto Boal writes in Theater of the Oppressed, ―the
theater is a weapon. A very efficient weapon.‖ 21 Boal sees the theater as a potential tool
of the oppressed and poorer classes for exploring their unjust plight and hypothesizes that
this power explains why the ruling classes strive for a strong hold on the theater and why
the lower classes must fight for access to theatrical performances, so they can create a
space for themselves to explore their own narratives. Felman, Daub, and Boal suspect
that in the ability to tell one‘s story, there is potential for empowerment, especially by
shaping a new story. In this story, traumatized individuals can revise their reality,
creating what Jill Dolan coins the ―utopia of performance‖: ―The very present-tenseness
of performance lets audiences imagine utopia not as some idea of future perfection that
might never arrive, but as brief enactments of the possibilities of a process that starts
now, in this moment at the theater.‖22 Although theater may not be able to change the
world, the act of performing allows individuals an opportunity to recognize social issues,
20 Shoshana Felman & Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnesses in Literature, Psychoanalysis,
and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), xiii.
21 Augusto Boal, Theater of the Oppressed, new edition, trans. Charles A. & Maria-Odilia Leal
McBride & Emily Fryer (London: Pluto Press, 2000), ix.
22 Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2005), 17.
17
play out solutions to these issues, and present a world in which these issues are nonexistent. Embodying or witnessesing this imagined reality makes social change seem
possible, and in this possibility lays hope for actualization.
Yet why, when aiming for such transformations, do the groups in my study use
Shakespeare? Would it not be more effective to use modern texts that explore issues not
removed by time and space from contemporary concerns? Or better yet, to use the
participants‘ own narratives? But, as my analyses show, a classic text actually can
enhance the experience of processing social issues in the theater. Boal argues that
Shakespearean drama is capable of ―opening up new paths.‖23 By taking Shakespeare
into their own hands, the groups I study undermine social assumptions about the
playwright and their own participants. They create new understandings of Shakespeare‘s
work, and by doing so, open his plays to new audiences, testing assumptions about whom
Shakespeare‘s texts serve in this country and beyond.
My dissertation illustrates how Shakespeare has become a collaboration of the
academy, the theater, and popular culture and how this amalgamation allows his plays to
reach a diverse swath of society. My hope is that, in a similarly collaborative way, my
dissertation will be of interest to scholars in various fields including theater history,
dramatic performance, and American studies. Dolan observes that in recent years there
has been a backlash against scholarship in the arts and humanities ―as critics complain
that academics who use certain kinds of theoretical vocabularies have created an insular,
self-referential elite whose work has no currency outside its own sphere.‖24 My project
shows how performance offers a means for translating these theatrical vocabularies and
disseminating them to the broader public. Arts and humanities departments face a
23 Boal, 73.
24 Jill Dolan, Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 5.
18
particularly hostile environment in recent years and are forced to answer questions about
profitability and worth. My project shows how the arts and humanities play an integral
role in our society, and how Shakespeare‘s plays are at their most lively and meaningful
when they engage with a broader public.
19
CHAPTER ONE
―WHO HADST DESERVED MORE THAN A PRISON‖:
TRANSFORMING PRISONERS IN SHAKESPEARE BEHIND BARS
In the opening storm of Shakespeare‘s The Tempest, Gonzalo takes comfort in the
fact that the Boatswain ―hath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion is perfect
gallows.‖25 Gonzalo‘s reference, characteristic of early modern physiognomy, indicates
his belief that the sailor is somehow ―marked‖ to commit crime. Although one likes to
believe that such attitudes have disappeared, there are still a number of judgments made
about the men and women in correctional systems, their pasts, their crimes, and their
potential for reform. These negative stereotypes can be so ingrained that the offenders
themselves believe them to be true. In the Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in
LaGrange, Kentucky, however, these stereotypes are being challenged through the use of
early modern texts. Shakespeare Behind Bars, an offshoot of the Kentucky Shakespeare
Festival, seeks to use Shakespearean drama as a transformative medium for its inmateactors. In these early modern plays, the men seek insights into their own violent pasts,
broken families, and need for redemption. In 2005, Hank Rogerson and Jillann
Spitzmiller released a documentary that follows this group of actors as they produce The
Tempest. I will examine how in this film Shakespeare‘s play gives voice to both the
offenders‘ stories and the larger issues of the American criminal justice system,
challenging the gallows marks that are often upheld in contemporary society.
25 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York:
Norton, 1997), I.i.25-27.
20
Shakespeare in Prisons: A Historical Overview
The relationship between Shakespeare and prisoners is more firmly established than one
first suspects. Amy Scott-Douglass‘s overview of Shakespeare‘s place in American
prisons notes that playbills and newsletters at the Folger Shakespeare Library suggest that
Shakespeare was performed in US prisons as early as the American Civil War and that
Americans from Malcolm X to Don King have studied Shakespeare during times of
incarceration.26 Yet in the present era of tough-on-crime policies and media portrayals of
prison as a places of heightened drama, violence, and corruption, Shakespeare-in-prison
seems a curious, if not frivolous, idea.27
Quietly, however, volunteer artists and teachers have carved out a niche for
literature, theater, and the arts in prisons across the country.28 Megan Sweeney‘s shows
that using literature as a form of therapy and education for prisoners was popular from
the 1950‘s through the 1970‘s when correctional institutions emphasized rehabilitation
over punishment. Yet after a rash of prison riots in the late 1970‘s and as prisons became
overcrowded in the 1980‘s, prison libraries and reading programs became a lower
26 Amy Scott-Douglass, Shakespeare Inside: The Bard Behind Bars (London: Continuum, 2007),
4.
27 Two recent fictional television portrayals of prison – HBO‘s Oz (1997-2003) and Fox‘s Prison
Break (2005-2009) – show prison as places of gang warfare, rape, and escape attempts. Oz does highlight
alternative rehabilitation techniques including creative writing, library services, music programs, dog
training, and theater. A recent string of cable television shows including MSNBC‘s Lock Up, WE‘s Women
Behind Bars, and MTV‘s Juvies are part documentaries and part reality shows, heightening the drama of
the US prison experience.
28 There is a wealth of essays about teaching literature and writing in prison including those in
Rachel Marie-Crane Williams‘s Teaching the Arts Behind Bars (Boston: Northeastern University Press,
2003). Judith Tannebaum has also written a full-length memoir, Disguised as a Poem: My Years Teaching
Poetry at San Quentin (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000). Robert Ellis Gordon has compiled a
collection of the writings of his prison writing group in The Funhouse Mirror: Reflections on Prison
(Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2000). PMLA also devoted an issue to the theories and
methodologies of literature programs for the incarcerated in PMLA 123, no.3 (2008).
21
priority.29 Nevertheless, many Shakespeare-in-prison programs again grew in popularity
in the 1980‘s and 1990‘s. At first, some of these programs were part of college degree
programs for inmates, but when the Omnibus Crime Control Act of 1994 eliminated Pell
grants for prisoners, Shakespeare studies became an extracurricular activity. Given the
instability of funding and institutional support for prison educational and arts programs, it
is difficult to give a clear and accurate picture of such programs across the nation. New
programs are instituted on a regular basis, but highly successful programs disappear
overnight when funds are withdrawn, when rehabilitation programs are thought to be too
soft, or when a supportive warden or staff person leaves. Nevertheless, the novelty of
prisoners studying and performing Shakespeare has led to a fair amount of documentation
of these programs in memoirs, documentaries, and journal articles, which together help
create a picture of the use of Shakespeare plays in prisons.
All Shakespeare-in-prison groups share the common goals of enhancing literacy
skills, exposing inmates to classical texts, and providing opportunities for teamwork and
goal completion. Yet why is Shakespeare so often used for these purposes? One answer is
provided in an essay on using psychodrama in secure settings, in which Sue Jennings
writes that ―Shakespeare, probably more than any other playwright apart from the ancient
Greeks, is able to tell a story that is relevant to everyone, even today, and to tell it in such
a way that it continues to resonate.‖30 Jennings‘s argument for universality is shared
among facilitators of successful Shakespeare-in-prison programs. Laura Raidonis Bates
29 Megan Sweeney, ―Reading and Reckoning in a Women‘s Prison,‖ Texas Studies in Language
and Literature 50, no.3 (2008): 306-312. In 2006, the Supreme Court ruled in Beard vs. Banks that it is
constitutional to deny prisoners in solitary confinement access to secular newspapers, journals, and
photographs. Sweeney discusses the greater implications of this decision and what is suggests about the
role of reading in prisoner reform. Megan Sweeney, ―Beard vs. Banks: Deprivation as Rehabilitation,‖
PMLA 122, no. 3 (2007): 779-783. See also Megan Sweeney, ―Books as Bombs: Incendiary Reading
Practices in Women‘s Prisons,‖ PMLA 123, no.3 (2008): 666-672.
30 Sue Jennings, ―The Nature and Scope of Drama Therapy: Theater of Healing,‖ in Shakespeare
Comes to Broadmoor, ed. Murray Cox (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1992), 242.
22
was a graduate student at the University of Chicago when she, skeptically, decided to test
the ―universality‖ of Shakespeare by staging performances of his plays with inmates.
Inspired by the work of Geese Theater Company of London and by Curt Tofteland of
Shakespeare Behind Bars (SBB), Bates has since worked with a range of prisoners,
including men and women, and those in minimum security facilities, maximum security
facilities, and even solitary confinement.31 Bates moves through the texts meticulously
with her students, making sure that everyone understands each word. Students then create
a paraphrased version of the text for their performance. In answer to her question of
universality, Bates writes: ―no doubt some of my students have left the classroom as
indifferent as they had arrived. But gradually, I discovered that at least some of the plays
are even more relevant to this group than to other, more traditional student populations.‖
She cites a student who told her he wished he had read Romeo and Juliet before he had
gotten involved with a woman from a rival gang, a choice which resulted in his attempted
murder charge. She also points to one of her solitary confinement students who told her
that after she left a class discussion on Richard II‘s soliloquy on imprisonment, the
inmates engaged in a heated debate on the text through their cells.32 Jean Trounstine,
who led successful writing and theater programs for women in Framingham Women‘s
Prison in Massachusetts, directed her students in productions of The Merchant of Venice,
Lysistrata, Rapshrew (a modern adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew), The Scarlet
Letter, Waiting for Lefty, and Arsenic and Old Lace during her tenure at Framingham. In
31 The United Kingdom has a particularly strong history of providing theater-in-prisons programs.
The Geese Theater Company of London, however, is actually an offshoot of John Bergman‘s Geese
Theater Company which was founded at the University of Iowa and is currently based in New Hampshire.
William Cleveland, ―Geese Theater: America‘s National Prison Theater Company,‖ in Art in Other Places:
Artists at Work in America‟s Community and Social Institutions (West Port, CT: Praeger, 1992), 51-64.
32 Laura Raidonis Bates, ―The Uses of Shakespeare in Criminal Rehabilitation: Testing the Limits
of ‗Universality,‘‖ in Shakespeare Matters: History, Teaching, Performance, ed. Lloyd Davis (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 2003), 162-163. For a haunting portrayal of Bates‘s work with prisoners in
solitary confinement, see Scott-Douglass, 109-120.
23
speaking of her students‘ work with Shakespeare, Trounstine said: ―they have found that
classical texts belong to everyone, and that what they consider most difficult can be
within reach.‖33 The claims that Trounstine and Bates make for accessibility are echoed
by Curt Tofteland of SBB. Tofteland believes Shakespeare‘s ―gift truly was insight into
human behavior, because in his plays, I can find insight into human behavior that is as
true now as it was four hundred years ago.‖34 For these facilitators, the connection
between prisoners and Shakespearean drama is based their actors‘ ability to see
themselves in the plays. When the prisoner-actors see themselves as part of a larger,
classical tradition, they catch a glimpse of their own humanity, a humanity often denied
them by the prison system and their society.
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault argues that the carceral system brings
together ―the triple points of view of psychology, social position and upbringing,‖ with
the result that a criminal is established as ―existing before the crime and even outside
it.‖35 Criminals often face economic and educational challenges and become caught in
cyclical patterns of abuse. Once these men and women have been branded as criminals,
they are no longer seen as intellectually curious individuals who would be interested in
the ―high culture‖ of Shakespeare. Yet the work of Bates, Trounstine, Tofteland, and
33 Jean Trounstine, Shakespeare Behind Bars: One Teacher‟s Story of the Power of Drama in a
Women‟s Prison (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 209. When Pell grants were no longer a
possibility, Trounstine‘s eager participants lost support and the program gradually disbanded. In 1993,
Trounstine co-founded the women‘s branch of Changing Lives Through Literature, a educational initiative
started by English professor Robert P. Waxler and Massachusetts Judge Robert Kane; in this program,
judges require criminal offenders to take a literature course with a college instructor, parole officer, and
judge as an alternative to jail time. For more about this program, see Jean Trounstine & Robert P. Waxler,
Finding a Voice: The Practice of Changing Lives Through Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2005).
34 Shakespeare Behind Bars, directed by Hank Rogerson (Santa Fe, NM: Philomath Films, 2005),
DVD; For Tofteland‘s actors‘ views on the universality of Shakespeare, see Scott-Douglass, 13-25.
35 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, 2nd ed.
(New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 252.
24
others reveals that prisoners are eager for creative and intellectual stimulation. SBB
member Leonard Ford argues that it is the lack of such stimulation that is the true horror
of prison: ―for me what is so horrible about prison is intellectual[ly] and psychologically
it shuts you down. I mean, there‘s a very real connection between being caged in
physically and caged in mentally, very real.‖36 Through these Shakespeare programs, the
facilitators convince their participants that they are able to understand some of the most
difficult reading in the literary canon. Ultimately, these facilitators are not universalizing
Shakespeare but humanizing prisoners.
After all, the universality of these programs is based on deeply personal readings
of the texts. The lives of men and women in Shakespeare-in-prison programs are
certainly full of the common themes of Shakespeare‘s plays – greed, grief, lust, love,
power, and poverty. Yet in these programs individuals take these ―universal themes‖ and
apply them in a specific way to their personal narratives. They find lines, phrases, or
words that speak to their own situations. By projecting their own lives onto those of
Shakespeare‘s characters, they are able to take an objective stance towards their own
narratives; this distance often allows them the opportunity to think deeply about
themselves, their histories, and their actions, and often come to new conclusions because
of the change in perspective.
Indeed, Shakespeare‘s foreignness suits him for prison performances. Agnes
Wilcox runs Prison Performing Arts in Missouri, a performing arts organization with
multiple programs that serve incarcerated men, women, and juveniles with programs in
theater, dance, and music. In 2002, Jack Hitt featured Wilcox‘s Hamlet Project on an
episode of the Chicago Public Radio‘s nationally syndicated This American Life. In this
college-credit program, Wilcox and male inmates at the East Missouri Correctional
36 Scott-Douglass, 15-16.
25
facility work through an act of the play each semester, performing it for both their fellow
inmates and public audiences. Wilcox cites the value of working through Shakespearean
texts with prisoners:
Often, these men are in prison in part because they couldn‘t
connect one experience to another. Many of their lives have been
chaotic, and they have not been able to create a structure for the
chaos. Literature, with its use of language and its study of
character and circumstance, helps them see, grasp, and articulate
the process of cause and effect in human lives, sometimes
including their own.37
Jonathan Shailor, who led a theater and empowerment course at the Racine Correctional
Institution in Wisconsin for twelve years, cites Wilcox as his inspiration for deciding to
stage King Lear with his students. He writes that the difficulty of Shakespeare‘s plays
provides a ―safe vehicle‖ for prisoners‘ journeys of self-discovery: ―The strangeness,
difficulty, and excellence of the plays are precisely the stimulus and the container needed
by men whose emotional lives are troubled, chaotic, and volcanic. While Shakespeare‘s
language at first seems formidably complex and alien, in time, the men make it their own,
and through making it their own they find a new voice.‖38 Interestingly, it might not be
Shakespeare‘s accessibility that makes him useful for personal growth; it might instead
be his inaccessibility. Both Wilcox and Shailor cite the deeply analytical experience of
reading Shakespeare as the reason his plays work so well with incarcerated actors. The
difficulty and foreignness of Shakespeare‘s language challenge these men and women to
be more playful with their interpretation than they might with a modern piece of
literature. That playfulness is enhanced by the fact that many of these individuals are
37 Agnes Wilcox, ―Denmark Is a Prison, and You Are There,‖ The Journal of the Midwest
Modern Language Association 38, no. 1 (2005): 122; Jack Hitt, ―Act V,‖ This American Life, Chicago
Public Radio, August 9, 2002. See also Becky Becker, ―Converting the Audience: A Conversation with
Agnes Wilcox,‖ Feminist Teacher 16, no. 3 (2006): 225-237.
38 Jonathan Shailor, ―When Muddy Flowers Bloom: The Shakespeare Project at Racine
Correctional Institution,‖ PMLA 123, no.3 (2008): 641.
26
coming to Shakespeare without preconceived notions about how to read his works. In an
article about teaching Dante and other classics at Attica in the early 1980‘s, Ronald B.
Herzman writes: ―I have often wished since then such an opportunity would present itself
when I teach Dante (or Shakespeare or Chaucer or any of the other canonical biggies) to
my more conventional undergraduates, and especially when I teach Shakespeare, where
presuppositions about who he is and how one is supposed to respond to him often get in
the way of engaging with the text.‖39 While traditional students come to a classroom
with expectations about the experience of reading a Shakespearean text, incarcerated
students tend to be free to construct a Shakespeare who suits their needs. These students
have an unusual opportunity to make him their own, and it is this individualization that
allows them to use Shakespeare so successfully not only as an intellectual exercise but
also as a means of self-reformation.
Those who teach literature and theater in prisons claim a powerful impact on the
reformation of prisoners. Megan Sweeney, who facilitates true crime reading groups for
incarcerated women, argues that Foucault‘s emphasis on biographical constructions of
prisoners conflicts with his later ideas on the freedom to transform oneself through
critical ontology and aesthetic experience, noting that ―[t]he prisoners whom Foucault
depicts in the pages of Discipline and Punish […] remain stranded in the gulf between
his hyperbolic emphasis on the totalizing institutional power of prison and his generalized
emphasis on resistance and self-transformation.‖40 She argues that the women in her
reading groups can bridge that gap as they use literature to analyze and transform their
lives within the correctional system. Self-transformation through art is particularly
prevalent in Tofteland‘s SBB program as participants use the dramatic process to explore
39 Ronald B. Herzman, ―Attica Educations: Dante in Exile,‖ PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 698.
40 Megan Sweeney, ―Living to Read True Crime: Theorizations from Prison,‖ Discourse 25,
no.1& 2 (2004): 59.
27
and even escape the social constructions of their own criminality. Leonard Ford, who
participates in the group, says of the program that ―[s]upport and personal growth and
reward for accepting responsibility are not part of the normal way the prison bureaucracy
is run. Shakespeare Behind Bars is different from the daily routine of prison; it‘s the
opposite.‖41 These programs offer inmates an opportunity to transcend their daily
experiences and, hopefully, to transform their lives. This process of self-actualization and
transcendence is highlighted in Hank Rogerson‘s documentary film about the group,
giving the public a rare glimpse into how Shakespeare, and literature and the arts more
generally, might play an important role in the criminal justice system.
Shakespeare Behind Bars
When Curt Tofteland first entered Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in
LaGrange, Kentucky, he had no intention of creating a Shakespeare company, let alone
performing plays in public. He fell into his work with SBB when, between 1991 and
1993, he helped Dr. Curt Bergstrand and Dr. Julie Barto develop a Shakespeare
curriculum for a Books Behind Bars program at Luther Luckett. In 1995, Tofteland was
invited to teach a master class in Shakespeare at the prison. After a single session of
working with the inmates on Mercutio and Tybalt‘s duel in Romeo and Juliet, he felt that
he and the actors had more work to do and asked Barto if she would sponsor him for
another visit. After his second visit, he again felt his work was unfinished and asked to
return again. This scenario repeated itself until he told the men that he ―would return until
they wasted [his] time.‖42 Although Tofteland left the program in 2008 for personal and
41 Scott-Douglass, 19.
42 Curt L. Tofteland, ―The Keeper of the Keys: Building a Successful Relationship with the
Warden,‖ in Performing New Lives: Reflections on Prison Theatre in the United States, ed. Jonathan
Shailor (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2010), author had advanced copy of the essay.
28
artistic reasons, he appointed Matt Wallace as its acting artistic director and still serves as
producing artistic director for the company, which celebrated its fifteenth anniversary in
2009-2010.
Rogerson‘s documentary is particularly well suited for charting the transformative
journeys theater-in-prison programs inspire in their participants since it follows SBB
participants over the course of nine months. During this long rehearsal period, Tofteland
collaborates with his actors to make unexpected connections between The Tempest and
the prisoners‘ lives. It is through these connections that the men begin to re-evaluate their
past, present, and future lives. One of Tofteland‘s favorite words is ―epiphany,‖ and his
aim is to provide a safe space in which his actors might gain personal insights. One
participant, Jerry ―Big G‖ Guenthner, says Tofteland provides them with ―an
environment where we all feel safe. You know, just give us open space. He started to
facilitate all the discoveries we go through and sometimes nudge or push us and not settle
for any bull crap. You know, push us for the truth, dig deeper.‖43 Tofteland encourages
the men to pull details from the texts and compare or contrast them with their own
experiences. As the inmates draw these connections, Tofteland acts as both drill sergeant
and cheerleader – telling the men to delve deeper into their stories, urging them to be
more authentic in their interpretations, and encouraging them when they seem to have hit
on something important. Tofteland does not focus on scansion or rhetoric with his actors;
instead, he asks his actors, ―What does this word mean? Where does it live in you? How
can you express that?‖44 His inmate actors thirst for this kind of work; these men are
eager to search themselves for the ―truth‖ of their connection to a character in a way his
professional actors resist. And Tofteland says his professional colleagues who come to
43 Jerry Guenthner, Floyd Gene Vaughn, & Curt Tofteland, ―Commentaries,‖ Bonus Features,
Shakespeare Behind Bars, directed by Hank Rogerson (Santa Fe, NM: Philomath Films, 2005), DVD.
44 Curt L. Tofteland, telephone interview by author, February 22, 2010.
29
SBB shows repeatedly tell him that they wish they could be as vulnerable as these actors
are on stage.45
Given Tofteland‘s personalized approach, Rogerson was excited when he heard
the director was considering staging Macbeth during the documentary‘s filming in 20022003. Rogerson expected that the Scottish king‘s ruminations on his own criminality, the
witches, and Lady Macbeth would yield fruitful explorations and fodder for the film.46
He was then initially disappointed when the troupe decided to perform The Tempest
instead, which he saw as a plotless and fantastical play. In the end, however, Rogerson
came to see this change as ―a gift.‖47 The Tempest deals with the themes of captivity,
revenge, and mercy on multiple levels – Prospero‘s banishment, his revenge on his
brother Antonio, Ferdinand‘s entrapment by Prospero, and the stories of Sycorax,
Caliban, and Ariel. The isolated island, not unlike Luther Luckett itself, is full of
individuals who are prisoners to each other and themselves.48
When it comes to casting these characters, Tofteland insists that troupe members
select their own roles. He believes this freedom of choice is an essential part of the SBB
experience, in that it encourages the men to have deep connections with their characters.
The men feel so inextricably tied to their roles that it has become a common mantra
45 Ibid.
46 Rogerson is apparently not alone in this thought. When characters on HBO‘s Oz perform a
Shakespeare play, their selection is Macbeth, and when the Educational Shakespeare Company
collaborated with prisoners make a feature length film, their selection was Macbeth as well. SBB finally
did perform Macbeth for their 2008-2009 season.
47 Hank Rogerson & Jillann Spitzmiller, ―Commentaries,‖ Bonus Features, Shakespeare Behind
Bars, directed by Hank Rogerson (Santa Fe, NM: Philomath Films, 2005), DVD.
48 Indeed, in his essay in the Shakespeare Sourcebooks edition of The Tempest, Tofteland offers
an extended metaphor comparing the world of Luther Luckett to Prospero‘s Island. Curt L. Tofteland, ―As
Performed: By Shakespeare Behind Bars at the Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in La Grange,
Kentucky, 2003,‖ The Sourcebooks Shakespeare: The Tempest, ed. Richard Preiss (Naperville, IL:
Sourcebooks, Inc., 2008), 21-32.
30
among the group to say ―[t]he roles pick us.‖49 Over the years, there have been instances
in which several members of the ensemble desired the same role. The group always
resolves these disputes among themselves using nonviolent communication and conflict
resolution to decide who most needs the role.50 The men must select their roles carefully,
articulating their connections to the characters and the reasons why it is important for
them to play the certain roles.
One of the most striking examples of an actor‘s connection to his role in the
history of SBB is Sammie Byron choice to play the part of Othello. In taking on the role,
he was agreeing to re-enact portions of his crime exactly: Byron is currently serving a life
sentence for strangling a former girlfriend. As Byron worked through the strangling of
Desdemona in the rehearsal room, he became emotionally overwhelmed and had an
epiphany about the nature and impact of his crime. Another member, Jerry Guenthner,
says he has witnessed many such moments of catharsis and compares the experience to a
line from Hamlet: ―to hold as ‗twere a mirror up to nature.‖ He explains that ―when you
look in that mirror and you find it relates really strongly to your past or your crime, that
truth, that pain just comes out. And it‘s almost like an emotional breakdown, such an
emotional release that it‘s just, whew, it‘s a trip to watch.‖51 Although there was a direct
connection between Byron‘s and Othello‘s stories, in Tofteland‘s methodology such a
close fit is not necessary, and as the documentary shows, even a plotless, fantastical play
like The Tempest can create therapeutic connections for these inmates.
The film offers a variety of examples of how the relationships between the actors
and their roles develop. In the case of Hal Cobb, for example, the role of Prospero
49 Guenthner, Vaughn, & Tofteland.
50 Tofteland, ―As Performed,‖ 24.
51 Scott-Douglass, 24.
31
allowed him to process his crime and begin a journey toward redemption. Cobb was
convicted of electrocuting his pregnant wife and concealing it as an accident for ten
years.52 For Cobb, who is estranged from his daughter, the relationship between Prospero
and Miranda offers a starting point for his study of Prospero. Early in the film, Cobb and
Marcel ―Red‖ Herriford, the actor playing Miranda, discuss the relationship between their
characters.53 Cobb points to Miranda‘s worries that she was a burden to her father in his
exile: ―Alack, what trouble / Was I then to you!‖54 Cobb then focuses on Prospero‘s
response, ―O, a cherubin / Thou wast that did preserve me,‖ saying that the line ―rips‖
him. 55 He continues:
COBB. Prospero and Miranda only have each other. If Prospero
hadn‘t had Miranda, he probably would have jumped out of the
boat – ―rotten carcass of a butt‖ – and just drowned.
HERRIFORD. Just killed himself.
COBB. Yeah. […] Miranda provided him the only reason to live
and I can identify with that. Once I killed her mother, I had to stay
around and take care of her. I was the only one left.56
Cobb gets a distant look in his eye, and although his exterior remains composed, the
camera cuts to his hands which are clenched into tight fists, a seeming physical
52 Cobb is one of the few inmates who performed in theater before he came to prison. In the
deleted scenes of the documentary, Cobb explains that he began his journey toward admitting his crime
when he had to enact a scene of violence against a woman in a revival of Carnival. The anecdote provides a
testament to power of dramatic re-enactment. ―Hal‘s Back Story,‖ Deleted Scenes, Bonus Features,
Shakespeare Behind Bars, directed by Hank Rogerson (Santa Fe, NM: Philomath Films, 2005), DVD.
53 Rogerson admits that this is one of the few staged scenes of the film. He told the men to discuss
their parts for the camera, but he did not anticipate the deeper connections Cobb would make with his
character. Rogerson & Spitzmiller.
54 I.ii.151-152.
55 I.ii.152-153.
56 Shakespeare Behind Bars.
32
expression of his inner turmoil.57 In his analysis of the text, Cobb offers a psychological
reading of his own character as well as Prospero‘s. Although he sprinkles his analysis
with references to the text, his insights into Prospero seem pulled from his own
biography. He complicates the understanding of his crime by voicing, presumably, his
own thoughts of self-harm and his need to comfort and be comforted by his daughter.
Although unsettling, this reading of the text allows Cobb to explore his own humanity; he
realizes the grief and sense of duty he feels toward his daughter despite the dire situation
he has created for her.
In this scene, his responsibility for the murder is overshadowed by the burden that
his actions created. This marginalization of responsibility is paralleled in Shakespeare‘s
text; as Prospero bitterly recounts the actions of his brother, he also admits that ―I, thus
neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated / To closeness and the bettering of my mind.‖58
Although Prospero does not feel that his distraction and neglect justify his usurpation,
acknowledging his inattentiveness encourages the audience to consider the role he played
in his exile. It is not until later in the play that Prospero starts to see that he must take
partial ownership of his situation and show mercy on the perpetrators – a lesson that
Cobb will learn with him.
Later in the film, Cobb and Ryan ―Bulldog‖ Graham tackle the Act V, scene i
exchange between Prospero and Ariel in a large group rehearsal. In this scene, Ariel
explains how the Neapolitan men suffer after Prospero‘s revenge. Tofteland suggests that
Ariel is Prospero‘s mentor in forgiveness in this scene and that Prospero has his own
57 Rogerson says that he asked cinematographer Shana Hagan to focus on the inmates‘ hands
during the filming because they committed their crimes with their hands. These shots of their hands also
provide some insight to the internal turmoil of these men. Although they often talk about their crimes or
time in prison in a matter of fact way, their anxiety seems to express itself through their hands. Rogerson &
Spitzmiller.
58 I.ii.89-90.
33
epiphany when he says, ―The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance.‖59 Tofteland
goes onto explain: ―Prospero at this moment – it‘s like a lightning bolt and his spirit is
free.‖60 Here, the camera cuts to Cobb, who again looks introspective. The film‘s editor,
Victor Livingston, then transitions to a scene where Cobb gives the details of his crime.
Five months into the shooting of the film, Cobb offers insight into the conflicted past that
lies beneath his collected exterior. In this scene, Cobb juxtaposes his struggles growing
up as a homosexual in a conservative Christian family with the details of his crime. For
the audience, this pairing mixes pity with horror, and one sees, just as Ariel explains to
Prospero, that even those who commit heinous acts suffer and are in need of compassion.
In Shakespeare‘s play, Prospero heeds Ariel‘s advice to show mercy and immediately
gives up his studies in the ―Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves‖
speech.61 In these final scenes, Prospero realizes that in order to move past his situation,
he must both admit his own responsibility by relinquishing his books and show mercy to
the perpetrators. Cobb, too, takes responsibility for his actions by articulating his role in
his family‘s tragedy. He also starts to show mercy toward the perpetrator – himself. At
the end of the film, Cobb says that Prospero has helped him learn to forgive himself
although he admits that for him this self-forgiveness feels ―hollow.‖62 Still, Prospero has
helped him begin a journey toward redeeming his life.
These sorts of deep and fruitful connections to their characters seem to come to
SBB actors even when they take on a role they did not, at first, want to play. This
hesitation is especially evident in those who take on female roles. In the SBB troupe, all
59 V.i.27-28.
60 Shakespeare Behind Bars.
61 V.i.20-57.
62 Shakespeare Behind Bars.
34
female roles are played by men. The first men who performed these roles faced the
criticism of other inmates on the yard, but as the practice has developed over the years, it
has become more accepted among the troupe members and the general population of the
prison. Now it is expected that troupe members take turns playing female roles. In the
film, Marcel Herriford appears to take his turn reluctantly; he says that others in the
troupe ―put the role [of Miranda] on [him]‖ when no one else wanted it. Tofteland says
that Herriford‘s statement in the film is misleading, and that Herriford actually said,
―They put the role on me. I rebelled and said, ‗Let me choose the role. Don‘t you choose
the role for me.‘‖63 He could have refused the role, but instead he wanted to take
ownership of it. It is not until we see Herriford and Cobb rehearsing the Act I, scene ii for
the group, however, that we begin to realize that Herriford‘s role does more than fill a
gap in the casting.
In Act I, scene ii, Miranda discovers that her father is the usurped duke of Milan.
When Prospero tells Miranda that he plans to tell her the story of her past, she replies,
―You have often / Begun to tell me what I am, but stopped / And left me to a bootless
inquisition, / Concluding ‗Stay, not yet.‘‖64 Miranda has long wanted to know her
history, but Prospero has dismissed her. Now at the age of fifteen, Miranda is allowed the
opportunity to know her past and to lay claim to her own identity. In one of the great
puzzles of the scene, Prospero continually accuses his daughter of not listening. Yet, as
she attests, ―Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.‖65 Perhaps it is the father‘s own anxiety
surrounding his past, but he does not seem to recognize that his daughter has a deep
desire to hear this story.
63 Curt L. Tofteland, ―As Performed,‖ 25.
64 I.ii.33-36.
65 I.ii.107.
35
As the documentary shows Herriford talking through this scene, we hear him
mention that the exchange reminds him of when he used to ask his mother about his
father; she would dismiss him, believing he was too young to understand. When
Tofteland presses Herriford to dig more deeply into his story, Herriford explains that
when he was fifteen his grandmother informed him of his background and he met his
father for the first time. Tofteland asks, ―And how old is Miranda?‖ A smile starts to
break on Herriford‘s face, and he says, ―She‘s fifteen.‖ Cobb asks, tongue-in-cheek,
―Hmm, I wonder why this role picked you?‖ After making the connection, Herriford
seems overwhelmed by the coincidence. As the film progresses, he is able to use the
character of Miranda to delve into his own past and re-imagine his future. Just as Miranda
chastises her father to be merciful – ―If by your art, my dearest father, you have / Put the
wild waters in this roar, allay them,‖ she seems to offer the same sort of lesson to
Herriford.66 At the end of the film, he says: ―Miranda helped me deal with some of the
things inside of me that needed to come out, to be developed. [It] just helped me to
understand how caring and loving this young lady is, coming from the situation she‘s in
and the tragedy that she‘s seen in her own life. It is just that you can forgive someone no
matter what type of situation it is.‖67 Through Miranda, Herriford comes to understand
how someone in a situation similar to his took an alternative path; he starts to understand
how he, too, might forgive those who were part of this troubled history and view, like
Miranda, a ―brave new world.‖
These sorts of personal identifications come not just from the actors‘ analysis of
the text but also from their physical performance of it. As Jerry Guenthner practices
Caliban‘s movement, for example, the physical representation of the character gives him
66 I.ii.1-2.
67 Shakespeare Behind Bars.
36
an opportunity to think about his own identity as well. In the documentary, Guenthner
says that the role is a challenge for him because ―Caliban is such a savage. I feel like I
have to regress to play him. I would say he represents a large percentage of the
population on the yard, I guess myself included in that, at least how I used to be. He
represents a savage and uneducated life form who is just existing at a primitive level.‖68
As we hear Guenthner explain his view, we see him struggle with Caliban‘s movement,
redoing his entrance over and over, playing with how he might physically represent a
primitive savage. In one attempt, he moves with weighted feet like a monster from a Bhorror film; in another, he drags his 375-pound body across the floor, using only his
hands as support. These attempts invoke the central question of what ―monstrosity‖ looks
like.
Certainly, this is a question that many previous productions have addressed.
Caliban has a long tradition of being played as a half-human or monstrous creature. The
Folio lists the character as ―a salvage and deformed slave.‖69 Alden T. Vaughan and
Virginia Mason Vaughan explain that ―salvage,‖ or ―savage,‖ would have meant
someone ―uncivilized by European standards‖ and could apply to ethnic groups as well as
English vagabonds, gypsies, and sturdy beggars. They argue that ―slave‖ indicates
Caliban‘s social status but admit that his deformity is left ambiguous.70 This ambiguity
has led many to misread Prospero‘s description of him: ―Then was this island – / Save for
the son that she did litter here, / A freckled whelp, hag-born – not honoured with / A
68 Ibid.
69 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Mr. William Shakespeare Comedies, Histories, &
Tragedies: A Facsimile of the First Folio, 1623 (New York: Routledge, 1998), 37.
70 Alden T. Vaughan & Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare‟s Caliban: A Cultural History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 7-15. I am also indebted to Christine Dymkowski‘s study
of Caliban in her introduction to Shakespeare in Production: The Tempest (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 49-71.
37
human shape.‖71 The description of Caliban, set off by dashes in most modern editions
and by parentheses in the Folio edition, indicates that Caliban is human. It is the island
that is ―not honoured with / A human shape.‖ The humanity of Caliban is further
complicated by Trinculo‘s question upon spotting the gabardine-cloaked man, ―What
have we here, a man or a fish?,‖ and Trinculo and Stephano‘s thirty-four references to the
character as a monster.72 Prospero also refers to Caliban as a ―thing of darkness,‖ an
ambiguous phrase that has been used to support readings of monstrosity, post-colonial
readings, and also readings of psychological ―darkness‖ – either that of Caliban or
Prospero himself. Thus, although the text never clearly distinguishes him as such, there is
a tradition of reading Caliban as a monster or some sort of primitive half-human. This
reading has become imbedded in the cultural imagination.
The monstrosity of Caliban takes on new meaning when staged in a prison.
Livingston highlights this new sense of monstrosity in his editing of the documentary.
Cross-cut with Guenthner‘s movement exercises, the editor inserts footage of Guenthner
giving the details of his crime. At the age of twenty-one, he killed an undercover police
officer in a shoot out. Although Guenthner was awarded the possibility of parole, it is
most likely, given the nature of his crime and his victim, that he will never be released.
At a young age, he was branded as a ―monster‖ by society and must serve out the rest of
his life in order to redeem himself.
As he talks about his struggle to discover how Caliban moves, Guenthner notes
that he finds this role difficult because he can observe human nature but he cannot
observe a monster. In response, Sammie Byron and Tofteland speak up:
BYRON. You know, in playing a monster it‘s easy to think I‘ve
got to be this big, robustuous, outrageous monster.
71 I.ii.284-286.
72 This is by far the most instances of the word in a Shakespeare play.
38
TOFTELAND. Caliban doesn‘t think of himself as a monster.
BYRON. Yeah. He doesn‘t think that way. He has real feelings,
and he‘s been hurt.
TOFTELAND. And that‘s the important insight into this character
of Caliban. His external may be monstrous, but he still feels and he
still hurts and he still grieves.73
In their reading of The Tempest, these men hit upon what is often overlooked – that
Caliban might not be a monster after all. Byron and Tofteland‘s observations easily
translate to Guenthner‘s life and the lives of all the men in SBB.74 In discussing the
objectification of the criminal, Foucault writes that an incarcerated man is ―designated as
the enemy of all, whom it is in the interest of all to track down [ . . . ] he appears as a
villain, a monster, a madman, perhaps, a sick and, before long, ‗abnormal‘ individual.‖75
These are, in fact, the terms commonly attached to criminals. Yet as Guenthner, Cobb,
and Herriford share their narratives, one realizes that they are also men who feel, hurt,
and grieve. Through both their stories and their artistic acts, the criminals complicate
their ―monstrosity,‖ challenging stereotypes about their nature.
Despite this complication, however, Guenthner does not use Caliban to establish
his own victimhood. He says:
I started out just like he was – not taking responsibility for my acts,
cussing my jailers, just living life as a fool. And then by the end of
the play, and here I am in my own process as a human being to
have taken responsibility for what I‘ve done, realizing what led up
to me making those mistakes, and like Caliban, deciding I‘m going
to ―seek for grace‖ and vow to be ―wise hereafter‖ and hope that
we are redeemed, hope that we will be forgiven for society.76
73 Shakespeare Behind Bars.
74 Tofteland, himself, refers to his actors as ―the Calibans‖ in his essay for the Sourcebooks
Shakespeare edition of The Tempest and notes that many in society believe that these men are past
redemption, just as Prospero believed of Caliban. Curt L. Tofteland, ―As Performed,‖ 22-23.
75 Foucault, 101.
76 Guenthner, Vaughn, & Tofteland.
39
Guenthner charts a journey for Caliban in the play – his bitter ―This isle is mine‖ speech,
his foolery with Stephano and Trinculo, and his contrite attitude toward Prospero at the
end of the play – and uses it as a model for his own journey. Although the film, like the
SBB project itself, seeks to allow prisoners a momentary escape from the social
constructions placed upon them, the men cannot truly evade being labeled as criminals.
Yet this acrimonious distinction is something that all the men share, regardless of their
crimes. SBB, and Shakespeare‘s plays more generally, allow them an opportunity to
share this experience with each other.
Building Community
The experiences of Hal Cobb, Marcel Herriford, and Jerry Guenthner show that
the epiphanies of SBB participants are not strictly private, but instead are often spurred
by collaborative discussions and rehearsals with fellow SBB members. A common refrain
of the troupe is that ―when one learns, we all learn.‖77 This sense of community is at the
core of what Tofteland sees as the driving force behind his project. During the talk-back
session after one of the troupe‘s performances of Macbeth in 2009, Tofteland referred to
the SBB members as his family, noting that not everyone had the advantage of such a
supportive environment; he saw SBB as a way to create that environment for these
men.78 The SBB mission statement includes the goals of developing empathy,
compassion, and trust, and becoming a responsible member of a group, community, and
family.79 By focusing on these skills, SBB has fostered a deep sense of brotherhood
77 Ibid.
78 Shakespeare Behind Bars, Macbeth, by William Shakespeare, directed by Matt Wallace,
Shakespeare Behind Bars, Luther Luckett Correctional Complex, LaGrange Kentucky, May 11, 2009.
79 Shakespeare Behind Bars, ―Mission,‖ Shakespeare Behind Bars, accessed May 22, 2011,
http://www.shakespearebehindbars.org/about/mission.htm.
40
among its members, giving them a network of support not readily found elsewhere in
prison.
The group‘s emphasis on brotherhood is apparent in an early scene of the
documentary. At one of the first rehearsals of the year, Sammie Byron stands before the
group to deliver the St. Crispin‘s Day speech from Henry V. The speech, Henry‘s rallycry to a rag-tag group of soldiers, is an ode to brotherhood and camaraderie. The group
finds inspiration in Henry‘s lines: ―We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. / For he
today that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother […].‖80 In his commentary on
the scene, Guenthner says: ―We became a band of brothers through the process. […]
that‘s what it is all about – putting our trust in each other. Putting our pasts, open
ourselves up for everybody to see. […] Great acts of courage all throughout this program.
Guys opening up and having trust in each other.‖81 He references Warwick‘s lament, ―O
that we now had here / But one ten thousand of those men in England / that do no work
today,‖ saying that those men back in England are like the guys on the yard who do not
engage in this difficult self-exploration.82 Echoing Henry, he says these men ―don‘t have
stomach for this fight, because it is a fight.‖83 The prison-actors see the battle at
Agincourt as a metaphor for their own personal battles, and it is through their own band
of brothers that they are able to battle impossible odds and ―share the honor‖ of selfexploration with each other.84
80 William Shakespeare, Henry V, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York:
Norton, 1997), IV.iii. 60-62.
81 Guenthner, Vaughn, & Tofteland.
82 IV.iii.16-18.
83 Guenthner, Vaughn, & Tofteland; IV.iii.33-36.
84 IV.iii.22.
41
As Byron works through this speech in the film, Tofteland and the other SBB
members jeer at him when they feel he is not being genuine and verbally encourage him
when they feel he is delivering the speech with conviction. Again, Livingston cross-cuts
Byron‘s work in the rehearsal room with an interview in which he admits the details of
his crime. From the moment the documentary crew started taping, Byron was ready to
discuss his crime, a willingness that highlights his position as the ―Alpha Male‖ of the
group. 85 Throughout the film, Byron is portrayed as both a model prisoner and a leader
of the program, providing an example of the program‘s ideal outcomes at the beginning
of the film. He exemplifies the group‘s desire that members take responsibility for their
crimes and achieve a sort of self-redemption. Given his leadership position in the
program, it is hard to see his performance as anything but a rallying cry at the opening of
the season – a call for the prisoners to join together on their personal battlefronts.
Much of the mutual support he calls for is fostered by SBB‘s internal system of
mentorship. In the spirit of early-modern trade guilds, the only way an individual can join
SBB is if he first serves out an apprenticeship. He must be asked to join and has to be
sponsored by one of the existing members, attend rehearsals and workshops, and perform
in a show before he can become a member. Yet once he has completed a show, he is a
member of the troupe for life. Seasoned performers instruct the apprentices not just in
their readings of Shakespeare, but also in their daily behavior in the prison. In order to
remain in the SBB group, participants must keep a clean record. The hope is that mentors
will be able to help new members to avoid the temptations of prison culture and maintain
good behavior. Guenthner explains that when he first came to prison he had multiple
―mentors,‖ who taught him how to hustle, get drugs, and con the police behind bars.
Guenthner has said that ―Through Shakespeare Behind Bars, I have learned that
85 Rogerson & Spitzmiller.
42
mentoring is important, but it is also important to mentor them in the right direction.‖ He
adds: ―You bring somebody into Shakespeare, it is your responsibility to make sure they
are doing the right thing.‖86
This sort of mentorship is what Guenthner tries to provide for Rickie. Rickie is a
young man who is serving two life sentences without the possibility of parole. Although
he has fallen into trouble at the prison in the past, Rickie says that when he saw SBB
perform for the first time, he was ―awe-struck‖ that the performers could ―create this
whole other world.‖87 As soon as Rickie got the role of Antonio, he ―just quit
everything.‖88 Throughout the film, he embraces the role and the straight life of SBB.
Guenthner says mid-film, ―He‘s not going to the hole [solitary confinement] because he‘s
different than he was six months ago.‖89 Yet in one of the great ironic moments of the
film, this joyful affirmation of mentorship is still subject to the reality of prison; just
before the production goes up, Rickie is sent to the hole for getting an illegal tattoo and
the role of Antonio must be recast. Although Guenthner admits in the commentary that he
was devastated by the loss of Rickie, his succinct reaction in the film reveals his
knowledge that even Shakespeare is no match for prison life: ―This is Shakespeare
Behind Bars; it ain‘t Mary Poppins productions.‖90 Elsewhere, however, Guenther has
argued that SBB is the reason there are so few violent crimes at Luther Luckett: ―I take a
lot of pride in what goes on in the yard as far as it not being violent, you know. I take
pride in being able to reach out to young guys and help them keep their heads on. This
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid.
88 Shakespeare Behind Bars.
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid; Guenthner, Vaughn, & Tofteland.
43
whole prison is changing. They say one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch; one good
apple can help a whole barrel of rotten ones.‖91 Guenthner and the rest of the SBB
members take great pride in turning out inmates – individuals who are upright citizens of
the prison – as opposed to convicts – individuals who reject prison rules and behave as
they did on the streets. SBB participants believe that they are working together to become
individuals who will be highly successful when they are released from prison, and, for the
most part, they are right. National recidivism rates are bleak; in a recent fifteen state
study, over two-thirds of prisoners released were rearrested within three years.92 Yet
only two of the forty-one SBB participants who have been released from prison have
been re-incarcerated for new crimes and only two have returned for parole violations.93
SBB participants do return to prison – to see their former SBB peers perform in
the public productions. Each year a handful of graduates who are on the outside come
back to Luther Luckett and watch their fellow SBB members‘ productions. Tofteland
says that the alumni of this program regularly tell him that their time with SBB
fundamentally changes them, and they credit that change with their ability to be
successful on the outside. Former SBB participants say that their relationships with their
loved ones on the outside, in some ways, cannot compare to the brotherhood they
experience with their SBB peers. They find themselves yearning for those relationships
again and the safe space of the rehearsal room.94
91 Scott-Douglass, 96.
92 US Bureau of Justice Statistics, ―Reentry Trends in the US,‖ US Bureau of Justice,
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/reentry/recidivism.cfm (accessed January 28, 2010).
93 Shakespeare Behind Bars, ―Shakespeare Behind Bars – History,‖ Curt L. Tofteland, email
message to author, March 27, 2009; Curt L. Tofteland, email message to author, February 2, 2010.
94 Tofteland, telephone interview, February 22, 2010.
44
The community these men have built around Shakespeare, in many ways, trumps
the playwright himself. In the actors‘ talk-back at the 2009 Macbeth performance, Ron
Brown, who played Macbeth, said that SBB project is ―not about Shakespeare.‖ Instead,
for him, it is about teamwork, a statement corroborated by Hal Cobb, who played Lady
Macbeth. The documentary highlights Brown and Cobb‘s rocky past relationship when
they get into a heated discussion after Cobb critiques Brown‘s performance of Ferdinand.
Despite this tension, Cobb said that when he heard Brown was interested in playing
Macbeth, he knew he wanted to play Lady Macbeth. Precisely because of their past
troubles, the two of them worked hard to build their relationship, and Cobb knew that
Brown would be someone he could trust as a scene partner.95 This element of trust
played out in their portrayal of the Macbeths. Cobb‘s Lady Macbeth did not rely on
sexual prowess to convince her husband to murder the king. Instead it was clear that her
persuasive powers came out of the deep trust they had in each other, and it was only
when Macbeth no longer confided in his wife, when that trust was withheld, that Lady
Macbeth lost her sanity.
During this same talk-back session, one of the apprentice actors articulated how
he learned the importance of community through that evening‘s performance. For him,
this realization came through learning to take criticism. He had struggled with accepting
constructive criticism and learning to trust others‘ advice throughout the year. After
going through the performance that night and having the audience react positively to the
things he was doing because of someone else‘s suggestion, he finally realized how
integral the others had been to his performance.96 Although the safe, collaborative space
of SBB was initially intended to be a private setting, opening up these dramatic journeys
95 Shakespeare Behind Bars, Macbeth.
96 Ibid.
45
to a wider audience allowed these men a new perspective on the things they learned in the
rehearsal room. Yet, while extending the SBB community to a greater public certainly
has advantages for both the inmates and the larger public, the decision is also fraught
with many complex relationships.
Going Public
Few theater-in-prison programs are ever developed with public performance in
mind, but over time many of them have found ways for the public to view their work. Yet
even when there is a public component, the emphasis is typically on the dramatic process
as opposed to the performance. Michael Balfour argues that what is important about
theater-in-prison programs is precisely that they question the importance of creativity
beyond its use for entertainment or leisure. In the structured, contained, and observed
world of the prison, theater allows inmates to indulge in the chaos, confusion, and
transcendental experience of creating dramatic art so as to ―re-educate, re-socialise, and
‗rehabilitate‘ themselves.‖97 Tofteland, too, believes art needs to be more than
entertainment; it has to have meaning and individuals have to create that meaning.98 This
focus on process makes spectators only tangential to the rest of the experience. Even
Rogerson, who originally planned to show much more of the inmates‘ performance of
The Tempest in his film, decided instead on a celebratory montage of moments from the
production because ―it‘s really about the process.‖99
97 Michael Balfour, ―Introduction,‖ Theater in Prison: Theory and Practice, ed. Michael Balfour
(Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2004), 2-3.
98 Tofteland, telephone interview, February 22, 2010.
99 Rogerson & Spitzmiller.
46
For SBB, the road to public performances was gradual. Even when it was clear
that Tofteland‘s work at Luther Luckett was more than a fleeting workshop, Tofteland
intended his actors‘ work to take place in an isolated environment. The more formal and
public productions emerged at the impetus of the actors. Initially, they asked to share
their work with the other inmates at the prison. Then they asked if they could offer a
public performance, which their families could attend; many of these men had not
completed such a project before in their lives, and they wanted to be able to share it with
a larger public. Media exposure, including spots on CNN, CBS, and NPR and an article
in the Christian Science Monitor, raised national awareness of the program, and this
awareness was augmented by screenings of Rogerson‘s documentary on public outlets
such as PBS, the Sundance Channel, and at the Sundance Film Festival, and a number of
other film festivals throughout the country.
The documentary has become essential in attracting broader attention to the group
and inspiring individuals to create their own such programs in locations across the world.
Tofteland receives weekly correspondence from individuals who are encouraged by the
film and want to work with Shakespeare and drama in prison. Yet, notably, Shakespeare
Behind Bars is not the first film to portray theater behind bars. In fact, it belongs to a
small genre of documentary films which provide the general public with a glimpse into
theater-in-prison programs.
In 2000, Rhodessa Jones and her company, Cultural Odyssey, created We Just
Telling Stories, a cinematic collage of the work done by her Medea Project, a theater
workshop for incarcerated women. Jones uses ancient Greek myths to frame her
participants‘ personal narratives in a theatrical performance at a public theater in San
Francisco. Her film splices together scenes of the women‘s rehearsal process, offering
disjointed dialogue, repeating visual motifs, and projecting the things the women say as
titles on the screen. The resulting visual experience captures the raw emotions that run
through the rehearsal room. Unlike Tofteland‘s program, in which inmates process their
47
own lives through Shakespeare, these women‘s personal stories are an integral part of
their public, off-campus performances. Although the Greek myths exist in the
background, it is ultimately these women‘s stories that are being told. Rena Fraden
documents this process in her study Imagining Medea. Trained as a literary scholar, she
expected (and wanted) the myths to be important, but when she asked one of the
participants, Felicia Scaggs, about the Medea myth, the actor responded: ―I didn‘t really
trip on that story. I always wanted to be an actress. I always wanted to be on a stage
doing something. You know what I‘m saying? That was just a way – all those people
seeing me. This is what I want. I want these people to see me. I want to get that applause.
I just clicked right with the show. It was lovely.‖100 Scagg‘s statement makes one
question whether or not specific stories, or even the dramatic process itself, is what is
ultimately valuable in these programs. Perhaps it is, simply, the opportunity to perform
and be seen.
Female inmates‘ stories are also at the center of a documentary co-produced by
Eve Ensler. What I Want My Words to Do to You (2003) is a documentary about Ensler‘s
creative-writing workshops with women in a maximum security prison. Best-known as
the creator of The Vagina Monologues, Ensler explains that after working with the
victims of violent crime, she felt compelled to seek out the perpetrators of such acts. The
documentary portrays many of the inmates as victims of abuse or neglect themselves;
Ensler works with these women to process the wrongs of their pasts, both those that were
committed against them and those that they themselves committed.
In an interview on the DVD, Ensler explains that her original intention was to
create a feature film, but after reading the women‘s writing, she knew that no fictional
100 Rena Fraden, Imaging Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 75; We Just Telling Stories, directed by Larry Andrews &
Rhodessa Jones (San Francisco, CA: Cultural Odyssey Project, 2000), DVD.
48
representation could capture the poignancy of her students‘ words and that she wanted to
give voice to them. What is interesting about Ensler‘s production, however, is that it is
not the women themselves who perform the monologues. Instead, the well-known
actresses Mary Alice, Glenn Close, Marisa Tomei, Rosie Perez, and Hazelle Goodman
stage the prisoners‘ work. The opening of the documentary explains that these actresses
performed the monologues at a benefit for prison education programs and then agreed to
offer an additional performance at the prison. Although the inmate writers display an
obvious sense of pride when these famous actresses perform their work, one does wonder
if the performance is somehow contradictory to Ensler‘s desire to give the women voices.
When one inmate, Betty Harris, watches Mary Alice perform her work and mouths the
words as the actress speaks, one begins to wonder if it would not be of at least equal
value to let Harris herself read her work for her peers.101
The Educational Shakespeare Company in Northern Ireland attempts to give
prisoners voice by having them make their own films and documentaries. Most recently
and ambitiously, prisoners in Belfast wrote, directed, and starred in the feature length
Mickey B (2006), a retelling of Macbeth. The DVD includes not only the film but also
two documentaries – one on the film‘s creation and the other on the impact of growing up
with violence. 102 The film‘s director Tom Magill says of his project: ―I know
Shakespeare is important enough to keep, and how we keep Shakespeare and make him
relevant to an audience today is by updating and translating him and making him
accessible to a new generation and to a new group of people […].‖103 One of the
101 What I Want My Words To Do To You: Voices From Inside a Maximum Security Prison,
directed by Madeleine Gavin, Judith Katz, & Gary Sunshine (Washington, D.C.: PBS Home Video, 2003),
DVD.
102 Mickey B, directed by Tom Magill (Belfast: Educational Shakespeare Company, 2006), DVD.
103 ―Documentary,‖ Mickey B, directed by Tom Magill (Belfast: Educational Shakespeare
Company, 2006), DVD.
49
prisoners working on the project attests to what this work of translating Shakespeare for
can offer its participants:
There‘s a lot of prisoners come in here and their IQ would be way
below average. No schooling all their life. In stolen cars, sniffing
glue, smoking dope, taking E‘s, partying, drinking constantly all
their lives. Whenever these people come they‘re sober and you‘re
trying to have a conversation with these people; they can‘t talk. So
you see them ones doing drama – it actually brings [them] out.104
This evaluation reveals that these programs not only allow prisoners to tell their stories,
but also gives them the skills to do so. Monica McWilliams, the Northern Ireland Human
Rights Commissioner, says of the program: ―People tell you that you‘re good for nothing,
and then you stand up and see yourself on stage or in front of a camera and see how
powerful and how good you are. That has to be worth something.‖105
Whatever their differences, at the core of all of these documentaries is the desire
to give voice to the inmates and their stories. The sensitive portrayals provided by these
films are in stark contrast to the ways that the institutions of law, justice, and the media
shape the stories of these men and women. Rogerson notes that ―[s]o many of these guys
do not have that many people listen to them. Some of them don‘t even talk to their
families anymore. And so they‘re looking for people to talk to so they can process.‖106
The camera provides an empathetic listener for the prisoners. It becomes a way for them
not only to testify to their own growth, but also to defy stereotypes of both themselves
and their lives in prison. They can portray themselves as intelligent, creative, contrite,
and emotional human beings and, thus, defy the fictionalized versions of prisoners that
Americans are used to. One of the joys of Rogerson‘s documentary for SBB member
104 Ibid.
105 Ibid.
106 Rogerson says that not all men are at this point and some refused to be filmed for the
documentary. Rogerson & Spitzmiller.
50
Floyd Gene Vaughn was its potential to complicate negative perceptions of prisoners:
―We did something bad. We deserve to be here. But on the other side, now that they see
this documentary they can say, ‗Well, there is hope for these guys. All you had to do was
give them a chance.‘‖107 For these prisoners, the recognition of their work, their worth,
and their potential for reform goes a long way towards establishing their self-esteem and
their ability to continue their work of reform during their incarceration.
Even when the reforms these films inspire are seemingly small, they are
ultimately profound in the world of a prison. Upon seeing himself on footage for a CNN
report on SBB, Jerry Guenthner says he discovered that he was a ―bald‖ man and cut off
his shoulder length mullet. After seeing himself again on the CBS evening news, he says
that he discovered he was a ―bald, fat‖ man; he put himself on a strict diet and lost over
100 pounds.108 Positive media exposure helped Guenthner recognize ways in which he
could change himself for the better even though he might never leave prison. Simply
knowing someone was watching benevolently allowed him to invest in himself in new
ways. Guenthner has committed himself to living each day in prison fully. He has
pursued all the college education available to him, trains dogs, continues his work in
SBB, and has begun a mentorship program.
These documentaries also allow inmates to tell their narratives to estranged family
members, giving them an opportunity to mend the painful relationships of their past. Hal
Cobb says his parents had difficulty understanding his crime and would not attend his
SBB performances. One afternoon, his sister happened upon a showing of Rogerson‘s
documentary at a local film festival and convinced their parents to come see it with her.
After seeing the film, his parents called him and expressed interested in seeing him
107 Guenthner, Vaughn, & Tofteland.
108 Ibid.
51
perform. Cobb said of their attendance at The Comedy of Errors in 2005: ―I hadn‘t heard
them laugh in fifteen years.‖ He said that his father told him after the show that during
the intermission, some people around him were discussing Cobb‘s previous work with
SBB, and his father proudly told them, ―That‘s my son.‖109 Tofteland also sent a copy of
the documentary to Ron Brown‘s estranged mother, and after watching it, she reconnected with her son. As these examples show, the film provides a medium for the
inmates to communicate with their families more successfully. Family members are given
a new perspective on the stories of their children, allowed to witness their lives in prison,
and see the personal growth they endeavor to undertake. It offers inmates a chance to
showcase their reform for some of those people who have been the most hurt by their
actions, those who might also be their harshest critics.
In addition to the people closest to them, the prisoner-actors are able to address an
equally difficult audience – the general public. Rogerson‘s rhetorical strategy in the film
works to undermine social stereotypes of prisoners. He first presents these men as actors,
works to establish empathy for them, and then slowly allows the details of their past lives
to be revealed throughout the film. Even with Sammie Byron, whose crime is revealed
early on, the audience first learns the patterns of sexual and physical abuse he endured as
a child. It is only at the end of the film that Rogerson reveals that this ideal prisoner and
SBB leader has served multiple prison sentences for a number of violent crimes. Even if
audience members, endeared by Byron‘s articulate leadership, can overlook this sordid
history, the parole board cannot. Although much of the film has anticipated Byron‘s
release from prison, a title at the end explains that Byron was denied parole shortly after
filming ended. Tofteland says that there is almost always an audible gasp at screenings of
the film when this revelation is made, and having offered a number of classroom
109 Hal Cobb, Leonard Ford, & Curt Tofteland, ―Commentaries,‖ Bonus Features, Shakespeare
Behind Bars, directed by Hank Rogerson (Santa Fe, NM: Philomath Films, 2005), DVD.
52
viewings of this film, I can confirm this observation. The audience‘s relationship to
Byron highlights the way in which the film works on its audience. The structure of the
film allows its viewers first to make a strong connection with the men in the film – to see
their humanity and their passion for Shakespeare. As they learn their crimes, the audience
members are faced with the difficulty of reconciling the men‘s crimes with their own
feelings of empathy toward them. They must come to terms with the fact that they share
an affinity with men who are child molesters, murders, kidnappers, or armed robbers.110
If prisons are for reform, they are charged in this moment with considering whether or
not they believe that reform can truly happen.
Although these confession scenes serve to complicate audience members‘ view of
the film‘s subjects, they also might be seen as a type of voyeurism. After all, one of the
reasons that this small genre of theater-in-prison documentaries (and a number of prison
reality shows) exists is that the men and women featured in them are curiosities. In each
of these films, there is a novelty that defies our expectations – prisoners performing
Shakespeare, prisoners performing for public audiences, Ensler‘s Hollywood friends
performing the work of prisoners, and prisoners making a feature-length film. The
combination of these novelties and the confession scenes can give these documentaries
the feeling of true crime entertainment.111 The experience is reminiscent of the midnineteenth century chain-gang entertainments that Foucault describes in Discipline and
Punish. As those prisoners traveled the country, spectators gathered to see them. Many
spectators wondered at their crimes and made a game out of guessing the offenses of the
110 Hitt attempts to articulate this disconnect in Act V when, after befriending Wilcox‘s students,
he discovers what their crimes are.
111 An article in the Wall Street Journal describes a performance of Twelve Angry Men in a
Lebanon prison in which the performance of Reginald Rose‘s script is interspersed with the men‘s dances,
testimonies, and the confession of their crimes. Melik Kaylan, ―Prisoners Play Jurors in the Land of the
Guilty,‖ Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2009.
53
prisoners. The prisoners began to play along with these games, displaying insignias
suggesting their crimes, miming their violent acts, mocking judges and law enforcement,
and boasting of future deeds.112 Foucault writes that the attention the men received
―aroused in the convict[s] not so much the compulsory marks of repentance as the
explosion of mad joy that denied the punishment.‖ The pious instruction that officials
believed spectators received from these prisoners – an understanding of the consequences
of crime – became complicated when the inmates sang songs that asked the crowd to
―choose between the barbarity of the executioners, the injustice of the judges and the
misfortune of the convicts who, though defeated today, would triumph one day.‖113
Foucault‘s assessment of chain-gang entertainments is not wholly removed from
what we see in Shakespeare Behind Bars and other prison documentaries. These are
individuals who are learning how to act. Can we trust that their confessions and
repentance are genuine? Are we simply falling for a con when we accept the ―barbarity‖
of their situation? Jerry Guenthner addresses these questions in the film, saying, ―I used
to think convicts would make good actors because [they are] good at lying, but it‘s the
opposite. It‘s about discovering the truth.‖114 Tofteland‘s emphasis on seeking out the
truth in oneself seems, on some level, to negate fears of the inauthentic. Moreover, the
impressively low recidivism rate of the prisoner-actors also speaks to the genuine work
the men do. Tofteland, however, emphasizes that accessing the truth does not come
simply with admitting one‘s crime. I asked him how he helps the men in SBB reconcile
their work on self-redemption with the fact that many of them are repeatedly denied
parole. He said that if they feel they are entitled to get out, they still have work left to do
112 Foucault, 257-264.
113 Foucault, 262.
114 Shakespeare Behind Bars.
54
and ―the ones who are my teachers are the ones for whom getting out of prison is not the
issue. Instead they go about living each day as fully and completely as they can.‖115
These men, he explains, have reached a high level of enlightenment; whether or not the
audience believes their story is not important.
James Thompson, a well-known theater-in-prison practitioner in Britain, points
out the darker side of taking prisoners‘ performed confessions as a form of repentance.
He describes a juvenile offenders program in Texas in which youths are required to make
public declarations of their names, their crimes, the length of their sentences, and the
names of their victims. Students learn the statement by rote, and the statement grows over
time to include the individuals‘ plans for re-socialization. The belief is that as these
individuals repeat the plan, they will begin to internalize its components. The statement is
to be delivered with a specified gestures and tone of voice. Successful delivery of the
statement is supposed to indicate rehabilitation. As Thompson argues, ―It might be ‗heartfelt‘ but there is no automatic connection between a fluently performed statement and the
performer‘s adherence to the values inherent in the script they are uttering. Many
Shakespearean actors would have been arrested and imprisoned over the years if the
performance and the person become conflated so easily.‖116
Thompson also criticizes a capital offenders course within this program that
requires offenders to re-enact their crimes in particularly painful ways and without
support for the emotions such re-enactments raise.117 In this case, the performance of
confession does not seem to serve a useful purpose for the convicts, and the theater work
115 Tofteland, telephone interview, February 22, 2010.
116 James Thompson, ―From the Stocks to the Stage: Prison Theater and the Theater of Prison,‖
Theater in Prison: Theory and Practice, ed. Michael Balfour (Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2004), 69.
117 Ibid., 70-72.
55
is instead either sterile or painful. Thompson sees this program as an example the harmful
potential latent in all theater-in-prison performances:
While the prison theater projects might hope that the prisoner is
given credit and respect for their creative efforts, often the only
credit given is to the system that has made the ‗perform in this
way‘. [The question] is whether prison theater can avoid becoming
part of this performance: a performance that not only dehumanizes
the prisoner but one that led to a huge rise in incarceration in both
the UK and US.118
In the wrong hands, prison-in-theater programs can do more harm than good. And when
prisoners‘ personal narratives are put on film there is also a risk that individuals might
use them in the wrong way, or worse, that their stories may be exploited for artistic or
commercial success. 119
Spitzmiller, in fact, points to her conflicted feelings about the success of the
Shakespeare Behind Bars documentary in an entry in her and Rogerson‘s Sundance diary
for PBS. She takes a moment away from descriptions of parties, celebrity sightings, and
meetings to reflect on the subjects of their film:
It seems so bizarre that the guys in the film can't be here. I was
struck yesterday by the fact that they have done this very private
psychological work in this prison theater program, and here at
Sundance, their very private work is becoming very public. As we
all enjoy watching and reflecting on it, they go about their day at
Luther Luckett living by the bells and orders of someone else. It
makes you really appreciate freedom. It makes you really think
about having the courage to face your own demons. These guys are
so courageous. We owe them big time.120
118 Ibid., 63.
119 Tofteland has refused some interested parties from filming his actors, fearing that they would
only exploit the footage for political or commercial reasons. Tofteland, telephone interview, February 22,
2010.
120 Jillann Spitzmiller, ―Sundance Diary – January 25-26, 2005,‖ Independent Lens blog, PBS,
accessed February 22, 2010, http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/insideindies/infocus/sundance_diary/
012605.html.
56
Spitzmiller notes how the film and its success are based on the personal, emotional
journeys of these men. Although these stories are reaching a wider audience via the film,
they are going on a journey that these men cannot. These stories may challenge the views
of audiences, but they really have little power to save the men who tell them. And
ultimately, both the producers and consumers are a part of the system that keeps these
men in prison.
Rogerson is attentive to his paradox and uses the visual rhetoric of the film to help
audiences question their own role in the prison system. The documentary crew was given
unprecedented access to the correctional complex. With this access, the crew worked to
put the audience in the position of a Luther Luckett guard, having them peer into SBB
rehearsals through locked doors and observe the yard through one of the central watch
towers. In his analysis of Bentham‘s Panopticon, Foucault describes the rooms in which
the prisoners are enclosed: ―They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in
which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. [ . . . ].‖121
Through the theaters created by Rogerson, these prisoner-actors become visible to
audiences, who are exercising the rights that Foucault ascribes to citizens in a Panopticon
system: ―Anyone may come and exercise in the central tower the functions of
surveillance, and that being the case, he can gain a clear idea of the way in which the
surveillance is practiced.‖122 It is a right not often practiced in relation to prisons in this
society. As a whole, citizens prefer to have others observe prisoners while they,
embracing a dungeon model, ignore that the offenders are there. Rogerson‘s film,
however, forces its audience to take up their right to enter the Panopitcon and to ―see
everything constantly.‖123 They must see the prisoners fully – the courageous work in
121 Foucault, 200.
122 Ibid., 207.
123 Ibid., 173.
57
the present and their horrendous pasts, the uplifting moments of rehabilitation and
brotherhood and the oppressive systems of rules and confinement. As they gaze on the
prisoners filing into their cells or watch them milling about the yard over the shoulder of
the central tower guard, they are reminded that they, too, are a part of this complex
system. Warden Larry Chandler puts the citizens‘ involvement in financial terms at the
beginning of the film, saying, ―You‘re paying $42 a day for something.‖124 When
Tofteland points out that SBB operates entirely on private funds, it becomes clear that
society‘s tax dollars are not contributing to the most inspirational part of the film.
The audience‘s implicit position in this system is emphasized at the end of the
film. This time, Rogerson turns to Shakespeare to articulate the paradox, using Prospero‘s
epilogue. In the speech, Prospero imagines the audience as his captors, saying:
Now ‗tis true
I must be here confined by you
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got,
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.
Prospero puts his fate in the audience‘s hands. He has been instructed in the ways of
mercy by Ariel and Miranda, and now he instructs his audience. He goes on to say:
Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults,
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.125
124 Shakespeare Behind Bars.
125 Epilogue 3-20.
58
When Cobb, as Prospero, delivers this speech in a prison performance, the metaphorical
implications cannot be ignored. Throughout the film, the prisoner-actors have attempted
to strip away social constructions of their own criminality. In the wake of this process,
they are left vulnerable, and even though they might have begun to forgive themselves,
they cannot escape their prisons (both literal and metaphorical) without the mercy of the
society that watches them. As the film moves to a celebratory scene in which the men
chat with their friends and families, the audience is left with hope, feeling that somehow
they have set these men free with their approval.
But Rogerson does not end his film at this triumphant moment. The scene is
abruptly disrupted by a guard, gathering the inmates for their re-entry into the prison. He
dons latex gloves, a reminder that these men will have to undergo strip searches before
they return back to their cells. As each man awaits his turn in a non-descript hallway, the
uplifting moment devolves into the monotony, humiliation, and control of daily prison
life. Through a series of fade-outs, the men dissolve from the scene. The sequence is like
a convoluted display of Ariel‘s magic. It is a stark reminder that there is no freedom for
them; no clapping audience can save them from this fate or truly provide the mercy they
need. Despite the emotional and redemptive moments of the production, it is a simply a
play.126 Although the audience might delight in the curiosity of this troupe or be inspired
by the journeys of its participants, Rogerson is careful to remind his viewers what it
means to be incarcerated in the American correctional system. Just as the viewers of his
film have come to question imbedded cultural attitudes towards prisoners, they must also
126 This fact was also made clear when I attended the 2009 SBB production of Macbeth. As we
listened to the prisoners discuss their process in the talk-back, crew members struck the set so that they and
the cast could exit the visitors‘ room in the timely manner required by prison officials. Absorbed in the
discussion, I was shocked when a crew member removed the cardboard placards covering the windows,
revealing the razor wire, gleaming in the setting summer sun. A fellow audience member and I looked at
each other out of the corner of our eyes; for a moment, we had forgotten where we were. Shakespeare
Behind Bars, Macbeth.
59
understand the inevitable ways in which these attitudes shape the prisoners‘ daily lives.
SBB is only an oasis in the prisoners‘ much longer journey through their incarceration.
Conclusion
When the boatswain reappears in Act V, scene i of The Tempest, Gonzalo says, ―I
prophesied if a gallows were on land / This fellow could not drown.‖127 Through his
survival, the boatswain affirms for Gonzalo his predisposition to crime. The boatswain
cannot win; either he dies or he is a criminal. A majority of American inmates find that
they, too, cannot escape the social constructions placed upon them. Although prisons are
supposed to be places of reform, they are particularly good at sustaining the gallows
marks of the men and women they house. The success of the SBB program is a testament
to how even small acts of critical self-awareness and creativity can challenge the social
constructions that define an individual. Rogerson‘s film provides witness to the
transformative potential of such acts and, by doing so, allows a broader audience to begin
to question what it means to be a criminal in contemporary American society.
127 V.i.220-222.
60
CHAPTER TWO
―‘TWAS A SWEET MARRIAGE AND WE WILL PROSPER WELL IN
OUR RETURN‖: CREATING AN INTERCULTURAL SHAKESPEARE
Unlike most of Shakespeare‘s plays, The Tempest has no single, literary source,
although it borrows from Ovid‘s Metamorphosis for Prospero‘s relinquishment of his
power and Michel de Montaigne‘s ―On the Cannibals‖ for Gonzalo‘s utopian vision of
the island.128 In the absence of a source for the plot, generations of editors and critics
have cited contemporary accounts of the wreck of the Sea Venture as a source for the
play. In 1609, the ship encountered a storm off the coast of Bermuda; the crew
miraculously survived, landing in Virginia nearly a year later. Reports of these events
arrived in London, written in pamphlet form, in 1610. William Strachey was aboard the
ship, and many argue his ―True Reportory of the Wrack,‖ a letter he wrote to an unknown
female recipient, was read by Shakespeare and incorporated into the first scene of The
Tempest. Sylvester Jourdain, another passenger on the Sea Venture, likewise wrote an
account of the experience in A Discovery of the Barmudas, which could also be a source
for Shakespeare‘s text.129
128 Ovid, ―Medea and Aeson,‖ in Metamorphoses, trans. A.D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986), 150; Michel de Montaigne, ―On the Cannibals,‖ in The Essays: A Selection, trans.
M. A. Screech (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 79-92.
129 The relationship of Shakespeare‘s play to the Sea Venture has been contested in the last
fifteen years as some critics, who date The Tempest earlier than 1611 and suggest that the similarities
between the play and the shipwreck are insubstantial. They argue that, ultimately, the elements of the wreck
that Shakespeare incorporates are not unique to Strachey‘s text. For an argument that disputes the
relationship between The Tempest and ―True Reportory,‖ see Roger Stritmatter & Lynne Kositsky,
―Shakespeare and the Voyagers Revisited,‖ Review of English Studies, 58 (2007): 447-472, and for an
argument in favor of Shakespeare‘s familiarity with the text, see Alden T. Vaughan, ―William Strachey‘s
‗True Reportory‘ and Shakespeare: A Close Look at the Evidence,‖ Shakespeare Quarterly 59, no. 3
(2008): 245-273, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40210277.
61
The long association between the Sea Venture and The Tempest has caused many
to associate the play with the European settlement of the Americas; many, especially
American critics, view The Tempest as Shakespeare‘s ―American‖ play. While the postcolonial readings of British cultural materialists have viewed The Tempest from the
vantage point of nineteenth-century British imperialism, American new historicists –
John Gillies, Stephen Greenblatt, and Jeffrey Knapp in particular – have seen the play as
intimately connected with the settling of the Americas and the Virginia Colony.130 Jerry
Brotton writes of the American critics: ―In claiming an exclusively American context for
the play‘s production, American new historicist critics overinvest something of their own
particularly post-colonial identities as American intellectuals within the one text that
purports to establish a firm connection between America and the culture which these
critics analyse with such intensity: early modern England.‖131 Regarding colonial-based
readings from both sides of the Atlantic, Brotton raises the concern that ―colonial
readings have offered a historically anachronistic and geographically restrictive view of
the play, which have overemphasized the scale and significance of English involvement
in the colonization of the Americas in the early decades of the seventeenth century.‖132
Emphasizing the settlement of the Americas blinds readers to the diverse experiences of
exploration and colonization occurring during the early modern period; it can also be
narcissistic as Americans use the play to establish a connection with the British
130 John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994); Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social
Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988); Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England,
America, and Literature From „Utopia‟ to „The Tempest‟ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
For an overview of the American reading of Caliban see Alden T. Vaughan & Virginia Mason Vaughan,
―The American School,‖ in Shakespeare‟s Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 118-143.
131 Jerry Brotton, ―‗This Tunis, sir, was Carthage‘: Contesting Colonialism in The Tempest,‖ in
Post-Colonial Shakespeares, eds. Ania Loomba & Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998), 27.
132 Brotton, 24.
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playwright and to limit the text to their perceptions of (and, in some cases, guilt over)
colonization. Thus, this brand of self-containment can, ironically, take a literary discourse
that is meant to uncover the voice of the oppressed and muddle it. As Francis Barker and
Peter Hulme argue, a post-colonial reading of the text should try to account for the
colonizers‘ ―anxiety and the drive to closure it necessitates.‖ ―Yet,‖ they note, ―these
aspects of [The Tempest‘s] ‗rich complexity‘ have been signally ignored by European and
North American critics, who have tended to listen exclusively to Prospero‘s voice: after
all, he speaks their language. It has been left to those who have suffered colonial
usurpation to discover and map the traces of that complexity […].‖133
In seeking out these complex voices, some critics have turned to alternative
colonial models for the play, more often than not using Caliban to center their arguments.
Dympna Callaghan proposes a Caliban closer to the motherland in her study of the Irish
as a prototype for Shakespeare‘s slave, while Malvern Van Wyk Smith makes an
argument that Shakespeare could have been referencing what we now know as South
Africa even if few English had traveled to the area; he cites increased English discourse
about the Cape in the 1590‘s and the seventeenth century as the basis for his
argument.134 Van Wyk Smith argues that Shakespeare might have used dispatches from
the Cape as the basis for Caliban. His argument, however, relies a great deal on
Shakespeare‘s familiarity with Dutch texts and, thus, can at times seem a bit far-fetched.
As these two examples show, the ambiguity of the island‘s location opens up ample
opportunities for the geographic location and sourcing of the text. In all cases, creating a
133 Francis Barker & Peter Hulme, ―Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: The Discursive Contexts of The Tempest,‖ in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), 204.
134 Dympna Callaghan, ―Irish Memories in The Tempest,‖ in Shakespeare Without Women:
Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (London: Routledge, 2000), 97-138; Malvern
Van Wyk Smith, ―The Africa that Shakespeare Imagined; or, Notes for Aspirant Film Makers,‖
Shakespeare in Southern Africa 21 (2009): 31-46.
63
geographic connection to the text relies on having a population of ―Calibans,‖ a group of
outsiders or a group that is oppressed by another. Indeed, as colonial and post-colonial
patterns developed over the centuries, the relationship between Caliban and Prospero
offered a springboard for critics throughout the world who have turned to Shakespeare‘s
text to articulate similar relationships in their own countries.
The ―prophetic‖ nature of Shakespeare and his text has caused commentators and
critics across the globe to use The Tempest to draw attention to the colonizer-colonized
relationships in their own countries. In his commentary on Indian colonialism, Caliban
and Gandhi, Mulk Raj Anand wrote that ―whoever he was William Shakespeare was a
prophet of the emergent imperial sway. […] Prospero‘s magic anticipates, symbolically,
the machines with which the Europeans subjugated the Black and Brown communities of
Africa, Americas and Asia, living in and with nature.‖135 Meredith Anne Skura, writing
from a Western perspective, agrees, saying that ―Shakespeare was the first to show one of
us mistreating a native, the first to represent a native from the inside, the first to allow a
native to complain onstage, and the first to make that New World encounter problematic
enough to generate the current attention to the play.‖136 In the early twentieth century,
much of this discourse equated Caliban with the oppressive side in these relationships.
Writing in 1900, Uruguayan philosopher and politician José Enrique Rodó saw Ariel and
Caliban as two complementary elements of colonization: Ariel, Spanish-American
culture at its best, and Caliban, North American civilization at its worst.137 In 1930, the
South African journalist Leonard Barnes published Caliban in Africa: An Impression of
135 Mulk Raj Anand, Caliban and Gandhi: Letters to „Bapu‟ from Bombay (New Delhi: Arnold
Publishers, 1991), 93.
136 Skura, Meredith. ―Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest.‖
Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 58.
137 For a discussion of Rodó, see Vaughan & Vaughan, Shakespeare‟s Caliban, 147-153.
64
Colour-Madness, sharply criticizing Dutch Afrikaners, who he viewed as an uncivilized
people, claiming their system of segregation was ―worthy of the freckled whelp of
Sycorax.‖138 In the 1950‘s, Octave Mannoni shifted the view on Caliban when he
compared the relationship between Prospero and his slave to the situation in Madagascar,
indentifying Caliban with the oppressed natives.139 Philip Mason expanded on
Mannoni‘s ideas, applying The Tempest‘s symbolism more broadly to India and Asia as
well as the Americas and Africa.140 In 1969, Aimé Césaire published his play Une
Tempête as a commentary on the situation in Martinique, and that same year, Roberto
Fernández Retamar linked the Cuban people with Caliban in his essay on Fidel
Castro.141 As Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin have noted, ―[c]olonial masters imposed
their value system through Shakespeare, and in response colonized people often answered
back in Shakespearean accents.‖142 That has certainly been the case, yet why do
colonized people repeatedly turn to Shakespearean plays, the product of the colonist
country, to address the issues of their own colonization?
Shakespeare‘s position as a cultural export of colonialism complicates the critical
views on the place of his work in formerly colonized countries. Post-colonial studies
includes a diverse field of opinions on the power and influence of the colonizers‘
138 Quoted in Vaughan & Vaughan, Shakespeare‟s Caliban, 158-159.
139 Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, trans. Pamela
Powesland (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990).
140 Vaughan & Vaughan, Shakespeare‟s Caliban, 161; Philip Mason, Prospero‟s Magic
(London: Oxford University Press, 1962).
141 Aimé Césaire, A Tempest, trans. Richard Miller (New York: TCG Translations, 2002);
Vaughan & Vaughan, Shakespeare‟s Caliban, 156.
142 Ania Loomba & Martin Orkin, ―Introduction,‖ in Post-Colonial Shakespeares, eds. Ania
Loomba & Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998), 7.
65
language on the colonized. 143 Some critics argue that it is naïve to believe that texts like
Shakespeare‘s allow oppressed cultures any sort of power against the violence with
which their colonizer‘s tongue was lashed against them. Stephen Greenblatt argues that a
majority of the narratives of European exploration either envisioned natives as having no
language or attested erroneously that there was no language barrier at all.144 By ignoring
natives‘ language systems in one of these two ways, European explorers were able to
dismiss native culture. Thus, spreading European languages, through texts such as the
Bible, and eventually Shakespeare‘s plays, became not only a way to exert control in
colonized countries but also to bring culture to ―wild and primitive‖ lands. In his seminal
study on colonization and The Tempest, Paul Brown suggests that ―colonialist discourse
voices a demand both for order and disorder, producing a disruptive other in order to
assert the superiority of the colonizer.‖145 Language, including Shakespeare‘s dramas,
became a way to exert the superiority of European culture; many scholars see attempts to
re-appropriate Shakespeare as a carryover of that control, without acknowledgement of
the injustice with which his works were instated.
143 The appropriateness of the term post-colonialism itself has been discussed it detail within the
field. Anne McClintock writes that the use of the word ―post‖ reduces colonialism to of part of a linear,
historical (European) progression and denies the continued effects of colonialism as well as the existence of
new forms of foreign influence; see her ―The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‗Postcolonialism,‘‖ in
Colonial Discourse / Postcolonial Theory, eds. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, & Margaret Iversen
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 255. Susan Bennett adds to this discussion by
distinguishing between anti-colonial, pre-colonial, neo-colonial, and post-colonial in order to create more
distinct periods of the colonial process. In ―The Post-Colonial Body?: Thinking Through The Tempest,‖ in
Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past (London: Routledge, 1995), 119150. For an additional discussion of the term, see Brotton, 25-26.
144 Stephen J. Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York:
Routledge, 1990), 16-39.
145 Paul Brown, ―‗This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine‘: The Tempest and the Discourse
of Colonialism,‖ in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, eds. Jonathan Dollimore &
Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 58.
66
Other post-colonial critics, however, see the re-appropriation of Shakespeare by
colonial and former colonial groups as a subversion of European culture. Homi Bhabha‘s
theory of hybridity, one of the most cited theories for tracing that subversion, is
sometimes criticized as oversimplifying the colonial experience and failing to account for
pre-colonial culture.146 Yet critics such as Natasha Distiller have agreed that ignoring
hybridity can also ignore the ―way that culture works in the context of histories of
colonization and oppression.‖147 With particular reference to Shakespeare in South
Africa, Distiller defends the theory of hybridity. She suggests that South African writers‘
ability to produce a South African Shakespeare defies ―the notion that cultures can be
separated and policed by the state, or by any other external force.‖148 She views this
hybrid Shakespeare as a potential means for resisting apartheid‘s constructions of cultural
and racial difference and argues that the myth of cultural purity is impossible to sustain,
both in South Africa and elsewhere, when the adaptability of Shakespeare‘s works is
recognized.149 Shakespeare‘s ability to play, and play meaningfully, in multiple cultures
cannot be denied. As Dennis Kennedy point out, even though most stage histories
included in single-play editions of Shakespeare‘s texts focus almost entirely on Anglo-
146 Homi K. Bhabha, ―Signs Taken for Wonders,‖ in Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd ed., eds.
Julie Rivkin & Michael Ryan (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 1167-1184; Ania Loomba,
Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2005), 145-153.
147 Natasha Distiller, ―South African Shakespeare: A Model for Understand Cultural
Transformation?,‖ Shakespeare in Southern Africa (2003): 21-27, accessed March 1, 2011,
http://find.gale.com/gtx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IACDocuments&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=I
TOF&docId=A122765920&source=gale&srcprod=ITOF&userGroupName=lom_umichanna&version=1.0.
148 Natasha Distiller, ―A Sign that History is Happening: Shakespeare in 20 th-Century South
African Literature,‖ Literature Compass 2 (2005): np, accessed March 1, 2001, DOI: 10.1111/j.17414113.2005.00145.x.
149 Distiller, ―South African Shakespeare.‖ For other seminal studies on Post-colonialism and The
Tempest see Thomas Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial
Appropriations (London: Routledge, 1999); Deborah Willis, ―Shakespeare‘s Tempest and the Discourse of
Colonialism,‖ Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 29, no. 2 (1989): 277-289.
67
American productions, he is ―actually the most performed playwright in the world at
large. He regularly crosses national and linguistic boundaries with apparent ease.‖150
Shakespeare‘s ability to travel across international borders and the ways in which
Anglo-American audiences react to ―exotic‖ Shakespearean productions is at the center
of this chapter. As a point of departure, I examine the genre of early modern travel plays
to consider how travel dramas offered a form of international exploration for early
modern audiences. The exoticism of these productions, however, was tempered by a
desire to contain and convert foreign worlds and uphold local interests, a method, I argue,
that is not wholly removed from contemporary productions of The Tempest that place the
play in an international setting. To examine this idea, I look at two productions that use
the setting of South Africa to explore the post-apartheid reverberations of the play. South
Africa – a place where the English traded very little during the early seventeenth century
and where America never held colonies – seems an unlikely candidate for this study. Yet
these two productions – Janice Honeyman‘s 2009 production for the Baxter Theatre in
Cape Town and the Royal Shakespeare Company and Indiana University theater
professor Murray McGibbon‘s Tempest project which played in both Pietermaritzburg
(2007) and Bloomington (2009) – provide an unusual opportunity to study how
international audiences react to these re-visionings of the play. Through these audience
reactions, we can see not only South Africans reactions to Shakespearean productions,
but also how Anglo-American reactions to the same productions might be shaped by new,
and more subtle, forms of post-colonialism.
150 Dennis Kennedy, Foreign Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 2.
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Theatrical Colonialism in Early Modern England
In 1599, the Dutch traveler Thomas Platter visited London and documented what
he saw, including entertainments in the city. He wrote of theater in the city: ―With these
and many more amusements the English pass their time, learning at a play what is
happening abroad; […] since the English for the most part do not travel much, but prefer
to learn foreign matters and take their pleasures at home.‖151 Platter‘s insight suggests
most English residents would not have real experience with travel during the early
modern period, an impression that Meredith Anne Skura confirms, noting that despite
popular notions of the Elizabeth period as a golden age of travel and colonization, it was
not until the war with Spain was over in 1604 that travel routes were opened and ships,
previously used for battle, could be put to use for exploration.152 Sea travels necessitated
a powerful patron, and any foreign travel from this island nation (except to Wales and
Scotland) would have required a sea voyage. As a result, ―Elizabethan England struck
some contemporaries as an insular nation with no interest in the wider world – or, at best,
as a nation of armchair travelers.‖153 Much of this ―armchair traveling‖ was aided by
travel narratives that were increasingly popular in the early seventeenth century and, as
Platter suggests, by a genre of travel plays that also came into vogue during the period.
Indeed, many of these travel plays were, in fact, based on popular travel narratives. In
addition to The Tempest‘s relationship with the Sea Venture wreck, the travels of brothers
Anthony, Thomas, and Robert Shirley were portrayed in Anthony Nixon‘s pamphlet, The
Three English Brothers (1607), and John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins‘s
151 Thomas Platter, Thomas Platter‟s Travels in England 1599, trans. Clare Williams (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1937), 170.
152 Skura, 55.
153 William H. Sherman, ―Travel and Trade,‖ in A Companion to Renaissance Drama, ed. Arthur
F. Kinney (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 111.
69
play The Travels of Three English Brothers (1607). Two sensational pamphlets from
1609 about English pirates John Ward and Simon Dansiker were the basis for Robert
Daborne‘s play A Christian Turned Turk (1612).154 Such travel plays shed light on not
only early modern ideas about travel and exploration, but also the place of theater in
understanding foreign lands.
John Fletcher‘s The Island Princess, for example, investigates the issues
surrounding colonial settlement in ―India,‖ a term that encapsulated both western
settlements in America and the West Indies and eastern settlements in India and beyond.
Specifically, the play is set on two islands in the Moluccan archipelago south of the
Philippines, known in early modern England as the Spice Islands.155 First performed at
Court in 1621 by the King‘s Men, the play centers on Quisara, the princess of the island
Tidore, and her vying suitors. Quisara‘s beauty and riches embody the characteristics of a
colonized land, and her suitors – the governor of Ternata and the Portuguese colonists
Ruy Dias and Armusia – represent the struggle to obtain control over that land. On the
one hand, Fletcher‘s play shows why the exploration and settlement of such lands is so
enticing. Armusia, for example, describes his impressions upon their ―blessed‖ arrival on
the island, saying that there ―every wind that rises blows perfumes, / And every breath of
air is like an Incense: / The treasure of the Sun dwells here, each tree / As if it envied old
Paradise, / Strives to bring forth immortal fruit […].‖156 He envisions the island as a sort
of new Eden, beckoning him and tempting him with its beauty. Moreover, he describes
the rivers and lands as throwing up ―pearls,‖ ―unknown gems,‖ and a ―thousand riches‖ –
154 Sherman, 113.
155 Gordon McMullan, ―Introduction,‖ The Island Princess, by John Fletcher (London: Nick
Hern Books, 2002), xiii.
156 Fletcher, John, The Island Princess (London: Nick Hern Books, 2002), I.iii.
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―Nothing that bears a life, but brings a treasure.‖157 The speech echoes the utopian view
of the island brought forth by Gonzalo and supported by Adrian in The Tempest. Shortly
after the men‘s violent landing on the island, Gonzalo praises their new surroundings as
paradise. Adrian agrees with this judgment, saying, ―The air breathes upon us here most
sweetly,‖ to which Gonzalo responds, ―here is everything advantageous to life. […] How
lush and lusty the grass looks! How green!‖158 Like Armusia, these men are seduced by
their new land, its beauty, and its potential treasures, a seduction echoed in the person of
Quisara in Fletcher‘s play.
Armusia‘s relationship with Quisara, however, also reveals the dangers of such
enticement. In Fletcher‘s play the danger of seduction lies in its ability to tempt
Europeans to conversion, specifically within a Christian context, but more generally, to
giving themselves over to the native way of life. Armusia eventually secures a betrothal
to Quisara, seemingly succeeding in the ―takeover‖ of the island. His success, however, is
complicated by her insistence that he convert to her Islamic faith. The demand awakens
Armusia to how ―lost‖ he has become in this venture:
How terribly I shake! Is this the venture?
The trial that you talk‘d of? where have I been?
And how forgot myself? how lost my memory?
When did I pray or look up steadfastly?
Had any goodness in my heart to guide me?
That I should give this vantage to mine enemy,
The enemy to my peace; forsake my faith?159
As their argument over his conversion escalates, Armusia lays out a blistering attack on
Quisara‘s faith, revealing early modern attitudes toward Islam:
I hate and curse ye,
Condemn your deities, spurn at their powers,
157 Fletcher, I.iii.
158 II.i.46-54.
159 Fletcher, IV.v.
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And where I meet your maumet Gods, I‘ll swing ‗em
Thus o‘er my head, and kick ‗em into puddles,
Nay I will out of vengeance search your Temples,
And with those hearts that serve my God, demolish
Your shambles of wild worships.160
The violent images of his tirade suggest the vigor with which he must reclaim himself
from the life of the wild natives. If this place is a new Eden, it comes with serpents, ready
to bring this paradise to ruin. Through Armusia‘s story, Fletcher highlights the traps of
colonialism, preying upon English anxiety about the darker side of foreign ventures.
Yet Fletcher also complicates this anxiety by having the natives express their own
view of European settlement. One of Quisara‘s other suitors, the Governor, outlines the
process of colonization: ―These men came hither as my vision tells me, / Poor,
weatherbeaten, almost lost, starv‘d, feebled […]. / Grew rich and powerful, suck‘d the
fat, and freedom / Of this most blessed Isle, taught her to tremble […].‖161 Although the
Governor has a villainous role in the play, he, like Caliban, becomes the voice of the
colonized. Echoing the Governor‘s speech, Caliban reminds Prospero that he was once
dependent on him for direction; Caliban showed his master ―all the qualities o‘th‘isle, /
The fresh spring, brine-pits, barren place and fertile […],‖ only to have Prospero grow
stronger, more powerful, and able to take over the island.162 In these and other scenes,
Fletcher shows the various sides of colonization, attempting to insert his audience into the
complex discourse of colonialism.163
160 Fletcher, IV.v.
161 Fletcher, IV, i.
162 I.ii.340-341.
163 For more critical studies of The Island Princess see Valerie Forman, ―Captivity and ‗Free‘
Trade: Fletcher‘s The Island Princess and English Commerce in the East Indies in the Early 1600s,‖ in
Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 113-145; Claire Jowitt, ―The Island Princess and Race,‖ in Early
Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, eds. Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., Patrick Cheney, & Andrew
Hadfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 287-297; Shankar Raman, ―Imaginary Islands: The
Colonial Fantasies of John Fletcher‘s The Island Princess,‖ in Framing „India‟: The Colonial Imaginary in
Early Modern Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 155-188.
72
Almost twenty years later, Richard Brome wrote The Antipodes, a comic play that
satirizes travel and travel narratives. First performed in 1638 by Queen Henrietta's Men at
the Salisbury Court Theatre, the play depicts the ―curing‖ of Peregrine, a man obsessed
with travel. Peregrine‘s father, Joyless, seeks the assistance of Hughball, a doctor of
physic, to reclaim his son from the travel narratives he consumes and to make him
attentive to his unconsummated, three-year marriage. Hughball‘s method is to employ
Letoy, who heads a theater company, to have his actors enact a play depicting the
Antipodes (he chooses the most exotic land possible, rejecting Europe, Arabia, Northern
Africa, India, and the Middle East as too close to home: ―No, I will pitch no nearer than
th‘Antipodes, / That which is farthest distant, foot to foot / Against our region‖).164 This
far distance delights Peregrine with its novelty. A devotee of the travel writing of Sir
John Mandeville, Peregrine claims that Mandeville was the only one who came close to
the region, and he revels in the possibility of charting this unmarked territory. Based on
what he knows from Mandeville‘s writing, he anticipates seeing ―Dragons, and serpents,
elephants white and blue, / Unicorns, and lions of many colours, / And monster more as
numberless and nameless.‖165 After drugging his patient, Hughball convinces Peregrine
that he has slept through the journey to the other side of the world. Peregrine, who has
never attended a play, is absorbed into the world created by Letoy‘s actors and is made to
believe that he walks through the worlds described in popular travel narratives. The
scheme echoes Platter‘s statement that the English go to the theater to ―travel,‖ to
experience ―first hand‖ the worlds they encounter in written accounts.166 As the
164 Richard Brome, The Antipodes, ed. Anthony Parr (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1995), I.iii.63-87.
165 Brome, I.iii.39-40. There was, in fact, a travel play (now lost) based on Mandeville‘s writings
titled Sir John Mandeville and performed between 1599-1600. Sherman,109.
166 Kim F. Hall explores in detail another popular travel narrative, A Geographical Historie of
Africa by Johannes Leo Africanus. Africanus, a native of Granada, was captured by pirates and delivered to
73
audience members laugh at Peregrine‘s gullibility they are, perhaps, laughing at their own
culpability in accepting the theater as a stand-in for actual travel and exploration.
Brome‘s play, however, shows how even through imagined travel, audiences can
implicate themselves in the same colonial notions of control presented in Fletcher‘s play.
Once in the Antipodes, the monstrosities that Peregrine pays the most attention to are
cultural oddities rather than exotic beasts. In this world, husbands are submissive to their
wives, old spouses willingly let younger spouses take lovers, courtiers beg, Puritans
perform plays, and high class men are illiterate while watermen write poetry. These
reversals are ultimately too much for this English traveler, and eventually these behaviors
must be corrected.
The plans of Hughball, Letoy, and the actors go askew when Peregrine discovers
the company‘s props backstage, including statues, planets, monsters, armor, and beards.
One of the company men, Byplay, describes Peregrine‘s reaction to this discovery to
Letoy:
Wonder he did
A while it seemed, but yet undaunted stood;
When on the sudden, with thrice knightly force,
And thrice thrice puissant arm he snatched down
The sword and shield that I played Bevis with,
Rusheth amongst the foresaid properties,
Kills monster after monster, takes the puppets
Prisoners, knocks down the Cyclops, tumbles all
Our jigambobs and trinkets to the wall.
Spying at last the crown and royal robes
[…] He takes the imperial diadem and crowns
Himself King of the Antipodes, and believes
He had justly gained the kingdom in his conquest.167
the Vatican where he wrote the stories of his travels. These stories were translated into English by John
Pory around 1600. His narrative, "Like other popular European narratives that begin to equate the
experience of writing the narrative with travel itself, A Geographical Historie gives the reader the sense
that the travels described are almost concurrent with the time of reading.‖ Hall notes that Africanus‘s
narrative shares a picture of Africa that is ―an almost exact inversion of English rule […]‖ much like the
Antipodes presented in Brome‘s play. Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in
Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 38-39.
167 Brome, III.i.300-317.
74
Upon proclaiming himself king, ―he begins to govern / With purpose to reduce the
manners / of this country to his own,‖ a process that Peregrine later calls a
―reformation.‖168 Even within this constructed fantasy, Peregrine enacts the narrative of
colonialism. The differences between his own culture and the Antipodes are, ultimately,
too ―monstrous,‖ a term used often in the play, to observe them only as a traveler. He
must seek to reform them into the image of his own European culture. 169
Like Fletcher, Brome takes his audience on a journey, but this journey cannot be a
simple pleasure cruise. While theater allows the audience to travel, even in an imaginary
context the antithetical culture must be corrected. And while, perhaps, the audience
laughs at Peregrine‘s foibles, they are complicit in the same dual experience of voyeurism
and corrective behavior. Both Fletcher‘s and Brome‘s plays utilize and sustain
stereotypes of people in these foreign lands, embedding these unknown locales with a
sense of mystery while at the same time sustaining their audiences as ―superior‖ travelers
to these lands. And although The Tempest predates both of these plays, one sees these
same themes emerging from Shakespeare‘s text. In discussing The Tempest as a travel
play, Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman write: ―When the spectators are ‗tourists‘
who never leave home, and the theatre is a place for the staging of secrets by actors who
are ‗natives of the island‘ both in and out of rôle, the local and the exotic become truly
inextricable – at least for the duration of the theatrical experience […].‖170 Yet in
Fletcher, Brome, and Shakespeare‘s plays, the local and exotic are also in continual
168 Brome, III.i.319-321; Brome, IV.i.260-263.
169 For more criticism of The Antipodes see Kim F. Hall, ―A World of Difference: Travel
Narratives and the Inscription of Culture,‖ in Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early
Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 25-61; Julie Sanders, ―The Politics of Escapism:
Fantasies of Travel and Power in Richard Brome‘s The Antipodes and Ben Jonson‘s The Alchemist,” in
Writing and Fantasy, eds. Ceri Sullivan & Barbara White (London: Longman, 1999), 137-150.
170 Peter Hulme & William H. Sherman, ―Introduction,‖ in “The Tempest” and Its Travels
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 12.
75
conflict with each other, and this sort of conflict, I would argue, is not wholly removed
from contemporary, post-colonial productions of Shakespeare‘s travel play.
Post-colonial performances are designed to question and combat issues of race
and empire, ultimately exposing embedded perceptions and attitudes of racial injustice.
Yet these plans can backfire and these plays can come to rely on exotic stereotypes
similar to those of the early modern theater. While the colonial, corrective impulses one
sees in early modern drama might not exist in contemporary drama, unaddressed
problems still linger in what Western theater producers and critics might laud as a postcolonial theatrical experience.
To discuss the conflict between the local and the exotic in contemporary
performances, I turn to two recent performances of The Tempest staged in post-apartheid
South Africa. Martin Orkin notes that The Tempest was not often staged in South Africa
during the decades of apartheid; yet Janice Honeyman and Murray McGibbon have both
used the play recently to examine issues of control, forgiveness, and redemption in the
wake of apartheid. 171 Their productions have been staged for South African and AngloAmerican audiences, offering unusual insights into the effects of post-colonial readings
on both ―exotic‖ and the ―local‖ viewers. Before examining these productions, however,
an overview of the place of Shakespeare in South Africa is useful.
Shakespeare in South Africa: An Overview
The commander of an English ship on its way to the East Indies in 1607, William
Keeling put this crew to work, not tending to the ship, but learning speeches, making
costumes, and rehearsing Hamlet. Off the coast of Sierra Leone, Keeling decided the
171 Martin Orkin, ―Whose Thing of Darkness?: Reading/Representing The Tempest in South
Africa After April 1994,‖ in Shakespeare and National Culture, eds. John J. Joughin & John Drakakis
(Manchester: Manchester University Press,1997): 163.
76
actors were ready for an audience. He invited men from another ship in their fleet to
come watch, and under the night sky, with the African coast in their sights, his crew
performed the tragedy of the Danish prince.172 Tradition has it that Keeling‘s crew also
played Hamlet when the fleet was anchored off the South African coast for two weeks,
marking Shakespeare‘s entrance into the region as early as the seventeenth century.173 In
addition to this legendary performance, Hamlet is also said to have been enacted on the
battlements of Fort Frederick in the Algoa Bay in 1799. This production, however, may
also be the stuff of legend; 1801 marks the first recorded performance of Shakespeare in
South Africa, a production of Henry IV, Part I for the opening of the African Theatre in
Cape Town.174
After this first production and the establishment of British colonial presence in the
country in 1806, Shakespeare became a regular offering in South African theaters. His
presence in the nation‘s cultural landscape became contentious, however, as various
ethnic factions used the playwright‘s works as tools in the social struggles of twentiethcentury South Africa. In the early part of the century, black African Sol Plaatje used the
work of Shakespeare to showcase the value of native Africans and their languages. A
journalist, politician, and translator, he was active in the fight against the oppression of
African people, and he found Shakespeare useful in this fight. Plaatje argued that
Shakespeare showed ―that nobility and valour, like depravity and cowardice, are not the
monopoly of any color.‖175 Because of this quality, along with the beauty of the
172 Giles Milton, Nathaniel‟s Nutmeg (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999): 151-152;
See also Gary Taylor, ―Hamlet in Africa 1607,‖ in Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the
Early Modern Period, eds. Ivo Kamps & Jyotsna G. Singh (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 223-248.
173 Laurence Wright, ―Shakespeare in South Africa: Alpha and ‗Omega,‘‖ Postcolonial Studies 7,
no. 1 (2004): 64.
174 Ibid., 66.
175 Sol Plaatje (William Tsininya-Chaka), ―A South African‘s Homage,‖ in A Book of Homage to
Shakespeare, ed. Israel Gollancz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1916), 338-339.
77
playwright‘s language, Plaatje thought that Shakespeare‘s plays would be an asset in the
establishment of a new African literary canon, especially since it appeared that ―some of
the stories on which his dramas are based find equivalents in African folk-lore.‖176
Plaatje himself translated The Comedy of Errors and The Merchant of Venice.
Particularly interested in preserving his own indigenous language of Tswanana from the
cultural ravages of colonialists, Plaatje translated Shakespeare‘s plays into his language
―to demonstrate that whatever could be said by Shakespeare could be matched by the
riches of the Tswanana language and culture.‖ His goal was not, as some critics assume,
to introduce the playwright to his rural brethren but instead to ―harness Shakespeare as a
vehicle of African language and culture [...].‖177
Plaatje was not alone in using Shakespeare to legitimize a language other than
English in South Africa. In 1908, the Afrikaans Language Movement (Akrikaanse
Taalvereniging) staged scenes from Much Ado About Nothing so as to have Afrikaans
recognized as its own language, independent of Dutch.178 After World War II, when the
power of Afrikaners grew, the government began staging more productions of
Shakespeare in Afrikaans, attempting, in a fashion similar to Plaatje‘s, to validate
Afrikaans culture by showing its language capable of expressing Shakespeare‘s poetry
and its artists capable of producing plays as impressive as those of the British.179
176 Ibid., 338-339.
177 David Schalkwyk & Lerothodi Lapula, ―Solomon Plaatje, William Shakespeare, and
Translations of Culture,‖ Pretexts 9, no. 1 (2000): 17-19.
178 Rohan Quince, Shakespeare in South Africa: Stage Productions During the Apartheid Era
(New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 4.
179 This movement, however, was coupled with an effort by the Afrikaans government to
distance Shakespeare from state schools. While the British imperialists placed heavy emphasis on
Shakespeare in their mandated curriculum, inferring that one needed ―Shakespeare to be fully educated,
indeed fully human,‖ the Afrikaners phased him out of required reading lists. Martin Orkin, Drama and the
South African State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 235.
78
On the eve of apartheid, Rohan Quince notes, black Shakespeare productions also
appeared, their cultural group‘s own bid to prove themselves civilized and educated.180
Quince cites a 1946 all-black production of The Tempest organized by liberal whites and
performed at the Cape Town City Hall. The collaboration between a group of white
theater practitioners and black performers was seen as a success, the black performers
living up to this national test of ―civilization.‖ Said one contemporary reviewer: ―Taken
as a whole the production was excellent and can, without a doubt, be said to have reached
the highest standards yet attained by Coloured actors in South Africa. For this reason the
occasion was a historic one.‖181 This moment of collaboration, however, was fleeting as
apartheid settled over the country in 1948.
After the establishment of apartheid, national theater in South Africa consisted
mainly of foreign and local plays based in English or Afrikaans culture. The government
increasingly interfered with the production of black and multicultural works, and by the
late 1950‘s a generation of black and white writers favoring a hybrid, multicultural
writing style had been exiled. Yet Drum Magazine, a publication for black audiences in
South Africa, also appeared during this decade, and as Natasha Distiller points out,
―Shakespeare permeates both the writings of, and about, Drum magazine, its staffers, and
Sophiatown itself, which through texts, including interviews, literature, journalism,
criticism, and conference papers, has been constructed as a Shakespearean space.‖182
The publication and its supporters repeatedly returned to Shakespeare, a cultural symbol
that seemed to transcend the strictest of cultural boundaries, to help articulate their ideas
about freedom and equality for black South Africans.
180 Quince, 6.
181 The Sun, April 15, 1946, quoted in Quince, 136.
182 Natasha Distiller, ―The Presence of the Past: Shakespeare in South Africa,‖ Quidditas 24
(2003): 91. For more on Drum‘s use of Shakespeare, see Distiller, South African Shakespeare.
79
In 1962, the government enacted the Group Areas Act, which reserved the use of
certain areas, including theaters, for certain racial groups. This, and the installation of
state-sponsored local arts councils, ushered in a boom period for Afrikaans theater and
plays that were loyal to the racist ideas of the government. The 1960‘s, however, also saw
playwrights like Athol Fugard crafting works that emphasized the claustrophobia, social
injustice, and trauma of apartheid, subverting racial ideologies through staging or by the
use of local accents.183 Also in this period, black communities organized theater events
in which participants would act out their life experiences under the apartheid regime. In
1965, for example, Cecil Manona, a math teacher at a black high school in Fort Beaufort
on the Eastern Cape, had students stage The Tempest so that they could more fully
understand the play for their standard examinations. One white university professor who
sneaked his white students into the play remembered: ―When Caliban went dancing off,
signing ‗Hi-day, holiday, freedom,‘ there was a burst of delighted, nervous laughter from
the young men at the back of the hall and they shouted with one voice, ‗Uhuru!‘ They
knew what it was about.‖184
In the 1970‘s black and white theater practitioners began to join forces in
traditional theater venues in order to oppose apartheid and develop forms of resistance
theater. At the same time, black dramatists developed mobile drama that utilized few
actors, needed minimal props, and could be staged almost anywhere as a form of protest
theater. By the 1980‘s and 1990‘s, however, the regime was losing control, and ―[p]lays
no longer had to confront or contest what was already changed and changing society.‖185
183 Quince, 7.
184 Quoted in Quince, 138-139.
185 For information on South African theater during apartheid, including a short chapter devoted
just to Shakespeare performance, see Orkin, Drama and the South African State. Other general overviews
of apartheid theater include Olga Barrios, ―Commitment and Performance in Black South African Theatre
Under Apartheid,‖ New England Theatre Journal 11 (2000): 19-46; Cynthia Erb, ―King Kong in
Johannesburg: Popular Theatre and Public Protest in 1950‘s South Africa,‖ in East of West: Cross-Cultural
80
In 1987, Martin Orkin wrote Shakespeare Against Apartheid in which he called upon
South African teachers of Shakespeare to question the nation‘s traditional method of
interpreting Shakespeare as an ideal universalist, spouting truths of human nature as a
hand-me-down from the European tradition; he argues that ―[i]n the teaching or study of
Shakespeare, unless we are willing at a profound level to countenance a shift in emphasis,
away from the determinedly simplistic view of traditional approaches on which they are
modeled – we shall continue to help apartheid.‖ He goes onto say that those seeking a
more equitable South Africa:
need to recognise that there is no neutral territory for Shakespeare
studies in present day South Africa. [….] We need to work for the
development of readings of the texts that will free them from
ruling class appropriation, from their present function as
instruments of hegemony. In so doing we may pave the way for a
new educational dispensation that will include one day, amongst
many other more important things, the emergence, perhaps, of a
people‘s Shakespeare.186
Currently, Shakespeare is introduced to South African students in the last years of high
school. The texts read in classroom are usually Romeo and Juliet or Julius Caesar, but
Othello, Hamlet, or Macbeth are also used. Murray McGibbon, a product of the South
African schools himself, explains that these plays, more often than not, are taught poorly
by teachers who see the texts as ―hangovers from the colonial past‖ that they would
rather not be teaching. The only Shakespearean plays performed in the country are those
which are part of the school curriculum. These plays are staged solely to attract the
Performance and the Staging of Difference, eds. Claire Sponsler & Xiaomei Chen (New York: Palgrave,
2000), 125-142; Cathy Maree, ―Resistance and Remembrance: Theatre During and After Dictatorship and
Apartheid,‖ South African Theatre Journal 12, no. 1-2 (1998): 16-18. For more information on postapartheid theater in South Africa see David Graver, Drama for a New South Africa (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1999); Marek Spitczok von Brisinski, ―Rethinking Community Theatre: Performing Arts
Communities in Post-Apartheid South Africa,‖ South Africa Theatre Journal 17 (2003): 114-128; Keith
Bain & Temple Hauptfleisch, ―Playing the Changes: Thoughts on Restructuring of the Theatrical System
and the Arts Industry in South Africa After Apartheid,‖ South African Theater Journal 15 (2001): 8-24.
186 Martin Orkin, Shakespeare Against Apartheid (Craighall: Ad. Donker, 1987), 181-184.
81
revenue of school groups, since most South African theater companies would not
otherwise have the funds to undertake such productions.187
This lack of funding has remained prevalent since the end of apartheid. Ten years
after apartheid, Rolf Solberg, who interviewed several South African theater
practitioners, noted that they repeatedly complained that the nation‘s funding for theater
was still overwhelmingly tied to keeping the old, large, white theater complexes of the
apartheid era.188 McGibbon, who was once Artistic Director at the prestigious Drama
Company in Durban, echoes the sentiment, explaining that in 1996 federal funds
disappeared overnight for his company, spurring him to emigrate to the United States. He
said he realized that despite his desire to make a difference in South African theater, the
task became too overwhelming. He thought: ―I‘ll be bashing my head against a brick
wall, and if I‘m not killed, I‘ll kill myself.‖189 McGibbon is not alone in his thinking,
noting that there are now ―thousands of Murray McGibbons‖ spread across the globe.
The theater artists who remain in South Africa struggle to know what kind of
stories to tell in their post-apartheid theaters. During apartheid, the issues the country had
to address were clear; now they are much murkier. South African playwright Lara Foot
Newton notes: ―We've grown up as a country. Now the question is: Where do we derive
our work from?‖ She says that younger artists are still searching for topics that resonate
with their audiences and that might spur reform.190 Director James Ngcobo explains that
while the country‘s dark history should not be ignored, the work coming out of South
187 MurrayMcGibbon, personal interview with the author, April 9, 2010.
188 Rolf Solberg, South African Theatre in the Melting Pot: Trends and Developments at the Turn
of the Century (Grahamstown: Institute for the Study of English in Africa, 2003), 6.
189 McGibbon, personal interview, April 9, 2010.
190 Stephen Nunns, ―In Post-Apartheid South Africa, Artists Struggle to Find a Cause,‖ The New
York Times (New York), May 14, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/11/arts/11iht-safstage.
1.5667833.html.
82
Africa should also account for the potential of a new democracy.191 These issues of
dwelling on the past and envisioning the future come into high relief in Janice
Honeyman‘s 2009 production of The Tempest, in which one can start to see what
individuals, both inside and outside the country, expect from performances created in the
new South African nation.
Janice Honeyman‘s 2009 Tempest
In 2009, Janice Honeyman produced The Tempest for The Baxter Theatre in Cape
Town. Featuring Antony Sher as Prospero, John Kani as Caliban, and Kani‘s son,
Atandwa Kani, as Ariel, Honeyman‘s production was a spectacular ode to South Africa.
Bright colors dominated the island landscape. African drums and music were interspersed
throughout the action of the play, and African sprites listened to and participated in the
story, responding in a variety of languages, including Bantu, Zulu, and Afrikaans. 192
Large puppets, designed by Janni Younge, helped relate the plot. The opening featured an
undulating snake, which, the program noted, was known in Zulu cosmology to cause
weather turbulences.193 Puppeteers also brought the character of Sycorax to life,
enacting her story as Prospero narrates it. Prospero‘s masque in the fourth act was ―a
near-carnival. Towering puppets on stilts celebrate[d] his daughter‘s wedding.‖194
191 Ibid.
192 Virginia Mason Vaughan, ―The Tempest,‖ Shakespeare Bulletin 27, no.3 (2009): 469.
193 Michael Coveney, ―The Tempest, Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon‖ The Independent
(London), February 23, 2009, accessed April 5, 2010, http://www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/the-tempest-courtyard-theatre-stratforduponavon-1629261.html.
194 Kate Bassett, ―The Tempest, Courtyard Stratford Othello, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leads,‖
The Independent (London), February 22, 2009, accessed April 5, 2010, http://www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/the-tempest-courtyard-stratfordbrothello-west-yorkshire-playhouseleeds-1628609.html.
83
Virginia Mason Vaughan notes that ―[t]he play‘s puppetry, music, costumes, and set
design incorporated a range of African motifs – not simply those of South Africa – and
together they evoked a consistent non-European wild, a fascinating and colorful world
where nature seemed alive.‖195
After its run at the Baxter, Honeyman‘s production was re-staged at the Courtyard
in Stratford-upon-Avon and later toured the United Kingdom. British critics seemed
smitten by it; Michael Billington‘s comment that it ―combines racial politics with visual
playfulness in a way that liberates this all-too-familiar play‖ is typically laudatory.196
Benedict Nightingale similarly praises the ―[v]isual excitement [that] bubbles away from
the start […] and doesn‘t let up until Sher […] picks up an old suitcase and trudges off to
Milan.‖197
For some critics, however, the spectacle ultimately served as a distraction from
the text. One critic complained that ―Honeyman makes the crucial error of interpreting
the magic through spectacle at the expense of the text wherein the genuine magic
lies.‖198 Another grumbled that:
In the end, you‘re not quite sure why they bothered with
Shakespeare at all. The director appears to have no sympathy with
the play whatsoever, and its subtler themes, of art versus life, or
the castaways‘ ‗sea-sorrow‘ magically transmuted into something
rich and strange, either don‘t interest her or elude her. There is
richness and strangeness here, but it‘s almost entirely due to the
195 Vaughan, The Tempest, 469.
196 Michael Billington, ―The Tempest, Courtyard, Stratford-upon-Avon,‖ The Guardian
(London), February 19, 2009, accessed April 5, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/feb/19/
review-tempest-stratford-upon-avon.
197 Benedict Nightingale, ―The Tempest at Courtyard, Stratford,‖ The Times (London), February
19, 2009, accessed April 5, 2010, http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/
stage/theatre/article5760106.ece.
198 Neil Norman, ―The Tempest,‖ Daily Express (London), February 20, 2009, accessed April 5,
2010, http://www2.dailyexpress.co.uk/features/view/85625/The-Tempest.
84
charm and sincerity of the dancers, the musicians and the
puppeteers.199
For these and other critics the heavy-handed South African spectacle ultimately distracted
from the presentation of the text. For them, The Tempest became merely a device by
which to convey this imagery, and Shakespeare‘s poetry was lost in the recontextualization. For many British critics, however, this re-contextualization is what
made this production particularly strong, especially in light of post-colonial readings.
Critics who praise the production tend to bring up its ending, especially
Prospero‘s epilogue, and its implications within a South African setting. In the scene,
Prospero delivered the speech to Caliban, a symbolic way to show that Prospero was
returning the island to its native. In her review, Kate Kellaway writes that she had ―never
seen the end of the play more movingly performed.‖200 Kellaway admired Caliban‘s
―elegant answer to Prospero‘s destroying of his magic wand,‖ which was to break his two
walking sticks: ―His Independence Day has come.‖201 Virginia Mason Vaughan adds
that Kani‘s Caliban raised a fist in a gesture of liberation at this moment and that
―[u]nlike many recent productions, Honeyman‘s Tempest was rooted in the actors‘ lived
experience, which made the colonial paradigm compellingly real, not simply a windowdressing.‖202 To these critics, the value of the play and of the South African imagery
comes in the ending: Prospero‘s returning of the island to Caliban serves as a metaphor
for the post-apartheid nation. The colonizer ultimately gives up his rule and grants power
199 Christopher Hart, ―The Tempest at the RSC Courtyard, Stratford,‖ The Sunday Times
(London), February 22, 2009, accessed April 5, 2010, http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/
arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article5765890.ece.
200 Kate Kellaway, ―What Magical Notes From a Small Island,‖ The Observer (London), March
1, 2009, accessed April 5, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/mar/01/theatre-tempest-rsc-baxtershakespeare.
201 Ibid.
202 Vaughan, ―The Tempest,‖ 470.
85
to the colonized, and the spectator is moved, thinking of similar events that unfolded in
South Africa only fifteen years earlier.
South African critics viewed this ending, and Honeyman‘s production as a whole,
differently. Cape Town-based theater practitioner Justus Baleka complained that the
exchange between Prospero and Caliban in Act I, scene ii ―was technically sound but not
sufficiently emotionally engaging – ‗flat,‘ one might say.‖ As for the colorful African
costumes and props, ―some authence members may have found this clichéd and too easily
recognizable as ‗African‘: somewhat stereotyped and packed for global perceptions of
what it means to be ‗African.‘‖ Baleka notes that although the production and its
embedded post-colonial reading seemed well-received by Cape Town audiences,
―[a]rguably, the show was designed for (and worked even better for) an international
authence, and judging by the response of critics in the United Kingdom, it has been
extremely successful there.‖203 Another South African critic, Anston Bosman, agreed
with Baleka that the show was filled with cliché motifs. In particular, he was
disappointed in Honeyman‘s casting:
The decision to cast Sher as a white Prospero in linen and Kani as
a black Caliban on a tether, thus reiterating a by-now-familiar
allegory of colonialism, did not merely prevent this good
production from becoming great. More instructively, it signaled the
exhaustion of The Tempest as a vehicle for that allegory and the
urgent need for South African theater, now fifteen years in
democracy, to appropriate Shakespeare in freshly imaginative
ways.204
In Bosman‘s view, one problem was that the African-themed spectacle of the production
bore an all-too strong resemblance to the puppets created by Michael Curry and Julie
203 Justus Baleka, ―The Tempest,‖ Shakespeare in Southern Africa 21 (2009): 88-90, accessed
April 5, 2010, http://gateway.proquest.com.proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.882003&xri:pqil:res_ver=0.2&res_id=xri:lion-us&rft_id=xri:lion:ft:abell:R04220803:0.
204 Anston Bosman, ―Cape of Storms: The Baxter Theatre Centre – RSC Tempest, 2009,‖
Shakespeare Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2010): 109.
86
Taymor for the 1997 Broadway musical The Lion King; another was that ―this vision of
Africa was not only derived in the United States from an animated film but subsequently
reproduced by the Walt Disney Company in theaters across the globe – including, three
years ago, in Johannesburg.‖205
Jonathan Miller is widely credited with creating the first post-colonial staging of
The Tempest in 1970, when he dramatized Mannoni‘s analogy of the Prospero-Caliban
relationship in his production at the Mermaid Theatre. His Prospero was a white colonial
governor, Caliban a black field hand, and Ariel a black house servant. Miller later staged
the play with white actors as the humans and black actors as the island spirits and
creatures. 206 Michael Billington wrote at the time: ―The colonial metaphor was pushed
through to its logical conclusion.‖207 Billington, perhaps, did not see the prematurity of
his statement as he would later praise Honeyman‘s 2009 production: ―And when it comes
to the concluding couplet [of the epilogue] – ‗as you from crimes would pardoned be, let
your indulgence set me free‘ – Sher turns directly to Kani and quits the island leaving
him in supreme charge. It becomes, in this context, a deeply moving cry for forgiveness
of the colonial past and an appeal to the spirit of truth and reconciliation.‖208
These reviews ultimately ask tough questions that are useful in evaluating our
response to The Tempest as an allegory for post-apartheid South Africa. In the mid1980‘s, Rob Nixon pointed out that Shakespeare‘s play ―lacks a sixth act which might
have been enlisted for representing relations among Caliban, Ariel, and Prospero once
they entered a post-colonial era […]‖ and predicted that the play was destined be of
205 Ibid., 110.
206 Ibid., 112-113.
207 Michael Billington, ―In Britain, a Proliferation of Prosperos,‖ New York Times (New York),
January 1, 1989.
208 Billington, The Tempest.
87
declining importance in third-world countries such as Africa.209 Nixon‘s hypothesis is
echoed by Ania Loomba, who observes that ―[w]hereas in The Tempest Caliban is simply
left on the island, we know that in reality Prospero rarely simply sails away.‖210 Unlike
the play‘s ending, a post-colonial world is complicated by the lingering effects of colonial
rule and the uncertainty of new regimes. In continuing to replay Prospero, Caliban, and
Ariel‘s relationships along racial, ethnic, or cultural lines, theater practitioners rehash the
issues of colonialism without necessarily looking forward to the ―brave new world‖ of a
post-colonial/post-apartheid world. This tendency to look backward is a type of nostalgia.
The desire not necessarily to return to the colonizer and colonized relationship, but to
relive that moment as illustrated at the end of Honeyman‘s production when Prospero
relinquishes control and the repressed minority triumphs. Basking in the glory of that
moment allows one to forget, even if momentarily, the work implied in Nixon‘s sixth act.
In the case of South Africa, the clearly drawn issues of apartheid are once again at the
forefront, and the struggle of wading through the murkier issues of a post-apartheid world
is temporarily forgotten. Caliban is triumphant and audiences are able, once again, to
celebrate his success.211 Paul Vallely critiques Honeyman‘s production for being
untimely, arguing that while it would have been apt in 1994, it did not reflect South
African‘s political situation in the early twenty-first century.212 This vision of South
209 Rob Nixon, ―Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest,‖ Critical Inquiry 13, no.
3 (1987): 576-577.
210 Ania Loomba, Gender, Race, and Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1989), 157.
211 Arguably, these productions also allow former colonizers to process (or re-process) their guilt
over apartheid. Christopher Hart, after all, describes Sher‘s Prospero as ―[b]urdened with this huge, lumpy
sack stuffed full of postcolonial and post-apartheid guilt […].‖ Hart.
212 Paul Vallely, ―The Tempest: Why the RSC Got It Wrong,‖ Independent (London), April 28,
2009, accessed March 3, 2011, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatredance/features/the-tempest-why-the-rsc-got-it-wrong-1675067.html.
88
Africa present in Honeyman‘s play–of Caliban with his crutch raised above his head, of
Nelson Mandela walking away from the Robben Island prison to become the first
democratic president of South Africa, of Archbishop Desmond Tutu‘s Rainbow nation, of
the sanitized and corporately sponsored South Africa that appeared in footage from the
2010 World Cup – this is the South Africa that foreigners want to see. Although South
African audiences clearly see through the nostalgic and dated presentation of
Honeyman‘s production, Anglo audiences seem desperate to cling to these images of
South Africa‘s victory over racial injustice in the waning days of the twentieth century.
At the same time, however, Caliban‘s victory is only one moment at the end of
the play. For most of Honeyman‘s production audiences were watching a white Prospero
control a black Caliban. This fact reveals a more subtle reason for the popularity of
Honeyman‘s show with international audiences. Perhaps, in addition to the celebratory
ending, they wish to see the South Africa they ―know‖ from apartheid-era dispatches: a
South Africa engulfed by racial hatred. The angst-ridden relationship between white
masters and black slaves represents the fifteen-year-old images of apartheid that
international audiences remember. If they continue to envision South Africa as an
apartheid nation, as the textbook example of racial hatred in the world, they can overlook
the subtle and not so subtle forms of racism that are still embedded in their own culture.
They can forget that they, too, are embroiled in their own version of Nixon‘s sixth act.
They can overlook that in 2009, 52,028 hate crimes were reported in England, Wales, and
Northern Ireland, and that the majority of these crimes – 43, 426 – were motivated by
race.213 They can also overlook the fact that since 1990 the number of hate crimes in the
United States ―has consistently ranged around 7,500 or more annually, or nearly one
every hour of the day,‖ and that 64.2 percent of these crimes were based on race or
213 ―Hate Crime Figures Published for the First Time,‖ BBC News, November 30, 2010, accessed
March 3, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11875321.
89
ethnicity.214 In other words, a more subtle or relevant exploration of racial issues in
South Africa might strike foreign audiences as hitting too close to home; they might see
their commonalities with a struggling post-apartheid nation, and, thus, not be able to
distance themselves from the events being enacted on stage.
Also at the heart of the international attraction to Honeyman‘s production is the
desire to see an ―exotic‖ South Africa. Honeyman‘s reliance on sweeping African
symbolism, the Lion King-esque nature of her production, presents an uncomplicated
South Africa that audiences can understand and easily embrace. And certainly
Honeyman‘s production is not the first South African theatrical export to demonstrate the
attractiveness of this exoticism to foreign audiences. In 1969, Welcome Msomi created a
Zulu adaptation of Macbeth called Umabatha. The show toured internationally, opening
the 1972 World Theatre season at the Aldwych in London; Laurence Wright says that
―London audiences went berserk, overwhelmed by the energy, spectacle and–dare I say it
–the exoticism of it all.‖ And when the show played once again in London in 1991 and at
the Globe in 2001, this same brand of enthusiasm still existed. 215 This appreciation for
exoticism and the ability to overlook the political complications among international
audiences, David Graver notes, is not only a post-apartheid prerogative. He writes that
when the political South African theater was taken abroad during apartheid, the activism
of these works lost its power: ―Unfortunately, away from the townships where the
struggle against apartheid was being fought, the politically engaged social function of
resistance theatre became less an assault upon injustice than a marketing ploy. On
214 The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Confronting the New Faces of Hate:
Hate Crimes in America 2009, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights/The Leadership
Conference Education Fund, accessed March 3, 2011, http://www.civilrights.org/publications/hatecrimes/.
215 Wright, Alpha and Omega, 71.
90
international tour, images of resistance and revolt served up for the audiences‘
inconsequential pleasure.‖216
In these contemporary audiences, one can see the same desire manifested by early
modern audiences to seek out exoticism in the theater and to do so in a way that defines
their own culture. Kim F. Hall writes that early modern travel narratives carried a
secondary purpose ―of developing a sense of English identity: allowing English readers to
know themselves by seeing others.‖217 In much the same way, travel dramas, both in the
early modern period and today, offer an opportunity for audience members to delve into
the unknown while simultaneously indulging in their pre-existing perceptions. Although
these dual purposes of exotic enticement and national identity are not wholly removed in
contemporary performance, Murray McGibbon‘s Tempest Project offers an interesting
alternative to this paradox for American and South African students.
Murray McGibbon‘s Tempest Project
Like Honeyman‘s production, McGibbon‘s Tempest Project was staged in two
vastly different cultures.218 The production was a representation of South Africa, both
for the people of that country and the people of foreign land. Yet McGibbon‘s production
was a more subtle exploration of that culture than Honeyman‘s would be. Although
McGibbon‘s production also used oversized masks, African-themed props and costumes,
216 Graver, 2.
217 Hall, 59.
218 Brian Pearce writes of a production of The Tempest he did in March of 2003 at the Durban
Institute of Technology in. Pearce used a primarily Zulu cast and featured a white Caliban (by chance, the
only white actor in the play). The production incorporated a traditional Zulu dance in the masque in Act IV,
scene i, but Pearce said that Tony Starkey, the Dean of Faculty, ―thought the masque was the one weak
point in our production, that we were exploiting a very conventional, ‗exotic‘ concept of Africa, a ‗picture
postcard‘ tribalism, which undermined the more serious attempt at finding genuine parallels between
Shakespeare‘s world and African culture.‖ See his ―Prospero‘s African Magic: A Post-Colonial Production
of The Tempest,‖ Shakespeare in Southern Africa 15 (2003): 39-45.
91
and African music, his production was not the brightly-colored carnival of Honeyman‘s.
McGibbon‘s production, ultimately, was based in the everyday realities of post-apartheid
life in South Africa. The irony is that Honeyman‘s cast consisted primarily of South
Africans whereas McGibbon‘s cast was half comprised of American college students.
Nevertheless, by literally having actors travel to the foreign land, by making the
American and the South African students work to understand each other and their place
in this text, McGibbon enabled his actors to explore the text and its relationship to the
South African situation fully, making Shakespeare‘s text a metaphor for struggles of the
new South Africa. Moreover, McGibbon‘s production, unlike Honeyman‘s, was created
for the benefit of the actors, rather than a paying audience. This shifted focus allowed the
Tempest Project to escape stereotypes and to provide a complex view of post-apartheid
South Africa.
A Collaborative Experience
Murray McGibbon came to the United States from South Africa in 1996 to serve
as a one-year visiting professor in the theater department at Indiana University in
Bloomington, Indiana; he has been a professor in that department ever since. McGibbon
says that the South African project he devised grew first and foremost out of his desire to
dig more deeply into the text of The Tempest. ―I just didn‘t get it,‖ he said, noting he had
walked out of numerous productions of the play due to his frustration with the text; he
realized that, for him, ―The only way to conquer The Tempest was to direct it.‖219
McGibbon had also long wanted to build a bridge between his work with
American students and his homeland. In 2004, he conceptualized an ambitious project
that would allow him to do that, as well as to finally understand The Tempest. He
219 McGibbon, personal interview, April 9, 2010.
92
proposed a collaborative production of the play that would include students from Indiana
University and students from University of KwaZulu Natal in Pietermaritzburg.
McGibbon said of his vision for this production:
I wanted to combine my American students with South African
students because I felt that my reason for doing The Tempest, apart
from indulging myself as a director and play and do different
things, was to see if those issues of forgiveness and redemption
that Shakespeare puts in the play could speak to a South African
audience […].220
After forty-eight years of oppression, ―the country was experiencing a Renaissance, a
rebirth […] but given my distance living in the United States it became all the more
pungent and important, imperative in fact that I celebrate this in some way.‖221
McGibbon received support for the project in the form of a New Frontiers Grant
from the Lily Endowment. He initially envisioned bringing the South African students to
the Indiana campus for the project, but he met resistance from his department. He
approached Butler University and other schools with the idea, and while they were
interested, they could not ultimately house his project.222 These obstacles are what led
him finally to decide to take six students from Indiana University to South Africa to work
with fourteen students from the University of KwaZulu Natal, providing an unusual
travel experience for the American student-actors and changing the scope of the project
altogether.
McGibbon auditioned hundreds of students at both Bloomington and
Pietermaritzburg to cast the play, yet he was not looking simply for the best actors: ―I
suppose I was looking for people who had an energy, enthusiasm, and excitement for the
220 Ibid.
221 Amber Kerezman, ―Murray McGibbon: The African Tempest Project,‖ Part 1, Alternative
Conversations, The Bloomington Alternative, February 10, 2008, online video,
http://www.bloomingtonalternative.com/content/9036.
222 Ibid.
93
work as opposed to those who spoke Shakespeare beautifully.‖223 Even after the
participants were selected, most of the roles remained unassigned. McGibbon wanted to
see how the ensemble worked together before finalizing casting. He had cast one role,
however, courting the well-known South African actor, Steven Gurney, to play the role of
Prospero. In the project, McGibbon was interested in creating a collaborative and
explorative process that echoed the ideas of Peter Brook. He wanted a lengthy rehearsal
period in which he and the actors could fully investigate the text using drama games and
sensory exercises. Initially, he was not entirely sure if they would ever have a public
performance of their show; his whole focus in this project was on the process. Of his
process, McGibbon said:
I have never been so nervous in all my life. Despite the fact that I
had done nearly three years of research and reading about The
Tempest, I had only a vague ‗formless hunch‘ of how the show was
to be realized on stage. I knew I wanted it set on a mythical island
off the east coast of South Africa, that I wanted to experiment with
non-traditional casting and that – most importantly – I wanted to
discover the text in the rehearsal room along with the actors,
feeding off their creative ideas and energies. […] I started blocking
Act One, Scene One with not one pencil marking in my script.224
The cast met daily from nine in the morning until five in the evening, breaking an hour
for lunch. The group spent the day experimenting with different approaches to the text,
all with the intent of discovering the script, not cementing the blocking. The emphasis on
exploration and the lack of authoritative direction, McGibbon said, ―was very frustrating
at times.‖ The actors found they could not rely on their established approaches for
pursuing these roles, and it made them feel ―extremely vulnerable at times.‖225
Eventually, however, the slow rehearsal process freed his young actors to discover for
223 Ibid.
224 ―The African Tempest Project: A Brief History,‖ (program note, The Tempest, Indiana
University Department of Theatre and Drama, 2009).
225 McGibbon, personal interview, April 9, 2010.
94
themselves what to do, looking to each other and not the director for support. The actors
would have conversations such as, ―This is what I need here. What can I do for you?,‖
which initiated a collaborative spirit that McGibbon says one rarely sees in the
professional theater. Moreover, these basic inquiries into each other‘s needs drove the
students closer together as they asked questions that, while seemingly simply, helped
them understand each other and their perspectives on the play.
McGibbon also insisted that the entire company be involved in the creation of
props, sets, costumes, and music for the play. When students were not in the rehearsal
room, they were expected to be in the shop working on construction. This collaborative
labor created additional bonding opportunities for students of varying backgrounds. As
McGibbon said, ―You had real first world and extreme third world working together in
extraordinary harmony most of the time.‖226 The work they did in the rehearsal and
construction rooms became an actualization of the theme of renewed understanding in
The Tempest. By working collaboratively on the production, students were able to get to
know each other and each other‘s cultures; the students built lasting friendships within
four to five days, friendships that McGibbon said he still sees evidence of on his
Facebook feed three years later: ―The bonding that occurred and the ensemble we created
was stronger than any one I had ever been a part of. That‘s not to say it wasn‘t a bumpy
ride and there weren‘t ups and downs and major disagreements from the group, but as a
whole when you saw that company walking around Prospero on that stage they were
walking as one, their hearts were beating as one.‖227
226 Amber Kerezman, ―Murray McGibbon: The African Tempest Project, Part 2,‖ Alternative
Conversations, The Bloomington Alternative, February 10, 2008, online video,
http://www.bloomingtonalternative.com/content/9037.
227 Ibid.
95
Incorporating the Experience
In addition to their work in the rehearsal room, McGibbon‘s students made
excursions into the surrounding countryside so as to see more of the country than the
well-worn tourist destinations in the city. These trips included tours of a Zulu village, the
Drakensberg Mountains, the Indian Ocean, and the Hluhluwe Game Reserve. Although
seemingly extracurricular, these excursions were incorporated into the performance. For
instance, the group went to McGibbon‘s house in Umzumbe off the coast of KwaZuluNatal. Early one morning, the actors decided to rehearse Act I, scene ii in a cove on the
beach, where they could experience what it would be like on an African island ―with the
waves crashing around them and the sun beating down.‖ McGibbon recalled: ―Michael
Aguirre, who played Ferdinand, made quite possibly the most novel entrance in any
Indiana University play rehearsal ever when he swam onto the shore on cue and began
reciting his lines just as he would do later on stage.‖228 Back in Pietermaritzburg, as the
cast struggled to focus on the same scene, Gurney whispered, ―Remember Umzumbe
Beach.‖229 This excursion may have been the inspiration for the final staging of the
scene in which Miranda and Prospero appeared as beachcombers with cooler, drinks,
lawn chairs, and umbrella.
As part of the preparation for the trip, McGibbon told the American students
about the prevalence of crime in South Africa, especially in its urban areas, and discussed
ways in which they might keep themselves safe. McGibbon, however, notes that the irony
of this meeting was that Bloomington itself had recently experienced a string of hate
crimes, revealing that a seemingly ―safe‖ Midwestern college town was not removed
from violence. McGibbon did not shelter the students when they were overseas or restrict
228 ―The African Tempest Project.‖
229 McGibbon, personal interview, April 9, 2010.
96
them to the safest areas, and the group experienced an incident of violence against one of
their own. One afternoon, the Indiana students and McGibbon drove into a rural area on
their way to the Drakensberg Mountains. The group stopped at a small restaurant for
lunch. Among them was Carmund White, the only African American student in the
group. White had looked to this trip a way to discover his roots and fell in love with the
country, telling McGibbon at one point during their travels that he wanted to move
there.230 As the group exited their vans, a black man loitering outside the restaurant
spotted White and began to curse at him calling him an American and chastised him for
associating himself with whites. The man threw a can of soda mixed with alcohol at
White. The man was quickly chased away by the owners of the restaurant and White was
not hurt, but the incident still left White, and the group as a whole, shaken. In the end,
however, White said that he was able to use the incident on stage. Gurney‘s Prospero was
particularly violent toward Caliban; in Act I, scene ii, he used his conjuring stick to
―choke‖ Caliban without actually touching him. Yet when White‘s Caliban claims
ownership of the island in the same scene, his delivery was more sad and pathetic than
angry, revealing resignation to the violence against him. As Caliban tells us how he was
betrayed in his love for Prospero, White, perhaps, shared his own sense of betrayal in that
attack outside the restaurant, an attack by a member of his adopted country and an
attempt to peg him as an outsider like Caliban.
The group also found themselves surrounded by violence when an industrial
teachers‘ protest broke out kilometers from the theater venue. These riots lasted from
June to August of that year and included several death threats and fatalities. They marked
one of the first times South Africa was paralyzed by the violence of black people
protesting against a black government, instead of black people protesting against a white
230 Carmund White, personal interview with the author, April 9, 2010.
97
government. Indeed, McGibbon feared he would have to cancel The Tempest because of
the proximity of the protests and the lack of a safe, accessible entry into the theater. This
concern subsided, but the group found a way to incorporate the images of protest that
surrounded them into the production itself. For the scene in which Prospero orders the
dogs on Trinculo, Stephano, and Caliban to counter their threatened insurgency, loud
police dogs barked through the sound system. At this moment, the lights went out and
black lights came on as the whole ensemble came on stage. Some were dressed in
fluorescent yellow police vests that glowed in the lights. Whips and night sticks, accented
in glowing colors, made trails of color as they slashed through the nightmarish scene. The
sound of chaos ensued. When the lights went up, Ariel stood above the rest of the cast,
who lay, like corpses, on the ground. Ariel‘s fist was raised in a gesture of revolution.
After the scene froze in tableau, the protestors left the playing space proudly
singing the new South African nation anthem, ―Nkosi sikele‘I Afrika.‖ Established in
2007, this song merges the hymn ―Nkosi sikele‘I Africa‖ (―God bless Africa‖) with the
former anthem of the republic ―Die Stem van Suid-Afrika‖ (―The Call of South Africa‖),
a symbolic representation of the reunified South Africa. The four verses incorporate the
five most widely spoken languages in the nation – Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Afrikaans, and
English. In light of the nightmarish scene that preceded it, the song held deep meaning.
Prospero, in this fantasy, tried to control an uprising against his power with violence, yet
despite his attempts, the fight for freedom continued as Prospero looked on. Near the
theater doors, a similar fight for equality was going on, even long after the ―Prosperos‖ of
the apartheid era had abdicated control. The singing of the national anthem served as a
reminder that even after the symbols of unification had been put in place, the work of that
unification was not over. The scene offered a glimpse of Rob Nixon‘s ―sixth act,‖ hinting
at the struggle that could take place after the day of freedom.
Using the song at this moment had a powerful impact on some audience members.
McGibbon said that South African audiences wept at this scene, recognizing its deeper
98
implications. Yet two years later, when McGibbon and his students restaged the
production in Bloomington, the audience laughed when the lights came back on and Ariel
stood with fist raised. Some of the laughter was awkward, some robust. The American
audience did not know what to make of the scene. They had watched a scene that is
generally played as a humorous fantasy, and what they had witnessed instead was
disturbing. The symbolism of Ariel standing with fist raised was lost on audiences
removed from the struggles of South Africa. Instead, they saw that gesture as a
caricature, and their laughter seemed to allow them to dismiss the tension of the moment.
Performing the Experience
After two months of rehearsal, McGibbon and his students staged the play for
South African audiences. These audiences were presented with a version of The Tempest
that investigated as well as critiqued the South African experience. McGibbon has said
that he, no longer living permanently in South Africa, felt free to forego political
correctness, and included political swipes in the production, such as a critique of Jacob
Zuma, the morally ambiguous politician who went on to become the president of South
Africa. McGibbon‘s willingness to speak frankly about the government, as well as the
inclusion of many of South Africa‘s ethnic groups, unnerved the South African
performers. Stephano and Trinculo, for example, were played by Indian performers, and
in rehearsal, the group decided to try to perform the parts with stereotypical Indian
shopkeeper accents. The Indian students had difficulty with the decision to include these
accents in the final production, feeling that gesturing toward these lower classes might be
demeaning. McGibbon explained that the intention was not to demean Indian
shopkeepers, but to bring the group into the landscape of the play: ―We are showing they
still exist. […] Shakespeare was writing about people at the lower end of the spectrum.
99
Stephano and Trinculo are there.‖231 In McGibbon‘s additions, one can see the desire to
eliminate the European, universalist Shakespeare of South African tradition and instead
move toward a more specifically South African Shakespeare. He said, ―I wanted to be
truthful to the playwright‘s intentions, but I also had to be more ruthless than I would
normally be because I was not putting on a museum version of The Tempest for literary
scholars. This was for […] fairly uneducated African audiences some of whom might not
have ever seen a play in their lives before and most of whom had never encountered
Shakespeare.‖232 McGibbon was not looking to create a hallowed version of the play; he
wanted to show that this colonial text could be made useful, engaging, and challenging
for the next generation of audiences in the new South Africa.
For the most part, McGibbon‘s audiences reacted well to this construction; as
McGibbon notes, they were ―just with it. They were laughing, laughing at things I didn‘t
think were funny, and you could tell the audience was visibly moved by what happened
given the South African experience.‖233 The group did little advertising for their show,
but their audiences grew through word of mouth as the South African run continued.
Some audience members, however, expressed discomfort with the production‘s critiques
of South African culture and politics. These critics assumed McGibbon would be
frustrated with their complaints, but he was ―heartened and delighted. […] I just thought
that was enormous praise for the project, because it meant that the play had touched a
nerve, it meant that it had engaged people on an intellectual and visceral level, and they
were interacting with the play.‖234
231 McGibbon, personal interview, April 9, 2010.
232 Ibid.
233 Ibid.
234 Amber Kerezman, ―Murray McGibbon: The African Tempest Project, Part 3,‖ Alternative
Conversations, The Bloomington Alternative, February 10, 2008, online video,
http://www.bloomingtonalternative.com/content/9038.
100
As the play closed in South Africa, McGibbon was inspired to try to re-stage it in
Bloomington so as to show American audiences what the ensemble had learned in their
time together. Eventually, he was able to secure funding to bring it to the Wells-Metz
Theater at Indiana University in 2009, along with most of the South African actors who
were part of the original production. Many of the South African references were cut
because they were dated or incomprehensible to an American audience. These audiences
did not have the emotional reactions, either positive or critical, that the group
encountered in South Africa. Instead, they were mostly polite, and perhaps indifferent.
McGibbon said he felt the US audiences listened, but he did not think they were as
emotionally tied to the performances as were the South Africans ―because it was not done
on their island.‖235 Although there certainly might have been a lack of emotional
investment in the setting, the American audiences‘ reactions also show that, perhaps,
McGibbon‘s productions did not meet some individuals‘ cultural expectations. By
downplaying the exotic potential of a South African Tempest and gesturing toward the
sixth act of post-colonialism, McGibbon‘s production did not necessarily allow its first
world audiences to separate themselves from the third world.
Audiences see in international productions a form of theatrical tourism, but like
much of actual tourism, this sort of travel comes with potential ―tourist traps‖: the trap of
buying into stereotypes and accepting them as representative of a culture; the trap of
overlooking the aftermath of a post-apartheid or post-colonial situation in favor staying in
a stagnant moment of celebratory liberation; and the trap of holding onto these ideas and
moments to feel better about their own cultural positions. McGibbon‘s production
challenged these traps; just as he took his students to South African destinations that were
off the well-traveled path, he aimed to have his audience explore key issues of the new
235 McGibbon, personal interview, April 9, 2010.
101
South Africa. The Bloomington audiences‘ tepid responses, however, suggest that they
were resistant to these detours. Ultimately, they might have preferred to stick with
Honeyman‘s less subtle South African production – a production that allowed the
audiences to keep their distance from the country and its troubles.
Conclusion
In the end, however, it mattered little what either the South African or American
audiences thought of the performance. Ultimately, as McGibbon intended, the Tempest
Project was an experiment in travel and cultural understanding for its participants. The
play was about process, not performance, and the audience‘s role in the production was
minimal. This focus on process was made possible by the outside funding McGibbon
received. Unlike Honeyman‘s production, it did not matter if the group made a single
cent off their production. McGibbon says that in the midst of this financial freedom, he
learned a great deal about what the traditional theater system, both in professional and
educational settings, loses when the focus is on the product. In his opinion, traditional
theater process loses an understanding of the basic human desire to tell stories and
explore social issues when it is crunched into a short rehearsal period or acquiesces to the
needs of its paying audience. And students do not receive the kind of acting experience
they need when directors are forced to tell them what to do instead of allowing them time
to explore the drama themselves.236 As his project shows, students stand to learn much
more in the theater than their assigned roles if they are given the opportunity to fully
understand the text and its context. Carmund White says of his South African experience:
What I learned - and I don‘t know if I can put that in words or
books – [is that] until you spend a lot of time outside of your own
country, you don‘t have any appreciation – you think you have an
236 McGibbon, personal interview, April 9, 2010.
102
appreciation for – that there‘s something outside of the world and
that there‘s people who do things differently and live differently
and they‘re completely satisfied that way. I lived in this place for
two and a half months, and I realized the world is much bigger.237
The opportunity to immerse himself in South African culture allowed White to realize
how surface-level his understanding of other cultures was. For the rest of us, it is
important that we approach our interpretations by acknowledging the limitations of our
own viewpoints. And although it is tantalizing to many American readers and critics to
view The Tempest as an exploration of American colonialism, it is important to
remember, as White says, that ―the world is much bigger‖ than our own experience.
Shakespeare, after all, has a global presence. His works have been used in a variety of
ways by various cultures, and in the end, it is essential to remember that our
understanding of the playwright is as manipulated by our own culture as it would be in
cultures which we believe are Antipodal to our own.
237 White, personal interview, April 9, 2010.
103
CHAPTER THREE
―IF YOU BE MAID OR NO‖:
SEEKING FEMININE POWER IN SHAKESPEARE‘S PLAYS
At the end of the masque in Act IV, scene i of The Tempest, Ferdinand celebrates
his new life: ―Let me live here euer, / So rare a wondred Father, and a wiʃe / Makes this
place Paradiʃe.‖238 Editors have debated whether Ferdinand is meant to say ―wise‖ in the
second line or, if indeed, the line should read, ―So rare a wondered Father, and a wife.‖
The former reading has the young man heaping praise on this new father-in-law; the latter
allows him to give equal praise to his wife. In 1709 Nicholas Rowe decided that ―wife‖
made more contextual sense and altered the line in his edition, a change that was repeated
throughout the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. Then in 1978, Jeanne
Addison Roberts released a study in which she examined several copies of the Folio
under a high-intensity light and discovered what she believed to be traces of damage to
the f‘s crossbar. She hypothesized that the letter broke early on in the printing process,
the crossbar eventually slipping away, thus turning ―wife‖ into ―wise.‖ Roberts‘s
discovery seemed a victory for the feminist reading of the line as it provided empirical
evidence that Miranda earned as much of Ferdinand‘s favor as Prospero did. Other
scholars, however, have questioned her analysis, because, as Ronald A. Tumelson II
points out, her findings are as much about gender politics as they are about textual
criticism.239
238 Shakespeare, The Tempest, The First Folio.
239 Jeanne Addison Roberts, ―‗Wife‘ or ‗Wise‘ – The Tempest I,‖ Studies in Bibliography 31
(1978): 203-208; Ronald A. Tumelson II, ―Ferdinand‘s Wife and Prospero‘s Wise,‖ Shakespeare Survey
59, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Cambridge Collections Online,
accessed February13, 2011, DOI: 10.1017/CCOL0521868386.007.
104
Yet the interpretive choices of editors and directors have long had an influence on
the way individuals understand Shakespeare‘s plays, including the way gender roles are
perceived in the text. In particular, the common understandings of Shakespeare‘s
feminine roles have been influenced by years of male-centered critical readings of them.
Michael Bristol, therefore, is surely correct in noting that ―the institution of Shakespeare
has been created largely by and for men.‖240 As a culture, we have been conditioned to
read Shakespeare through this masculine lens, and our understanding of his plays has
been influenced by years of editorial, directorial, and critical interventions. Phyllis
Rackin notes that even contemporary readers have been ―taught to read from the subject
position of a man, and a misogynist man at that.‖ She goes on to argue that even in a
post-feminist world we must take up ―the point of view of late twentieth-century
academic men who may – consciously or not – be anxious and ambivalent about the
progress women have made in the wake of the contemporary women‘s movement.‖241
Feminist understandings of Shakespeare, therefore, must overcome both texts grounded
in a patriarchal culture and generations of similarly hegemonic critical readings of them.
Yet despite the complexity of creating a feminist Shakespeare and a paucity of
female characters in his plays, Shakespeare has long been appealing to women.242 Ann
Thompson and Sasha Roberts suggest that although the canon of Shakespeare criticism
240 Michael D. Bristol, Shakespeare‟s America, America‟s Shakespeare (London: Routledge,
1990), 5.
241 Phyllis Rackin, ―Misogyny is Everywhere,‖ in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed.
Dympna Callaghan (London: Blackwell, 2001), 47-48.
242 The restrictions against women on the English stage in the sixteenth and seventeenth century
explain the few female roles available in Shakespeare‘s plays. Female roles were instead played by the two
or three boy apprentices who resided with the London companies. For more on the role of boy apprentices
in early modern theater, see Richard Madeline, ―Material Boys: Apprenticeship and the Boy Actors‘
Shakespearean Roles,‖ in Shakespeare Matters: History, Teaching, Performance, ed. Lloyd Davis
(Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 225-238; Scott McMillin, ―The Sharer and His Boy:
Rehearsing Shakespeare‘s Women,‖ in From Script to Stage in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Holland
& Stephen Orgel (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2004), 231-245.
105
inherited by the twentieth century readers was largely male, women had made worthy and
substantial contributions to the field by the nineteenth century. The lack of awareness of
this critical work has to do with the hierarchy of academic writing; whereas the scholarly
edition, book, essay and journal article are considered valid forms of critical debate,
women‘s criticism appeared in less scholarly sources – autobiographies, theater criticism,
popular books, club records, adaptations, and periodicals.243 Feminine interest in
Shakespeare has carried through to the twenty-first century as well. Such interest is
particularly prevalent in the contemporary theater. An informal survey of the theater
companies that belong to the Shakespeare Theatre Association shows that 35% of the
individuals in management positions at these companies are women. There are at least
three all-female Shakespeare companies – Los Angeles Women‘s Shakespeare Company,
Judith Shakespeare Company in New York City, and The Weird Sisters Women‘s
Theater Collective in Austin, Texas. The female attraction to Shakespeare is, in fact, why
many of these all-female companies developed. Tired of seeing their female students and
peers relegated to minor roles and marginal participation in Shakespearean productions,
the founders of these companies were eager to provide a way for women to explore the
texts fully. Through cross-gender casting and adaptation, these companies have allowed
women to carve out a visible place for themselves in Shakespeare performance.
243 Ann Thompson & Sasha Roberts, ―Introduction,‖ in Women Reading Shakespeare 16601900: An Anthology of Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 6-7. An understudied
component of women‘s contributions to Shakespearean criticism are the Women‘s Shakespeare Clubs that
took hold in eighteenth and nineteenth century America. These grassroots organizations allowed women to
use the texts to address social issues such a marital relations, family issues, feminine education and access
to literature, feminine ideals, race relations, and the experience of civil war. Moreover, they gave women a
safe space in which to explore and perform the texts and ask questions about their confusions. See Ann
Thompson, ―A Club of Our Own: Women‘s Play Readings in the Nineteenth Century,‖ Borrowers and
Lenders 2, no. 2 (2006), accessed July 31, 2010, http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/cocoon/borrowers/
request?id=781461; Katherine Scheil, ―Public and Private Reading: Shakespeare and American Women‘s
Reading Groups,‖ Reader 55 (2006): 36-56.
106
Why are women attracted to these canonical scripts from which they have been
traditionally excluded? As Lizbeth Goodman notes, ―Nowhere is the gender-based
hierarchy of theater studies brought out more strongly than in the performance of
Shakespeare. Most parts are played by men, except in the rare all-women or mixed-cast
experimental productions, and most of the directors are men.‖244 So why do women
continue to try to claim a place for themselves in Shakespearean performance? One
possible answer is that the same cultural weight that hampers feminist readings of
Shakespeare also makes these roles attractive to female actors. That is, these roles are
often billed as some of the most complicated and rewarding for theater artists, which
naturally enough makes them attractive for ambitious female performers. Shakespearean
roles are often considered a mark of an actor‘s accomplishment, and A-list actors such as
Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Patrick Stewart, and Ian McKellen are expected to work
their way through the roles of the Complete Works as they age. Women, however, are
often excluded from this rotation. In her study of women in the American theater, Ida
Prosky recounts a story told to her by one of the actors she interviewed. He was working
for a small Shakespeare company who he said made ―the God-awful mistake of hiring
four women for their season.‘‘ He claimed the company must have been unfamiliar with
the playwright, because anyone who was familiar with his work should know ―you don‘t
need four women to play Shakespeare. You need a young one, an old one, and someone
who‘s willing to play the maid.‖245 Shakespeare might be the way to earn one‘s acting
―chops,‖ but the opportunity to take up these roles is not readily available to most
women.
244 Lizbeth Goodman, ―Women‘s Alternative Shakespeares, and Women‘s Alternatives to
Shakespeare in Contemporary British Theater,‖ in Cross-Cultural Performances: Differences in Women‟s
Re-Visions of Shakespeare, ed. Marianne Novy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 207.
245Ida Prosky, You Don‟t Need Four Women to Play Shakespeare: Bias in Contemporary
American Theatre (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1992), 1.
107
As another respondent in Prosky‘s study notes, ―plays are so often written about
people in power, people in leadership positions, people doing important things. […]
we‘ve got however many centuries of dramatic literature with kings and dukes in the
spotlight.‖246 Marianne Novy notes that it might actually be the lack of feminine power
that attracts some women to Shakespeare. Novy argues that that there are three images of
Shakespeare that have particular resonance for women: ―the outsider, the artist of wideranging identification, and the actor.‖247 She notes that Shakespeare was a man who had
little education and many early women writers clung to this fact, including Margaret
Cavendish, who wrote of the poet in the general prologue to her plays (1662): ―Although
less learning, yet full he writ; / For all his Playes were writ by Natures light / Which give
his Readers, and Spectators Sight.‖248Aphra Behn similarly notes in her preface to The
Dutch Lover (1673), ―We all know that the immortal Shakespears Playes (who was not
guilty of much more of this [education] than often falls to womens share) have better
pleas‘d the World than Johnsons works […].‖249 In 1775, Elizabeth Griffith wrote in her
commentary on Shakespeare‘s comedies: ―Shakespeare had long appealed particularly to
women as their classic, the philosopher whose understanding of the human heart came
‗from nature‘, not the theories of ‗the school-men‘, and who was concerned particularly
with ‗those moral duties which are the truest source of mortal bliss – domestic ties,
246 Ibid., 2.
247 Novy, Women‟s Re-Visions, 2.
248 Margaret Cavendish, ―A General Prologue to All My Playes,‖ in Playes Written by the Thrice
Noble, Illustrious and Excellent Princess, the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle, (London: A. Warren, 1662),
Early English Books Online, accessed August 10, 2010, http://gateway.proquest.com.proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/
openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:50022.
249 Aphra Behn, ―Epistle to the Reader,‖ The Dutch Lover (London: T. Dring, 1673), Early
English Books Online, accessed August 10, 2010, http://gateway.proquest.com. proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/
openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.882003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:98391.
108
offices, and obligations.‖250 These women admired Shakespeare as an uneducated
individual who was able to please his audiences. For these female writers, Shakespeare is
the playwright of human experience; his work is special because it focuses not on learned
knowledge or power but on the everyday, common, and often domestic interactions to
which they had equal access. He made women‘s roles as outsiders seem an ideal place
from which to start their artistic endeavors.
Because this attraction of women to Shakespeare continues, some contemporary
theater companies have attempted to perform Shakespeare in new ways so as to give
female actors more opportunities to find their voice and define their career within the
canon. Yet if one is working within the traditional canon, can the work be seen as truly
radical? Nancy Taylor argues that women who are attracted to Shakespeare are less
radical in their feminist politics, but concedes that ―they can find compelling ways subtly
to reach people‘s consciousness and promote social change for a wider audience than
feminist avant-garde theater could reach.‖251 Gay Gibson Cima, in fact, suggests a much
more complicated relationship between feminism and the canon, saying, ―Whereas many
feminist theater scholars have dismissed all women‘s work in the canon as a process of
simple victimization and others have tried to redeem the male playwrights as geniuses
who write ‗universal‘ women‘s roles, I see a complex intertwining of hegemonic
scripting and feminist countermovements.‖252
250 Elizabeth Griffin, The Morality of Shakespeare's Drama Illustrated (London: Cadell, 1775),
ix-xiii.
251 Nancy Taylor, Women Direct Shakespeare in America: Productions from the 1990‟s
(Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), 19-20.
252 Gay Gibson Cima, Performing Women: Female Characters, Male Playwrights, and the
Modern Stage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 19.
109
Like Cima, I see the relationship among women, theater, and Shakespeare as a
complicated marriage of tradition and innovation that can, at times, yield mixed results.
In this chapter, I explore how companies have used cross-gender casting to question
gender constructions. I also argue that adaptation allows women to borrow from the
canon, but also embrace the work of female writers, artists, and playwrights.
Cross-Gender Casting and The Tempest
Roles for women are particularly scant in The Tempest, with only Miranda and the
goddesses available for female performers. Ann Thompson notes that the lack of female
characters in the play made the early feminist readings, which attempted to re-claim
female characters‘ viewpoints, nearly impossible; even the nineteenth-century female
critics who specialized in ―aggrandizing and romanticizing Shakespeare‘s heroines, could
not find a great deal to say about Miranda.‖253 One critic who did write about her was
Anna Jameson, who wrote at the turn of the century that Miranda was an ideal woman
who ―resolves into the very elements of womanhood. She is beautiful, modest, and
tender, and she is these only; they comprise her whole being, external and internal. She is
so perfectly unsophisticated, so delicately refined, that she is all but ethereal.‖254
Jameson‘s ―ethereal‖ reading of Miranda points to the difficulty of her character. Her
critical history as an ideal character makes her a nearly impossible character-type for
feminists to claim. When her character is added to the equally ethereal goddesses,
femininity presents almost unreachable standards in this play.
253 Ann Thompson, ―‗Miranda, Where‘s Your Sister?‘: Reading Shakespeare‘s The Tempest,” in
The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy, 2nd ed., eds. Gerald Graff and James Phelan (Boston:
Bedford/St. Martin, 2009), 404.
254 Anna Murphy Jameson, Shakespeare‟s Heroines, or Characteristics of Women, ed. Cheri L.
Larsen Hoeckley (London: Broadview Press, 2005), 189.
110
One way that theater practitioners have attempted to address the absence of
women in The Tempest is through cross-gender casting. From the eighteenth until the
early part of the twentieth century, the role of Ariel was commonly considered a
woman‘s role. Although Ariel refers to himself with a male possessive, ―Ariel in all his
quality‖ (I.ii.193), he is a non-human creature and shape-shifter, taking on female shapes
throughout the play including a ―nymph o‘ th‘ sea‖ (I.ii.301), a harpy (III.iii.53), and the
goddesses Ceres in wedding masque (IV.i.167).255 In the twentieth-century, however,
more and more men were being cast as Ariel. Christine Dymkowski attributes this
change, in part, to Darwinism and post-colonial readings of the text. As Caliban became
more human and Prospero less God-like, the parallels between Caliban‘s and Ariel‘s
stories became clearer. In order to highlight these parallels, producers typically cast Ariel
as a man: ―Just as a bestial Caliban was seen to deserve Prospero‘s punishment and
restraint, the service of a female Ariel was too culturally normative to be disturbing.‖ 256
Feminist ideas of the 1970‘s and 1980‘s, brought some female performers back to the
role but not for long. Today, the role often goes to men. Within the scope of my study,
Ariel is played by a female only once: in an all-female production of the play. Although
the challenging of a submissive, feminine Ariel is ultimately good for feminist readings
of the text, the elimination of Ariel as a female role takes away yet another opportunity
for female Shakespearean actors.
Perhaps the gap created by this trend to cast Ariel as male is one of the reasons
behind a popular twenty-first century casting choice: turning Prospero into Prospera.257
255 Christine Dymkowski, ―Introduction,‖ in William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Shakespeare in
Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 34.
256 Ibid., 44-45.
257 Women taking on leading, male Shakespearean roles is certainly not limited to The Tempest.
A non-exhaustive list includes Sara Siddons and Sarah Bernhardt who both played Hamlet; Charlotte
Cushman who played Romeo; Marianne Hoppe who played Lear in Frankfurt in 1990; Diane Venora who
played Hamlet in Joseph Papp‘s 1982 staging of the play; Pat Carroll who played Falstaff in Michael
111
In 2000, in one of the first and most influential examples, Vanessa Redgrave took on the
role of Prospero/a in the Globe‘s production of The Tempest. The early announcement of
this casting choice generated a good deal of excitement among theater critics. Mark
Rylance, then artistic director of the Globe, called Redgrave‘s acceptance of the role
―courageous.‖258 Redgrave‘s performance, however, was ultimately criticized as
enigmatic, boring, and apolitical, and caused at least two reviewers to quip of Prospera‘s
closing speech, ―Our revels hardly begun.‖259 Penny Gay writes that many reviewers did
not care for Redgrave‘s lack of vengefulness and says their comments illustrate ―how
hard it is for any actor – much less a woman playing a male role – to break the mold of
accepted interpretation of major classic roles.‖260
Despite these tepid reviews, casting women as Prospero took off as a trend after
Redgrave‘s performance. Demetra Pittman played the role of Prospero in Penny
Metropulos‘s production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2001 with Linda Alper
playing her sister Antonia. The Judith Shakespeare Company in New York also staged
The Tempest Project in 2001, with Virginia Wing playing Prospero. In 2003, the Georgia
Kahn‘s 1990 The Merry Wives of Windsor; Fiona Shaw who played Richard II in Deborah Warner‘s 1995
production; Kathryn Hunter who played Lear in 1997; and Dawn French who played Bottom in 2001. See
Lizbeth Goodman, ―Lear‘s Daughters on Stage and in Multimedia and Fiona Shaw‘s King Lear Workshops
as Case Studies in Breaking the Frame,‖ in Languages of Theatre Shaped by Women, eds. Jane De Gay and
Lizbeth Goodman (Bristol, England: Intellect, 2003), 37-47; Tony Howard, Women as Hamlet:
Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007); Catherine Silverstone, ―‗It‘s not about gender‘: Cross-Gendered Casting in Deborah Warner‘s
Richard II,‖ Women: A Cultural Review 18.2 (2007), 199-212.
258 David Lister, ―Vanessa Redgrave Will Play the Main Man in ‗The Tempest,‘‖ The
Independent (London), January 19, 2000; See also Robin Stringer, ―Globe Turns Things Round Again with
Vanessa as a Man,‖ The Evening Standard (London), January 18, 2000.
259 Stephen Fay, ―Theatre: Our Revels Hardly Began,‖ The Independent (London), May 28,
2000; Paul Taylor, ―First Night: Please, Release Us From Redgrave‘s Soggy Island,‖ The Independent
(London), May 27, 2000; Matt Wolf, ―The Tempest,‖ Variety, June 12, 200-June 18, 2000.
260 Penny Gay, ―Changing Shakespeare: New Possibilities for the Modern Actress,‖ in The
Cambridge Companion to the Actress, eds. Maggie B. Gale & John Stokes (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007) 314-326.
112
Shakespeare Festival performed the play with a Prospera, Antonia, and Gonzala. The Los
Angeles Women‘s Shakespeare Company lists an all-female The Tempest in its credits,
and in 2006, Jody Hovland played Prospera in Mark Hunter‘s production for the
Riverside Shakespeare Theatre Festival in Iowa City, Iowa. Finally, Julie Taymor‘s 2010
film version of The Tempest featured Helen Mirren as the powerful sorceress of the
island. Taymor‘s film was not well-received, and flopped at the box office. Critics were
mixed as to whether or not the gender-bending contributed to the film‘s failure. Some
saw Mirren as the saving grace of the film, whereas others complained that ―[e]verything
that makes Shakespeare‘s final play a great expression of the dangers and risks of
ambition in Western civilization is lost in this sex change.‖261
Despite mixed reviews of its effectiveness, casting women as Prospero has
opened up a new opportunity for female performers. When asked about her desire to play
Prospero as a woman, Hovland said: ―I was looking for [a role] to sink my teeth into.
When doing classical texts, it becomes a particularly difficult for a middle-aged woman
to do much more than the nurse.‖262 Andrew James Hartley and Alan Armstrong make
similar observations about the casting choices in the Georgia and Oregon productions,
mentioning that a Prospera created an additional opportunity for the female actors in
these repertory companies to play a larger role. Hartley, however, notes that this practical
reason was silenced in the public relations surrounding the Georgia production, and the
261 Armond White, ―Julie Taymor Sullies Shakespeare with an Unneeded Sex Change,‖ New
York Press (New York), December 7, 2010, accessed May 19, 2011, http://www.nypress.com/article21943-miranda-rights.html; for more examples of the mixed reviews of Mirren‘s performance, see Melinda
Sue Gordon, ―The Tempest: Movie Review,‖ Christian Science Monitor, December 10, 2010, accessed
May 19, 2011, http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Movies/2010/1210/The-Tempest-movie-review;
Andrew O‘Hehir, ―The Tempest: Helen Mirren's Sadly Elegant Mom-Magician,‖ Salon.com, December 10,
2010, accessed May 19, 2011, http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/our_picks/?story=/ent/movies/
andrew_ohehir 2010/12/10/tempest; Claudia Puig, ―Helen Mirren Shines, the Bard Gets Lost in The Tempest,‖
USA Today, December 10, 2010, accessed May 19, 2011, http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/reviews/2010-12-10tempest10_ST_N.htm.
262 Jody Hovland, personal interview, August 10, 2010.
113
company instead sold the choice by saying Shakespeare would have wanted to write
these types of roles for women if he were alive today, and explained that they ―were
merely fulfilling the play‘s destiny.‖ 263
Hollow claims about Shakespeare‘s intentions aside, Prospero does provide an
interesting role for women. For one, it conjures up early modern ideas about the witch.
After all, Prospero inherits his power on the island from the female sorcerer Sycorax.
This feminine inheritance is magnified when in Prospero‘s revocation of his magic in Act
V, scene i, the language is lifted from Ovid‘s Medea. Barbara Mowat argues that
although previous critics have attempted to link Prospero‘s magic with a Magus, a
benevolent intellectual and spiritual seeker, taking the speech from Medea links Prospero
to “a tradition which was seen in the Renaissance as the antithesis of Hermetic magic.
Ovid‘s Medea is an enchanter, a magician who, unlike magus does not seek spiritual
growth, but seeks instead godlike control over the natural and supernatural worlds.‖264
Yet, as Mowat recognizes, this is also the moment when Prospero relinquishes his power.
The vision of the all-powerful sorceress comes at the same instance in which Prospero
denies himself the luxury of that control. He serves as an ideal Christian man by rejecting
the lure of feminine spirituality and power. Allowing a Prospera to participate in this
moment reverses the tables; a woman is able to overcome the lure of power, a woman is
able to choose the empathy and forgiveness that Ariel suggests, and a woman can become
the Christian ideal that was prized at the time of the script‘s writing.
263 Andrew James Hartley, ―Prospera‘s Brave New World: Cross-Cast Oppression and the FourFold Player in the Georgia Shakespeare Festival‘s Tempest,‖ in Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender
Casting in Contemporary Performance, ed. James C. Bulman (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 2008), 131-149 ; Alan Armstrong, ―Shakespeare in Ashland: 2001,‖ Shakespeare Bulletin
(Spring 2002): 25.
264 Barbara A. Mowat, ―Prospero, Agrippa, and Hocus Pocus,‖ in The Tempest: A Norton Critical
Edition, eds. Peter Hulme & William H. Sherman (New York: Norton, 2004), 173.
114
This connection to Medea, however, also highlights a problem with the
feminizing of Prospero, one referred to in almost all the reviews of the productions cited
above. Even with a female Prospero, the play still remains Shakespeare‘s play –
embedded in the world of early modern patriarchy. Although the script might be altered
for pronouns and other gendered signifiers, the characters are still powerless to change
the course of the story. Alan Armstrong, in fact, notes that the careful attention paid to
the gendered language in the Oregon Shakespeare production might have hurt the larger,
feminist aims of the production: ―Working out, scene by scene, the immediate practical
consequences of cross-gender casting, the production occasionally loses sight of larger
dramatic end, paradoxically allowing conventional gender stereotypes to drive
performance choices.‖265 Andrew James Hartley elaborates on these inescapably
gendered roles and the danger of having a victim of oppression play the role of Prospero:
The female actor, in getting to play one of Shakespeare‘s great
male roles, was escaping centuries of constraint, but in doing so
she became not simply free but an oppressor. […] What began as
an escape from patriarchy turned into a study of oppression in
which the oppressor was forced – due to the actor‘s own
experience of having been marginalized and controlled by the
ideological forces inherent in the Shakespearean text – to
sympathize with the oppressed while being powerless (for the bulk
of the play) to escape her own tyranny as dictated by that same
text.266
A female Prospero, particularly Prospero as he is viewed in the light of post-colonial
theory, has its own way of trapping women. Such a role does not allow a woman to
escape the duality of victim and villain. Instead she moves seamlessly from one to the
other, making the rage of Prospera at the beginning of the play not all that different from
the caricatures of second-wave feminism that haunt the modern consciousness.
265 Armstrong, 25.
266 Hartley, 134.
115
The paradoxical returns created by these productions cause some critics to wonder
if cross-gender casting is a viable way to address issues of feminism in any Shakespeare
play. Teresa Dobson writes in New Theatre Quarterly that cross-gender casting is
―futile.‖ If the aim is to give women a voice, she argues that the project fails as women
become merely mouthpieces for male canonical texts.267 Although cross-gendered
casting techniques enable women to have larger Shakespeare roles, they face seemingly
insurmountable challenges. The woman must still use the voice of patriarchy. She must
live up to a performance history of traditional, hegemonic portrayals of her role, and must
avoid challenging culturally ingrained visions of her character. She must do all this while
living up to the innovation of a woman playing a male role, somehow adding to that same
performance history she must not defy. In the end, it seems an almost impossible task.
Ann Thompson asks, ―is it possible for a staging of The Tempest to convey anything
approaching a feminist reading of the text (without rewriting it […])?‖268 The tepid
reviews of twenty-first century Prosperas, perhaps, begin to answer this question and
direct us to her parenthetical whim – would feminist rewritings of The Tempest be more
successful?
Tempest Adaptations
Many feminist critics who have grappled with The Tempest have included
creative responses to the play within their analytical work. In a well-known essay, Lorrie
Jerrel Leininger re-writes the epilogue to the play, this time in Miranda‘s voice.269 Irene
267 Teresa Dobson, ―‗High Engender‘d Battles: Gender and Power in ‗Queen Lear,‘‖ New
Theatre Quarterly 14 (May 1998): 144.
268 Thompson, ―Miranda, Where‘s Your Sister?,‖ 412.
269 Lorie Jerrell Leininger, ―The Miranda Trap: Sexism and Racism in Shakespeare‘s Tempest,‖
in The Tempest: Signet Classics Edition, ed. Robert Langbaum (New York: Signet Classics, 1998), 146155.
116
Lara includes part of an original poem based on the character of Sycorax in her critical
essay, ―Beyond Caliban‘s Curses: The Decolonial Feminist Literacy of Sycorax.‖270 And
Linda Bamber responds to generations of critical response to The Tempest through a
creative piece which utilizes a series of emails that Miranda writes to her sister-in-law,
Claribel.271 Even these critics cannot seem to talk about the experience of women in The
Tempest without engineering ways for those women to voice their own experience.
Beyond criticism, in both literary and theatrical circles, writers have long established a
tradition of rewriting The Tempest, and more often than not, they have adapted the text in
order to include the experience of women.
Since the Restoration and the coming of the actress onto the English stage, theater
producers have adapted Shakespeare‘s plays to include more women. The Tempest, with
its lack of female characters, was a prime candidate for these Restoration adaptations,
which include The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island, The Mock-Tempest: or the
Enchanted Castle, and The Tempest. An Opera. Perhaps the first adaptation of The
Tempest was John Fletcher and Philip Massinger‘s The Sea Voyage. The Norton Critical
Edition of The Tempest includes the opening scene of Fletcher and Massinger‘s play,
suggesting that this first scene borrows directly from the opening of Shakespeare‘s play.
What these editors fail to note, however, is that The Sea Voyage reconstitutes many of
The Tempest‘s themes and plots and adds to them a number of feminine roles. The crew
and passengers of Fletcher and Massinger‘s ship end up on an isolated island, as did
Shakespeare‘s, but this island is governed by an ―Amazonian‖ leader and her female
companions. The crew also comes with a woman on board. There is no magic on this
270Irene Lara, ―Beyond Caliban‘s Curses: The Decolonial Feminist Literacy of Sycorax,‖ Journal
of International Women‟s Studies 9, no.1 (2007): 80-98.
271 Linda Bamber, ―Claribel at Palace Dot Tunis,‖ in Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary
Women‟s Revisions in Literature and Performance, ed. Marianne Novy (New York: St. Martin‘s Press,
1999), 239-257.
117
island; the acts of malice and kindness in the play are done by humans alone. And
although multiple characters, including the Amazonian governess, seek vengeance
throughout the play, they all, through the help of their peers, come to forgive one another.
Fletcher and Massinger create an island ruled by feminine power, an echo of
Shakespeare‘s island under Sycorax‘s rule. Moreover, within this center of feminine
power, reconciliation is possible without the intervention of spirits; the characters are
able to set aside past differences through collaboration, reason, and understanding.272
John Dryden and William Davenant‘s Restoration version, The Enchanted Island,
displaced Shakespeare‘s text for almost two centuries.273 Dryden and Davenant
simplified some of Shakespeare‘s language, updated the political references, added more
stage spectacle, and increased the number of characters in the play. Both Miranda and
Caliban gain sisters, Dorinda and Sycorax respectively, and Prospero gains a male ward.
Of course, the inclusion of more women‘s roles was due to the introduction of women to
the Restoration stage. Penny Gay notes, however, that these additions do not necessarily
lead to a stronger female presence on the stage: ―One striking change in several instances
of renegotiation of gender […] is the extent to which the revised female characters endure
new forms of violence. […] everything from rape to dismemberment and (usually self-)
murder.‖274 This degradation of women is perhaps further seen in The Mock-Tempest. A
272 This type of adaptation is also present in Fletcher‘s The Tamer Tamed, an adaptation of
Shakespeare‘s The Taming of the Shrew. In Fletcher‘s play, Petruccio is trained by his new wife, Maria,
who teaches him that a spirit of cooperation and equality is more important than patriarchal domination. A
full investigation of Fletcher‘s proto-feminist responses to Shakespeare‘s work is out of the scope of this
project, but it certainly merits further investigation.
273 Eds. Peter Hulme & William H. Sherman, The Tempest: A Norton Critical Edition (New
York: Norton, 2004), 308-312; George Robert Guffey, After The Tempest (Los Angeles: University of
California, 1969). For information on a contemporary staging of Dryden and Davenant‘s play, see Tim
Keenan, ―Adapting the Adaptors: Staging Davenant and Dryden‘s Restoration Tempest,‖ Journal of
Adaptation in Film and Performance 2, no.1. (1990): 65-75.
274 Penny Gay, ―Women and Shakespearean Performance,‖ in The Cambridge Companion to
Shakespeare on Stage, eds. Stanley Wells & Sarah Stanton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), Cambridge Collections Online, accessed May 19, 2011, DOI:10.1017/CCOL0521792959.009.
118
rival of Dryden‘s company, Thomas Kilgrew and the King‘s Company, commissioned
Thomas Duffett to write a satire in answer to the tremendously successful The Enchanted
Island. Duffet‘s version mocked Shakespearean adaptations in general and, by making
Prospero the overseer of Bridewell, a prison for prostitutes, it looked forward to more
burlesque forms of Shakespeare in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.275
The Tempest also has a rich history of influencing literary works outside of the
theater. Poets, for one, have found the play particularly fruitful. Robert Browning
provides a Darwinian meditation for Caliban in his poem ―Caliban upon Setebos Or,
Natural Theology in the Island‖ (1864). T.S Eliot alludes to the play in ―The Waste
Land‖ (1922), and Marjorie Pickthall included the poem ―Miranda‘s Tomb‖ in her
collection The Wood-Carver‟s Wife in the same year. W.H. Auden provides creative
criticism of the play in his poetry collection The Sea and The Mirror (1944). Poet H. D.,
born Hilda Doolittle, takes the viewpoint of Claribel in her collection By Avon River
(1949). Sylvia Plath‘s posthumous collection of poetry was titled Ariel (1965), and the
collection includes her poem by the same name. Indian-Canadian poet Suniti Namjoshi
explores Miranda‘s desire for the other in a long poem sequence titled ―Snapshots of
Caliban‖ in The Bedside Book of Nightmares (1986). Several novels also take up the
themes of The Tempest and its characters including Margaret Laurence‘s The Diviners
(1974), Toni Morrison‘s Tar Baby (1981), Sarah Murphy‘s The Measure of Miranda
(1987), Constance Beresford-Howe‘s Prospero‟s Daughter (1988), Marina Warner‘s
Indigo (1992), and Nancy Huston‘s Plainsong (1993).276 While Browning, Eliot, and
275 Hulme & Sherman, 312-314.
276 For general information on feminist Tempest adaptations, see Chantal Zabus, Tempests After
Shakespeare (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 127-154. For information on specific adaptations, see Diana
Brydon, ―Tempest Plainsong: Returning Caliban‘s Curse,‖ in Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary
Women‟s Revisions in Literature and Performance, ed. Marianne Novy (New York: St. Martin‘s Press,
1999), 199-216; Diana Brydon, ―Sister Letters: Miranda‘s Tempest in Canada,‖ in Cross-Cultural
Performances: Differences in Women‟s Re-Visions of Shakespeare, ed. Marianne Novy (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1993), 165-184; Caroline Cakebread, ―Sycorax Speaks: Marina Warner‘s
119
Auden are among them, the majority of nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors who
make use of The Tempest are women. Despite the play‘s lack of women, or perhaps
because of it, women seem particularly drawn to the text, eager to carve out new,
feminine perspectives on its characters and themes.
This rewriting of The Tempest has to be understood in the context of the long
history of adaptations of Shakespeare for female readers, and in particular, young female
readers. This is due largely to the plethora of Shakespeare editions published for children
and families in the nineteenth century, which were, for the most part, intended for female
audiences. Moreover, these editions were largely the work of female authors. Henrietta
Bowdler‘s The Family Shakespeare was first published in 1807 under her brother
Thomas Bowdler‘s name. The collection was not attributed to Henrietta until the
twentieth-century. That same year, Tales from Shakespeare was first published under
Charles Lamb‘s name; subsequent editions listed both Charles and his sister Mary Lamb
as co-adaptors, and critics now argue that Mary was the instigator of the project.277
These collections, as well as Edith Nesbit‘s later collections The Children‟s Shakespeare
(1897) and Twenty Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare: A Home Study Course (1907),
were billed for children, but their introductions make it clear that these texts were
Indigo and The Tempest‖ in Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women‟s Revisions in Literature
and Performance, ed. Marianne Novy (New York: St. Martin‘s Press, 1999), 217-236.
277 See Janet Bottoms, ―Of Tales and Tempests,‖ Children‟s Literature in Education 27, no. 2
(1996): 73-86; Janet Bottoms, ―To Read Aright: Representations of Shakespeare for Children,‖ Children‟s
Literature 32 (2004):1-14; Janet Bottoms, ―Familiar Shakespeares,‖ in Where Texts and Children Meet,
eds. Eve Bearne and Victor Watson (London: Routledge, 2000), 11-25; Kate Chedgzoy, ―Shakespeare in
the Company of Boys,‖ in Shakespeare and Childhood, eds. Kate Chedgzoy, Susanne Greenhalgh, &
Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 184-200; Erica Hateley, ―Of Tails
and Tempests: Feminine Sexuality and Shakespearean‘s Children‘s Texts,‖ Borrowers and Lenders 2, no.1
(2006), accessed July 18, 2010, http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/cocoon/borrowers/request?id=781420; Jean
I. Marsden, ―Shakespeare for Girls: Mary Lamb and Tales from Shakespeare,‖ Children‟s Literature 17:
47-63; Shinichi Suzuki, ―Learning to Read Shakespeare: Caliban in The Tempest for Children in the Late
19th and Early 20th Centuries,‖ in Shakespeare and His Collaborators Over the Centuries (Newcastle upon
Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 157-172.
120
primarily for the education of young women. In the preface to the Lambs‘ collection,
Mary makes her audience explicit:
For young ladies too it has been the intention chiefly to write;
because boys being generally permitted the use of their fathers‘
libraries at a much earlier age than girls are, they frequently have
the best scenes of Shakespeare by heart before their sisters are
permitted to look into this manly book […].278
An advertisement in the second edition of the collection, published in 1809, reemphasized not only the collection‘s audience but also its purpose: ―It has been the
general sentiment, that the style in which these Tales are written, is not so precisely
adapted for the amusement of mere children, as for an acceptable and improving present
to young ladies advancing to the state of womanhood‖ (iii). These editions were
masterminded to provide women with ―safe‖ versions of Shakespeare – ones that exalted
ideal femininity by emphasizing the domestic portions of Shakespeare‘s plays. The
female characters of Shakespeare‘s plays were made the main characters; their good
virtues were emphasized, and their questionable behaviors elided. These editors
eliminated the low humor, violence, and characterizations of Shakespeare‘s plays that
were considered too risqué for young girls. In short, these editions were censored
versions of the text, and ironically, they were censored for women by women.279
Moreover, they reduced Shakespeare‘s plays to mere plots, eliminating the poetry that,
arguably, made knowledge of the plays desirable.
The Lambs‘ version of The Tempest provides an example of the revisions the
plays underwent in their adaptors‘ hands. In their version, the love story between
278 Charles & Mary Lamb, Tales From Shakespeare (New York: Book of the Month Club, 1995),
viii.
279 Such editing of Shakespeare‘s text led to the verb ―Bowdlerize,‖ but Janet Bottoms notes that
this type of editing happened before the Bowdlers. Bell‘s editions of Shakespeare, for example, took out the
―glaring indecencies‖ of the stage so as to make the texts ―more instructive and intelligible, especially to
the ladies and youth.‖ Bottoms, Familiar Shakespeares, 13.
121
Miranda and Ferdinand is the focal point of the story. Ariel is a ―lively little sprite‖ who
―had nothing mischievous in his nature, except that he took rather too much pleasure in
tormenting an ugly monster called Caliban, for he owed him a grudge because he was the
son of his old enemy Sycorax.‖ The monstrous Caliban, perhaps because he is ―lazy‖ and
ape-like, is relegated to the margins in this retelling in favor of his mother. Sycorax
provides the Lambs with the antithesis of ideal femininity. She is a witch who ―enchants‖
the island; she imprisons good spirits in the trees ―because they have refused to execute
her wicked commands.‖ She is the mother who endowed her son with his ―bad nature.‖
This truncated tale also includes the seemingly throw-away anecdote of Sycorax‘s birth
in and exile from Algiers in full detail. Sycorax becomes more of the villain than
Antonio, who at the end of the story ―with tears, and sad words of sorrow and true
repentance, implored his brother‘s forgiveness […].‖ Sycorax, an unseen and unvoiced
character, becomes the Lambs‘ straw-woman as they work toward their purpose of
―advancing the state of womanhood.‖280
Contemporary female theater artists continue the tradition of adapting
Shakespeare‘s plays, but do so in order to encourage audiences to question the original
texts. Adaptations that pay particular interest to feminist and women‘s issues include
Paula Vogel‘s version of Othello, Desdemona‟s Handkerchief; the Women‘s Theatre
Group‘s Lear‟s Daughters, an adaptation of King Lear; and Ann-Marie MacDonald‘s
280 Charles & Mary Lamb, 1-13. These family-editions of Shakespeare set a precedent for prose
adaptations of Shakespeare‘s works for young audiences throughout the twentieth- and twenty-first
century; yet instead of using these re-tellings to sanitize the playwright, many contemporary young adult
authors have chosen to question traditional interpretations of plays such as The Tempest. Grace Tiffany‘s
Ariel (2005) provides not only a back story for Ariel, but also questions the ―rape‖ of Miranda by
imagining that it was the young girl, and not Caliban, who made the sexual advances. Madeline L‘Engle‘s
A Wrinkle in Time (1962) creates a science fiction retelling of a Miranda-like daughter, her brother, and
friend who find their scientist father imprisoned on an isolated planet, and Zibby O‘Neal‘s In Summer Light
(1986) and Penni Russon‘s Undine (2006) also have daughters, on an island setting, renewing their
relationships with distant fathers. While nineteenth-century children‘s authors created restrictive voices for
their Shakespearean heroines, contemporary authors often use his text to explore the themes of parent-child
relationships, outsiders, race relations, magic, and adolescence in new ways, finding in adaptation a way to
both introduce children to the canon while, at the same time, teaching them to question it.
122
Shakespearean fantasy Good Morning, Desdemona, Good Night, Juliet.281 With regards
to The Tempest, Chin Woo Ping created the one-woman play Psycho Wracks, which she
explains is not so much a re-visioning of The Tempest but rather is ―more concerned with
abstracting and meditating upon her character as a trope and springboard for allusive,
parodic, and ironic creation.‖282 Another interesting example is Susan Gayle Todd‘s
prequel to The Tempest, Sycorax, which I discuss in detail later in this chapter.
Unlike such predecessors as Cavendish and Behn, contemporary women are not
attracted to Shakespeare because he is a fellow outsider. Instead, it is Shakespeare‘s high
place in the canon that draws these women to his work. Through their rewritings, they
seek to re-claim these canonical texts, so as to allow women a place in our culture‘s most
prominent stories. Shakespearean texts, despite claims of universality by theater and
literary critics alike, do not fully encompass female experience; adaptation thus becomes
one way in which writers can amend that. Using ―safe,‖ canonical works, feminist artists
are able to raise questions about that canon – questions that The Weird Sisters‘ Theater
Collective of Austin, Texas prides itself on asking.
The Weird Sisters
The Weird Sisters Women‘s Theater Collective was founded in 2005 when Susan
Gayle Todd and Christa French brought together a group of women to perform Todd‘s
adaptation of Macbeth – Weird Sisters, Hand in Hand. Todd, a Masters student in the
Women‘s Studies department at the University of Texas at Austin, had studied English at
281 See also Marianne Novy ―Saving Desdemona and/or Ourselves: Plays by Ann-Marie
MacDonald and Paula Vogel,‖ in Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women‟s Revisions in
Literature and Performance, ed. Marianne Novy (New York: St. Martin‘s Press, 1999), 67-85.
282 Chin Woo Ping, ―Sycorax Revisited: Exile and Absence in Performance,‖ Modern Drama
46.1 (2003), 94.
123
UT as an undergraduate and participated in that department‘s Shakespeare at Winedale
program, in which UT English students stage Shakespeare plays each summer at the
Winedale Historical Center in Round Top, Texas. As a teacher at Leander High School in
Leander, Texas, Todd started a ―Shakespeare in performance‖ program for her students.
Through her experiences at Winedale and with her high school students, Todd realized
that a number of the young women she encountered had a strong interest in Shakespeare,
but that their opportunities to participate in theatrical productions of his works were
limited. She continued to revisit something one of her mentors, UT English professor and
founder of the Winedale program, James Ayres, had asked her about Shakespearean
texts: ―Are you satisfied?‖ For herself and her female students, the answer was no.
In the summer of 2003, while serving as assistant director for the Shakespeare
Theater at Winedale, Todd noted that although female students accounted for the
majority of the participants, they played only minor roles, and were usually cast as pages,
messengers, or boys. She recalls one incident in which the male participants were all
working with professional stage combat instructors, while the female participants
lingered listlessly on the sidelines. Early modern women had been banished from the
English stage, and 400 years later on a muggy Texas afternoon, it seemed women were
facing similar marginalization.
That summer, Todd met Christa French, a friend of one of the Winedale
participants, who spent time with the group as they rehearsed. In the evenings, the two
women talked about the inequalities they noticed, both at Winedale and in theater more
generally. French found Todd inspirational and encouraged her to start her own, allfemale company. Todd resisted: ―It wasn't that I thought it was a bad idea. I just felt I was
too busy with grad school, and I didn't think people would be all that interested.‖ But
French ―wouldn't take no for an answer; for every reason I gave her that it wouldn't be
124
practical, she came back with five reasons it would work.‖283 Despite French‘s
persistence, Todd continued to hesitate, until she saw a way to merge her academic work
with her desire to create a ―safe space‖ for women in classical theater. Todd recalls
―[when I] realized I was actually going to try to write this adaptation of Macbeth with
Lady M[acbeth] at the center, I talked to Christa about going for it – about putting the
word out that we had a project in mind and wanted others to join us. […T]he Saturday
morning of our first salon, I couldn't believe the turnout. Women of all ages showed up at
my house, enthusiastic about both the collective AND the Lady M project. Amazing.‖284
The salon was French and Todd‘s way of wading into the venture in October
2004. They invited women who might be interested in Shakespeare or a women‘s theater
collective to discuss the possibility of working together. To their surprise, the room was
overflowing with women. As they went around the room, woman after woman told
stories of being objectified and excluded by directors in traditional theater companies.
One woman said that she had finally left theater, which she had studied in college,
because too many directors had instructed her male colleagues to molest her on stage
without textual justification. These women hungered for a space in which to perform
Shakespeare; like Virginia Woolf, they craved a room, or stage, of their own.
At the salon, Todd announced her plan to create a feminist adaptation of Macbeth
for an all-female cast, and the response was ―overwhelming.‖285 French and Todd held
another salon in November of that year, and invited women to share work related to
feminism and Shakespeare, work that ―ranged from conference-style academic pieces on
contemporary marriage and relationships to an interactive improvisation exercise entitled
283 Susan Gayle Todd, personal email correspondence to the author, August 27, 2010.
284 Ibid.
285 Susan Gayle Todd, The Weird Sisters, Hand in Hand: A Female-centric Adaptation of
Shakespeare‟s Macbeth (master‘s thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 2005), 101.
125
‗Walk Like a Man.‘‖286 In addition, the women met weekly to read plays such as Caryl
Churchill‘s Vinegar Tom and Paula Vogel‘s Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief.
The group read Todd‘s adaptation when it was finished, and Todd and French
asked who would be interested in participating in a production of the script. The resulting
group included a large array of women of various ages and backgrounds. Among them
were Todd‘s daughter and her friends, her son‘s girlfriend, Todd‘s former high school
students, her former high school teaching colleagues, and colleagues from Winedale and
the UT graduate program. Most of these women had little or no stage experience, a
prospect that delighted Todd: ―although I hoped for a product we could feel proud of, I
wanted the project to be primarily about the process of feminist exploration and
discovery, not virtuosity.‖287
Exhausted after organizing that first production, Todd decided not to pursue the
all-female company further. Yet in 2006, when Michelle Lee, one of Todd‘s UT
colleagues, approached her with Angels of the House – a play about two real-life
Victorian women, Katharine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper, who wrote drama and
poetry under the pseudonym Michael Field – Todd knew she needed to reassemble the
group and perform the play. The group has since performed yearly, staging Twelfth Night
(2007); The Merry Wives of Windsor (2008); McDonald‘s Good Night, Desdemona,
Good Morning Juliet (2009); and another original play by Todd, Sycorax (2010). As the
group‘s members became formally organized, they needed a name. Originally, they
proposed ―The Austin Women‘s Theater Collective,‖ but that name met resistance from
others in the tight-knit Austin theater community who felt that the name unfairly implied
ownership of all female performance in Austin.288 The group instead decided to take its
286 Ibid., 101.
287 Ibid., 102.
288 Christa French, personal interview with the author, June 19, 2010.
126
name from their first production and became The Weird Sisters Women‘s Theater
Collective.
The group‘s manifesto illustrates its approach to both theater and feminism by
breaking down the significance of each word in its name. The Weird Sisters embrace
weird ―in its original sense: wayward.‖ They see traditional theater as defaulting to
hegemonic ways of interpreting texts and guilty of the ―general exclusion and
objectification of women.‖ They feel they challenge the status quo by ―celebrat[ing]
women—female artists, and even fictitious female characters who shape our
understanding of real-live women—who have been silenced or vilified as a result of
pervading, institutionalized sexism. Theater is where we expose, try, and condemn
misogyny. It is also our healing place where loss can be restored, lives can be revived,
and stories can be re-imagined.‖289 The Collective deliberately works to rectify what
Todd perceives to be the ―abysmal‖ status of women in many professional, community,
and educational theaters: ―Women make the best of it, but when it comes down to it,
they‘re still largely used as eye candy. They have brief windows of opportunity for
substantial ingénue roles (if they happen to be slender and white), but before long, it‘s
either Lady Macbeth or Martha in [Albee‘s] Virginia Woolf. Both good roles, but
rare.‖290 Playwright and performer Bryony Lavery echoes Todd‘s argument, saying that
the perpetuation of the canon limits roles for women in existing productions and creates a
lack of funding for new or experimental pieces: ―The theatre seems too much like a great
museum run by male curators. […] There are far too many good women actors for the
amount of space in those glass museum [cases].‖291 The goal of the Weird Sisters is to
289 The Weird Sisters Women‘s Theater Collective, ―Manifesto,‖ The Weird Sisters Women‘s
Theater Collective, accessed July 5, 2010, http://weirdsisterscollective.com/manifesto/.
290 Susan Gayle Todd, personal email correspondence to the author, December 19, 2010
291 Lizbeth Goodman, ―Women‘s Alternative Shakespeares,‖ 206-207.
127
break through these cases and find ways to allow every woman access to both the theater
and the canon.
With the term ―Sisters,‖ the group‘s members aim to reflect their equal status as
performers and the ―nurturing, feminist space‖ they seek to create.292 When the Weird
Sisters were still a dream, French emailed Lisa Wolpe, founder of the Los Angeles
Women‘s Shakespeare Company, to ask for her advice. Wolpe‘s recommendation was:
―Don‘t let boys in because it completely changes the dynamic.‖293 Todd admits that she
has often struggled with that advice, wondering if sensitive male allies and supportive
partners should be excluded from the group‘s work. French and Todd are aware of the
pitfalls of second-wave feminism, and they do not want to exclude men‘s experience
from their own empowerment. Yet French acknowledges that the choice to restrict the
group to female participants challenged their members to learn new skills and take the
initiative. She says that she has never regretted the decision ―because even in that first
production having people have to step up and do all of the tech, all of the things guys
normally do, all of the leadership in small groups. So much so that stuff is, not through
anyone‘s fault or desire, it often falls out that a guy will take leadership of that kind of
thing […].‖294 Todd argues that the absence of men also makes women more apt to
voice their concerns, ideas, and talents. She feels ―sure that the all-women model has
strengthened us and given us solidarity.‖ Although men have, from time to time, served
as allies to the group and assisted the women with fundraising, loading in, striking,
292 Weird Sisters Women‘s Theater Collective, ―Manifesto.‖
293 French, personal interview, June 19, 2010. In the summer of 2010, Lisa Wolpe appears to
have reconsidered her own advice as she allowed men into the Los Angeles Women‘s Shakespeare
Company productions and staged an all-male Macbeth. Ellen Gamerman, ―Midsummer Nights‘ Mutants:
Shakespearing It Up, With a Blue-Footed Bobby. Or Pirates,‖ The Wall Street Journal (New York), June
11, 2010.
294 French, personal interview, June 19, 2010.
128
choreography, or building set pieces or props, Todd prefers that they continue in this ally
role: ―Males have plenty of opportunity to be on stage, particularly Shakespeare, but
women don‘t. That‘s our niche, and for now I think it should stay that way.‖295
Even as it excludes men, the group strives to uphold an inclusive vision of
women; they ―welcome WOMEN of all ages, colors, sizes, and abilities. We are profemale and certainly not anti-male. […] We do not promote any particular or narrow
feminist agenda, but one that is encompassing.‖296 In a statement on theater, Todd wrote
that she is ―dedicated to promoting opportunity for every voice and every body. I reject
traditional, exclusive writing and casting that shoves people into trite roles – or offstage
altogether – because of their color or sex or height or physical ability or age or bone
structure or weight.‖297 For proof of the importance of this inclusiveness, one need only
look at professional and semi-professional actors who took part in Sycorax – Feliz Dia
McDonald and Azure Osbourne-Lee, two African American women, and Rae Petersen
and Chris Humphrey, women who are in their 50‘s and 60‘s respectively. Traditionally,
women in these categories have difficulty finding rewarding leading roles in both
classical and contemporary theater, yet the Weird Sisters actively seek to place them in
such roles. In the group‘s 2009 production of MacDonald‘s Good Morning, Desdemona,
Good Night, Juliet, Humphrey played the lead role of Constance Ledbelly, a young
assistant professor. Humphrey said, ―I wasn‘t sure if I had the time to be in the
production, and after the read-through I thought I was safe – there were no roles for
someone like me. So when they asked me to play Constance, I was shocked.‖298 Todd
295 French, personal interview, June 19, 2010; Susan Gayle Todd, personal email correspondence
to the author, December 6, 2010.
296 Weird Sister‘s Women‘s Theater Collective, ―Manifesto.‖
297 Susan Gayle Todd, ―My Theater‖ (Course Essay, University of Texas at Austin, 2007).
298 Chris Humphrey, personal interview with the author, June 14, 2010.
129
and the Weird Sisters believe earnestly in the power of ―play‖ in the theater. Anyone can
be anything they want to be; that, in fact, is the point of theater. To this group, the theater
is the place to experiment with and challenge our social perceptions and constructions. It
is a forum in which they can, as Jill Dolan writes, create their own utopia.299 In the case
of the Weird Sisters, this utopia is both practical – in that the woman are able to play
roles they might not otherwise have the opportunity to in traditional theater – and
idealistic, in that they are creating a vision of the world where all can overcome social
strictures and see them as mere constructions.
This attempt to highlight the informal play of the theater is emphasized in the way
the Weird Sisters spell theater with the Americanized -er. They write: ―Because we are
here in Central Texas, U.S.A., our THEATER is spelled with an ‗er‘ rather than a
pretentious ‗re,‘ which positions it in ‗high culture.‘ Wherever women are, we encourage
them to claim their right to theater and community. We are committed to our tolerant and
generous local audience, whose support, attention, and participation are essential to what
we do.‖300 This group values its place in Austin and its vibrant theater community. Todd
said the group has developed a reputation ―as the ultimate place where women can be
free to play and to invent. [… I]f you‘re a woman, and you want to do some politically
motivated theater work, you‘re welcome to join us.‖301 The Weird Sisters try to attend
other Austin theater events together, and French said it is her dream to make sure these
outings happen on a regular basis and to develop a blog on their Web site with theater
reviews of their fellow companies. French believes this is a way to increase the group‘s
299 Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance.
300 Weird Sisters Women‘s Theater Collective, ―Manifesto.‖
301 Todd, personal email, December 6, 2010.
130
exposure, show their support for other local theater groups, and develop relationships
with potential allies.302
Finally, as the last word in their name makes clear, the group is a collective. The
idea of theatrical collectives was particularly prevalent among the feminist theater
movements of the 1970‘s, which saw the institution of theater as highly patriarchal. The
collaborative groups of the 1970‘s eliminated the director and, instead, gave each
member a voice and a vote in the production. Borrowing as much from American
democracy as from Marxist notions about collectives, ‘70‘s groups proposed that if the
purpose of feminist theater was to give voice to the voiceless, then it was important that
every member had a chance to be heard.303 This democratic ethos is what the Weird
Sisters aim to create as well:
We enjoy making theater, but the most crucial thing that brings us
together is the company of powerful, adventurous, wise women,
with whom we foster strong, deep relationships. We pool our
resources so that no playwright, director, dramaturg, technician, or
actor carries more importance than anyone else in our plays; nor
are our salons for the glorification of any individual speaker or
scholar, but rather for sharing of questions, talents, and
discoveries.304
The aim of giving a voice to every member becomes especially important in the face of
third-wave feminism‘s insistence that female experience is not ―universal;‖ each
individual is different and theater is one of the places where women can bring together
their collective experiences so as to provide a nuanced view of femininity.
Repeatedly, this collaborative emphasis is what women told me they loved about
the Weird Sisters and helps explain why they continue to come back to the group. Rachel
302 French, personal interview, June 19, 2010.
303 Charlotte Canning, Feminist Theaters in the U.S.A: Staging Women‟s Experience (London:
Routledge, 1996), 63-111.
304 The Weird Sisters Women‘s Theater Collective, ―Manifesto.‖
131
Brilles said, ―Everyone‘s opinions are really heard, and even though they might not be
used in the end, they are still valued, and I love that.‖305 Both Alyson Curtis and Penny
Smith admitted that this collaborative process, and not Shakespeare, is what attracted
them to the group. Smith acknowledges that ―Shakespeare has always been difficult for
me. What I love about the Weirds, and Susan [Todd] and Christa [French] and everyone
involved, is that they have this amazing understanding of Shakespeare. So anytime we do
a play, I just grasp all this knowledge I never had about Shakespeare.‖306 Many of the
Weird Sisters are attracted to the collaborative process of the group, as well as to the
nurturing environment that provides a space where they can encounter difficult early
modern texts in a comfortable way. In a situation in which questions and cooperation are
encouraged, these women are able to make Shakespeare their own.
This creative ownership of Shakespeare also applies to those, like Todd and
French, who already have a deep knowledge of the playwright. When Todd started her
Macbeth adaptation, she was going to extrapolate Lady Macbeth‘s lines to emphasize her
character‘s experiences in the play. Yet Todd realized quickly that isolating the
matriarch‘s lines would hurt, instead of help, the audience‘s perception of her. Todd notes
that Lady Macbeth is a forceful character up until her humiliation in the banquet scene,
and then she re-enters, incoherent, in the sleepwalking scene, leaving the audience to
infer the trajectory of her mental deterioration. Todd decided that what she needed to do
was fill in that gap. Not wanting to veer too far from Shakespeare‘s original, she reappropriated lines that once belonged to Macbeth, Malcolm, and one of the murderers to
create motivation for the woman. Then she augmented the story by using some of Henry
305 Rachel Brilles, personal interview with the author, June 16, 2010.
306 Alyson Curtis, personal interview with the author, June 14, 2010; Penny Smith, personal
interview with the author, June 19, 2010.
132
VIII‘s lines and her own ―fakespeare.‖307 Trained as a Shakespeare ―purist,‖ Todd said
the act felt transgressive: ―like I was going to get in trouble.‖ Yet it also felt
liberating.308 Since she wrote Weird Sisters, Hand in Hand, Todd has started to take
more liberties with original play texts, leading to her creation of a back story for one of
Shakespeare‘s most enigmatic characters – Sycorax.
Sycorax, Editorship, and Storytelling
In early 2010, Todd proposed that the Collective perform her play Sycorax, a
prequel to Shakespeare‘s The Tempest that focuses on the former matriarch of the island
where Shakespeare‘s travelers are marooned. Unlike Weird Sisters, Hand in Hand,
Sycorax did not extrapolate from Shakespeare‘s text, but provided a back story for his
Algerian witch. Todd‘s Sycorax is the bi-racial daughter of the white Algerian healer,
Talma. The mother dies early in the play and passes on her gifts of healing and midwifery
to her daughter. Shortly after the mother‘s death, the spirit Ariel appears in Sycorax‘s life
and attempts to mentor her in the ways of magic, despite Sycorax‘s resistance. A
successful healer in Algiers, Sycorax takes in a young assistant, Clare, with whom
Sycorax pursues a committed, lesbian relationship. Sycorax‘s gifts get her noticed by the
Algerian governor, and through a rudimentary form of artificial insemination, she helps
him produce an heir. Sycorax achieves elevated status in her society – earning the title of
Pasha and having a statue of herself erected in the town square. When a Tsunami hits the
village, however, the people begin to blame Sycorax and her lover Clare. Under pressure
from his advisor, the Governor condemns Clare to death by burning and places Sycorax
on a ship to be used as the sailors‘ whore. In the climactic scene of the play, the sailors
307 Todd, The Weird Sisters, 103.
308 Susan Gayle Todd, personal interview with the author, June 14, 2010.
133
gang-rape Sycorax and leave her for dead on a deserted island. Sycorax survives with the
help of Talma and Clare‘s ghosts. She learns she is pregnant by her rapists and gives birth
to Caliban. Ariel, growing jealous of Sycorax‘s attachment to Caliban, threatens the
child, and Sycorax, encouraged by Clare, traps the spirit in a tree to save her child.
At first the group resisted Todd‘s suggestion that they perform the play, arguing
that the Weird Sisters had found a niche with the humorous plays they had done in recent
years; they had no desire to take on the violence and heavy themes of Sycorax. Moreover,
the cast called for two African American women to play the roles of Sycorax and Ariel.
Despite the group‘s desires and efforts to recruit more ethnically diverse members, it had
no African American members. Hollie Baker said, ―One thing we‘ve always been
missing in the Weirds is diversity. Not just with race necessarily, but in a lot of ways. It
seems like we have a lot of intellectual white women sitting around agreeing with each
other for the most part. This is the first time when we were really challenged because we
needed to cast two black females.‖309 It was important to Todd and French that they
provide this opportunity for black actresses. If the Weird Sisters were about providing a
space for every female actor to express her experiences through play, they needed to
provide roles for all actresses, even those who were not already permanent members of
their group. Moreover, in order to thrive as a group and fulfill their mission, they needed
to challenge themselves, both in the types of plays they selected and in the types of
female voices those plays included. The group‘s members had to admit that their
commitment to canonical works meant they could be excluding those women whose
voices were most oppressed. As Todd noted, ―We value equal opportunity so much in the
Weirds, and it was high time we began to acknowledge our non-diversity. I‘m still not
sure why we‘ve not become more culturally diverse, but at least we‘ve begun to pay
309 Hollie Baker, personal interview with the author, June 14, 2010.
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attention to that glaring fact.‖310 Ellen Donkin and Susan Bennett argue that in canonical
literature, the women who do exist are ―more closely linked to male fantasies and
projections of women than the actual, complex daily lives of real women. The result is
not only erasure but distortion. And for women of color, lesbians, and lesbians of color,
the issue is virtual erasure.‖311 Thus to present a play that was both ―canonical‖ and that
featured a lesbian woman of color as the lead character provided a special opportunity for
the Weird Sisters because it would allow them to interrogate the patriarchal voices that
dictate the stories of the canon.
Sycorax is particularly suitable for that interrogation because of the way her own
story is told. In The Tempest, we learn her history from Prospero. In Act I, scene ii,
Prospero dismisses Ariel‘s pleas for freedom:
PROSPERO.
Hast thou forgot
The foul witch Sycorax, who with age and envy
Was grown into a hoop? Hast thou forgot her?
ARIEL. No sir.
PROSPERO. Thou hast. Where was she born? Speak. Tell
me.
ARIEL. Sir, in Algiers.
PROSPERO.
O, was she so? I must
Once in a month recount what thou hast been,
Which thou forget‘st. This damn witch Sycorax,
For mischiefs manifold, and sorceries terrible
To enter human hearing, from Algiers,
Thou know‘st, was banished. For one thing she did
They would not take her life. Is not this true?
ARIEL. Ay, sir.312
310 Susan Gayle Todd, personal email correspondence to the author, February 8, 2011.
311 Ellen Donkin & Susan Bennett, ―Introduction,‖ in Upstaging Big Daddy: Directing Theater
As If Gender and Race Mattered, eds. Ellen Donkin & Susan Bennett (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1993), 1.
312 I.ii.258-270.
135
In Shakespeare‘s play, Prospero re-tells Ariel the story of Sycorax monthly, reinforcing
the woman‘s image as a witch. He places special emphasis on the place of her birth so as
to invoke images of exoticism and dark magic.313 He vilifies her by referring to her
―mischiefs manifold, and sorceries terrible.‖ Yet Prospero glosses over the point that
there was something Sycorax did to redeem her life.
Shakespeare‘s decision to offer Sycorax redemption from execution has long
perplexed critics. Charles Lamb said that this enigma was explained to him when he
learned of an infamous Algerian witch who was granted a stay of execution when she
saved Algiers from an attack by Emperor Charles V.314 Much of the twentieth century
criticism on the subject, however, has focused on Sycorax‘s pregnancy as her salvation.
Zeroing in on the phrase ―blue-eyed hag,‖ Leah Marcus shows how the fixation on
Sycorax‘s pregnancy has led contemporary editors to sustain the same racially-charged,
negative images of the woman that Prospero conjures. Many editors gloss ―blue-eyed
hag‖ as a sign of pregnancy, assuming that the Northern African woman‘s eyes cannot be
blue, and thus, editors align blue-eyed individuals with the light-skinned imperialists. As
Marcus writes, ―the witch cannot have blue eyes, because the cultural image of blue eyes
is overwhelmingly positive and Sycorax has to be understood as negative.‖315 Thus,
knowingly or not, editors who see the blue eyes as a sign of pregnancy seem to align
themselves with Prospero, forgetting, perhaps, that Prospero himself is an editor of this
story.
313 Diane Purkiss, ―The Witch on the Margins of ‗Race‘: Sycorax and Others,‖ The Witch in
History: Early Modern and Twentieth Century Representations (London: Routledge, 1996), 259-262.
Purkiss notes that Sycorax is derived from a tradition of ―foreign‖ witches that includes Circe, Medea, and
Dido. Pindar‘s fourth Pythian ode locates Medea‘s origins as North African and Dido is also from North
Africa.
314 Charles Lamb, ―Nugae Criticae,‖ London Magazine (November 1823), quoted in Leah
Marcus, ―The Blue-Eyed Witch,‖ in The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy, 2nd ed., eds.
Gerald Graff & James Phelan (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin‘s, 2009), 250-251.
315 Marcus, 256.
136
If we look more closely at how Shakespeare handles this ―blue-eyed hag‖
moment, it is obvious that Prospero has an ulterior motive in telling her story:
This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child
And here was left by th‘ sailors.
Thou, my slave,
As thou report‘st thyself, was then her servant;
And for thou was a spirit too delicate
To act her earthy and abhorred commands,
Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee […]316
Prospero uses the story as a means of fear mongering. Even though Ariel is the one who
told the story to Prospero, Prospero is able to turn the information into a weapon against
both the spirit and his former mistress. He says of Ariel‘s confinement in the tree: ―It was
a torment / To lay upon the damned, which Sycorax / Could not again undo. It was mine
art, / When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape / The pine, and let thee out.‖317 In
Prospero‘s spinning of this narrative, he is situating himself as the hero and the more
powerful of Ariel‘s two masters. The Sycorax he describes not only maliciously punishes
the spirit when he will not do her bidding, but ―could not again undo‖ the punishment.
Prospero infers that Sycorax‘s magic was no match for his powers, even though as the
play continues it seems Ariel is, in fact, the conduit of Prospero‘s magic. Moreover,
Prospero puns on the word ―witch‖ with the phrase ―which Sycorax,‖ revealing his not so
subtle intent to libel the woman. Jane Kamensky argues that the mere possession of a
voice could lead a woman to condemnation as a witch: ―Minister, magistrates, and
common folk agreed that the witch‘s crime was often, at root, a crime of female
speech.‖318 This anxiety is embedded in Shakespeare‘s text as he denies the woman the
ability to speak her narrative and, instead, gives that opportunity to Prospero.
316 I.ii.271-276.
317 I.ii.291-294.
318 Jane Kamensky, ―Female Speech and Other Demons: Witchcraft and Wordcraft in Early New
England,‖ in Spellbound: Women and Witchcraft in America, ed. Elizabeth Reis (Wilmington: Scholarly
Resources, 1998), 27.
137
Generations of audiences and critics have accepted this version of Sycorax. This
acceptance is apparent in two earlier productions, which incorporated Sycorax into their
performance scripts. In a 1968 production of The Tempest at the Round House Theatre,
Peter Brook opened the play with Sycorax entering the stage as a ―monster-mother […]
portrayed by an enormous woman able to expand her face and body to still larger
proportions…Suddenly she gives a horrendous yell, and Caliban, with black sweater over
his head, emerges from between her legs: Evil is born.‖319 Derek Jarman also includes a
―monster-mother‖ Sycorax in his film version of The Tempest; his matriarch is a
grotesque sorceress who smokes a hookah and feeds a grown Caliban at her breast. Diane
Purkiss argues that Brook and Jarman‘s depictions are similar to Prospero‘s in that they
―cannot resist conflating Sycorax willy-nilly with as many images of feminine and ethnic
darkness as they can lay their hands on.‖320 These directors sustain, rather than question,
Prospero‘s narrative. Although they include the character of Sycorax, she does not
receive any more agency or voice in their production. The female actors merely serve as
illustrations of the text, and as long as one stays bound by the original text, moving
Sycorax‘s story beyond Prospero‘s patriarchal fantasy is difficult at best. Adaptation,
however, allows for the creation of Sycorax‘s voice and her story. This opportunity is
radical because listening to Sycorax‘s voice ―challenges [the] monolingualism practiced
by dominant groups who have the power to narrate the official history.‖321 Taking
liberties with the depiction of Sycorax allows one to move past the gendered,
imperialized, and heteronormative stories of the canon to investigate what stories might
lie underneath. By re-writing Sycorax‘s history, Todd displaces Prospero as the narrator
319 Purkiss, 252.
320 Ibid., 252. Purkiss goes on to note that this ―oversimplification‖ of Sycorax is why the woman
is so often left out of discussions about representations of witchcraft on the early modern stage.
321 Lara, 83.
138
of the story and allows Sycorax to vocalize her own place in the canon. At the same time,
Todd‘s script challenges the way Sycorax‘s story has been told by Todd herself and by
others.
As the Weird Sisters rehearsed Sycorax, they decided it would be helpful to
perform an excerpt of The Tempest to introduce the characters of Sycorax, Prospero,
Ariel, and Caliban and, thus, used Act I, scene ii of The Tempest as a prologue to their
performance.322 The intent was simply to educate audience members who might not be
familiar with The Tempest, but paired with the epilogue to Todd‘s play, their prologue
provides a powerful commentary on the ability of adaptation to change the way one
views a canonical script. In the prologue, Ariel was played by Feliz Dia MacDonald, who
played the same role in Sycorax. MacDonald‘s Ariel in the prologue was a jolly, obedient
servant. Her malleable facial features displayed the extremes of emotion, and she was far
removed from the subtle, powerful, and enigmatic Ariel she portrayed throughout
Sycorax. In this prologue, Vicki Yoder‘s Prospero was commanding, but he softened
when Miranda, played by Rachel Brilles, demanded of her father, ―If with your art, my
dearest father, you have / Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.‖323 Prospero
immediately obeyed, displaying his love and attentiveness to his daughter. Azure
Osborne-Lee, who played the title role in Sycorax, played Caliban in this introduction.
Osborne-Lee‘s Caliban was haggard and moved heavily. He often shook his shoulders
after talking to Prospero as if trying to physically shake off the old man. The only real
energy Caliban showed is when he interacted with Miranda.
At the end of the prologue, Osborne-Lee came to the front apron and stripped
away the male signifiers of Caliban – a belt, a vest, and pantaloons, cap – to reveal her
322 The Weird Sisters Women‘s Theater Collective, Sycorax, by Susan Gayle Todd, directed by
Christa French, Gemini Theater, Austin, Texas, June 17-27, 2010.
323 I.ii.1-2.
139
underlying costume of a stained and tattered smock. Around her, the actors playing the
sailors transformed the muslin ―sand‖ of the island into the sail of a ship, uncovering
shipping boxes and barrels. Osborne-Lee collapsed on a crate center stage, a brilliant
turquoise cloth with gold peacock feathers embroidered on it next to her; her
transformation to Sycorax was complete as the prologue segued into Todd‘s play
Sycorax.
In the script, Sycorax remains on this ship until the sailors leave her for dead on
the island in the second act. Yet as Todd has her narrate her story, her past comes to life
through a series of flashbacks. The audience sees Talma‘s home, the city of Algiers, or
the Governor‘s palace, but these moments are only memories – as is signaled by the fact
that Sycorax, despite her rise and fall in fortunes, wears no other costume but her
mangled dress. These memories tell the story of a strong but flawed woman. She resists
the people of Algiers‘s narrative of her greatness, even as she earns fame, titles, and a
statue in her honor. She is helpless when those same people alter this narrative, blaming
her for the disaster that befalls them. This change in narrative is illustrated through a
shadow puppet show, when, through improvised dialogue, the puppet masters manipulate
the events revealed in earlier memories to paint Sycorax as a conniving and immoral
witch. The puppet show ends with Clare and Sycorax burning in a fire, and the
suggestion prompts the Algerians to call for the same punishment to be enacted in real
life. Sycorax‘s last memory is the burning of Clare, and then the audience enters real
time, returning to the woman on the crate and watching her rape and its aftermath unfold.
In the Weird Sisters‘ performance, the play‘s epilogue ties this string of memories
to back to the Tempest scene enacted at the beginning of the play. The epilogue, which
echoes the themes of storytelling present throughout the rest of the play, is a polished,
poetic retelling of the conception of both Sycorax and Caliban, naming their father as
Setebos. It employs the language of myth, imagining the distant father as the moon and
the children as blessings on the earth. Todd said she envisioned it as a story told over and
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over, like The Tempest itself or a fairy tale: ―It was certainly Sycorax‘s revision of her
own experience—her reclamation of place and people and heritage—the version that she
gives Caliban. I imagined her telling it to him night after night—giving him the family
and honorable legacy he would never have. And it‘s the kind of story that‘s true even
though it‘s not accurate.‖324 The epilogue is unattributed in the script. In the original
production of Sycorax at the Cohen New Works Festival at the University of Texas –
Austin in 2007, it was performed by a woman in traditional African dress, who addressed
the audience.325 In that production, the epilogue implied that Sycorax‘s story was handed
down to new generations by female storytellers. It was a testament to how women‘s
stories are passed down orally as opposed to canonically.
The Weird Sisters, however, decided to give the speech to Caliban. As the
epilogue began, Miranda and Caliban cuddled on Sycorax‘s crate, clearly in the throes of
infatuation. The Weird Sisters concluded that there was no real proof that Caliban
attempts to rape Miranda in The Tempest. In their interpretation, Caliban and Miranda
shared a mutual infatuation, which Prospero discovered and, disturbed by his daughter‘s
relationship with a ―native,‖ tried to thwart by inventing the narrative of attempted rape.
The partnership between Caliban and Miranda, as witnessed in the epilogue, was
innocent; Miranda timidly took Caliban‘s hand, and they teased each other. Caliban‘s
head was wrapped in the same peacock-feather scarf that once belonged to his mother.
Earlier in the play, Clare gave the scarf to Sycorax, and in the last scenes of the play,
when Caliban is a baby, Sycorax swaddled him in it; thus, his connection to the women
was made clear. He told the story of Talma, Setebos, Sycorax, and Caliban, becoming the
hero in his own story. He explained his history as his mother passed it down to him, and
324 Todd, personal email, February 8, 2011.
325 Cohen New Works Festival, Sycorax, by Susan Gayle Todd, directed by Fadi Skeiker,
University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, 2007.
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although it is different from the one she told the audience, it is a story of which he was
proud, and one that clearly enthralled Miranda.
Mid-way through Caliban‘s recounting of his story, Prospero stumbled on the
couple. Lurking in the shadows, his face fell. He seemed to recognize instantly the
relationship transpiring between his daughter and his slave. This subtle moment drew the
audience back to Act I, scene ii. Prospero‘s version of Sycorax‘s story was not only a
means of fear-mongering among his servants, but it is also a way to reverse Caliban‘s
prideful version of the same story. Prospero told this narrative to regain control of his
daughter, and looking back to the Act I, scene ii excerpt at the beginning of the play, one
saw that his methodology worked.
Editors have long debated whether the speech beginning ―Abhorred slave, /
Which any print of goodness wilt not take, / Being capable of all ill!‖ should be attributed
to Miranda, as it is in the Folio, or to Prospero. 326 Many argue that the lines sound more
like Prospero and do not seem appropriate for a character who embodies empathy and
who, just a few lines earlier, says, ―Oh, I have suffered with those I have seen suffer.‖327
In the Weird Sisters‘ interpretation of the scene, these lines came off more as a lovers‘
spat than an aggressive attack by Miranda. Caliban delivered a good deal of his ―This
island‘s mine‖ speech to Miranda:
When thou cam‘st first,
Thou strokest me and made much of me, wouldst give me
Water with berries in‘t, and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night; and then I loved thee,
And showed thee all the qualities o‘th‘isle,
The fresh spring, brine-pits, barren place and fertile –328
326 I.ii.354-365.
327 I.ii.5-6.
328 I.ii.335-341.
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He then took the rest of the speech (starting at ―Cursed be I that did so!‖) to
Prospero and the father-daughter pair more generally. Isolating these lines and delivering
them to Miranda, helped lay the foundation for the relationship the audience saw at the
end of the Todd‘s play. The choice to play Caliban‘s speech in this manner informed
Miranda‘s lines, especially her reference to teaching Caliban language (I.ii.357-361)
since he has already alluded to her tutelage. Caliban and Miranda‘s conversation and its
embedded conflict seemed adolescent. The audience saw how Prospero‘s control of the
narrative, and his usurpation of Caliban‘s, changed the relationship between the couple.
The Weird Sisters‘ prologue and epilogue, then, highlighted the themes of story-shaping
found throughout Sycorax. These moments demonstrated what happens when one does
not seek other viewpoints and what is gained and lost by listening to disparate voices.
All-Female Casting and Sycorax
Scholars disagree about the effectiveness of all-female groups attempting to
subvert gendered constructions. Elizabeth Klett argues that, on the whole, all-female
troupes are less disruptive to our understanding of Shakespeare and gender roles than
mixed-gender productions.329 She argues that all-female casts work ―to naturalize the
presence of women in male roles and thus legitimize the casting.‖330 As with a play at a
single-sex high school or in a prison, audiences accept cross-casting as a necessity, and
thus, they fail to engage with the production choices on a political level. Melissa D.
329 Elizabeth Klett, ―Re-dressing the Balance: All-Female Shakespeare at the Globe Theatre,‖ in
Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance, ed. James C. Bulman
(Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008), 167.
330 Ibid., 172. Although all-male Shakespeare troupes have become popular in recent years (due
in part to the original practice movement, which will be discussed in the next chapter), their potential for
subversive sexual politics is often downplayed on the grounds that all-male casts reproduce early
performance practices.
143
Aaron, however, notes in the Los Angeles Women‘s Shakespeare Company‘s version of
The Winter‟s Tale, ―[h]earing the lines of Leontes spoken by a woman brought out the
startling ugliness of this thought process; it defamiliarizes the text and makes it
impossible to dismiss with historical relativism.‖331 Aaron believes that audiences come
to expect that sort of ranting from a man, but when they see this sort of behavior from a
woman, they are more sensitized to the injustice of that behavior. Aaron sees the clash of
female performers in male roles as offering potentially interesting insights for spectators,
allowing them to reflect on the gender norms to which they, themselves, subscribe. The
Weird Sisters‘ experience follows Aaron‘s line of thinking, but shows how the insights
raised by this clash are potentially disturbing for some members of their audience and can
cause them to dismiss the cross-casting entirely. In other words, if their gender
constructions become uncomfortably tested, some audience members default to Klett‘s
suggested reaction and consider the casting just a product of the circumstances.
In the online publication, Austin Theatre Examiner, Ryan E. Johnson wrote of
Sycorax: ―As the play begins, and we‘re presented with each of the characters, a major
problem rears its ugly head: these women, on the whole, make rather unconvincing men.
They may stick hair to their chins, and try to talk in the manliest accents they can muster,
but there‘s a certain femininity that they just can‘t hide.‖332 On the one hand, Johnson‘s
observation is correct; the women of the Weird Sisters‘ Theater Collective do not make
convincing men. But on the other hand, they do not see their mission as molding
themselves into masculine form. Their goal, instead, is to explore and make their
331 Melissa D. Aaron, ―‗A Queen in a Beard‘: A Study of All-Female Companies, in Shakespeare
Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance, ed. James C. Bulman (Madison, NJ:
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008), 160.
332 Ryan E. Johnson, ―Sycorax: A Bizarre, but Intriguing Look at One of Shakespeare's Most
Enigmatic Characters,‖ The Examiner (Austin, TX), June 23, 2010, accessed February 16, 2010,
http://www.examiner.com/x-14051-Austin-Theater-Examiner~y2010m6d23-Sycorax-A-bizarre-butintriguing-look-at-one-of-Shakespeares-most-enigmatic-characters.
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audience question prevailing gender constructs. The failure to engage in flawless male
mimicry is a criticism many all-female companies face, highlighting a double standard in
our culture. Eureka Angelos, a female actor who plays male roles, says that reviewers
criticize her for being ―one-dimensional‖ in her portrayals but these same critics do not
disparage women who play female roles in stereotypical ways.333 In general, our society
accepts, and even expects, certain ―types‖ of women and femininity to be presented on
stage, but has difficulties when gendered behavior interferes with more complex views of
men.
One need only look at Lisa Wolpe and reviews of her Los Angeles Women‘s
Shakespeare Festival to see this bias. Wolpe, the founder and director of the company, is
well-lauded for her performances of masculinity. Charles McNulty of the Los Angeles
Times writes of her Iago: ―Director Lisa Wolpe saves her most interesting interpretation
for the diabolic ensign, a role she performs so naturally that you‘re hardly aware of any
cross-dressing trickery.‖334 Sharon Perlmutter of Talkin‟ Broadway writes of the same
performance:
It's difficult to pay attention to Iago's initial dialogue, as your brain
is taking a moment to process how perfectly Wolpe creates a male
character. [….] Linda Bisesti is posturing as a man in the role of
Roderigo, but Wolpe's Iago actually is male. It isn't about a
swagger or a lowering of voice. Just watching the way Iago sits
and holds his cigarette tells you not only that he's a man, but a man
of a certain class (not that high), a man of a certain attitude (that
the world should give him what he believes is his due), and a man
of thoughtfulness.
Perlmutter goes on to note that the ―problem – and it is a problem that frequently plagues
LA Women's Shakespeare – is that Wolpe is not backed up by a company that matches
333 Nancy Taylor, 46-47.
334 Charles McNulty, ―Villainous Iago Steals the Show,‖ The Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles),
February 29, 2008, accessed July 7, 2010, http://articles.latimes.com/2008/feb/29/entertainment/etothello29.
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her talents.‖335 Although Wolpe‘s skill as an actor is clear, these reviews also reveal
social expectations about how masculinity should be performed: Wolpe is valued because
she ―becomes‖ male; her colleagues‘ tendency to betray their own femininity is a
―problem.‖ Such reviews reveal an inability to value feminine traits embedded into a
male character.
This criticism is misguided. The point of the cross-dressing in groups such as the
Weird Sisters is not to create mimetically perfect imitations of men, but to draw attention
to normative gender constructions. As Jill Dolan argues, these women are using the
performative to draw attention to the inequalities of gender roles found within many play
texts.336 When a male character is played by a woman, his words and his actions can be
seen from a female point of view and thus exposed as constructed. As Aaron suggests,
the hope of all-female acting troupes is that audiences will, as a result, less readily accept
gendered constructions. Their performances become a type of activism that draws
attention to social inequities and seeks to create a stage upon which those inequities are
lessened, if not erased. Criticizing the women actors for not being ―male enough‖
overlooks this element of these companies‘ missions.
The Weird Sisters, after all, know that they are not fooling anyone. Alyson Curtis
said, ―When we play [a man], for the most part, […] we don‘t do make-up like men, but
we‘re not trying to pull one over on anyone, we‘re not actually trying to fool anyone into
thinking we‘re actually men [. . .].‖337 Rachel Brilles laughed at the idea of performing
straight masculinity: ―I can‘t keep my feminine stuff out!‖ She went on to say that all
335 Sharon Perlmutter, ―Othello,‖ Talkin‟ Broadway, February 28, 2008, accessed July 7, 2010,
http://www.talkinbroadway.com/regional/la/la262.html.
336 Jill Dolan, Geographies of Learning, 84. See also Dolan, Utopia in Performance.
337 Curtis, personal interview, June 14, 2010.
146
men have some feminine qualities: ―I think us bringing in some feminine qualities isn‘t
all that bad. They might not want to admit it, but they got some girliness going on.‖338
After Johnson‘s review was released, the Weird Sisters discussed his comments at
length via email, analyzing his response instead of dismissing it completely. Some of the
women pointed out that he seemed to have no trouble with the all-male version of The
Taming of the Shrew he had reviewed a month earlier, but was dismissive of their
portrayals of men in Sycorax.339 Rae Petersen articulated what seemed to be the crux of
matter by sharing an anecdote about her husband. She explained that her husband initially
expressed discomfort with the production: ―He was exceedingly uncomfortable with the
sailors. He said no man he knows would ever act like that. The comment in the Austinist
about the ‗saltiest‘ sailors ever spoke loudly to him, and it bothered him that men were
portrayed that way.‖ Yet Petersen noted that after several conversations, her husband
began to second guess his initial reactions: ―He said that he has spent the week thinking
about the play, and admitted that much of his first comments were driven by his own
discomfort‖ and he decided to attend another showing of Sycorax in order to get a
broader perspective on the story and his own reactions.340 Alyson Curtis said of
Petersen‘s story, ―It's hard to feel stereotyped, it can seem unfair – and it is. […] I find it
interesting that people think the sailors are so shocking. Think of Mercutio and gang they were bawdy and nasty. It's seeing our (sailors‘) dark side that‘s usually only implied
or glossed over that makes it harder to swallow.‖341 Curtis alludes to the fact that it can
338 Brilles, personal interview, June 16, 2010.
339 Ryan E. Johnson, ―Taming of the Shrew a Charming, Refreshing Change from Your Usual
Shakespeare,‖ The Examiner (Austin, TX), accessed June 23, 2010, http://www.examiner.com/theater-inaustin/taming-of-the-shrew-a-charming-refreshing-change-from-your-usual-shakespeare.
340 Rae Petersen, email correspondence to the Weird Sisters, June 23, 2010.
341 Alyson Curtis, email correspondence to the Weird Sisters, June 23, 2010.
147
be disturbing for male spectators to see caricatures of themselves, and doubly so when
women are the ones performing those caricatures. Just as Aaron suggests, the gender gap
between male characters and female actors can draw particular attention to the
undesirable or unacceptable behavior of male characters. But the dismissal of the
production by Petersen‘s husband and the male reviewer suggests that this discomfort can
lead at least some spectators to critique the performance instead of their own gendered
expectations. This sort of resistance, confusion, and questioning is exactly what the
Weird Sisters aim to create in their productions. If they are, on any level, getting their
audience to consider and reconsider gender roles, they are succeeding in their roles as
activists.342
Addressing Violence and Creating Safety
In addition to exposing stereotypes, the Weird Sisters also are concerned with
drawing attention to violence towards women. The Weird Sisters broadly define this
violence to include not only rape and physical assault, but also emotional and verbal
abuse. For example, the group was initially hesitant to perform The Merry Wives of
Windsor because of the number of fat jokes, but one member, Courtney Glenn, lobbied
for the group to stage the production. Todd said, ―I remember Courtney saying, ‗I‘m fat,
and I wanna play Falstaff! It won‘t bother me.‘ But as it turned out, it did bother all of us,
and perhaps Courtney, too.‖ The group ultimately decided to eliminate most of the fat
342 Sarah Werner shows how women playing men can also be risky business. In her study on the
feminist politics of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Sarah Werner tells the story of an all-female
performance group that the company formed to stage one of Shakespeare‘s plays during its regular season.
This group was continually denied the resources it needed and was ultimately not allowed to perform any
of the Shakespeare plays they proposed because the administration argued that they could not risk losing
money on a popular Shakespeare play by allowing an all-female cast to perform the show. This anecdote
shows that women face an uphill battle as compared to their counter-parts in all-male companies. Whereas
men performing these plays seem ―historical;‖ women performing these parts is ―experimental.‖ See Sarah
Werner, Shakespeare and Feminist Performance: Ideology on Stage (London: Routledge, 2001), 50-68.
148
jokes in the play. French said, ―The question we were facing was not whether these jokes
were hurtful, but whether our specific performance could incorporate them in a way that
was self-aware enough to be a commentary on the injury and not an endorsement of it.
While we didn‘t decide that this was not possible, ultimately our attempts didn‘t work,
and we cut the jokes.‖343 As the group members deal thoughtfully with issues of
violence, they find repeatedly that the victims of violence in the plays they work with are
almost always women. Member Vickie Yoder told me that she, in fact, has come to prefer
playing male roles because ―[i]t feels safer. If there is a conflict, something usually
happens [to the woman]. She cries. I don‘t want to cry on stage; I want to yell. I don‘t
want to cry.‖344
The violence that exists in many of Shakespeare‘s plays, the Weird Sisters argue,
is often amplified in performance. As in the film, television, and gaming industries, many
productions of both classical and contemporary drama feature images of physical and
sexual violence. This violence is often inflicted upon female characters, and the acts of
violence one sees in these plays are not always explicitly called for by scripts. In a
keynote address at the 2010 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, Barbara
Gaines of Chicago Shakespeare and actress Chaon Cross discussed how they blocked
Cressida‘s arrival at the Greek camp (Act IV, scene vi) in the 2007 production of Troilus
and Cressida at Chicago Shakespeare; Gaines chose to interpret the scene as a gang rape
of Cressida. Gaines praised Cross‘s willingness to allow and encourage the male actors in
the scene to touch her in whatever ways might be appropriate to create a realistic rape
scene. Cross was lauded for her professionalism as an actress because she endured this
behavior every night during the run, even though she became visibly upset when Gaines
343 Christa French, personal email correspondence to the author, February 8, 2011.
344 Vickie Yoder, personal interview with the author, June 16, 2010.
149
showed the SAA audience a film of the scene.345 In my time in Austin, Todd mentioned
that she recently had been asked to sit in on a rehearsal of The Taming of the Shrew. The
female director instructed the actor playing Petruccio to manhandle the woman playing
Katherine. The text, however, never calls for Petruccio to hit or physically abuse the
woman. Reflecting on Todd‘s story, French noted that ―A lot of plays are written by men.
A lot of them involve scenes like that. So if you are doing traditional theater and you are
handling scenes like that and you are an actress, that‘s what happens to you. Someone
says, ‗Grab her body‘ and you let them.‖346 With few leading roles for women and
numerous prospective female actors, performers often feel obligated to endure this type
of direction, whether they are comfortable with it or not. In her study of women in the
American theater, Ida Prosky discovered that ―[i]n audition situations, the actress can be
made to feel that getting the job depends on her unqualified acceptance of whatever the
director demands. This can apply to sexual behavior or nudity which may or may not be
called for in the script.‖347
Yet it is interesting to note that both of the plays cited above were directed by
women. Although French is correct to point out that many of the plays performed today
are by male authors, it should be acknowledged that some of the plays that include acts of
345 Barbara Gaines, Chaon Cross, & Kevin Gudahl, ―Understanding the Work and Vitality of the
Chicago Shakespeare Theater‘s Art on the World‘s Stage,‖ panel discussion at the Shakespeare Association
of America 38th Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, April 1, 2010.
346 French, personal interview, June 19, 2010.
347 Prosky, 36-40. Moreover, in the intimate spaces of auditions, rehearsals, and performances,
professional and private lives can become confused, often leaving women especially vulnerable. One of
Prosky‘s subjects writes: ―The rules are so different. Your whole self is out. […] it‘s very hard to
keep…being totally open in rehearsal and in character, and then in informal offstage relationships you try
and keep that limit but often it gets muddled. So you tend to be more open with the people you work with
than you normally would be.‖ This problem is augmented by the fact that most theater jobs are temporary
in nature; individuals tend to put up with uncomfortable situations because they know there is a definitive
end to the experience. Moreover, even in large cities, theater communities are tight-knit. One does not want
to get a reputation as a ―difficult co-worker,‖ or a co-worker who ―creates problems‖ when that individual
wants to find more work in that community.
150
violence against women are either written or directed by females; this includes both of
Todd‘s plays which were performed by the Weird Sisters. Many women, including Todd,
argue that they want to draw attention to violence, and specifically violence against
women, in order to unsettle the ways in which actors, directors, and audiences readily,
and often thoughtlessly, accept such acts in entertainment. Todd said, ―I‘m so disturbed
and angry that violence against women has been the status quo forever. I want to expose
it for what it is; it‘s not deserved, it‘s not sexy, it‘s more rampant than anyone wants to
believe or face.‖348 French adds:
As an artist my intent is to raise awareness of violence and not to
promote it or titillate. […] it‘s helpful for audiences to empathize
with the victim of violence – and it CAN be helpful for audiences
to empathize with the perpetrator as well, though that‘s trickier.
[…] Critically, most of the time you don‘t want the audience to
find the scene sexually arousing, or to identify with the lust of the
perpetrator and not the effect on the victim. HOWEVER, it‘s not
always that simple. Loilta, for example, is designed specifically to
titillate audiences. Why? We can speculate that it‘s because the
author wants audiences to think complexly. I personally think,
though, that the medium makes a huge difference and that it is
more difficult to ask audiences to think complexly when you‘re
giving them visible, audible sex of any kind. Violence evokes a
similar primitive response.349
Walking the line between awareness and voyeurism is tricky, a fact the women of the
Weird Sisters continually recognized when I asked what their biggest challenge was in
staging Sycorax: overwhelmingly, they responded, ―the rape scene.‖350
In the second act, Sycorax becomes pregnant when the sailors gang rape her. To
compound the difficulty of this scene for the group, two of the women involved in the
scene were survivors of sexual violence. French and Todd were adamant that there be no
348 Todd, personal email, February 8, 2010.
349 French, personal email, February 8, 2010.
350 When Sycorax was first performed at the Cohen New Works Festival in 2007, Fadi Skeiker,
the male director, was equally disturbed by the scene and refused to choreograph it by himself. He called in
one of his female professors and Todd to collaborate with him on the scene.
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touching in the scene. They wanted to capture the aggression and fear of the scene
without running the risk of sexual titillation. In the end, the group created a dance-like
portrayal of the rape. While Sycorax recited a poem that warned ―Never let them tell you
/ there are no soft surfaces in hell,‖ the sailors moved in rhythmic circles around her,
changing places and crouching down in menacing poses. As Sycorax progressed through
the poem, they gradually tighten their circle, closing in and raising their arms menacingly
as the poem finished and the lights blacked out. French said that ultimately she felt this
way of staging the scene worked to create a vision that ―everyone [could] be proud of,
respecting our own ideals, respecting each other.‖351
One of the women playing a sailor in the scene, however, told me that she felt
they could have been more direct in their handling of the issue. ―I think we are misguided
with dealing with it [i.e., rape] in this play,‖ Rae Petersen said, ―and almost every other
play I‘ve ever seen deal with it. As it gets treated as a kind of dance, as opposed to just
dealing with it openly and squarely. It seems to me that titillation is a part of it for
everyone and we should deal with it head on.‖ For Petersen, opting for a dance or ballet
simplifies the issue; her preference would be for a production to draw attention to
violence against women in an open way.352 The fact that Peterson can with frankness
take issue with staging choices illustrates the success of one of the group‘s key aims – to
create a place where difficult issues such as violence can be discussed and evaluated.
That is, after all, a central paradox for women in contemporary theater: how can
one draw attention to violence and treat it with respect without dulling its impact? The
task is especially hard if a theater group is working with early modern plays. Shakespeare
told the stories of Lavinia who is raped and maimed, of Sylvia who is offered to the man
351 French, personal interview, June 19, 2010.
352 Petersen, personal interview, June 19, 2010.
152
who tried to rape her by the man she loves, of Ophelia who descends into madness, and
of Isabella who is repeatedly asked to forego her morals for the men in her life. In the
corpus of early modern plays, there are also the torturous downfall of Webster‘s Duchess
of Malfi, the violent murder and maiming of Ford‘s Annabella in ‗Tis Pity She‟s a
Whore, and the self-starvation of Anne Frankford, lauded as a sign of her obedience to
her husband, in Heywood‘s A Woman Killed with Kindness. For the Weird Sisters, the
challenge is to find a balance between offering women a chance to act in well-respected
canonical plays while avoiding gendered pitfalls. Petersen reinforces why she and the
group keep coming back to these problematic texts: ―There‘s a world of information and
experience to be had in Shakespearean theater, and I think it‘s invaluable training as an
actor. You can handle Shakespeare, you can handle most anything.‖353 There is a double
meaning in Petersen‘s last statement. These women show that it is not only the language
of Shakespeare that prepares actors to ―handle most anything,‖ but also his often violent
and patriarchal stories. By making these texts their own through performance, editing,
and adaptation, the Weird Sisters have discovered a fruitful way to deal with violent and
misogynistic plays, learning lessons they can carry outside the protective circle of their
theatrical troupe.
The protective circle is not entirely metaphorical. At the start of every rehearsal
and performance the Weird Sisters ―circle up.‖ The circle is a place to receive notes, to
stretch, and to participate in vocal warm-ups. It is a place to check-in with each other and
to ask the questions, ―What are you feeling tonight?‖ and ―What do you need tonight?‖
These are genuine questions, and the women are encouraged to answer them honestly.
The philosophy of the circle is echoed in Sycorax. At the beginning of the play, Sycorax
takes a piece of charcoal and makes a circle on the deck of the ship. She invokes a
353 Ibid.
153
symbol of witchcraft, a symbol she knows the sailors fear, as a means of protecting
herself. The ploy works for awhile and the sailors are kept temporarily at bay. Sycorax‘s
circle is not unlike the theatrical space that the Weird Sisters create. Instead of allowing
themselves to operate on the margins of the theatrical world, they are drawing their own
margins, encapsulating themselves in a community where they can speak and be heard,
where they can encounter texts and roles that are not readily available to them in
traditional venues, and where they can lean on each other for support while doing so.
Conclusion
Despite a scarcity of roles and a history of male-centered criticism, women since
the seventeenth century have sought to find their own place in the Shakespeare canon.
One solution used in performance is cross-gender casting. Placing females in male roles,
however, can have mixed results. In this method, there is the risk that the female actor
merely becomes a voice for the patriarchal ideas embedded in the early modern texts.
Adaptation offers women a way to revise Shakespeare‘s plays, inserting their own
experience into Shakespeare‘s stories. Ultimately, however, one must acknowledge that
the limitation of this choice is that the adapted text, at some point, ceases to be
Shakespearean. At the same time, can anyone argue that any text or performance is
―purely‖ Shakespeare? From the moment the foul papers of these plays were placed in
the hands of their actors and early modern printers, interpretive decisions have shaped
―Shakespeare‖ as our culture understands him today. The work of the Weird Sisters
highlights this malleability of the playwright and how one group of women has been able
to create a vision of Shakespeare that not only makes room for them in his canon, but also
uses the playwright to address their particular social concerns.
After an evening showing of Sycorax, Todd and some members of the cast met at
Rio Rita for drinks. On the edge of Austin‘s vibrant 6th Street, the bar holds fast to the
154
city‘s desire to ―Keep Austin Weird.‖ At one side of the table, Courtney Glenn and
Noelle Fitzsimmons talked excitedly about what play the Weird Sisters should do next.
Suddenly, Glenn yelled down to Todd at the opposite end of the table, ―Susan! I think our
next play should be Lear! Think about it – Regan and Goneril are so villainized. But what
if they had reason? What if Lear abused or neglected them?‖ Todd smiled and said, ―That
sounds like a story that needs a prequel. You should write that prequel.‖ Suddenly, the
whole table was in on the conversation. And on the funky patio lit by Christmas lights on
this warm June night, everyone discussed Lear, his daughters, and the marginalized
voices of the text over chips and margaritas. Keeping Austin ―Weird,‖ indeed.
155
CHAPTER FOUR
―WHAT‘S PAST IS PROLOGUE‖: BUILDING MODERN
COMMUNITIES WITH ORIGINAL PRACTICE PERFORMANCE
In one of the most famous speeches in The Tempest, Prospero, after abruptly
ending his masque for Ferdinand and Miranda, provides an epilogue for the piece:
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.354
The speech is a rumination on the fleeting nature of theater and life. Prospero notes that
the grand pageant which he has orchestrated is nothing more than spectacle – ―baseless‖
visions which disappear as quickly as they are conjured. The ephemeral nature of
theater‘s spectacle is certainly not lost on contemporary theater audiences, many of
whom are used to the grand visual effects of not only theater, but film and television as
well. Yet the grand ―cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples‖
Prospero describes were produced much differently in Shakespeare‘s theater. Although
Henslowe‘s Diary lists such tantalizing clues as ―1 Hell mouth‖ and a pair of stairs and
chariot for Phaethon, ultimately most of the ―special effects‖ in Shakespeare‘s
illuminated, minimalist theaters were created through language and imagination. In an
age of ever-increasing technological advancements, one group of scholars and theater
354 IV.i.148-134.
156
practitioners, those who study original practices, find the minimalist nature of
Shakespeare‘s theater particularly enticing.
This chapter explores the original practice movement in the United States,
specifically the work of the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia. This
type of theater, with its basis in academic research, is often considered to serve small,
elitist, or academic audiences. Yet the rhetoric of original practice theater suggests that
by stripping away years of editorial changes and staging assumptions, companies can
reconstruct a ―Shakespeare‖ who is both more genuine and more accessible to the general
public than is the case in standard portrayals. This chapter will examine how original
practice theater both upholds and attempts to destroy an iconic Shakespeare. The
foundation of the original practice movement in the academy and its dependence on
pedagogical programs leads practitioners to set themselves up as authoritative interpreters
of Shakespeare. Yet they also distance themselves from the ―legitimate‖ theater by
positioning themselves as marginal. And as they attempt to create the popular
Shakespeare they promise, they find ways to negotiate the rules for authenticity they have
established so as to win over modern audiences. This chapter will examine how the
American Shakespeare Center navigates its way through these paradoxes and how it is, as
one reviewer has said, a company that ―does and does not want to take you back in
time.‖355 Although it advertises the ―authentic‖ Shakespeare of its playhouse, the
American Shakespeare Center is, ultimately, a twenty-first century company that plays to
the artistic and cultural tastes of contemporary audiences.
355 William Triplett, ―‗Labour‘s‘: An Express Almost Up to Speed,‖ The Washington Post
(Washington, D.C.), November 19, 2002, accessed July 21, 2009, http://global.factiva.com.proxy.lib.
uiowa.edu/aa/.
157
History of Original Practices
―Original practices‖ or ―original staging practices‖ refers to a theoretical
movement that incorporates the study of theater history into practical and artistic
applications of that history. Although the term ―original practices‖ encompasses a wide
variety of approaches and methodologies, proponents often advocate returning to the
earliest versions of Shakespeare‘s texts (the quarto and Folio editions), a duplication of
early modern theatrical conventions, and, in some cases, the reconstruction of early
modern playing spaces. Enthusiasts of the movement often claim that the marriage of
historical context and performance lends itself to a clearer understanding of the text and a
theater-going experience that imitates that of early modern audiences; these two results,
they argue, create a performance that is closer to Shakespeare‘s intended vision of the
play than productions performed using contemporary conventions. Original practice
performances can range from experimental stagings or readings for small groups of
scholars to large, commercial productions intended to entertain audiences and draw a
profit.
This type of reconstructive theater has its roots in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries and was originally a reaction against elaborate, Victorian stagings of
Shakespeare‘s plays. The technological advancements of the nineteenth-century allowed
theater producers to become increasingly visual.356 Theater artists, who could now
illuminate their stages with gas and lime lights, began to see themselves as visual artists,
painting elaborate, detailed scenes on the stage. Henry Irving‘s Much Ado About Nothing
featured a replica of a Sicilian Cathedral with wrought-iron gates and thirty-foot columns
supporting an ornamental roof. Charles Kean‘s production of The Tempest featured an
356 Michael R. Booth, ―Pictorial Acting and Ellen Terry,‖ in Shakespeare and the Victorian
Stage, ed. Richard Foulkes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 81-82. See also J.L. Styan,
The Shakespeare Revolution: Criticism and Performance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977), 11-29.
158
Ariel who repeatedly descended to the stage in a ball of fire, and in his production of
Henry VIII, Kean included a moving diorama of 1543 London. 357 Although the text
could be easily lost in these elaborate stage pictures, it was believed that contemporary
audiences needed this type of pictorialism to understand Shakespeare.358
Englishman William Poel, however, thought that the elaborate sets, as well as the
elocution practices and extraneous gestures of Victorian actors, obscured the meaning of
Shakespeare‘s language. In particular, Poel was disturbed that actors did not base their
performances on a careful study of the text, but instead provided audiences with
caricatures of previous interpretations of Shakespeare‘s characters. He believed the
Shakespeare his contemporaries embraced was the product of centuries of editorial
comments, performance history, and re-contextualized ―beauties‖ and the result was not,
in his estimation, a ―true‖ Shakespeare. Poel believed that a more genuine understanding
of the playwright was only accessible if one stripped away editorial comments and
production technology and returned to earliest form of the text.
For Poel, the only real acting copy of a Shakespeare play was a quarto edition.359
When Poel started to compare his 1879 editions of the plays to the early quarto editions,
he began to see the centuries of interventions; differences not only in cuts and
357 Richard W. Schoch, ―Pictorial Shakespeare,‖ in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare
on Stage, eds. Stanley Wells & Sarah Stanton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 64-67. See
also Schoch‘s book length study Shakespeare‟s Victorian Stage: Performing History in the Theatre of
Charles Kean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
358 Across the Atlantic, Shakespeare ―translation‖ emphasized style rather than image.
Shakespeare‘s villains and heroes provided excellent material for the popular melodramas of the day.
Moreover, in America, Shakespeare‘s popularity was fostered by an aural culture. Levine, 38-40 & 46.
359 Early modern playwrights first composed their work in rough drafts called foul papers. This
draft was then re-transcribed into a fair copy which printers may have used when they printed these plays in
quarto editions. Thus, these texts are the closest we have to Shakespeare‘s foul copies. Tiffany Stern,
Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (London: Routledge, 2004), 140-147.
159
punctuation but also in act arrangement.360 Poel saw the texts‘ close relationship to their
source as providing ―information which cannot be found elsewhere.‖361 He theorized
that these editions were taken down from actors‘ parts or transcribed during the original
performances of the plays, linking them closely with the original productions, and
offering actors ample guidance through embedded stage directions. He believed that
actors could present clearer versions of the plays by being attentive to these early texts.
Poel also thought these language-based interpretations of the plays would offer
interpretations of Shakespeare that were relevant to the modern society. He complained
that the highly characterized, Victorian style of Shakespearean acting robbed audiences
of human readings of the plays; to contemporary actors, Shakespeare‘s characters were
―theatrical types which are not supposed to conform to the conditions that govern human
beings in everyday life.‖362 Melodramatic Shakespeare parodies, in his opinion, were no
better, as they encouraged audiences to believe that they were incapable of understanding
authentic Shakespearean productions. Returning the plays to the actual conditions in
which they were first performed and, thus, providing clearer interpretations, he believed,
would make them more accessible. Poel dismissed ―the notion that it is only a university
professor who can know anything about Shakespeare worth putting in a book.‖363 He
believed that with a clearer text, Shakespeare would cease to be the property of Romantic
ideals and academic authority; in his purer form, Shakespeare would again speak to the
groundlings as well as the nobles.
360 Robert Speaight, William Poel and the Elizabethan Revival (London: William Heinemann,
Ltd, 1954), 47.
361 William Poel, Shakespeare in the Theatre (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., 1913), 47.
362 Ibid., 214.
363 William Poel, Monthly Letters, ed. A.M.T. (London: T. Werner Laurie Ltd., 1929), 91.
160
In a 1918 newsletter to members of the London Shakespeare League, Poel wrote
that ―[t]he London stage still needs a producer who will have the courage to give up
setting Shakespeare‘s plays as if they were written on the plan of eighteenth-century
opera [ . . .]‖.364 Since 1895, Poel had attempted to be that producer; he founded the
Elizabethan Stage Society ―with the object of reviving the masterpieces of the
Elizabethan drama upon the stage for which they were written, so as to represent them as
nearly as possible under the conditions existing at the time of their first production – that
is to say, with only those stage appliances and accessories which were usually employed
during the Elizabethan period.‖365 For their first production, Measure for Measure, the
society built a model of the Fortune stage in the Royalty Theatre in Soho. The stage was
based on the existent Fortune contract but was significantly scaled down to fit the space.
The stage jutted out into the audience, and Poel stationed men in Elizabethan dress
around its perimeter and placed costumed women in balcony, creating a living-historylike setting.366 Poel also proposed a reconstruction of the Globe in central London,
envisioning the structure as both a ―temple‖ to the nation‘s greatest playwright and a
symbol of the national theater.367 The plans were eventually dismissed in light of
building regulations, debates over what a National Theater should entail, and the advent
of World War I.368 Although he had grand plans for the future of reconstructed drama,
364 Ibid., 86.
365 Poel, Shakespeare in the Theatre, 203-204.
366 Peter Thomson, ―William Poel,‖ in The Routledge Companion to Directors‟ Shakespeare, ed.
John Russell Brown (New York: Routledge, 2008), 363.
367 Poel‘s dreams of reconstruction were inspired by German dramaturg Ludwig Tieck who,
when seeking a bare stage, built a stage set based on the Fortune contract in 1843. Vanessa Schormann,
―Shakespeare‘s Globe Theatre: Where History Meets Innovation,‖ Theatre Symposium: A Journal of the
Southeastern Theatre Conference 12 (2004): 124.
368 Poel, Shakespeare in the Theatre,193-240; Andrew Gurr and John Orrell, Rebuilding
Shakespeare‟s Globe (New York: Routledge, 1989), 27 & 33. The closest Poel came to having his dream
161
Poel was not the most gifted of directors, and his productions, with the exception of their
miniaturized, early modern sets, were not all that noteworthy. Nevertheless, Poel is
remarkable for what he spurred others to do; inspired by his ideas, other theater
practitioners such as Tyrone Guthrie and Harvey Granville Barker revisited earlier
editions of Shakespeare‘s plays and re-envisioned how they might translate the early
modern to their contemporary theaters.
Despite his desire to bring Shakespeare to a more general public, Poel‘s theories
about original staging first appeared in academic circles on the other side of the Atlantic.
Academics such as George Pierce Baker at Harvard (1895; 1904-1908), Raymond
Macdonald Alden and Ben Greet at Stanford (1902-1905), Ben Iden Payne at the
Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh (1926), John Ashby Conway at the
University of Washington (1930), and John Cranford Adams at Hofstra (1951), used
Poel‘s ideas to stage their own original practice productions.369 Poel‘s vision of original
practice theater as a great equalizer was negated by the fact that it was performed by and
for members of the academic elite. These academic performances sustained the idea that
original practices led to ―museum theater,‖ arcane performances that served only
educational purposes. This type of theater was seen to have little artistic or aesthetic
value, and it seemed to be wholly removed from the lives of the casual theatergoer.
It was not until more permanent reconstructions of Shakespeare‘s theaters began
to appear in North America that the original staging movement displayed its potential to
reach a more diverse audience. Throughout the twentieth century, reconstructed Globes
realized was convincing Edward Lutyens to build a full-scale replica of the Globe at Earl‘s Court in 1912.
Schormann 124. For information about Poel‘s sketch of the Globe replica, see Martin White, ―William
Poel‘s Globe,‖ Theatre Notebook 53, no. 3 (1999): 146-162.
369 Marion O‘Connor, ―Reconstructive Shakespeare: Reproducing Elizabethan and Jacobean
Stages,‖ in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on the Stage, ed. Stanley Wells & Sarah Stanton
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 80.
162
appeared throughout the United States with varying degrees of ―authenticity.‖ One of the
first notable reconstructions was the Globe reconstruction built for the 1934 Chicago
World‘s Fair. Using the Visscher and Hollar illustrations of the Globe and the existent
Fortune contract, Thomas Wood Stevens oversaw the construction of an octagonal theater
with an inner, middle, and outer stage and upper balcony. The ceiling and walls were
painted blue and accented with stars to give the theater the feeling of being open-air.370
Attendees watched amateur actors perform cut-down versions of Shakespeare‘s plays.
These performances were so popular that the ticket line continually stretched from the
box office to the street.371 The Chicago replica was taken down and later rebuilt for the
Great Texas Fair in Dallas in 1936, and Stevens constructed a similar structure at the
California Pacific International Exposition in Balboa Park in San Diego. After that
exhibition ended, the structure was purchased by a local community theater group and
remained a working theater until it was destroyed by arson in 1978.372
In the same year as the San Diego installment, Angus Bowmer, a high school
teacher in Ashland, Oregon, noted the similarities of the exterior walls of a local
Chautauqua to an early modern theater. He proposed holding a Shakespeare festival in
conjunction with the local Fourth of July celebration; this event eventually grew into the
Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which projected earnings of over 20 million dollars in 2008
370 Rosemary Kegl, ―[W]rapping Togas over Elizabethan Garb‖: Tabloid Shakespeare at the 1934
Chicago World‘s Fair,‖ Renaissance Drama, n.s., 28 (1997): 81.
371 Lenox R. Lohr, Fair Management: The Story of a Century of Progress (Chicago: The Cuneo
Press, Inc, 1952), 176.
372 In its place, the Old Globe Company of San Diego constructed its festival stage, an outdoor
approximation of Shakespeare‘s Globe. The Old Globe, ―The Theatres,‖ The Old Globe, accessed August
20, 2009, http://www.theoldglobe.org/theatres/index.aspx. For more information on Stevens‘ company see
Donna Rose Feldman, ―An Historical Study of Thomas Wood Stevens‘ Globe Theatre Company 19341937‖ (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1953).
163
and is one of the largest Shakespeare festivals in the nation.373 The Chautauqua that
Bowmer refashioned into an approximation of an Elizabethan stage has been reenvisioned two times in the past twenty-five years, with increasing faithfulness to
Elizabethan architecture.374 Other Globe reconstructions (and approximations) appeared
in such disparate North American locations as Stratford, Ontario; Los Angeles,
California; Odessa, Texas; Cedar City, Utah; and Iowa City, Iowa.375
Original Practice Staging Today
Given American interest in reconstruction, it should not come as a surprise that it
was an American who realized Poel‘s dream of a reconstructed Globe on London‘s South
Bank. As a teenager, Sam Wanamaker saw the reconstructed Globe at the Chicago
World‘s Fair. The legend then follows that in 1949 Wanamaker, an actor, went to visit
the original site of the Globe and was disappointed when all he found was a small plaque
on the side of a tavern. Feeling it was a disservice to the bard and English literary history
not to have a more lasting memorial, Wanamaker started a crusade to build a Globe near
the original site. In 1970, Wanamaker founded what would become known as the
373 Oregon Shakespeare Festival, ―Operating Budget Summary 2006, 2007, 2008,‖ Oregon
Shakespeare Festival, accessed August 20, 2009, http://www.osfashland.org/_dwn/about/reports/
Budget_Summaries_2006-2009.pdf.
374 Oregon Shakespeare Festival, ―Our History,‖ Oregon Shakespeare Festival, accessed August
20, 2009, http://www.osfashland.org/about/archive/theatre_history.aspx; O‘Connor, 87.
375 Stratford Shakespeare Festival, ―Festival Theatre,‖ Stratford Shakespeare Festival, accessed
September 15, 2009, http://www.stratfordfestival.ca/about/theatre.aspx?id=1865; ―The Great Globe of the
Southwest,‖ accessed August 20, 2009, http://www.globesw.org/; Utah Shakespeare Festival, ―Theatres,‖
Utah Shakespeare Festival, accessed August 20, 2009, http://www.bard.org/about/theatres.html; ―The
Riverside Shakespeare Festival,‖ accessed August 20, 2009, http://riversidetheatre.org/. For a discussion of
international Globe replicas include ones in Germany, Japan, the Czech Republic, and Lappland, see
Schormann, 122 & 133.
164
Shakespeare Globe Trust, and seventeen years later, his organization began making plans
for a Globe reconstruction.376
The building of the London Globe took the original practice movement to a whole
new level. Many of the choices in the reconstruction were informed by the nearby Rose
Theater excavation site (uncovered in 1989). The wooden beams of the £30 million
Globe are held in place by oak pegs and not nails. The plaster used is a mixture of lime,
sand, and goat‘s hair. After receiving special permission from fire safety officials, it
became the first thatched building in London since the fire of 1666.377 Audience
members sit on backless wooden benches or stand as the groundlings would have. As a
company, the Globe artists have used the Globe as a laboratory for original practice
experiments, including all-male and all-female casts, using early modern instruments,
dressing in costumes that were constructed using early modern methods, and using early
modern pronunciation.
Given the research-based nature of this theater, one might assume that the project
was not far removed from the academic, museum theater one saw in American
universities in the mid-twentieth century. Yet Wanamaker saw the Globe complex as
both a research institution and an entertainment destination, saying he ―didn‘t believe that
popular entertainment and scholarly research are at all incompatible.‖378 In fact, he
believed what made Shakespeare a literary genius was his ability ―to express the human
376 Shakespeare‘s Globe in London, ―Background,‖ Shakespeare‘s Globe in London, accessed
August 30, 2009, http://www.shakespeares-globe.org/abouttheglobe/background/.
377 Jeff Bradley, ―Rebuilding the Globe: Sam Wanamaker‘s 40-Year Effort is on the Brink of
Fruition,‖ Denver Post (Denver), January 7, 1996, accessed July 21, 2009, http://global.factiva.com.proxy.
lib.uiowa.edu/aa. See also Gurr & Orrell; Pauline Kiernan, Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe (New
York: St. Martin‘s Press, 1999); J.R. Mulryne & Margaret Shewring, Shakespeare‟s Globe Rebuilt
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
378 Wanamker, 19.
165
condition in a form recognizable to all people.‖379 Wanamaker believed that his
reconstructed theater would be more conducive to serving this wider, more diverse
audience than the common theatrical spaces of the twentieth century:
We have lost the popular public theatre through these changes in
theatrical architecture. The closed space of the new theatre became
the prerogative of the bourgeoisie, who in the older theatres
(despite seat-price differentials, which are still there in the footballstadium or the bull-ring) shared the same space with the common
people. The Globe will make the theatre (not only Shakespeare)
once again popular, public and accessible: the working-class man
will feel less constrained and inhibited there than in the plush,
enclosed space of the theatre.380
Wanamaker‘s observation seems to suggest that is the theatrical space, and not the text,
that allows for the universality of Shakespeare‘s play. His logic is a bit perplexing (aren‘t
elites and commoners together in the shared spaces of proscenium arch theaters as well?),
but one can see that he believes, like Poel, that by returning plays to their original staging
conditions, his Globe can make theater accessible to a greater public.
But if it is the architectural space that provides his audience with access to
Shakespeare, why did Wanamaker undergo years of government lobbying to insure that
his Globe was built near the site of the King Men‘s theater on the South Bank? Couldn‘t
one pursue original practices or build a Globe replica anywhere (as those replicas spread
across America prove)? The answer leads one to the fact that these original practice
theaters are inevitably and irrevocably tied to the tourist dollar. Their claims of
accessibility, in fact, are largely connected to the fact that they must attract a wide
audience base in order to stay lucrative, and there is no more lucrative place for winning
the tourist dollar than the Globe‘s ―original‖ spot.
379 Ibid., 19.
380 Ibid., 21.
166
Jeremy Lopez, in fact, credits Mark Rylance, founding artistic director at the
Globe, as the originator of the term ―original staging practices.‖ Rylance‘s role in the
field demonstrates how the lines blur between the academic, the artistic, and the
commercial in this approach. Lopez argues that the original practice movement has not
gained academic popularity because it has no ―manifesto‖ as other fields of critical study;
instead, ―its ‗manifestos‘ might be said to be buildings like Shakespeare‘s Globe or the
Staunton, Virginia Blackfriars.‖381 These buildings, and the money, research, and efforts
that went into them, offer validation of the field of study and house active centers for that
research. These buildings, however, also highlight a weakness in original practice theory.
As Lopez states, ―the things that happen in these buildings are complexly, divergently
mediated by the exigencies of the Shakespeare-driven tourism industry (and/or the
tourism-driven Shakespeare industry).‖382 Although original practice theaters might be
selling themselves as scholarly institutions, a large part of their audience is not, in fact,
scholars. They are often selling their academic credentials to tourists. And this
commercial relationship compromises original practice studies. In order to sell tickets,
these theaters often make claims of authenticity that can easily be disputed. They are,
after all, theaters with ―original‖ practices that include women on stage, color-blind
casting, modern music, anachronistic costumes, and electrically-lit playing spaces.
Original practice theaters provide just enough early modern elements – fully illuminated
theaters, thrust staging, the use of doubling – to suggest authenticity while making
adjustments which will appeal to their audiences. Original practice theaters suggest the
theme of Elizabethan England without fully committing to this historical context.
381 Jeremy Lopez, ―A Partial Theory of Original Practice,‖ Shakespeare Survey 61 (2008): 303,
Cambridge Collections Online, accessed August 1, 2009, DOI:10.1017/CCOL9780521898881.023.
382 Ibid., 303.
167
It is no surprise, then, that original practice theaters are often compared to theme
parks. Tourists come to these centers for the high culture their theme implies, but they
can decide to what extent they will engage with the history and art. As W. B. Worthen
suggests, ―at themed historical events and theme parks, a general acquaintance with the
theme – ‗Pilgrims,‘ ‗Disney,‘ ‗Shakespeare‘ – is all you need for a successful experience,
to get your money‘s worth.‖383 Reconstructed theaters actively resist the theme park
label. At the time of the Globe‘s opening, Michael Holden, executive director of the
Globe Centre, warned that ―if anyone turns up in Elizabethan costumes – as they have
done in our workshop programme –we will eject them from the premises.‖384 Ralph
Alan Cohen, founding executive director of the American Shakespeare Center goes
further, advertising a trip to his theater as an alternative to a theme park vacation.385 Yet,
as Worthen points out, this resistance suggests that original practice theaters realize they
are part of ―the conceptual (and capital) economies of theme parks.‖386 Original
practices in the twenty-first-century are big business. Its tourist-driven theaters serve as a
reminder that one of our most canonical authors is also one of our most public and one of
our most commercial.
Regardless of its commercial ties, however, original practice theater played for
contemporary audiences will inevitably be a negotiation between the early modern period
and our own. As Michael D. Bristol notes, ―Every staging of a Shakespeare play results
383 W.B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 115.
384 Dennis Kennedy, ―Shakespeare and Cultural Tourism,‖ Theatre Journal 50, no. 2 (1998):
175-188. Accessed June 4, 2009, http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/journals/theatre_journal/
v050/50.2kennedy.html.
385 Ralph Alan Cohen, ―A Shakespeare Original, A New Virginia Treasure,‖ The Richmond
Times-Dispatch (Richmond), September 20, 2001, accessed July 21, 2009, http://global.factiva.com.
proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/aa/.
386 Worthen, 93.
168
from a dialogue between the historical moment of its creation the contemporaneity of the
mise-en-scene.‖387 No matter what attempts at authenticity are made, the communities
involved – its critics, its producers, its actors, its audiences – will always be modern. True
―authenticity‖ can never be reached. In discussing reconstructions of medieval drama,
Claire Sponsler argues that theatrical reconstructions follow ―the logic of metonymy,‖
assuming a set of artifacts or events can create the entirety of a past experience and thus
establish a clear connection between the past and present.388 Original staging practices
are guilty of their own brand of containment; they selectively choose the theatrical
conventions that make their performances ―real‖ Shakespeare, but ignore or re-imagine
those conventions which do not speak to their audiences.
This negotiation between past and present is inevitable. Robert Weimann argues
that, ―The tension between what is past and what lives for us today is obvious; and yet,
from the point of view of the function of literary scholarship, it seems impossible to
relegate the pastness of Shakespeare‘s theatre to the ‗pure‘ historian and its
contemporaneousness to the ‗pure‘ critic or modern producer.‖ Instead, Weimann asserts
that ideal critical work should be ―both a product and a ‗producer‘ of history of the effect
of Shakespeare‘s work.‖389 This aim to be both the product and the producer of history is
the paradox within which original practice staging situates itself. Perhaps what is
unsettling to its critics is that original practice seems blithely to embrace its place
between the past and the present, the academic and the commercial, and the authentic and
the metonymic. Ultimately, the word ―original‖ is misleading; these productions are not
387 Michael D. Bristol, Big-time Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1996), 13; see also John
Russell Brown, Shakespeare and the Theatrical Event (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 12.
388 Claire Sponsler, Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2004), 177-178.
389 Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre: Studies in the Social
Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), xiii.
169
early modern, but instead some sort of post-modern, early modern pastiche. The extent of
―authenticity‖ in original practice productions is limited by the cultural expectations,
aesthetic tastes, and production values of the companies that produce them, and perhaps
more importantly, by the audiences for whom they produce them.
The American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia provides an apt case
study of the dilemmas of original practices. In 2001, the company opened a
reconstruction of Shakespeare‘s indoor theater, the Blackfriars. Like the Globe, the
company advertises its original stage practices as both rigorous and scholarly. Yet it is
also a company that NPR‘s Bob Mondello says is ―[b]lowing the cobwebs out of
Elizabethan drama.‖390 The company balances its place as a research laboratory for
original staging practices with its need to create performances that will attract
theatergoers to a rural community in southwest Virginia. The Globe has the advantage of
being in central London and the distinction of being housed near the original spot of
Shakespeare‘s theater, but the ASC has had to work harder to attract national and
international attention. Its transition from an amateur, regional company to a professional,
national company offers insight into the state of original staging practices in this country
and how these practices are made attractive to contemporary American audiences.
History of the American Shakespeare Center
Shenandoah Shakespeare Express was founded in 1988 by Ralph Alan Cohen, a
professor at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and his student Jim
Warren, an English and Theater major. Cohen frequently escorted groups of students
overseas for the purpose of attending major Shakespeare productions, but in the mid- to
390 American Shakespeare Center, ―Home,‖ American Shakespeare Center, accessed October 10,
2009, www.americanshakespearecenter.com.
170
late 1980‘s he found that both he and his students were growing increasingly
disillusioned by these performances: ―I felt like they were paying money to have the love
of Shakespeare drained out of them.‖ Cohen fretted that students came home from these
productions ―underwhelmed or bored.‖391 In 1986, Cohen took a group of students to the
Beargardens Museum in Southwark, then the center of Wanamaker‘s fundraising efforts.
It was on this trip that Cohen met Patrick Spottiswoode, the founding Director of
Education at the London Globe. Cohen says the way in which Spottiswoode described
original staging practices seemed to speak directly to what he saw as some of the issues
with the plays he and his students were attending – specifically an emphasis on set and
setting instead of the language and story. Upon his return to Virginia, Cohen decided to
offer a seminar on Henry V at JMU that emphasized original staging practices, which led
to a production of that show for the university‘s theater department.
Capitalizing on post-show energy, Warren suggested to Cohen that they start a
traveling company that specialized in original staging practices. Twelve actors were cast,
and the troupe toured Richard III throughout the Shenandoah Valley in 1988. They called
themselves the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express (SSE), a name that Cohen ―intended to
identify our region while suggesting whole American straightforwardness and speed.‖392
The company thrived in the region, drawing regular audience members and financial
support from the area. The actors began hiring themselves out to perform at high schools
and colleges nationwide, and twenty years later, the company had toured their workshops
and performances both nationally and internationally.
391 Hap Erstein, ―The Shenandoah Troupe: Brevity is the Soul of Will,‖ The Washington Times
(Washington, D.C.), July 8, 1992, accessed July 21, 2009, http://global.factiva.com.proxy.
lib.uiowa.edu/aa/.
392 Ralph Alan Cohen, ―Building of the Third Blackfriars Playhouse,‖ in The Theatre of Teaching
and the Lessons of Theatre, eds. Domnica Radulescu & Maria Stadter Fox (Lanham, MD: Lexington
Books, 2005), 149-150; Erstein, ―The Shenandoah Troupe.‖
171
The young company‘s original practice performances received mixed reviews
from critics and scholars. Reviewing a 1999 production of Macbeth, Tom Sime says the
company‘s lights-on strategy gave the show ―the non-look of a cattle-call audition‖ but
added ―what was lost in mood was made up in lucidity and momentum.‖393 Speed and
clarity were almost unanimously noted by SSE‘s critics. In Shakespeare Quarterly,
Stephen Booth praised the group‘s elimination of frequent pauses – for elocution, for
movement, or for set changes – that are often seen in contemporary productions. The
quick pace highlighted the fact that Shakespeare‘s lines ―give the actors every
opportunity to embody the feelings they report, give the same opportunities that actors
commonly pause to manufacture for themselves. Every Shakespearean pays lip service to
the idea of ‗trusting the play‘; Ralph Cohen really does it, and he wins big.‖394 By paring
down the set and emphasizing a rapid delivery, Cohen and Warren created productions
that came close to fitting within the infamous time frame of ―two-hours traffic.‖ Although
this quick delivery seemed to be a nod toward original staging practices, it also meshed
with contemporary attention spans. After all, Cohen‘s assertion that his company‘s name
emphasized American straightforwardness and speed directly connects the company‘s
run-time philosophy to the ever-increasing pace of modern culture.
SSE productions, indeed, embraced modern influences. In the early days of the
company, actors appeared in tailored black pants, matching t-shirts, and Converse hightop sneakers. They warmed-up their audiences with songs by The Beatles and The Doors
and included popular culture references in their plays. Some critics found these additions
attractive; Stacey Chase called SSE productions ―pared-down, sped-up, sassy, hip and
393 Tom Sime, ―Macbeth made light Shenandoah Shakespeare Express Gets Back to Dynamic
Bard Basics,‖ The Dallas Morning News (Dallas), March 27, 1999, accessed July 21, 2009,
http://global.factiva.com.proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/aa/.
394 Stephen Booth, ―Review of The Shenandoah Shakespeare Express,‖ Shakespeare Quarterly
43, no. 4 (1992): 481, accessed August 25, 2009, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2870867.
172
totally honest.‖395 The company claimed these modern touches captured the spirit of the
popular culture and music that early modern audiences would have encountered at their
playhouses.396 Yet their ―sassy‖ or ―hip‖ readings could also fall flat. Of a version of
Love‟s Labour‟s Lost at the Folger in 2002, William Triplett wrote that ―[t]he problem is
that for every inspired scene or moment – usually involving the play‘s merry pin-popping
of pomp and pretension – there‘s at least one or more that tries too hard, that feels, well,
labored.‖397 Critics noted that these passes at relevancy often feel gimmicky or that they
emphasized the youth and inexperience of the actors who worked with the SSE. Yet Hap
Erstein pointed out that the audiences the company typically played for were also young
and seemed taken with the SSE‘s performance. Erstein and other critics often explained
away flawed SSE productions as pedagogical exercises. Education, certainly, was at the
heart of the SSE‘s mission to create enduring interest in the works of Shakespeare, but as
long as they remained a company that played primarily in high school gymnasiums and
college black box theaters, they would not be readily accepted as an aesthetic experience.
As Erstein noted, the RSC and the Shakespeare Theatre in D.C. had ―nothing to worry
about from Shenandoah Shakespeare Express.‖398
The chance to re-envision the scope of the company would come in the late
1990‘s. In 1991, Cohen, spoke of the adaptability of his touring troupe: ―We can put
Shakespeare on anywhere; we don‘t need a theatre.‖399 Despite Cohen‘s assertion, six
395 Stacey Chase, ―Shakespeare,‖ The Richmond Times-Dispatch (Richmond), March 17, 1991,
accessed July 21, 2009, http://global.factiva.com.proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/aa/.
396 American Shakespeare Center, ―About Us,‖ American Shakespeare Center, accessed
September 1, 2009, http://www.americanshakespearecenter.com/v.php?pg=5.
397 Triplett.
398 Hap Erstein, ―Shakespeare as Just Plain Bill: Express Brings Drama to Children,‖ The
Washington Times (Washington, D.C.), July 10, 1992, accessed July 21, 2009, http://global.factiva.com.
proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/aa/.
399 Chase.
173
years later, SSE found itself in the middle of a bidding war between two Virginia cities,
Richmond and Staunton, that wanted to build the company a Globe reconstruction. In the
end, however, other Richmond theater companies protested the proposed plan for a Globe
complex and the city government balked at the hefty price tag for the project.
Enter Staunton. One hundred miles northwest of Richmond, this rural Virginia
community of 24,000 has one of the largest samplings of Victorian architecture in the
country. Moreover, it boasts of itself as the birthplace of both Woodrow Wilson (even if
the future president lived in the town for less than a year) and the members of the country
music band The Statler Brothers, a hometown band that once attracted thousands of their
fans to Staunton annually for a Fourth of July Concert titled ―Happy Birthday U.S.A.‖
But the music group gave their final performance in 1994, and the town knew it had to do
something to keep people coming to Staunton.400
When Richmond rejected the Globe project, Staunton saw its opportunity. The
city offered Shenandoah Shakespeare Express $500,000 in interest-free loans to build a
performance space in downtown Staunton. The project, initially estimated at $10 million,
also centered on a reconstructed Globe, but the group decided to first concentrate its
efforts on a $4 million dollar indoor playhouse, a reconstruction of Shakespeare‘s
Blackfriars Playhouse. Initially, the Globe was projected to open in 2007, but to date,
there is no Globe in Staunton; the company‘s Web site only states that they are in the
―long-term planning process‖ for the outdoor theater. In many ways, Staunton‘s
investment seems to have paid off. The Blackfriars Playhouse opened in September of
2001, and within the first year of its existence, 50,000 visitors traveled to Staunton. Half
of the theater‘s tickets are sold to people who live more than 90 miles from Staunton, and
400 Beth Jones, ―Stage-Struck in Staunton,‖ The Roanoke Times (Roanoke, VA), July 31, 2000,
accessed July 21, 2009, http://global.factiva.com.proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/aa/.
174
the company estimates the amount of income it generated in the Staunton community in
2007 was $70,808.401
After the opening of Blackfriars in 2001, Shenandoah Shakespeare, now having
dropped the ―Express,‖ was able to position itself for further educational and commercial
ventures. It retained the touring company and established a resident company in the
Staunton playhouse. As the Globe had done, Shenandoah Shakespeare positioned
Blackfriars as a laboratory for scholarly research. In 2002, the company started a masters
degree program in Renaissance literature and performance, housed at Staunton-based
Mary Baldwin College. In addition to youth summer camps and in-house workshops for
school groups, the company has hosted a number of National Endowment for the
Humanities summer programs. The company bi-annually sponsors the Blackfriars
Conference, which brings together early modernists from all over the country to discuss
issues surrounding original practice studies. In 2005, the company took advantage of its
off-season to feature an Actors‘ Renaissance Season. The productions borrowed from
Tiffany Stern‘s research on the early modern rehearsal process, eliminating the director
and instead allowing the actors to collaboratively form the production. Stern notes that
these productions avoid the ―museum-piece‖ mustiness and ―[l]ike the Blackfriars
building, which uses modern American craft to produce a living Renaissance structure, [ .
. . ] the Blackfriars actors mingle modern creativity with historical experimentation to
produce something telling about the past and also very present.‖402 This mixture of past
and present has proven lucrative for the company. During the 2009 Actors‘ Renaissance
401 Sarah Enloe, Director of Education, American Shakespeare Center, e-mail message to author,
June 15, 2009.
402 Celia Wren, ―They Do It Like the King‘s Men Did – Almost,‖ American Theatre 23, no. 2
(2006), accessed July 21, 2009, http://global.factiva.com.proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/aa/.
175
Season, the company had a 62% occupancy rate, a rate that rivals their annual
productions of The Christmas Carol.403
Simply put, Blackfriars allowed Shenandoah Shakespeare to position itself as
both a research institution and a travel destination, giving the company the sort of clout it
needed to transcend the pigeonholes of pedagogical performance, to enhance its artistic
development, and all the while, to attract a broad array of new audiences to its shows.
The day before the opening of the Blackfriars, Cohen wrote an op-ed piece for The
Richmond Times-Dispatch in which he describes his vision of the new theater:
The Blackfriars Playhouse […] is more than a beautiful building.
Shenandoah Shakespeare aims to make it a national center for the
performance and study of Shakespeare. […] the Blackfriars and the
Globe will make Staunton a premiere theater destination for the 10
million Americans who go each summer to Shakespeare festivals.
By adding the performing arts to the other attractions of the Valley,
we offer families an alternative to theme-park vacations – real
architecture; real historic homes; real mountains, lakes, and
caverns; real museums; and now, real Shakespeare in a real
Elizabethan theater.404
Cohen‘s assertion of the ―real‖ slips from the ―real‖ historical architecture of the city to
the company‘s claims that they are presenting the ―real‖ Shakespeare. After all, the
Victorian architecture is an innate part of the city, but the Elizabethan theater was never a
part of its historical fabric; that was only added a few years ago, with the impetus of
attracting more tourists to the Staunton area. And with this driving purpose in mind, can
we really believe that Blackfriars is more ―real‖ than the theme park Cohen
dismisses?405
403 Ralph Alan Cohen, personal interview by author, Staunton,VA, May 14, 2009.
404 Cohen, ―A Shakespeare Original, A New Virginia Treasure.‖
405 See Diana E. Henderson, ―Shakespeare: The Theme Park,‖ Shakespeare After Mass Media,
ed. Richard Burt (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 107-126.
176
Looking at the changing character of Staunton since 2001, one sees how the town
has refashioned itself into a themed environment. Bed and breakfasts have emerged in the
city with distinctly Shakespearean names, including The Twelfth Night Inn and, most
recently, Anne Hathaway‘s Cottage. The latter is built in the style of an English cottage
and its Web site advertises that it has a real thatched roof ―(made by an Irish man!).‖406
You can order the Shakespearean Pizza at Shenandoah Pizza, a Blackfriars sandwich at
The Pampered Palate Café, and Othello wine from Veritas Vineyards. Shakespeare kitsch
has appeared in nearly every storefront on Beverley Street, the main street running
through downtown. In the first years of the Blackfriars‘s existence, the local bookshop,
now closed, named its resident cat ―Shakespeare.‖ Perhaps the most telling symbol of this
town‘s burgeoning position as a Shakespeare tourist attraction, however, is their new city
logo. Colloquially, the ―u‖ in Staunton is silenced when pronounced. This new logo plays
off the common mispronunciation of the city‘s name by highlighting the ―u‖ in yellow
and accenting it with three hash marks. To the side of the logo on the city‘s Web site and
publications, one sees printed: ―As U Like It,‖ the ―U‖ identical to the one used in the
town‘s name.407 It‘s hard to escape the impression that the town has irreversibly tied its
fortunes to those of the theater. In Cohen‘s op-ed piece, he advertises his company‘s
theater as ―your new building;‖ this town, for one, has taken Cohen at his word,
gratefully allowing original practice enthusiasts to transform their Victorian town to a
cozy British hamlet.408
406 ―Anne Hathaway‘s Cottage Bed and Breakfast,‖ accessed July 15, 2009, http://annehathaways-cottage.com/index.html.
407 ―City of Staunton, Virginia,‖ accessed September 10, 2009, http://www.staunton.va.us/frontpage.
408 Cohen, ―A Shakespeare Original.‖
177
Shenandoah Shakespeare has worked hard in recent years to position itself as an
American theatrical institution. Despite its regional roots and the fact that the local
community raised the majority of the funds needed to build Blackfriars, the company
decided in 2005 to change its name from Shenandoah Shakespeare to the American
Shakespeare Center (ASC). Cohen says, ―We always thought we would be changing our
name to something. We knew we had a marketing issue. We loved our name. I still think
Shenandoah Shakespeare is one of the great names. I love it. But it‘s so local and so
provincial.‖409 Although the company continues to attract larger numbers of national and
international patrons – people whom Cohen describes as ―serious looking people who are
not academics‖ – their donor base was strictly local. The company began asking itself,
―How do we claim a larger thing? How do we get people to think of us as the
Smithsonian of Shakespeare? How do we get that weight?‖410 Ultimately, the company
saw the name change as a type of rebranding. Shenandoah Shakespeare, although poetic,
was provincial. The American Shakespeare Center is a name that serves multiple
purposes. Foregoing ―theater,‖ ―company,‖ and ―players,‖ ―center‖ is a utilitarian word
that encompasses the artistic, pedagogical, academic, and tourist aims of the company‘s
mission, and ―American‖ sets the company up as a national and authoritative institution.
The re-naming clings to the hope of self-fulfilling prophecy. If the company brands itself
as a national artistic center, it will become one.411
ASC has taken great strides in the past few years to position itself on the
international scene as well, striving to make itself the American counterpoint to the
London Globe. Through National Endowment for the Humanities grants, the company
409 Cohen, personal interview, May 14, 2009.
410 Ibid.
411 Ibid.
178
has established a three-week summer course for educators called ―Shakespeare Theatres
In and Out.‖ After spending the first two weeks in Staunton, the group travels to London
for a residency at the Globe center, linking the companies as a matched set of
Shakespearean theaters despite the ocean‘s distance between them. The company has
hired a number of directors who also work at the Globe, including Spottiswoode and the
Globe‘s Master of the Verse, Giles Block. In 2008-2009 the bi-annual Blackfriars
Conference was paired with a sister conference in its off year, which was held at the
London Globe. In addition to Spottiswoode and Block, the Globe‘s director of theater
design, Jenny Tiramani, and Andrew Gurr, scholar and academic advisor for the building
of the Globe, have served as visiting faculty for the Center‘s master‘s degree program.
Despite its active campaign to achieve an authoritative, international position, the
American Shakespeare Center (and all its former identities) has long advocated for a
more accessible Shakespeare. Warren once said, ―What we‘re trying to do is bring
Shakespeare back to regular people so it‘s not a culture thing, a class thing [ . . . ]. We‘re
trying to show you don‘t have to have a British accent and tights to do Shakespeare.‖412
As the company‘s mission statement says, it ―recovers the joys and accessibility of
Shakespeare‘s theater, language, and humanity.‖413 Ultimately, the ASC is focused less
on the playwright than the communal experience of the audience. The Blackfriars
Playhouse is not so much a memorial to Shakespeare as it is an architectural space that
allows for community-based theater. Cohen explains, ―What we‘re trying to do [ . . . ] is
show that [Shakespeare] isn‘t an altar to worship at, that it still moves us at a human
level, and that we should go expecting to enjoy ourselves – literally – and that we come
412 Raymond M. Lane, ―Staunton Playhouse Gets Back to the Bard: Blackfriars Offers Faithful,
Raucous Re-Creations,‖ The Washington Times (Washington, D.C.), August 26, 2004, accessed July 21,
2009, http://global.factiva.com.proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/aa/; Chase.
413 American Shakespeare Center, ―About Us.‖
179
away enjoying each other.‖414 Cohen says the audience members, ―lit by chandeliers and
wall scones that illuminate the action, […] surround the stage at the Blackfriars
Playhouse, hear themselves spoken to, and see themselves and their fellow audience
members as part of the play.‖415 By putting audiences in an intimate playing space and a
space where they can see their fellow theatergoers on every side, fully illuminated, ASC
makes their spectators keenly aware of the communal aspect of theater. Sime, who
criticized SSE‘s lights-on look for making the performance seem like a cattle-call
audition, also could not help but note the inevitable sense of community this created.
Playing on the company motto, ―We do it with the lights on,‖ Sime said, ―We were
‗doing it‘ together.‖ 416
In this same collaborative spirit, the company continually negotiates between the
modern tastes and expectations of audiences and their own commitment to original
practices. One can see an example of such negotiation in the seating arrangements at the
Blackfriars. No permanent seatbacks were a part of the plans for the Staunton playhouse,
but audience members could rent removable seatbacks and bench cushions for $2 a-piece.
Just as some twenty-first century audience members stand at the Globe, members of the
Blackfriars audiences were meant to endure the two-hour show as their early modern
counterparts would have: on backless wooden benches. Cohen, in fact, spoke of this
arrangement as advantageous to the communal atmosphere of the theater: ―[W]hen an
audience leans forward because they don‘t have any way to lean back, it pushes this kind
of energy toward the actor. It‘s a different environment. So even though it seems like a
414 Brad Knickerbocker, ―Bare-bones Shakespeare Holds Youngsters‘ Attention,‖ Christian
Science Monitor, May 20, 1994, accessed July 21, 2009, http://global.factiva.com.proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/aa/.
415 Cohen, ―A Shakespeare Original.‖
416 Sime.
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really minor thing, it can change the show, and for the better.‖417 Despite all this
excitement, the company decided to forego the rental system in 2006, and now visitors to
Blackfriars arrive at their seats with the cushion and back already in place. As the move
to permanent seatbacks suggests, the ASC does not so much turn their audiences into
early modernists as it creates original practice version of these shows that can, at times,
be remarkably twenty-first century.
The American Shakespeare Center‘s 2006 Tempest
The experience of attending a Blackfriars show is unusual. The lobby of the
Blackfriars is nondescript with simple, modern lines. The company likes to say that the
first Blackfriars was an early modern theater in a medieval building and their Blackfriars
is an early modern theater in a twentieth-century building.418 In the far right corner of
the lobby, the company has tucked away a gift shop, and theatergoers can browse through
a wide array of Shakespeare-inspired merchandise while waiting for the doors to open –
everything from Shakespeare finger puppets to ―Top Ten Shakespeare Pick Up Lines‖ Tshirts to silk Shakespeare ties to academic books. Most of these books are written by
original practice scholars and include titles by Tiffany Stern, Andrew Gurr, and Cohen
himself.419 When the volunteer ushers, in vests that hint at Renaissance tapestry, open
the house doors and welcome guests inside, it is a breath-taking architectural transition.
417 Robert Siegel, ―Blackfriars Playhouse,‖ All Things Considered, NPR, September 7, 2001,
accessed July 21, 2009, http://global.factiva.com.proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/aa/.
418 Cohen, ―Shenandoah Shakespeare and the Building of the Third Blackfriars,‖ 154.
419 In her discussion of the Stratford birthplace, Barbara Hodgdon describes the gift shop as ―the
discursive field where ideology becomes most fully materialized, and where, through the agency of the
souvenir, the [Shakespeare] narrative moves into the visitor‘s private time and space. The Shakespeare
Trade: Performances and Appropriations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 232. See
also Graham Holderness, ―Bardolatry: or, The Cultural Materialist‘s Guide to Stratford-upon-Avon,‖ The
Shakespeare Myth, ed. Graham Holderness (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988) 2-15.
181
The theater is a room of Virginia white oak and plaster. The central, thrust stage is
surrounded on three sides and two levels by the audience, with enough seating for 300
people.420 Architect Tom MacLaughlin based his design on the description of the theater
in the Kingmen‘s lease on the Blackfriars and the design of the Tudor great halls.421
Local cabinetry workers carved the buttresses, spindles, and other decorations. The oak
gleams in the electrically produced ―candlelight‖ of the wrought-iron chandeliers and
wall sconces. The front gallery is a series of raked benches.422 On the sides closest to the
stage are the cushioned ―Lord‘s Chairs,‖ which are slightly more comfortable and
available for a higher price. On the stage there are six stools on each side –gallants stools
– from which the audience is invited to watch (and often participate in) the play.
The playing space borrows from the façades of Tudor halls. There is a central
discovery space and two, heavy wooden doors on either side. Above there is a balcony
which covers the length of the façade; this is another space where audience members are
invited to sit, following the assumption that royalty or the wealthy would sit in these seats
so as to be seen. The frons scenea has an elaborate stone-and-marble finish with black,
red, and gold accents. The audience galleries, however, remain unpainted, a nod to the
aesthetic preferences of modern audiences (and board members). The playing space also
has a trap and a fly space. While the trap is frequently used in ASC productions, the fly
space is not (the 2003 Midsummer Night‟s Dream and the 2006 Tempest are notable
exceptions) because the company does not have the right safety equipment.
420 There is also a third level, as there was in the original Blackfriars, but there is no seating on
this level of the Staunton Blackfriars.
421 To my knowledge, there is only one book-length study on the construction of the King‘s
Men‘s Blackfriars: Irwin Smith, Shakespeare‟s Blackfriars Playhouse: Its History and Design, (New York:
New York University Press, 1964). The book is highly conjectural (as all reconstructive theatrical work is
to some extent) and many of Irwin‘s theories have been brought into question by both scholars and the
work at the Staunton Blackfriars.
422 The gallery of the original Blackfriars would not have been raked.
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As the audience filters into the theater, members of the company come onto stage,
most already in costumes. Some carry instruments and others immediately set about
selling souvenir programs and greeting the audience. A theater employee rolls a cart on
stage and begins to sells soda, wine, and small plastic containers of candy. Audience
members chat and mingle while sipping from plastic cups. On the stage, the actors begin
to play their instruments. The musical fare is usually recognizable rock and pop songs
from the past twenty-five years, often linked thematically to the night‘s performance. For
example, before a 2009 production of Hamlet, actors performed Seal‘s ―Crazy,‖ Bob
Dylan‘s ―Like a Rolling Stone,‖ and Creedence Clearwater Revival‘s ―Someday Never
Comes.‖ From the beginning, it is an odd mix – an early modern theater, a contemporary
audience drinking local Virginia wine, and actors, dressed in costumes from any period
imaginable, rocking out to tunes that play like a review of American popular culture.
In the middle of this pre-show entertainment, the company frames its performance
with an introduction to original practices. In the early modern theater, plays were
sometimes preceded by an induction, a metatheatrical scene in which actors appeared on
the stage before the prologue to discuss the pending performance.423 Inductions were
used in early modern plays as both a way to mark the beginning of the performance in the
absence of darkening house lights and as a plea for the creative collaboration of the
audience in the performance. In most modern performances, audiences willingly cede
authority when house lights go out, but ASC instead uses their modern inductions to
423 Existent inductions belonged primarily to the boy companies, with the exception of one
written for the King‘s Men‘s performance of The Malcontent and those written by Ben Jonson for
Bartholomew Fair and Everyman Out of his Humor. These set-pieces typically expressed anxiety about the
pending performance, commentary on the playwright, or mockery of the audience. For other examples of
inductions, see Beaumont and Fletcher‘s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Marston‘s Antonio and Mellida,
Jack Drum‟s Entertainment, and What You Will, Jonson‘s Cynthia‟s Revels and Poetaster, Day‘s The Isle
of Gulls, and Middleton‘s Michaelmas Term. For more information on prologues to early modern plays see
Douglas Bruster & Robert Weimann, Prologues to Shakespeare‟s Theatre: Performance and Liminality in
Early Modern Drama (London: Routledge, 2004).
183
mark the beginning of the show and explain their performance philosophy to their
patrons.
Cohen argues: ―[o]riginal staging returns power to the audience and with it the
accessibility [of the text] available only through collaboration.‖424 In order for this
collaboration to work, however, the company must first explain their staging techniques.
The ASC‘s pre-show talk starts with one or two of the actors entering the stage space,
welcoming audience members, and polling them to see who has seen an ASC show
before. They serve as the audience‘s guide into this ―authentic‖ experience; they provide
historical context (and justification) for why the company uses original practices. The
bullet points of this induction are typically the same from show to show. The first order
of business is to explain that the lights will remain on during the show, so not only can
the actors see the audience but that the audience members can also see each other. The
community of the theater is made clear from the outset, and theatergoers are encouraged
to respond to each other and take on active roles in the performance. If any of the gallant
stools on stage or the seats in the balcony of the theater are open at this time, the cast
members encourage the audience to take a free ―upgrade,‖ offering them seats where they
will be a part of the stage picture and in prime position to be the subject of the actors‘
direct addresses. The actors also discuss doubling, cross-gender casting, and their
repertory cycle (a not-so-subtle advertisement for their other shows) as elements of their
original practice approach. The pre-show talk is a crucial moment for the company‘s
members; it is the moment when they sell the audience on their approach, advertise that
approach as both accurate and fun, and begin to sow the seeds of their promised
accessibility. Although the talking points of these speeches are static, the gimmicks the
actors use to frame the message vary from show to show. Sometimes actors deliver them
424 Cohen, ―Shenandoah Shakespeare and the Building of the Third Blackfriars Playhouse,‖ 145.
184
in a fairly straight manner, but often, to capture the ―fun‖ aspect of an ASC performance,
the openings are delivered in a playful way which capitalizes on the themes of the show.
This latter approach was evident in the opening moments of the 2006 Tempest.
This Tempest production differed slightly from other ASC productions: upon
entering the theater, one noticed more of a ―set‖ than the ASC typically uses. Four large
ropes hung down from the Heavens and extended into the stalls on either side of the
stage.425 Onto this stage picture, James Keegan, dressed for his first role of the sea
captain, entered and began the pre-show talk with ―Ahoy there maties.‖ This greeting was
the first in long series of puns that infiltrate this speech. Keegan was joined on stage by
Celia Madeoy, who played Gonzalo. Madeoy crawled out of the trap, referring to it as
―below.‖ They explained that women were not allowed on stage during Shakespeare‘s
day, saying it was an old sailor superstition that ―women on board were bad luck,‖ but
they celebrated that the ban had been lifted for that performance. They punned ―sale‖
with ―sail‖ when discussing the company merchandise available.426 Madeoy made a joke
about a Captain Jack bobble-head doll, a reference to Disney‘s second Pirates of the
Caribbean film which came out during the run of the show. They informed the audience
that the intermission would be marked by the ―ship‘s bell.‖ At the end of the speech, they
performed a sea shanty which summarized the main points of their talk. When they
finished singing, Keegan said, ―We should get going.‖ When Madeoy questioned why,
Keegan gestured toward the back of the house and said, ―There‘s a tempest coming‖ and
with a shake of the thunder sheet, the play began.
425 Andrew Gurr discusses the use of ropes in the opening of the original Tempest in ―The
Tempest‘s Tempest at Blackfriars,‖ Shakespeare Survey 41 (1989): 96-97.
426 The puns seemed to come naturally to the pair. When a young women ran across the playing
space to join her friends on the other side, her high heels pounded loudly on the wooden floor. Without
missing a beat, Keegan said, ―Don‘t mind her, she‘s going through a stage.‖
185
The long list of nautical references and the canned humor perhaps seemed more at
home at Busch Garden‘s Globe reconstruction in Williamsburg than at a national center
for Shakespeare studies.427 Yet one can also see this opening speech, and all of ASC‘s
contemporary inductions, as a part of its mission to create productions that seek to
demystify or de-idolize Shakespeare. The troupe attempts to create a more laid-back
Shakespeare –one who can take (and make) a few jokes about pirates, one who is keenly
aware of the popular culture surrounding him, and one who uses that culture to draw
audiences into the theater. Moreover, the 2006 Tempest opening, despite its silliness,
actually laid some groundwork for the company‘s interpretation of the play. The
combination of the pun-heavy dialogue and the ―in character‖ Gonzalo emphasized
Gonzalo‘s love of puns when he used them later in the play. The nautical humor did
prepare the audience‘s imagination for the scene that unfolded before them, and as all the
references to the sea, ships, and pirates were made, the audience realized, perhaps, that
the interior of the Blackfriars resembles the exterior deck of a ship. Thus, just as it claims
Shakespeare did, ASC uses language to help audiences envision the setting of the play.
Through these introductory speeches, ASC recruits its audience as artistic collaborators
and transitions them in the world of their plays.
Yet if, as the philosophy of original practices suggests, everything one needs to
access Shakespeare is in the text, why would one need a stage speech that sets the scene?
Shouldn‘t one be able to simply trust the text? This is one of the paradox that the ASC
comfortably embraces. Within the overarching concept of ―original practices,‖ ASC uses
modern touches to create productions that are infused with popular culture, subversive
cultural readings, and populous re-visionings of the text. This can be seen in the 2006
427 See Henderson.
186
Tempest through the company‘s use of music, its use of cross-gender casting, and its use
of direct audience address.
Music
The philosophy of ASC in regards to music seems to embody its overall approach
to creating original practice theater. In a description of its key tenets on the company
Web site, the company describes its use of music: ―The ASC sets many of these songs in
contemporary style. The result is emblematic of our approach – a commitment to
Shakespeare's text and to the mission of connecting that text to modern audiences.‖428 In
addition to putting songs from the text into contemporary settings, they often use popular,
modern songs before, during, and after the show as both an answer to the various
entertainments of the early modern playhouse and a way to create a lively atmosphere in
their own playhouse. These songs are meant to capture the ―fun‖ the ASC promises, but
they also often speak thematically to the play.
Music was a quintessential part of the early modern theatrical experience.
Musicians were placed on the stage, most likely in the upper balcony, and provided music
both as pre-show entertainment and an integral part of the plays themselves. David
Lindley and Claire van Kampen, however, note that the modern understanding of
theatrical music is much different from the way music was used in the early modern
theater. While the media of television and films have trained us to think of music as
incidental, decorative, or emotionally illustrative, the music of the early modern theater
was active and audible to the characters on stage. Music served as a signifier of action, as
important as language, costume, and scenery in creating the world of the text.429 Lindley
428 American Shakespeare Center, ―About Us.‖
429 Claire van Kampen, ―Music and Aural Texture at Shakespeare‘s Globe,‖ Shakespeare‟s
Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, ed. Christie Carson & Farah Karim-Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge
187
notes that given our modern understandings of opera or musical theater, we tend to think
of characters who sing as ―giving voice to their own emotions; yet in Shakespearean
drama almost all performed songs are rendered by professionals or servants who do not
articulate their own feelings so much as sing to, or on the behalf of, others. Those who
sing directly ‗for themselves‘ are generally drunk, mad, in their dotage, or socially
subversive.‖430
In addition to music, jigs were performed after the play. Comic and often bawdy,
these dance pieces, as Charles Baskerville writes, were the ―darling[s] of the groundlings,
not the literati.‖431 In his classic study on jigs, Baskerville hypothesizes that the subject
and setting of the jigs were connected to popular early modern ballads. These source
materials made these pieces especially popular among the lower classes. Gurr seems to
agree with this theory. When the King‘s Men took over the Blackfriars, they obtained the
theater‘s musical consort and, for the first time, could make music an integral part of their
performances. Gurr hypothesizes that during this transition, jigs became the
entertainment of the company‘s Globe performances as the lower class audiences
preferred these popular entertainments while the upper class audiences of the Blackfriars
preferred the musical numbers provided by the consort.432
The musical environments of the contemporary Blackfriars and Globe, however,
are reversed. In the spirit of early modernism, ASC only uses acoustic instruments. The
University Press, 2008), 81-82; David Lindley, ―Music, Authenticity and Audience,‖ Shakespeare‟s Globe:
A Theatrical Experiment, ed. Christie Carson & Farah Karim-Cooper, (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), 90-100.
430 David Lindley, Shakespeare and Music (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006), 8.
431 Charles Read Baskerville, The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama, (New York: Dover,
1965), 3.
432 Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company 1594-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), 69-77.
188
acoustic guitar is a mainstay of the company, but the instruments used are often an
eclectic mix of flutes, fiddles, accordions, and brass. The opening song of the ASC‘s
Tempest, Ween‘s ―I Can‘t Put My Finger On It,‖ featured guitar, trumpet, trombone,
clarinet, xylophone, and drum. Although acoustic, the instruments used are not early
modern. Unlike the Globe, which creates its sound with only period instruments, ASC
translates the use of music for its contemporary audiences. Their musical sets directly
resist the label of ―museum theater‖ that the hornpipe and the lyre at the Globe might
suggest. In essence, the music of ASC performances does not fulfill the original practice
component of their mission, but rather provides modern audiences with a connection to
the text.
In addition to the Ween song, the company also performed Thomas Dolby‘s ―She
Blinded Me With Science‖ in the 2006 Tempest production. These contemporary songs
drew out the theme of knowledge acquisition (and its pitfalls) that was present in the
play. By pairing the text with modern music, the ASC shows audiences that elements of
the story unfolding in the play are still being explored through popular music and lyrical
poetry today. Thus the music attempts to chip away at the stereotype that Shakespeare‘s
text is distanced from the audience. By equating him with popular music, ASC aims to
create a Shakespeare who is modern and hip.433 While the reconstructed music at the
Globe might serve to take audiences back into the past, the music at the ASC brings the
past forward, assuring audiences that the show is more than an academic experiment; it is
also a production that accounts for the present tastes and pre-occupations of its audiences.
Although these musical interludes are meant to be the downtime of the play – a
chance for audiences to visit the restrooms, buy more beverages, or simply stretch after
433 For a discussion on the use of rock-n-roll music in Shakespeare productions, both cinematic
and theatrical, see Kevin J. Westmore, ―Are You Shakespearienced?: Rock Music and Contemporary
American Production of Shakespeare,‖ Theatre Symposium: a Journal of the Southeastern Theatre
Conference 12 (2004): 48-64.
189
sitting on the wooden benches – they are often some of the most delightful moments in
the playhouse and most audience members linger in their seats to watch and listen. Paul
Menzer notes in a review of the 2006 summer season that the music at ASC can often be
so good that it trumps the performance of the plays: ―the interludes are often colorful,
noisy, and physical, which can make the surrounding drama seem drab, respectful and
static. [ . . . ] These musical interludes, though highly entertaining, can have the
unintended effect of pointing out how reverent, if not traditional, is the Blackfriars
approach to Shakespeare‘s plays.‖434 Although the company aims to resist ―museum
theater‖ with its musical interludes, the heighten liveliness of the musical interludes can
produce the unintended effect of making the performances seem less inventive and more
conservative, especially when the music in the play proper is conservative.
The 2006 Tempest is a good example of this in-show conservatism. The Tempest
is one of Shakespeare‘s most musical plays. This is probably due to the fact that the
King‘s Men‘s acquired the Blackfriars and its musical consort around the time the play
was written.435 The music of the play, however, is not simply a way to highlight the
newly available consort; instead, the music works in tandem with the magical themes of
the play, suggesting the strangeness of these supernatural elements.436 Given all this, it is
434 Paul Menzer, ―Review of As You Like It, Macbeth, Tempest, and Othello,‖ Shakespeare
Bulletin 25, no.2 (2007): 106, accessed June 1, 2009, http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/
journals/shakespeare_bulletin/v025/25.2menzer.pdf.
435 Gurr, The Shakespeare Company 1594-1642, 81; Theresa Coletti, ―Music and The Tempest,‖
Shakespeare‟s Late Plays, ed. Richard C. Tobias & Paul C. Zolbrod, (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press,
1974), 189. The musical nature of The Tempest also led the play to be adapted in operatic form many times
during the eighteenth-century; see Irena Cholij, ―A Thousand Twangling Instruments: Music and The
Tempest on the Eighteenth Century London Stage,‖ Shakespeare Survey 51 (1998): 79-94.
436 In his introduction to the New Cambridge edition of The Tempest, David Lindley argues that
the music of the play both adheres to neo-platonic views that music imitated divine harmony and
challenges these views by associating music with Prospero‘s manipulation and control of the island‘s
inhabitants. Ultimately, however, Lindley argues that the music belongs to benign Ariel, making music
morally neutral. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. David Lindley (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 18-22.
190
surprising that the songs in the ASC 2006 production are unmemorable. Although the
falsetto voice John Herrall provides Ariel was eerily otherworldly, the musical settings of
Ariel‘s island music, the drinking songs of Trinculo and Stephano, and the orchestrated
masque were conservative and predictable. There was nothing particularly wrong with
such settings, but they do seem unimaginative when placed in relation to the interlude
music. Menzer hypothesizes that the in-show music‘s lack of inspiration might be
because the musical interludes are under the sole artistic direction of the company actors,
whereas the music in the play is orchestrated by company directors; the actors, he
believes, ―clearly give themselves permission to make bold musical and staging choices,
choices that are often more dynamic than those of the directors.‖437 The irony, of course,
is that actor-orchestrated moments are more reminiscent of the early modern theater than
director-led choices. Therefore, actor-organized contemporary tunes and directororganized, early modern music both represent the type of contradictions seen in modern
original practices. Presented with these dueling contradictions, perhaps it is better for
ASC to select the scenario which will be more pleasing to its paying audience, even when
that choice champions a presentist vision of the early modern theater over a more
―authentic‖ representation.
Cross-Gender Casting
The blurred lines between the innovation and conservatism of the company can
also be seen in its casting practices. On the early modern English stage, there were, of
course, no women. As an original practice company, ASC had to decide whether to
employ only men in their company or overlook this restriction. It has chosen the latter,
regularly hiring three or four women in their troupes of eleven actors. Warren and Cohen
437 Menzer, 106.
191
willingly admit their practice of hiring women is a contradiction, but try to explain that
all-male companies are also not accurate if they are not hiring young boys as well. Even
in light of this justification, Cohen admits, ―I‘m obviously dancing on the head of a pin,
here.‖438 The company spins its decision in a slightly different way on its Web site:
―Because we are committed to the idea that Shakespeare is about everyone – male and
female – the ASC is not an all-male company, but we try to re-create some of the fun of
gender confusions by casting women as men and men as women.‖439 The desire to
create a Shakespeare who speaks to and is accessible to everyone once again trumps the
desire to re-create authentic staging conditions: the original practice belief that
Shakespeare is universally accessible is more important than the actual original practices
themselves. Moreover, the company asserts that the cross-gender casting is for ―fun,‖
suggesting that it adds more to the entertainment-value of the show. The ASC, however,
seems to take this relegation of ―fun‖ quite literally, using cross-gender casting sparingly,
mostly to create a humorous effect and only timidly using the practice to push on modern
constructions of gender. The company has given a handful of serious male roles to
women, including Jessica Pohly as Caliban in 2003, Kate Eastwood Norris as the Duke of
Gloucester in the 1998 Richard III and as Lear‘s Fool in 2003, and most recently, Alyssa
Wilmoth as Henry VI in the first part of the trilogy in 2009. But for the most part, the
female actors are typically cast in feminine roles or the roles of young men.
If males are given female roles in the company, it is often for humorous effect;
Kip Pierson appeared as Mistress Quickly in the 2003 Merry Wives of Windsor, Dennis
Henry played Lady Bracknell in the 2004 Importance of Being Ernest, René Thornton, Jr.
438 Wren.
439 American Shakespeare Center, ―What We Do,‖ American Shakespeare Center, accessed
October 10, 2009, http://www.americanshakespearecenter.com/v.php?pg=49.
192
played Titania in the 2004 Midsummer, and John Harrell was the Widow in the 2005
Taming of the Shrew. The ―fun‖ of male to female gender-switching appears mainly in
drag-like performances in the comedies, a gender-switching convention that modern
audiences are both familiar and comfortable with. The company also uses men to play
women in Shakespeare‘s plays-within-a-plays: John Paul Scheidler (2005) and Josh
Carpenter (2009) as the Player Queen in Hamlet, James Hurdle (2001), Dennis Henry
(2004), Chris Jonston (2007), and Thomas Keegan (2009) as Flute/Thisbe in Midsummer,
and John Herrall, René Thornton, Jr., and Álvaro Mendoza as Ceres, Juno, and Iris
respectively in the 2006 Tempest. Male to female casting in these metatheatrical moments
calls attention to early modern theatrical conventions while simultaneously pointing out
that the company is only hesitantly playing with this convention themselves. Judging
from these examples, it seems that to make Shakespeare for everyone is also, in some
ways, to make him gender safe.
Despite the typically safe choices of the company, the 2006 Tempest did play with
gender in some interesting ways, revealing how embracing original practice casting might
produce subversive readings of modern gender roles. This gender-play was most likely
due to the influence of Giles Block, who in 2003 directed an all-male Twelfth Night for
the London Globe. In the ASC production, John Harrell played the part of Ariel.
Shakespeare writes the spirit as male, but because of the ethereal nature of the character,
there is a theatrical tradition of giving the role to a female.440 Herrall‘s performance,
however, both played with and resisted common perceptions of Ariel‘s ―light‖ nature.
Herrall, who is over six feet tall, wore an iridescent silver costume, a pajama-like tunic
and pant set with a matching pillbox hat; on his frame, this costume immediately
represented the contradiction Herrall presented in his character. His speaking voice was
440 See Chapter 3 for more discussion of casting Ariel along gender lines.
193
light and high and his singing voice, as mentioned above, otherworldly. His movements,
however, were stiff and calculated, and he often moved at 90-degree angles. These tight
movements were counterbalanced when Herrall frequently pointed his foot and tapped it
on the ground, giving his movements a ballerina-like finish. Herrall seemed to represent
the malleable nature of Ariel‘s gender identity, embracing both the male and female
elements Shakespeare embeds in the spirit.
If Herrall‘s role as Ariel attempts to suggest the fluidity of gender roles, the
portrayal of Sebastian and Antonio pushes this exploration into ideas of sexuality.
Discussing Block‘s all-male Twelfth Night, James Bulman makes the argument that the
Globe company uses original practices to create a subversive reading of contemporary
gender issues. Pairing the production with a discussion of an all-male version of As You
Like It performed by Cheek by Jowl, Bulman suggests that ―the Globe‘s ‗original
practices‘ productions advance a culturally transgressive agenda rendered safe by the
distancing device of historical recuperation – they offer us subversive sexual politics
which, under the conservative guise of archeological work, are made palatable as popular
entertainment.‖441 In Bulman‘s reading, original practices actually provide a screen that
allows the company to experiment with sexually-charged readings of the play without
those readings being seen as controversial. This sort of ―safe‖ subversion can also be seen
in the ASC‘s 2006 The Tempest. The casting of Sarah Fallon as Antonio and the
relationship that she and René Thornton, Jr. created between Antonio and Sebastian
allowed the actors to explore the homoerotics of the early modern stage in a way that still
adheres to the conservative and uncontroversial nature of gender-switching at the ASC.
441 James C. Bulman, ―Queering the Audience: All-Male Casts in Recent Productions of
Shakespeare,‖ A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgdon & W.B. Worthen
(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd, 2005), 575.
194
Fallon and Thornton have regularly appeared in leading roles for the company,
often paired together as romantic leads (as they were in their performances as Othello and
Desdemona which ran in repertoire with The Tempest in 2006). The chemistry of their
past pairings filtered into their portrayal of Antonio and Sebastian in the 2006 Tempest as
they built a sexual relationship between the two men. The relationship is first evident
when, after Alonso and the rest of his court have been lulled to sleep, Sebastian delivered
his line, ―I find not / Myself disposed to sleep,‖ as a sexual suggestion, touching Antonio
so as to encourage him to ―not sleep‖ with him. Fallon responded with a move,
reminiscent of her 2005 Kate (opposite Thornton as Petruccio), in which she countered
Sebastian‘s sensual touch by twisting his arm. The scene that followed was one of
emotional manipulation. Sebastian was feminized, not just by his colleague, but by his
lover, raising the stakes of the exchange. Phrases such as ―how to flow‖ and ―do so‖ were
particularly emphasized for a heightened sensual effect. As Antonio asked for Sebastian‘s
compliance to his plan to kill the king, Fallon placed her hand on Thornton‘s chest, a
move that suggested other favors might come if Sebastian agreed to the plan. As
Sebastian poised himself to kill his brother, his hesitation on ―But one word more‖ was a
clear crisis of courage; it was a final move that solidified Sebastian‘s feminization. The
establishment of this relationship provided a heightened reading of the characters and
gave them clearer, and yet more complex, motives. This characterization was both
subversive and safe, playing with the homoerotic fun of the early modern theater but also
keeping it safe for school groups and tourist groups.
Direct Audience Address
Given the emphasis on ensemble in original practice theater, the ASC is adept at
making all of the characters in Shakespeare‘s plays, regardless of the size of their role,
complex and interesting for their audiences. Madeoy‘s Gonzalo, for example, was a more
195
memorable presence in this production than in others I have seen. She was able to draw
from Shakespeare‘s text to create an elderly counselor who was both comical and
endearing. She created a character who is appealing to the audience, and when Ariel told
his master that Gonzalo wept, it worked not just on Prospero‘s sympathies, but on the
audience‘s as well. The ASC‘s ability to create nuanced readings of smaller roles not
only shows its ability to use close readings to create characters but also, in turn, to use
these characters to appeal broadly to audiences. And the affinity that all these characters
build with their audiences has much to do with the way the company uses direct audience
address.
An extension of the company‘s ideas about universal lighting, direct audience
address is a key component of the original practice experience it provides for its
audience. They hypothesize that because the early modern audiences and actors could see
each other, lines were regularly delivered directly to audience members. These moments
of direct address included soliloquies, yes, but also lines that might be embedded in
dialogue throughout the play. So, for example, when Nerissa asked Portia about her
suitors in the company‘s 2004 production of The Merchant of Venice, Nerissa ―cast‖
various male audience members as these suitors, and Portia delivered her evaluation
directly to that ―suitor.‖ In its 2003 production of Fletcher and Beaumont‘s The Knight of
the Burning Pestle, Rafe, played by Paul Fidalgo, selected a female in the audience to be
his ―Susan‖ and then delivered his blazons and oaths of love to that same woman
throughout the show. The best example of actors using audience address in the 2006
Tempest is Fidalgo and James Keegan‘s performances as Trinculo and Stephano. In this
production, Trinculo and Stephano quickly became crowd favorites, consistently
receiving entrance and exit applause, verbal cues, and belly laughs from the audience.
Part of the reason for their popularity is that Fidalgo and Keegan regularly found
ways to include the audience in their scenes, using them as both set pieces and scene
partners. Running from the storm in his first entrance, Fidalgo‘s Trinculo hid behind
196
audience members‘ legs, hats, and souvenir programs. Keegan entered singing a drinking
tune about a woman named Kate from the text. He boisterously belted out, ―The master,
the swabber, the boatswain, and I. / The gunner and his mate, / Loved Mall, Meg, and
Marian, and Margery, / But none of us cared for [...],‖ trailing off when he, too
inebriated, could not finish the line. An audience member sitting on stage dutifully filled
in ―Kate‖ for him, delighting Keegan and spurring him to finish the rest of the song.
From the first moments these two characters entered the playing space, they recruited the
audience as their collaborators. Given this power, the audience was immediately smitten
and willingly worked with the actors to create funny and entertaining scenes.
Fidalgo and Keegan rewarded their collaborators with what seems to be their
favorite scenes in the play. In the gabardine scene, Fidalgo climbs on top of Caliban,
played by Jake Hart, and the scene that followed was full of physical and sexual humor,
leading to the audience‘s uproarious laughter. When Ariel conjured the clothes for the
clowns in Act IV, Trinculo and Stephano performed a runway show which had the
audience yelling out their approval and clapping. It was one of those oddly anachronistic
moments one encounters at an ASC show, but their audience seemed to adore such
presentism.
In many ways, the Trinculo, Stephano, and Caliban scenes with their drinking
tunes and raucous fun resembled the musical interludes in that they trump the main story
line of the play. Jake Hart‘s Caliban, perhaps, bore the brunt of this overshadowing
despite (or maybe because of) his participation in the Trinculo and Stephano scenes. For
example, when Ariel orchestrated the fight between the clowns in Act III, scene ii, both
men unabashedly courted the audience. A teary Trinculo settled himself next to an
audience member, weeping into his jester‘s hat. When his pathetic state garnered a
verbal, ―AW!‖ from the audience, Stephano walked over him and stuffed the jester‘s hat
into his mouth, trumping the audience‘s sympathies with humor. As the scene went on,
Fidalgo‘s Trinculo continued to steal the audience‘s attention, cuddling up to an audience
197
member, making puppy eyes at the rest of the audience, and using hand gestures to egg
on the verbal shows of sympathy from the crowd. Although it was clear that the audience
loved Fidalgo, it was also clear that they were not paying attention to Caliban‘s ―Burn but
his books‖ speech, an important plot point in the play. Hart‘s Caliban was lost in this
scene, overshadowed by his fellow actors. Given this situation, one wonders if the
ensemble ASC strives for is successful. In an article about the opening of the London
Globe, Michael Cordner writes that ―[t]he excitement of playing to and with such an
active and interventionalist audience can transform the actor into a kind of addict,
constantly needing the fix of another audible response from the spectators to buoy him
up.‖442 Something similar seemed to have happened in the 2006 ASC Tempest. Although
the actors found a way to incorporate the audience into the play, they were, essentially,
losing a key component of original practice studies – offering a clear reading of the text.
Yet perhaps this neglect was merely an inevitable by-product of the ASC‘s larger aim of
creating community in the theatrical experience. In the end, the careful attentiveness of
the audience could not withstand the raucous fellowship the original practice movement
claimed was present in the early modern theater. The ASC, then, must negotiate with its
original practice conventions and know that, given the live nature of theater, they will not
fulfill all their aims all the time. Moreover, they must negotiate with their audiences,
creating a blend of the early modern and contemporary that will attract audiences to this,
most unlikely, Virginian hamlet.
442 Michael Cordner, ―Repeopling the Globe: The Opening Season at Shakespeare‘s Globe,
London 1997,‖ Shakespeare Survey, ed. Stanley Wells (Cambridge University Press, 1998): 216,
Cambridge Collections Online, accessed May 23, 2011, DOI:10.1017/CCOL0521632250.016.
198
Conclusion
Original practice Shakespeare is a negotiation between the past and the present.
From William Poel‘s editing of the plays to the ASC‘s selective use of early modern
theatrical tenets, these companies are not creating an ―authentic‖ Shakespeare but a
historically inspired Shakespeare who can speak to contemporary audiences. More than
authenticity, these groups are interested in community. They use their early modern
playing spaces and selected conventions, not so much as homages to Shakespeare but as a
ways to re-imagine contemporary theatrical experiences. Cohen has said, ―I‘m not
interested in Ye Olde England. [ . . . ]What we‘re interested in is modern theater. I used
to think the game was all about Shakespeare – but it‘s not anymore.‖443 Instead, he now
thinks that the ASC‘s historically grounded mission shows how theater, as an art form,
can capitalize on its strengths. What one gets from a play, rather than a movie or TV
program, he observes, is ―the sense that the show you went to was different from any
other, because you were there.‖ The most important thing they do as a company, Cohen
believes, is return the audience to the play.444
As I have written this chapter, the original practice movement has begun to have
conversations about the legitimacy of its name. At the 2009 Blackfriars conference and in
a panel session on original practices at the 2010 Shakespeare Association of America
conference, scholars and theater practitioners debated whether or not they could claim to
be ―original‖ when the kind of theater happening at the ASC and other original practice
companies is not genuinely early modern. Moreover, these discussions asked, ―Do these
companies really want to be original?‖ For ultimately, they seem happier taking what
they perceive as the best elements of early modern and modern performance and merging
443 Cohen, personal interview, May 13, 2009.
444 Wren.
199
them into new types of production values. When I asked Cohen about the term, he said,
―You have to put something in a brochure.‖ The statement, of course, links original
practices to its inevitable position as both a fiscal and academic venture. Cohen is
thinking of a new term for the movement – ―origins Shakespeare.‖ He said, ―It doesn‘t
sound like you‘re claiming anything [ . . . ] getting back to origins sounds much less
pretentious than getting back to original.‖445 Pretention, after all, is what original
practices wants to avoid. The movement wants to find a way to invite a diverse set of
contemporary audiences into the play and to break down traditional assumptions about
the playwright. Its approach for achieving this, perhaps counter intuitively, is to reach
back in time in order to bring the playwright forward, and by doing so, they are creating a
new type of Shakespearean performance that is a happy amalgamation of past and
present.
445 Cohen, personal interview, May 13, 2009.
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CONCLUSION
When Caliban tells Stephano and Trinculo how they might bring down Prospero,
he repeatedly advises them to first destroy Prospero‘s books. The books, he explains, are
where Prospero‘s power lies: ―Remember / First to possess his books, for without them /
He is but a sot as I am […].‖446 For Caliban, Prospero‘s books, and his possession of
knowledge generally, are what make him powerful. Moreover, Caliban views his own
lack of ―books‖ as a disadvantage. If he can successfully take away his master‘s
knowledge, he can put the two of them on the same level, erasing the class and power
distinctions that separate them. This relationship between Caliban and Prospero can be
translated to the relationship between Shakespeare‘s ―gatekeepers‖ and those members of
the general public who think they are merely ―sots‖ when it comes to accessing the
Shakespeare‘s plays. Although it is not the intention of scholars to separate themselves
from those outside the academy, cultural perceptions of Shakespeare as elitist and
canonical can create a divide between those who study him and those who view him as
inaccessible. Personally, I have seen this divide happen on numerous occasions when
strangers ask what I do. When I explain I am working on my PhD in English, they often
seem delighted. ―What do you study?,‖ they ask. ―Shakespeare,‖ I say. ―Oh,‖ they nod
politely, and I can see them retreating mentally from the conversation.
This divide between Prospero and Caliban, of course, is enhanced in
contemporary understandings of the island‘s patriarch. Prospero has achieved a kind of
villainy in post-modern readings of the play. He enslaves Caliban and Ariel; he uses
Miranda as a pawn in his own game of chess; and he tortures his enemies. Yet, if The
Tempest is a play about redemption, one must acknowledge that Prospero, despite (or
446 III.ii.86-88.
201
because of) his flaws, is the greatest example of this quality in the play, both in his ability
to forgive his enemies and his ability to try to redeem himself. When Ariel calls on
Prospero‘s humanity in the Fifth Act, he pleads with him to think of the suffering of
Gonzalo, who showed Prospero kindness during his exile. Moved, Prospero grants mercy
to his enemies. At the same time, he also relinquishes his magic, realizing, perhaps, that
he has as much guilt as those against whom he seeks vengeance. He ritualizes the
moment, saying, ―I‘ll break my staff, / Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, / And deeper
than did ever plummet sound / I‘ll drown my book.‖447 Prospero attributes his magic,
and thus his power to control and manipulate those around him, to his books, as Caliban
had earlier suggested. There is an unsettling sort of anti-intellectualism embedded in this
equation: for although knowledge is power, it is only in relinquishing this power that one
can become ―human‖ again.
There is an additional reason that Prospero drowns his books. Ariel reminds him
of Gonzalo in order to ask for Prospero‘s mercy. Gonzalo is, in fact, the only reason
Prospero has access to his books on the island. In the First Act, Prospero explains to
Miranda that Gonzalo, ―Knowing I loved my books, […] furnished me / From mine own
library with volumes that / I prize above my dukedom.‖448 On the fateful night of
Prospero‘s exile, Gonzalo not only provides the pair with food, water, and escape, but
also with books. Prospero has only obtained his power in the play because this man
ensured he had his books, and now Gonzalo, because of his act of kindness, suffers. Upon
realizing this, Prospero relinquishes his power.
Books and knowledge, thus, are at the center of both Caliban and Prospero‘s
struggles for power in the play. And it is only when Prospero relinquishes his control of
447 V.i.54-57.
448 I.ii.g167-169.
202
these things that both characters seem able to, as Caliban says, ―seek for grace.‖449
Perhaps, then, there is a lesson for all of us in the play. Knowledge, indeed, is power, but
it should be tempered with humanity. One must not only possess books, but also share
them.
In this study, I have shown how performance is a particularly useful way to allow
individuals who consider themselves outsiders to Shakespeare‘s plays a chance to possess
his ―books‖ and how productions of Shakespeare‘s works can serve a wide variety of
audiences and social needs. The men of Shakespeare Behind Bars use Shakespeare to
reflect on their troubled lives and reclaim their own humanity. Murray McGibbon‘s
Tempest project pairs travel experience with the texts to create a deep cultural
understanding that transcends Western perceptions of post-colonialism and exoticism.
The women in the Weird Sisters Women‘s Theater Collective adapt Shakespeare to seek
out silenced voices that have previously existed at the margins. Finally, the American
Shakespeare Center goes back to the origins of Shakespeare‘s plays so as to invite
audiences to re-imagine them as a collaborative experience in which they themselves play
an essential role, thus, building a community in the theater that aims to combat
contemporary issues of isolation. Using a diverse set of performance techniques, the
groups I study each find ways to re-invent Shakespeare, producing versions of the
playwright and his plays that defy common cultural perceptions of his work as elitist or
inaccessible.
The groups I study invite new audiences to participate in Shakespeare‘s plays by
finding innovative ways to bring his work into dialogue with contemporary lives.
Through performance, they model a way in which social issues can be explored and
449 V.i.299.
203
transcended. Jill Dolan discusses the potential of such modeling in her utopian view of
theater:
I still believe this can happen in the theater, that people
destabilized by difference can speak and be spoken to, be touched
by and touch. Theater can be a mobile unit in a journey across new
geographies, a place that doesn‘t center the discourse in white male
hegemony, but a space that can be filled and moved, by and to the
margins, perpetually decentered as it explores various identity
configurations of production and reception.450
Dolan‘s belief is exemplified by the groups in my study as they work through pressing
social issues with the seemingly unlikely help of a canonical author. As they work to
create new identities, they employ the aid of equally ―inaccessible‖ contemporary literary
critics. Using ideas generated by performance studies, new historicism, post-colonialism,
gender studies, and original-practice studies, the groups I study incorporate a wide variety
of experiences into Shakespeare performance and, thus, provide a more inclusive vision
for their audiences. Through such productions, both Shakespeare and literary criticism
receive a new life and broader audiences.
The accessibility these groups create masquerades, often through their own
rhetoric, as Shakespeare‘s ―universality‖ – the assumption that Shakespeare‘s plays
transcend all time and geographic space. Proponents of this universality cite the
playwright, who himself wrote of ―This wide and universal theatre‖ in As You Like It.451
My research, however, shows that Shakespeare is more ―wide‖ than ―universal.‖ His
plays, by themselves, do not necessarily speak to contemporary audiences whose
temporal distance and cultural perceptions often convince them that the plays are
inaccessible. Yet through a wide variety of techniques, including playful interpretation of
language, re-visioning of time and setting, and creative theatrical approaches for both
450 Jill Dolan, Geographies of Learning, 84.
451 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 1997),
II.vii.136.
204
actors and audiences, the theater groups I study open Shakespeare‘s plays to
contemporary culture. Through this process, theater practitioners are able to make, not a
universal Shakespeare, but a Shakespeare who speaks directly to the personal lives and
social concerns of contemporary audiences.
Perhaps this focus on social concerns is not, in the end, all that removed from
what Shakespeare imagined as being possible in the theater. Take, for example, the full
context of his assertion about a ―wide and universal‖ stage in As You Like It. The Duke
Senior makes this comment after he sends the desperate Orlando to fetch the ailing Adam
so that both men can join the exiles‘ camp and receive water, food, and rest. As Orlando
leaves, the Duke reflects on the forlorn pair, saying to his followers, ―Thou seest we are
not all alone unhappy, / The wide and universal theatre / Presents more woeful pageants
than the scene / Wherein we play in.‖452 Using a theatrical metaphor, the Duke
recognizes that ―woeful pageants‖ play out all around, and that we must be attuned to
witnessing them. His observation seems a precursor to the empathetic Miranda who, after
watching the spectacle of the tempest, has ―sufferèd / With those that I saw suffer.‖453 In
these characters, Shakespeare suggests that the act of performing and witnessing
performance can generate empathy. He, in fact, provides a blueprint for the type of work
done by the groups in this study. The ―universality‖ of Shakespearean theater, thus,
means more than common and timeless themes. It means combining these themes with
careful and empathetic attention to contemporary narratives, and, by doing so, creating a
―brave new world‖ for Shakespeare‘s plays in the twenty-first century.
452 II.vii.135-138.
453 I.ii.5-6.
205
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