Big-Shouldered Shakespeare: Three Shrews at Chicago Shakespeare Theater

This performance criticism project enlists theorist Michel de Certeau’s concepts of institutional strategy and individual tactic to examine social resistance in three productions of William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (1593/94) staged by the Midwestern Shakespearean repertory company, the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. The three productions date from CST’s new millennium rise to prominence on the Navy Pier skyline and instantiate the ways in which the theater reconciles its self-promotional image of Shakespeare the Great Humanist with the misogynist content of Taming. Since 1999, CST has staged two full-scale productions of Taming, one led by David H. Bell (2003) and one helmed by Josie Rourke that featured purpose-writteninduction matter by playwright Neil LaBute (2010). During the summer of 2012 as part of Chicago’s fledgling Cultural Plan initiative, the theater launched a Chicago Shakespeare in the Parks outreach that transferred a Short Shakespeare! production of Taming (Dir. Rachel Rockwell) from the theater’s main stage to parks in neighborhoods underserved by the city’s major arts institutions. Analysis of these productions demonstrates just how difficult it can be to extricate high art from its institutional moorings and how vexed the authorizing imprimatur of Shakespeare the Great Humanist can be

Too Soon Forgot: The Ethics of Remembering in Richard III, NOW, and House of Cards

Three interconnected performances of Shakespeare\u27s Richard III display the extreme hermeneutical volatility of representation when remediated through a celebrity\u27s personal history. The film NOW: In the Wings on a World Stage (dir. Jeremy Whelehan, 2014) documents the Bridge Project Company\u27s Richard III directed by Sam Mendes and starring Kevin Spacey (2011-12), a production launched at London\u27s Old Vic and transferred to twelve cities across the globe. Just prior to the distribution of NOW, Netflix released its first season of House of Cards (2013) with Spacey as the politician, Francis Underwood, at the center of its seamy landscape. Spacey insists in multiple interviews, The truth is Frank [of House of Cards] wouldn\u27t exist without Richard III. The House of Card\u27s indebtedness goes deeper than the Mendes production since both Michael Dobbs\u27s original book trilogy (1989-1995) and the Andrew Davies-BBC television adaptations of Dobbs\u27s work (1990; 1993; 1995) acknowledge Shakespeare\u27s history play as inspiration. This web of Richard III performances and slant appropriations does not simply chronicle literary indebtedness but also prompts questions about epistemological ethics and hermeneutical instability. As of October 2017, these three performances of Richard — the Mendes staged instantiation, the Spacey-as-Richard of NOW, and Richard as Frank Underwood — are haunted by the revelation of Spacey\u27s career-long sexual predation. All three Richards began their artistic journey trading on the capital of Spacey\u27s notoriety and deploying a curated history as remediative strategy for producing the 400-year-old play. Now the intersection between celebrity biography and performance confronts the responsibilities of knowing and challenges the affective pleasure viewers take in witnessing the unfettered agency and appetitive voracity of the powerful. The destructive intrusion of Spacey\u27s celebrity biography on the memory and meaning of this suite of Richard III performances provokes heightened ethical scrutiny not just of the institutions that protect predatory artists but also of audiences who must acknowledge their own complicity with Richard\u27s seductive immorality and the stars who play his part

Colour-conscious Casting and Multicultural Britain in the BBC Henry V (2012): Historicizing Adaptation in an Age of Digital Placelessness

With its substantial record of film and televisual productions, Henry V serves as a case study for reading adaptation historically. The advent of digital distribution and streaming have complicated, however, the ways in which the historical context of an adaptation may be accessed and examined. A recent adaptation, the 2012 Henry V directed by Thea Sharrock and aired as part of the BBC’s The Hollow Crown broadcast, demands a methodological expansion to account for digital placelessness. Produced within the framework of the Cultural Olympiad that coincided with both the London Olympics and the Queen’s Jubilee, the Hollow Crown Henry V provokes questions about the status of multicultural Britain in the third millennium. The film does so in ways that invoke both the dynamics of ethnic identity endemic to its country of production origin—the United Kingdom—as well as to motifs present in the visual lexicon of its wider international market—especially the United States. The casting of Paterson Joseph as the Duke of York manifests fissures in these local and international histories. That the Duke of York is played by the only actor of colour in the film burdens the role with new pressures of representation and interacts in troubling ways with the policies of multiculturalism in the United Kingdom as well as the trope of the Magical Negro in Hollywood filmmaking. Pursuing these twinned contexts facilitates a reconsideration of how a historical methodology determines its points of reference and pursues the ethical in adaptative artworks

D-1 Shakespeare and the Cultural Olympiad: Contesting Gender and the British Nation in the BBC’s Hollow Crown

As part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad celebrating both the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics, the BBC launched a season of programs entitled, “Shakespeare Unlocked.” To boost cultural capital, the BBC partnered with the Royal Shakespeare Company and its World Shakespeare Festival as well as the British Museum. “Shakespeare Unlocked” featured a range of programming, including a documentary hosted by Simon Schama, scene performances and analyses by members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and freshly produced, full-length adaptations. Described as “a season exploring how one man captured so much about what it means to be human,” Shakespeare Unlocked most notably presented the plays of the second tetralogy in four feature-length adaptations that aired in June and July of 2012. These plays so obviously engaged with the question of English nationalism suited a year in which the United Kingdom wrestled with British identity in a post-colonial and post-Great Recession world. Released under the unifying title The Hollow Crown, these films project in the maturation of Tom Hiddleston as Hal a concept of British identity—Caucasian, male, and virile—rooted in surprising traditionalism and feature lamentably outdated approaches to casting and staging. In Shakespeare Unlocked, the BBC marshaled programming to showcase a British cultural icon, Shakespeare the Great Humanist, who captures “so much about what it means to be human.” But The Hollow Crown reveals yet again that the gender and ethnic identity of that “human” continues to be defined, at least for the BBC, within fairly narrow borders

A Son Less Than Kind: Iconograhy, Interpolation, and Masculinity in Branagh\u27s Hamlet

Kenneth Branagh’s infamous “full-text” Hamlet (1996) relies upon military conquest as an image of masculinity and as a pre-text to open out the stage drama of Shakespeare, to give the film the vaunted “epic” feel Branagh claimed in publicity interviews. In Branagh’s film, the Fortinbras invasion of Denmark provides epic material for the action genre aspirations of the film and legitimizes Branagh as a sedulously faithful interpreter of Shakespeare’s original text. However, in the vexed treatment of Hamlet Senior and the conquering Fortinbras’s prowess, Branagh articulates ambivalence about the ideal of active masculinity the film ostensibly celebrates and capitalizes on for box-office profit. A cluster of iconographic moments in the film demonstrates this ambivalence. Branagh’s heavy-handed deployment of interpolated matter–the convention whereby visual additions explicate text–deepens the conflict over masculine subjectivity. In Branagh’s Hamlet, interpolation paradoxically expands uncertainty about masculine identity by protesting too much. It is no accident that the scene most laden with cuts to interpolated material is also the one most burdened by the imprint of the father’s authority–the ghost scene. As the father calls his son to martial vengeance, the son/director asserts a narrative authority that while appearing to confirm the Ghost’s tale actually presents an alternate masculine subjectivity that speaks rather than acts and that trumps physical aggression with epistemological certainty. What emerges from Branagh’s Hamlet is a concept of masculinity as tortured as the titular hero himself–one that asserts deeds over words but ultimately transforms words into a superior form of action

Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Adaptation

Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television examines recent film and television transformations of William Shakespeare’s drama by focusing on the ways in which modern directors acknowledge and respond to the perceived authority of Shakespeare as author, text, cultural icon, theatrical tradition, and academic institution. This study explores two central questions. First, what efforts do directors make to justify their adaptations and assert an interpretive authority of their own? Second, how do those self-authorizing gestures impact upon the construction of gender, class, and ethnic identity within the filmed adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays? The chosen films and television series considered take a wide range of approaches to the adaptative process - some faithfully preserve the words of Shakespeare; others jettison the Early Modern language in favor of contemporary idiom; some recreate the geographic and historical specificity of the original plays, and others transplant the plot to fresh settings. The wealth of extra-textual material now available with film and television distribution and the numerous website tie-ins and interviews offer the critic a mine of material for accessing the ways in which directors perceive the looming Shakespearean shadow and justify their projects. Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television places these directorial claims alongside the film and television plotting and aesthetic to investigate how such authorizing gestures shape the presentation of gender, class, and ethnicity.https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/cas-books/1006/thumbnail.jp

P-14 The Disappearing Moor: Race, Authenticity, and the Nation’s History in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies

The 2015 BBC televisual adaptations of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009)and Bring up the Bodies (2012) strive to match an “authenticity” standard claimed by their novelistic sources, notably Mantel’s remarkable attention to the minutiae of Tudor quotidian habits—household regulations, food preparation, religious rituals, and various social customs. Further authorized by a literary genealogy including Shakespeare and Fletcher’s co-authored play, Henry VIII (1613), the BBC adaptations twin the racial codes embedded in two genres—the history play and heritage film—to reinforce an exclusively white story of England. Even as she replicates the particularities of material daily life in Tudor England, Mantel argues that received notions of historical truth must be disrupted, “We need to pass on the stories but also impart the skills to hack the stories apart and make new ones.” This mandate results in her novels’ controversial reassessments of Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More; however, what remains untouched in her work and the BBC adaptation is the “hallowed” whiteness of the English Renaissance past. Tracing the sanitized fate of one troubling reference to blacking-up—a disappearing moor—illustrates the BBC’s recognition of racially problematic tropes. Nonetheless, in its representational choices, the adaptation perpetuates the blind spots of Mantel’s novels, denies the impact made by persons of color on the emergent English nation, and insists on a dubious historical authenticity

Color-Conscious Casting and Multicultural Britain in the BBC Henry V (2012): Historicizing Adaptation in an Age of Digital Placelessness

Four hundred years after the death of William Shakespeare, the playwright’s works and their afterlives occupy an uncontested position as signifiers of cultural value. However, those same works as instruments of an Anglo-White hegemony also shorthand enduring contestations over which cultural identities enjoy power. Throughout its adaptational history, Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599) has long telegraphed British imperial might. Produced within the framework of the Cultural Olympiad that coincided with both the London Olympics and the Queen’s Jubilee, the BBC’s Hollow Crown Henry V (2012) wrestles with the status of multicultural British identity in the post-Great Recession and post-9/11 climate. Henry V (directed by Thea Sharrock) raises questions by casting in an otherwise all-White film one non-Caucasian, Paterson Joseph, as the Duke of York. That the Duke of York is played by the only actor of color in the film burdens the role with new pressures of representation and interacts in troubling ways with the policies of British multiculturalism and the trope of the Magical Negro in Hollywood film-making