SHAKESPEARE’S VIOLATED BODIES

This timely study looks at the violation of bodies in Shakespeare’s tragedies, especially as revealed (or concealed) in performance on stage and screen. Pascale Aebischer discusses stage and screen performances of Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Othello and King Lear with a view to showing how bodies which are virtually absent from both playtexts and critical discourse (due to silence, disability, marginalisation, racial Otherness or death) can be prominent in performance, where their representation reflects the cultural and political climate of the production. Aebischer focuses on post-1980 Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theatre productions but also covers film adaptations and landmark productions from the nineteenth century onwards. Her book will interest scholars and students of Shakespeare, gender, performance and cultural studies.

PASCALE AEBISCHER is Lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature in the Department of English, University of Leicester. She has contributed to a number of books and has published in journals including Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Etudes Anglaises and Studies in the Novel. She is also the principal editor of Remaking Shakespeare: Performance across Media, Genres and Cultures.

SHAKESPEARE’S VIOLATED BODIES

Stage and Screen Performance

PASCALE AEBISCHER

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Pascale Aebischer 2004

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2004

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeface Adobe Garamond 11/12.5 pt.   System LATEX 2_e   [TB]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Aebischer, Pascale, 1970–
Shakespeare’s violated bodies : stage and screen performance / Pascale Aebischer.
p.   cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 203) and index.
ISBN 0 521 82935 6
1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Knowledge – Anatomy.   2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Stage history.   3. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Film and video adaptations.   4. Body, Human, in motion pictures.   5. Body, Human, in literature.   6. Death in motion pictures.   7. Death in literature.   8. Dead in literature.   I. Title.
PR3069.B58A68   2003
822.3′3 – dc   222003055765

ISBN 0 521 82935 6 hardback

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgements

The beginning is an ending: my last English class in summer 1989. My teacher, Thomas Rüetschi, had repeatedly insinuated that my entire form, myself included, were too dim to understand Shakespeare. Now, as a ‘farewell present’ to us all, he asked me to read Katherina’s final speech in The Taming of the Shrew aloud – I had never read it before, didn’t know the play, and as I worked my way through ‘Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth, / Unapt to toil and trouble in the world . . .’ I was increasingly outraged by its import. What better motivation could one possibly have to launch into a resisting reading of Shakespeare? My deep thanks to Thomas for stinging my pride and teaching me to love Shakespeare.

   Since then, many teachers, friends and colleagues have nurtured that love and helped me during the gestation period of this book. Warm thanks are due to my supervisors in Oxford, Emrys Jones and Ann Pasternak Slater, who gently guided me through the process of thesis-writing and allowed me the freedom I so desperately needed. Meanwhile at home, John E. Jackson, Werner Senn and Margaret Bridges offered continuing support. I am also grateful to the ‘ghosts’ who haunt this book in its margins: my drama teachers at the London Academy of Performing Arts, where I learnt how much thought goes into the performance of violence, and my twenty-five fellow graduate students at Lincoln College, Oxford (you know who you are), who helped me stage the production of Q1 Romeo and Juliet which, though nearly entirely absent from this book, informs so much of my thinking about performance and how to read early modern playtexts. In this context, I must acknowledge the strong influence exercised both by Tiffany Stern and Paige Newmark, who have regularly challenged my assumptions and made me think of the present in terms of the past, and by Regina Schneider, who acted as a sounding-board for my ideas in the early stages of this book.

   Many more people have responded to drafts, helped answer specific queries or discussed questions that have eventually had an impact on this book. I would like to single out Lukas Erne, Emma Smith, Blair Worden, Paromita Chakravarti, Simone von Büren, Kathy Henderson, Bill Worthen (an inspiring examiner), Deborah Cartmell, Kathy Wheeler, Peter Holland, Carol Rutter, John Kerrigan, Karen Junod and Ginger Vaughan, whose generous, sensitive and perceptive feedback on different chapters has provided much food for thought and greatly assisted me in formulating my ideas. More than anything else, these readers have combined an encouraging belief in my work with responses that have not shied away from occasionally pointing to its immaturity. I hope that now they will agree that the book is ‘ripe’. Andrew Gurr, Dominic Oliver, Patricia Lennox, Marjolijn Vlug, Robert Shaughnessy, Mary Luckhurst, Jonathan Burch, Peter Donaldson and Claire Preston have responded to some sometimes odd queries with wonderful aplomb, while Richard Schoch, Drew Milne, Helen Cooper, David Hillman and Harry Berger Jr have pushed me in the right direction at crucial moments. Special thanks are due to my ‘South African informants’, as I like to think of them: Andrew Vandervlies, Natasha Distiller and Ndumiso Luthuli have helped more than they are probably aware, while Azmeh Dawood and Anshuman Mondal have assisted me in the tightrope-walking exercise of talking about race. Bernard Rappaz taught me a few things about journalistic cheek, while Cécile Crettol, with Lucien and Anaïs, asked all the right questions. José Ramón Díaz Fernández, meanwhile, made sure that I was up-to-date with my reading by providing me with his extraordinary bibliographies.

   As I write these acknowledgements and the list of names grows longer and longer, I cannot help feeling deeply moved by the generosity of all the individuals who have supported me over the years. This is particularly true of the next group of names, those of inspiring artists and back-stage miracle-workers who have taken the time to answer questions, sometimes at great length, and who have given me thrilling insights into their work and world. It has been a privilege to talk and correspond with Janet Suzman, Julie Taymor, Nicholas Hytner, Lee Beagley, Jane Hartley, Xavier Leret, Jo Carr, Jenny Tiramani, Jonathan Holloway, Kate Ward, William R. Lockwood, Roger Howells and Claire van Kampen. Thanks also to Louise Teal and Gerald Murray for their generosity.

   Generosity is the keyword for the next acknowledgement, too: every little girl should have a fairy godmother, and I have certainly had more than my fair share of one. Barbara Hodgdon is ‘the star to every wand’ring barque, / Whose worth’s unknown although his height be taken’. If one day some younger scholar is only half as grateful to me as I am to her for her friendship, unstinting support and guidance, it will make me very proud indeed.

   My research was greatly facilitated by the assistance and initiative of the staff at the Shakespeare Centre Library in Stratford-upon-Avon, in particular Jo Lockhart, Sylvia Morris and, more recently, Karin Brown. Thanks also to Vera Ryhajlo at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and Camille Seerattan and Georgiana Ziegler at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. I have received practical – and meticulous – help with bibliographies and copy-editing from Erica Longfellow and Angie Kendall, to whom I am deeply indebted, as I am to Caroline Howlett, the fabulous copy-editor at Cambridge University Press. In recent months, Elaine Treharne has been instrumental in making me realise what is important – many thanks to her and to the Department of English at the University of Leicester for moral and financial support. The University of Leicester (especially Carl Vivian at AVS, who spent hours creating ‘video grabs’ with me) is only one of several institutions that have assisted me with this project: thanks are due to the Folger Shakespeare Library for a short-term Research Fellowship; Darwin College, Cambridge, where I was elected to a Research Fellowship in 1999; and the Swiss National Science Foundation which supported my research for several years. I am equally indebted to Lincoln College, Oxford, where I spent the three very happy years of my tenure of the Berrow Scholarship (many particular thanks to the late Marquis de Amodio) and where I also held a Senior Scholarship.

   On a very personal note, I am grateful to my late grandmother, Elisabeth Aebischer, for the computer which has travelled to so many libraries with me; to my other late grandmother, Lucie Crettol, for teaching me what it means to be strong, good and humble; and to my fabulous, inspiring, supportive parents whose love has seen me through several rough moments and who have coped so well with the rather odd course my life has been taking. Finally, David Jones is responsible for the absence of many a comma, the readability of many a sentence and the presence of my sanity (?) and good humour (!). Saying ‘thank you’ just doesn’t come near to meaning enough.

   Some parts of this book have appeared in print before. I would like to gratefully acknowledge Paula Burnett of EnterText, Jean-Marie Maguin and Patricia Dorval of the Société Française Shakespeare, Kathrin Heyng of Gunter Narr Verlag, John E. Jackson and Olivier Pot, François Laroque on behalf of Etudes Anglaises and Gilly Duff of Pluto Press for permission to re-use material from the following articles: ‘Yorick’s Skull: Hamlet’s Improper Property’, EnterText 1:2 (2001), 206–25; ‘“Yet I’ll Speak”: Silencing the Female Voice in Titus Andronicus and Othello’, in Patricia Dorval (ed.), Shakespeare et la voix (Paris: Société Française Shakespeare, 1999) pp. 27–46; ‘Looking for Shakespeare: The Textuality of Performance’, SPELL 13 (2000), 157–73; ‘Hamlet, mémoire, langue, action, et passion’, in Olivier Pot (ed.), Emergences et formes de la subjectivité littéraire aux ⅩⅥe et ⅩⅦe siècles (Geneva: Droz, forthcoming); ‘Women Filming Rape in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus: Jane Howell and Julie Taymor’, Etudes Anglaises 55:2 (2002), 136–47; and ‘Black Rams Tupping White Ewes: Race and Gender in the Final Scene of Six Othellos’, in Deborah Cartmell, I. Q. Hunter and Imelda Whelehan (eds.), Retrovisions: Reinventing the Past in Film and Fiction (London: Pluto, 2001), pp. 59–73.

Note on texts used

The desire to have a clear and reader-friendly referencing system has led me to select for each play the most recent comprehensive and accessible scholarly edition. Thus references to Titus Andronicus are to the 1995 Arden 3 edition by Jonathan Bate (London: Routledge, 1995), an edition which includes the Folio-only ‘fly’ scene (allowing me to base my discussion of the play on the Folio text). In its sensitivity to the theatre, the edition lends itself particularly well to the type of readings I propose in this book. The same is true for E. A. J. Honigmann’s 1997 Arden 3 edition of Othello (London: Thomas Nelson, 1997). Though at times sadly biased against the character of Desdemona, as when, on page 291, he reattributes her lines about Lodovico in act 4 scene 3 to Emilia because ‘For Desdemona to praise Lodovico at this point seems out of character’, the edition shares the Arden 3 series’ concern with textual and theatrical issues and is much more comprehensive and up-to-date than its rivals. For Hamlet, a play which I treat here as consisting of all the different playtexts and performances that make up its corpus, I use Harold Jenkins’s conflated Arden 2 edition for references (London: Methuen, 1982). The lines I quote in the chapter are present (with minor variants) in both the Second Quarto and the Folio texts. For the First Quarto text, the edition I work with is Paul Bertram and Bernice Kliman’s 1991 The Three-Text Hamlet: Parallel Texts of the First and Second Quartos and First Folio (New York: AMS Press, 1991). It is only for the chapter on King Lear, where the textual differences between Quarto and Folio have a direct bearing on my argument, that I quote from the two texts separately, using René Weis’s King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition (Harlow: Longman, 1993). I generally quote from the Folio text, using the Quarto text only for the Quarto-only lines, marking both types of quotation with F and Q respectively.