review spectral shakespeares (SQ).pdf

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BOOK REVIEWS

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Screening Early Modern Drama: Beyond Shakespeare. By PASCALE AEBISCHER. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Illus. Pp. xii + 274. $99.99 cloth. Spectral Shakespeares: Media Adaptations in the Twenty-First Century. By MAURIZIO CALBI. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Illus. Pp. xii + 236. $95.00 cloth, $32.00 paper. Reviewed by RAMONA WRAY Pascale Aebischer is one of the foremost critics to have worked on Derek Jarman, the avant-garde filmmaker known for his irreverent recreations of Renaissance culture. But in Screening Early Modern Drama: Beyond Shakespeare Aebischer discusses with insight and scholarship a series of films dating from both sides of the millennium that, taking up Jarman’s example, move beyond the Shakespeare canon and explore the dramatic inheritances of Ford, Jonson, Marlowe, Middleton, and their ilk. Case studies are devoted to memorable films such as Mike Figgis’s Hotel (2001)—an adaptation of The Duchess of Malfi, which is compared to Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989)—Alex Cox’s Revengers Tragedy (2002), and television productions such as Compulsion (2009), an ITV adaptation of The Changeling. Inside these case studies, Aebischer writes with zeal and brilliance, and the chapters themselves are packed with stimulating local analyses. It would be wrong to see what Aebischer terms “Jacobean film” as being centered only on a modest clutch of fascinating instances because, throughout, discussion is contextualized in terms of a wide range of other artists and movements (hence, in chapter 1, the distinctive contribution of Jarman’s Edward II is linked to the influence of Artaud, Eisenstein, Visconti and others). Conclusively making a case for the films as a “coherent corpus” (6), Aebischer’s study refutes the assumption that there is no tradition of adapting non-Shakespearean drama to the screen. With its two substantial appendices (225–51), Screening Early Modern Drama superbly maps a new field and provides the materials for it to develop and prosper. One major virtue of the book is its demonstration of the interconnectedness of the chosen materials. Building on the theory of Susan Bennett, Aebischer makes a compelling case for a Jacobean aesthetic, characterized by its “transgressive, violent . . . sexually dissident . . . and modern” (4) tendencies. The book showcases how these Jacobean films assume a consistently oppositional attitude, generating schema of representation marked by thrillingly dissident energies. Crucial are Aebischer’s arguments for the engagement of her filmmakers with the present. Equally important is the extent to which the plays themselves constitute sites of contemporary critique: by juxtaposing her examples with early modern conceits (a purposeful anachronism), Aebischer places “the past and present” in “dialogue” (7), with illuminating results. For example, she unpacks Compulsion in the light of George Puttenham’s rhetorical figure of “hypallage” (189), while a related trope, that of “cannibalism,” as popularized by Montaigne, is tied to Hotel, the two sharing an uncanny partnership (68). Screening Early Modern Drama mounts its arguments with brio; it also affords a pleasurable reading experience, not least because of the

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connections it makes between then and now. Early modern drama assessed in this way forms a vital part of present-day culture, practice, and belief. Throughout, Aebischer’s meticulous situating of her materials inside industry and production contexts is a distinctive strength, and there are salutary lessons for those of us working on Shakespeare, film, and performance. The author’s polemic reveals both the development of filmmakers’ ideas across periods of time (a historical move that has not always been sufficiently rehearsed) and the ways in which these ideas are shaped by changes in technology, financial shifts, and political vicissitude. Indeed, Aebischer is particularly acute in spotlighting the constraints placed on the independent filmmaker and charting how they affect meaning and style. Her discussion of Revengers Tragedy, for example, is enlivened by the details of Cox’s public battles with the British Film Council, one of his backers (139–40). More generally, identifying the material underside to Jacobean film production lends the study an original interpretive edge. In addition, her technical know-how and exploration of digital versions of the non-Shakespearean on-screen are impressive. Chapter 4, on “Early Modern Performance and Digital Media,” is particularly savvy, not least in its recognition that the digital environment is fundamental to the remediation of the genre and to extensions to “the canon of early modern drama on screen . . . beyond the core” (147). Aebischer insists on the merits of a digital culture in which the opportunity to view productions in various ways—as fragments, collages, blogs, or images— makes for a “very different, markedly more fragmented and non-narrative viewing experience” (157). As she explains, there are advantages to such remediation— accessed digitally, films and performances take on a new expansiveness; insist upon their own open-endedness; and invite challenging, retrospective readings. Here, as elsewhere, Aebischer brings a wealth of knowledge to revelations of intertextuality. She is an adept reader of citation and allusion, as in the discussion of Compulsion where she name-checks British Asian films and television programming, Bollywood features, and even classic Hollywood noir as part of the “web of associations” (188) determining the production’s multivalent reverberations. The importance of Screening Early Modern Drama goes further than the screen that is its ostensible subject, for it is also relevant to those of us working in adaptation studies and theater and performance studies. This is a study vitally responsive to the crossover between stage and screen. Aebischer reflects upon both perceptively, illustrating the interdependent nature of these two representational forms. Once again, Aebischer is something of a trailblazer here, for stage and screen are all too often conceived of, and written about, in separate critical domains. For Aebischer, the Jacobean phenomenon she describes is in contest with a more conservatively branded Shakespeare. Yet part of the complexity of the account is that it can also admit of disparities that trouble the “smoothness of [the] overarching argument” (11); for example, a film such as Anonymous (2011), eloquently invoked in the conclusion, demonstrates how the divide between the Jacobean and the Shakespearean is closing, making them less “opposed cultural forces” (224), while the so-called independent “‘new wave Shakespeare on screen’” (11) points up how the Bard can simultaneously be appropriated from radical standpoints.

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This latter kind of Shakespeare is the one to which Maurizio Calbi subscribes. Spectral Shakespeares is a fine work in a variety of ways, not least in its densely packed theoretical apparatus. Drawing on Derrida’s notion of “spectrality,” the study argues for the importance of ghosts and “hauntings” to the profusion of “Shakespeares” in the mass media products of the twenty-first century. Not surprisingly, then, Calbi turns to adaptations of the plays most readily associated with ghosts, Hamlet and Macbeth, investigating in chapter 1 how Mark Brozel’s BBC Macbeth (2005) and Billy Morrissette’s Scotland, PA (2001) are mutually illuminated when considered alongside Derridean notions of sovereignty, eating, and food, which, specter-like, inform the translation process. Similarly, in chapter 6, Calbi explores Klaus Knoesel’s Rave Macbeth (2001), stressing the ways in which the film is able to contemplate future ghostly versions of itself. Conversely, in chapter 5, he discusses Alexander Fodor’s Hamlet (2006) and the extent to which its “extreme” changes to the “original” (of gender and class) are related to its summoning of the ghosts of past Shakespeare representations. Other chapters extend the remit of “spectrality” by considering, as does chapter 2, a film such as Kristian Levring’s The King is Alive (2000), which, set in the Namibian desert, centers on the trials of some abandoned tourists who rehearse King Lear as a means of survival. Their inchoate performance, Calbi argues, constitutes “an ironic reminder of the (multiple) spectral supplement at the source” (42). Chapter 3 looks at Alexander Abela’s intriguing Souli (2004), an adaptation of Othello set in Madagascar, and emphasizes how the film’s “rhetoric of silence” (63) allows for a “spectral kind of communication” (64) embracing “touch and telepathy” (65). The Othello that emerges, because “bare” and “spectral” (70), reminds us of how Shakespeare’s play functions as a “Western inscription . . . of . . . alterity” (74). Race is returned to in chapter 4 in which Roberta Torre’s film, Sud Side Stori (2000), a “stagy” and “realistic” (81) adaptation of Romeo and Juliet set in Palermo, is assessed in terms of its preoccupation with “specters” of “home”; most notable, Calbi contends, is the ethnic conflict between Nigerian sex-workers and conservative Italians, a charged indicator of a “neurosis of cultural homogeneity” (82). This chapter was a particular highlight. Finally, in chapter 7, Calbi turns his attention to a 2010 “performance” of Romeo and Juliet on Twitter involving members of the public and actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). Such Tweet Sorrow was distinguished by foregrounding the medium of its dissemination even as it traced a “‘spectral’ movement toward the language of the ‘original’” (138). As this rehearsal indicates, the template of “spectrality” is consistently applied and invariably with exciting consequences. Nevertheless, there were points at which issues of identification and provenance were arguably muddied by the reliance on an overarching theme. There are, for example, generic differences in the sample (between a television production and an arthouse film or between alternative linguistic versions of the same film) that might have been emphasized more; similarly, in the discussion of Sud Side Stori, one might have expected a greater consideration of Roberta Torre’s role as a female Shakespeare director. This film, indeed, is a complex constellation, involving professional and amateur actors, and the “real” sexworkers who participated were reported to have been unhappy at the ways in which

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they were represented, a fact that Calbi passes over. I paused to reflect upon how the particular sample had been arrived at: if a “spectral” Shakespeare, as the author so compellingly demonstrates, is constantly spilling over boundaries, where is the line drawn? Or should we not even be thinking in such terms? To be fair, these are only carping qualifications, questions stimulated by the verve and eagerness with which Calbi elaborates his thesis. Too, intriguing rationales for the book’s content and approach are in evidence. Calbi’s interests reside with a “post-cinematic” (3) moment, and accordingly the focus falls on interactive modes, social media, and multicultural (often non-Anglophone) Shakespeare manifestations. The author also defends his choices on the basis that they are invariably “experimental or oppositional” (5) in orientation; they are adaptations that call into question the nature of “adaptation” itself and underline contrary trends in the postmodern encounter with the Bard. At his most assured with these other “Shakespeares,” Calbi makes felicitous comparisons, attends to matters of reception, offers enabling rehearsals, writes with a suppleness rivaling that of the French philosopher himself, and never forgets the texts at his adaptations’ core (despite proper finessing of now rightly discarded “fidelity” models). There are gratifying points of connection as the study progresses, particularly in the acknowledgment that films and Twitter feeds alike allegorize their own adaptive processes, and a further virtue is the argument that adaptations are in and of themselves significant: they retrospectively produce the “original,” adding to it and forcing it to interact with other ideas and influences. The “Shakespeare” discovered in these pages, as the author attests, “keeps on coming back [as a] multi-layered . . . body that is repeatedly on the point of vanishing only to reappear elsewhere” (19), and we have Calbi to thank for introducing us to such an imaginatively assembled and investigated wonder-cabinet of Shakespeare instantiations.

Teaching Shakespeare beyond the Centre: Australasian Perspectives. Edited by KATE FLAHERTY, PENNY GAY, and L. E. SEMLER. Palgrave Macmillan Shakespeare Studies Series. Basingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. xii + 260. $95.00 cloth. Reviewed by DARRYL CHALK The teaching of Shakespeare, no matter where or at what level, comes with much baggage. Many of the preservice secondary Drama and English teachers I help to train, anticipating students “forced” to read Shakespeare, find themselves asking questions that reestablish stereotypical boundaries and tired assumptions about the cohorts they will teach: Is it better to champion the text or explore the play as written for performance? How do I combat the preconception that Shakespeare is too “hard” and/or “boring”? How do I break through the fog of social-media-addled brains? Why are we teaching four-hundred-year-old plays at all? Or perhaps the ultimate cliché of the prospective Shakespeare teacher: how do I make him relevant? Teaching Shakespeare beyond the Centre is, at times, an inspiring collection of essays devoted to working against the grain of such thinking. The