All the proceeds from the latter book go towards funding Shakespeare Birthplace Trust education projects.
BSA 2023 Conference Schedule
23rd April 2023
Dear Members of the BSA,
We hope you will all enjoy celebrating Shakespeare’s birthday today in various ways, watching, reading, performing, writing. For those who would prefer to ‘Open your ears’, Radio 3 is broadcasting a production of Henry IV Part II at 19.30pm today, 23rd April.
We are delighted to publish the ‘At a Glance’ schedule for our BSA Conference ‘Relocating Shakespeare’ to be held in Liverpool 25-28 July:
Very best wishes to you all – and to revitalising Shakespeare,
Alison Findlay
(Chair of the BSA)
CfP: The Blackfriars Conference ‘Performance, Playhouse, Practice, and Play’, 2-5 November 2023
22nd April 2023
‘Performance, Playhouse, Practice, and Play‘
The Blackfriars Conference Returns!
ATTEND THE CONFERENCE: NOVEMBER 2-5, 2023
This November, the American Shakespeare Center will welcome conference attendees back to the Blackfriars Playhouse, where we will join together each day of the conference to hear papers, celebrate attending the plays in our season, and enjoy other social events and activities. Additionally, for the first time ever, conference registration and submissions will be open to undergraduate students. Paper presentations and staging sessions will be in-person only, but we are excited to also offer remote participation for some colloquy sessions.
Read below for details about the submission process for this cycle.
Call for Papers
For the 2023 Blackfriars Conference, we are soliciting three different types of submissions:
Plenarypapers – Since 2001, we have featured papers that explore the performative conditions of early modern plays, the effect of place on those performances, the practices of the players, and the texts themselves through time. These 10 minute (13 minutes for presenters employing actors to demonstrate a point) plenary presentations take place on the Blackfriars Stage. To present a plenary paper, please submit a 250-300 word abstract outlining your topic.
Colloquy leaders – Since 2009, we have convened conversations amongst interested scholars on a variety of subjects. These 60 minute colloquies are guided by a leader who determines their format and shape. Examples of past presentations include: panels of short papers, seminars in which each participant submits a paper to the group before the conference for discussion at the conference, and round-tables. To lead a colloquy session, please submit a 250-300 word proposal outlining your topic of conversation and proposed format.
Staging sessions – Since 2019, we have invited submissions for early modern, non-Shakespeare plays to include in ASC’s production year. These 20 minute staging sessions are “competitive” opportunities for proposers to make the case for why their play should be performed on the Blackfriars stage at this time (in other words, why this play here and now). Sessions will be adjudicated by ASC artistic staff and the winning submission will secure their title’s inclusion in the artistic season for the following year. To lead a staging session, please submit a 250-300 word proposal that includes the play title and an outline of your argument.
Topics for consideration in any of the above formats might include:
Casting practice, rehearsal practice, performance practice
Evidence of practice in the extant plays or documents
Evidence of education or experience in plays or documents
Connections between texts (editorial, allusions, character symmetry, etc)
The status of ‘performance’ in early modern culture
Audiences and audience response
Props and costumes
Spaces of performance
Please submit your 250-300 word proposals by May 15, 2023 via the submission link: https://americanshakespearecenter.com/education/educationhomepage/blackfriars-conference/.You may only present once, but may be considered for all three categories by submitting this form multiple times with the appropriate category selected. Proposals will be considered based on their alignment with the conference aims, their originality and scholarly interest, and their potential to contribute to a program representative of the diverse constituencies served by the ASC. Presenters will receive notification by August 1, when registration opens.
Don’t Miss: Adjoa Andoh in Richard III
14th April 2023
Adjoa Andoh, Honorary Fellow of the BSA, directs and stars in a production of Richard III that remains true to the text but radically transforms our understandings of it.
Andoh’s exciting production runs at the Liverpool Playhouse until 22 April and the Rose Theatre Kingston from 26 April to 13 May, exploring what happens ‘when the one punched down upon punches up’.
A Remarkable Richard III by BSA Honorary Fellow Adjoa Andoh
14th April 2023
Adjoa Andoh, Honorary Fellow of the BSA, directs and stars in a Richard IIII that remains true to the text but radically transforms our understandings of it. Andoh’s exciting production (Liverpool Playhouse until 22 April and the Rose Theatre Kingston 26 April-13 May) explores what happens ‘when the one punched down upon punches up’. The result is far from being a loud, angry protest. Andoh’s production uses a surprisingly sunny, rural setting to take us deep in into the tragic effects of prejudice, abuse, and neglect, primarily for Richard, but also for society.
By casting and playing Richard as the only person of another race in a white English rural environment, Andoh’s interpretation is deeply personal. As a child, she ‘felt a kinship’ with Richard ‘through some of my own experience of being judged by what I looked like’ in the Cotswolds where she grew up. The setting (designed by Aemelia Jane Hankin) recreated those memories: a rural idyll, visually dominated by a huge tree trunk. It was lit (by Chris Davey) in warm gold, and haunted by folk melodies composed by Andoh’s brother Yeofi Andoh,
All is not as it seems in the Cotswold idyll. A troop of white-masked morris dancers chanting in celebration of ‘this glorious summer’ forcibly deck Andoh’s Richard with a boar’s head and bind him to the maypole with their ribbons. Carnival festivity blurs frighteningly with the violence of Klu-Klux-Klan white supremacy in this prologue which physically recreates Richard’s nightmare of being trapped in a thorny wood from Henry VI Part 3 (3.2.173-181).
‘Glorious summer’ May Morris Prologue to Richard III. Photograph by Manuel Harlan.
For Andoh’s Richard,‘Not knowing how to find the open air / But toiling desperately to find it out,’ it’s not surprising he turns to ‘hew my way out with a bloody axe.’ (3 Henry VI 3.2.181) Executions are excised from the summer stage, but their violence is played out in ominous shadow-work behind curving translucent screens at the back of the stage (sometimes resembling the Globe structure). The physical force in Cotswold Morris stick dances could have been brought out more fully in the final battle scenes.
Andoh takes a brave risk in not milking the comedy of Richard’s villainy, an easy point of contact with the audience. Instead, she shifts brilliantly between two styles to show Richard’s complexity. One the one hand, Richard’s sense of fun and companionship in plotting has the passionate quality of child revenging the sense of ‘that’s not fair’, especially when shared with his supporters Buckingham (Joseph Kloska), Catesby (Harry Clarke) and Ratcliffe (Antonie Azor) in their hilarious pantomime of mock-piety to the bemused Mayor (Oliver Ryan). At other points, Richard’s desire to be accepted by others creates surprising, new effects. The wooing of Anne (Phoebe Shepherd), for example, is poignantly played as a moment of acceptance, a spotlit romance – of what could have been, or what could be – as they tenderly connect hands beneath the tree. Numerous physical gestures showed Richard’s sensitivity to the dehumanizing insults in the text, creating a tangible sense of injury – literally so with the addition of his mother’s disgust at touching his head when he asked the Duchess of York (Caroline Parker) for her blessing.
Richard (Adjoa Andoh) kneels for his mother’s blessing. Duchess of York (Caroline Parker), watched by Clarence’s son (Joshua Day). Photograph by Manuel Harlan.
Andoh makes lines like ‘E’re you were Queen’ (to Elizabeth) ‘I was a pack-horse in his [Edward’s] great affairs’ stand out as a bitter recognition of Richard’s lack of self-worth, as well as his jealousy of Elizabeth. Height differences between Adjoa Andoh and the taller white cast members emphasize their dominance. Sam Cox’s commanding portrayal of Stanley provided a sympathetic anchor of reason amidst the factions. Fine performances make Rivers (Robin Morrisey), Dorset (Joshua Day), and Queen Elizabeth (Rachel Sanders) more strikingly powerful stage presences than usual.
Richmond (Daniel Hawksford) and Stanley (Sam Cox) photograph by Manuel Harlan.
Fine performances make Rivers (Robin Morrisey), Dorset (Joshua Day) and Queen Elizabeth (Rachel Sanders) more strikingly powerful stage presences than usual. Queen Margaret (Liz Kettle) towers above, claiming ‘the benefit of seignory’ in grief (4.4.33); the lightning and music which accompany her curses lends her an unworldly resonance as the voice of history.
Anne (Phoebe Shepherd) and Richard (Adjoa Andoh) as Carnival King and Queen. Photograph by Manuel Harlan.
The transcience of power which she embodies is also cleverly marked in the use of the costumes (by Maybelle Laye): the crowns of bone, or woodland greenery are those of carnival kings and queens, for a day or a season, rather than forever. The brown mudcloth (the traditional home-made cloth of rural people across Africa) covering Henry VI’s corpse reappears as Clarence’s shawl and King Edward’s robe, and no one sits for long on shallow seat in the tree trunk which serves as throne. Daniel Hawksford skilfully doubles an insecure Edward IV (by turns, shakily ritualistic and savage to Richard) with a confident Richmond.
Despite the communal feel created by the rural design (including real strawberries from the Cardinal), the consequences of prejudice and fear isolate many of the characters. The suffering of each is given full weight in some excellent cameo moments. Oliver Ryan made Clarence’s nightmare of drowning spine-chillingly immediate, for example.
Clarence (Oliver Ryan) wakes from his nightmare only to be drowned in malmsey by Catesby and Ratcliffe. Photograph by Manuel Harlan.
Joshua Day’s lament as Clarence’s son – a lone figure clutching a toy horse – movingly demonstrated the victimization of children who are forced to carry political and emotional burdens in an adult world (telegraphed again through the ultra-white puppet representing the Duke of York and humped on the back of the Prince of Wales).
Although it could be argued that such ‘spotlit’ moments fragment the play, that is surely the point. Everyone, whether perpetrator or victim, suffers in a climate that promotes prejudice and fear. What brings the company together is universally excellent verse speaking using Cotswold accents. The range of voices allows Shakespeare’s language to sing out, uncluttered by elaborate sets or costumes, in this thought-provoking and inspiring production. Congratulations to Adjoa and to all the company.
Buckingham (Joseph Kloska), Richard (Adjoa Andoh) and Queen Margaret (Liz Kettle). Photograph by Manuel Harlan.
Alison Findlay
University of Lancaster
Darren Freebury-Jones: Plucking Shakespeare’s Feathers
I am currently working on a book titled Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers. The project uses the first reference to Shakespeare as an actor-dramatist, in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, as its structural fulcrum:
there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.
The discussions that arose between Elizabethan writers in the wake of this notorious pamphlet’s publication, and the theories it has spawned among generations of Shakespeare scholars, provide the pillars of my study: authorship, collaboration, adaptation, and imitation. The book is about Shakespeare’s borrowed feathers and the community of playwrights working in early modern London. I explore Shakespeare’s engagement with the plays of these contemporary dramatists, dealing with matters of authorship, varying modes of collaboration (such as co-authorship and revision), as well as the ways in which Shakespeare was influenced by, imitated, and adapted, plays by fellow authors, beginning with John Lyly and concluding with John Fletcher.
How might we go about plucking a crow and determining the origins of each of his feathers? Literary indebtedness can be measured in a variety of ways, be it through allusions, studies of similarities in dramatic narrative and structure, characterization, and explorations of the ways in which dramatists appear to have parodied each other. I rely on each of these approaches, but a major point of difference is that Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers provides a systematic account of Shakespeare’s debts to his contemporaries through the use of modern electronic corpora. Pervez Rizvi has developed an electronic corpus of 527 plays dated between 1552 and 1657, titled Collocations and N-grams, which is an invaluable aid for researchers investigating links between early modern plays. The automated results allow scholars to check for every phrase shared between surviving plays of the period and to establish just how many times that phrase occurs. This database therefore allows researchers to examine objective, factual data linking early modern plays according to such factors as common authorship, chronology, genre, and influence. I aim to provide the most accurate account of the influence of contemporary playwrights’ language on Shakespeare’s dramas yet conducted by consulting Rizvi’s spreadsheets for plays composed by each of the dramatists I survey; each pair of plays is ranked according to the number of unique phrases (i.e. occurring in just two plays in the corpus) they share.
The results are fascinating and tend to validate and extend previous hypotheses concerning intertextual relations between plays. I have discovered that Shakespeare was even more of a magpie at the beginning of his career than suspected, and I attribute this in large part to the rhetorical training he received during his grammar school education and his background as an actor, a profession that required an acute reliance on aural memory. Several early modern dramatists were also actors and would develop an intimate familiarity with plays in which they had performed. The necessity for actor-dramatists to possess extensive verbal memories meant that they could draw from a variety of plays when composing their own works. To offer some examples, it should be noted that Thomas Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda does not seem to have been as popular with audiences and readers as his The Spanish Tragedy, judging by its printing history and contemporary allusions. Nevertheless, the play had a significant influence on Shakespeare. In the spreadsheet for Soliman and Perseda, one-fifth of the top twenty plays are by Shakespeare: The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Henry V, and Troilus and Cressida. In Shakespeare’s early plays we find striking borrowings that are unique in the theatrical vernacular of the period, such as when, near the conclusion of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Thurio says of Silvia: ‘I claim her not,and therefore she is thine’. Here he is echoing the moment Erastus laments losing a love token in Kyd’s play: ‘I kept it not, and therefore she is lost’.
Examples of borrowings from other Elizabethan playwrights can be provided, such as the line in Henry VI Part Three, ‘Sham’st thou not, knowing whence thou art extraught’, and a line in The Troublesome Reign of King John, attributed to George Peele: ‘And when thou knowest from whence thou art extraught’. The verbal evidence also validates scholarly observations on Shakespeare’s borrowings from that chronicle history play when he composed Richard II. Bolingbroke commands the execution of Bushy and Green, who ‘stained the beauty of a fair queen’s cheeks’. Just as Shakespeare likens the kingdom to an unweeded garden, King John speaks of ‘ambitious weeds’ that can ‘stain the beauty of our garden plot’. Examined in context, we can see that Shakespeare’s borrowings relate to not only wording but to imagery at the heart of The Troublesome Reign of King John and, subsequently, Richard II.
Shakespeare often seems to gaze wistfully towards past dramas for inspiration. For instance, while Lyly established several precedents for Shakespeare’s plays, there is little indication that Shakespeare was overly familiar with his dramatic language. That is until, as I have discovered, Shakespeare started composing plays for the indoor Blackfriars Theatre, where Lyly’s plays had previously been performed by the Children of Paul’s. I have also discovered that Shakespeare owes as great a debt to Kyd’s plays, if not greater, than those of Christopher Marlowe, which has important implications for our understanding of Shakespeare’s dramatic development. The book deals with the thorny issue of distinguishing Shakespeare’s early style from Kyd and Marlowe’s, the two playwrights he most closely emulated at the beginning of his career and with whom scholars have long proposed he collaborated.
In my investigations of Shakespeare’s early collaborations, I have found that whilst the idea of Shakespeare guiding younger dramatists in his later co-authored plays is now accepted, there remains some unwillingness to accept that Shakespeare himself was guided in earlier collaborations. Scholars still prefer to imagine Shakespeare improving, or even salvaging, the work of more experienced dramatists, rather than learning from the process of co-authorship at the beginning of his career. This is something I interrogate in tandem with older scholarship reluctant to recognize Shakespeare as a borrower, scholarship that instead assumes other dramatists borrowed from him. Advances in technology and the sound chronology developed by Martin Wiggins mean that we can now gain insights into the directions of influence in the early modern dramatic canon that evaded previous studies.
My research thus reveals that Shakespeare borrowed from Elizabethan contemporaries such as Marlowe, Kyd, and Peele to a remarkable degree. However, having delved deeper into Shakespeare’s career, there is little evidence, on a verbal level at least, of Shakespeare attending closely to the plays of Jacobean contemporary playwrights. We can interpret these results in varying ways: perhaps Shakespeare did not have easy access to plays performed by rival and children’s playing companies. As an actor Shakespeare would of course be working when plays were usually performed, meaning that he was more likely to be influenced by his own company’s repertory than by others. However, it seems likely to me that Shakespeare, with his keen commercial eye, would attend the plays of other companies when he had afternoons off. Perhaps then the results are indicative of the development of Shakespeare’s distinctive idiom later in his career. Although Shakespeare dabbled in popular genres such as city comedies in The Merry Wives of Windsor and Measure for Measure, and masques in The Tempest, his stylistic feathers are of a distinctly different hue to those of dramatists such as Thomas Dekker, John Marston, and Ben Jonson. Even in the cases of Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour and Sejanus, in which we know Shakespeare acted, we do not find the same kind of verbal recall as is evident in Shakespeare’s engagements with dramatic forebears.
Having investigated Shakespeare’s dramatic relationship with Thomas Middleton and Fletcher in order to increase our understanding of the working methods shared between these playwrights, I plan to conclude my study by looking at the ways in which the compilers of the First Folio helped to create the image of Shakespeare as a solitary genius. It seems to me that Shakespeare’s dramatic identity was shaped in large part by the people with whom he collaborated most.
This collection of essays seeks to explore the many exciting new directions surrounding the scholarship concerning Macbeth. Long associated with the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, Macbeth continues to fascinate multifarious cultures around the globe. Macbeth’s weird witches and fantastic apparitions are inescapable whenever one watches this play. This particular collection is especially interested in abstracts that concern film, stage, and scholarly treatments of the play in Eastern European countries, Russia and Ukraine, China, Japan, India, Africa, and South America. Possible topics for papers may include the following, but are by no means delimited by them:
Productions of Macbeth, Past and Present on Stage
Films, Adaptations, and Appropriations of Macbeth in the Global Arena
Issues of National Identity, Race, and Ethnicity in Macbeth
The meanings and representations of the Witches in Macbeth
The Problematics of Pedagogy, Macbeth, and the Undergraduate Classroom
Homosociality and Queer Affiliations in Macbeth
The Cultural Function of Witchcraft and Fortune Telling in Macbeth
The Green World: Macbeth and Eco-criticism
The Digital, Textual, and Editorial History of Macbeth
Vanessa I. Corredera (Associate Professor at Andrews University) writes about her work on Othello in ‘post-racial’ America and her recently published monograph, which is available from Edinburgh University Press.
Given my scholarship on what in my book I call “reanimations” of Shakespeare’s Othello—essentially, works that either briefly or more extensively engage with and therefore bring Othello back to life in the modern era—academic friends frequently ask whether I have heard about/seen/read the latest reiteration of Shakespeare’s (in)famous tragedy. Such was the case recently when someone posted in the Shakespeare Society Facebook group about Frantic Assembly’s adaptation of Othello at the Lyric Hammersmith. I had not heard of this adaption, so I followed the Facebook link to learn more. While I know that one should rarely, if ever, look at online comments, I could not help myself, and I was struck by two observations. First, several commenters noted that they had taken their students to see this adaptation of Othello. Second, the longstanding debate about whether Othello is a racist play or a play critiquing racism reappeared in the comments. In my book, Reanimating Shakespeare’s Othello in Post-Racial America (Edinburgh University Press), I trace how the racial frameworks (the strategies for conceptualizing race) so popular in America’s supposed “post-racial” era (2008-2016) frequently result, even if unintentionally, in anti-Black versions of Othello. To instead craft an anti-racist engagement with Othello, I reveal, takes significant, intentional care both with the racial frames used to interpret Othello and with the details that comprise the work, whether a performance of the play, a comic book rendition of the titular character, or a comedy sketch referencing both. I therefore wondered: What racial frameworks did Frantic Assembly use when adapting Othello? How did those frameworks shape their artistic decisions? And were the students who saw the adaptation properly prepared to assess whether it perpetuates racist caricatures or critiques racist systems, whether, in other words, it is an anti-Black or anti-racist Othello?
Though Reanimating Shakespeare’s Othello focuses on reanimations of Othello in America and in an era that can in hindsight seems especially naïve, the principles I explore in the book for considering race and/in Othello can nevertheless help scholars, creators, and teachers engage more ethically with the play. While the belief in a post-racial society has receded, the racial frameworks of the post-racial era I discuss in the book linger. And though scholars consider these frameworks most often in relation to the U.S., the stereotyping and therefore scapegoating of minoritized identities for racial inequity instead of attending to systemic issues, the appeal to the so-called “colourblind” view of race, and the continued privileging of white perspectives are employed far beyond America’s shores. I thus offer key questions that all who engage with Othello—from scholars to adaptors to theatermakers to teachers to the everyday audience member—can ask in order to assess more effectively the racework undertaken every time this by-and-large “toxic” play is brought back to life.[1]
1. Does this reanimation of Othello take a colour evasive approach?
First, a word on the term colourblind, which was long used to convey the ideas at the heart of what is now called colour evasive. People rightly note that it is an ableist term and that we should therefore avoid employing it. Though I do so in my book, I want to rectify that usage here. While no one term has yet to replace colourblind when it comes to discussions of racial perspective and/or casting, I think the proposition of colour evasive is an especially thoughtful and effective substitution.[2] In discussions of post-racial America, however, philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, and performance studies scholars all employ colourblind to describe the fundamental approach toward race underpinning the post-racial era: “not seeing” race. Essentially, to be what we would now call colour evasive entails considering each race as if society treats them equally, as if racial inequity no longer exists. Often, people conceptualize not recognizing race as the more polite, even ideal attitude, as if the concept of race is the issue and acknowledging race the problem. The true issue, however, occurs when people ignore racial inequality, and with it, racism. But what does this mean for Othello?
Too often, creators who re-animate Othello do not truly pay attention to race, approaching the play as if a tragedy where a Black man marries and murders a young white woman can ever be race-neutral. The reanimations of Othello I study, however, suggest that when creators are inattentive to race, their versions of Othello frequently depend on stereotyping, racial caricatures, and one-dimensional versions of the titular character, thereby making them anti-Black. Yet short of creators saying they do not focus on race, which they usually do not say expressly, how can we tell if they are taking this approach? One place to start is by paying attention to the ways they frame their reanimation.
For instance, in my Introduction, I demonstrate how when creators argue that the play is not about race and/or gesture toward their emphasis on so-called “universal” themes such as jealousy, it often means they are not thoughtfully considering race in Othello. Additionally, the care any work takes toward confronting race in Othello may be perceived by analyzing promotional materials. As I argue in Chapter 1, how we visualize Othello matters and gives insights into the racial perspectives taken when reimagining the character. For instance, in the promotional poster for Frantic Assembly’s Othello, why does only Desdemona meet the viewer’s gaze? What should we make of the fact that Othello’s shirt is positioned half-way up his back, exposing his body to the viewer? What racial dynamics does this tableau tap into or contest? If one discerns that care has not been taken concerning race and representation when promoting a particular reanimation, one can in turn be wary about a similar lack of care in the work itself.
2. Does the reanimation meaningfully push back against the stereotypes of Black masculinity triggered by Othello?
The violent Black man. The rage-filled brute. The Black Buck. These are all common stereotypes about Black masculinity that reanimations of Othello can easily invoke, even if unintentionally. After all, audiences see Othello’s rage as he confronts Desdemona’s supposed infidelity, and that rage eventually becomes murderous. While Othello may not rape her, the intimate nature of the strangling on their nuptial sheets nevertheless evokes the threat that Black masculinity supposedly poses to white femininity as envisioned in the stereotype of the Black Buck. Yes, some of these racial caricatures may have American histories. But as American cultural artifacts such as police procedurals with Black men as gangsters or hip-hop songs comprised of stanzas glorifying violence and demeaning women circulate globally, so too do these distortions of Black men. Thus, audiences within and outside of the U.S. may likely bring these stereotypes to bear upon reanimations of Othello.
It is therefore vital for creators who reanimate Othello across mediums to craft a complex vision of Black masculinity, such as the one developed by Keith Hamilton Cobb in the play American Moor (Chapter 4). Through the central figure of the unnamed actor auditioning for the role of Othello, Cobb depicts a Black man justifiably angry at the systems that delimit and oppress him, but a man who is also funny, earnest, loving, and creative. He may be virile, but he is no threat, adamant, but never violent. And importantly, through this actor, Cobb also articulates a multifaceted vision of Othello in stark contrast with the white director’s facile one. Depictions like Cobb’s vitally counter versions of Othello reduced to mere caricature, such as what I argue can be found in the comic series Kill Shakespeare (Chapter 1), where Othello is nothing more than a brutish, violent soldier reduced to a status so abject that he comes across as less than fully human. To craft an anti-racist Othello therefore means developing a nuanced, multidimensional, and decidedly non-stereotypical Othello. Anything less is unequivocally anti-Black.
3. Does the reanimation inculcate sympathy for both Desdemona and Othello?
In Chapter 5 of Reanimating Shakespeare’s Othello, I address what I call the “Desdemona problem,” namely, the difficulty creators and audiences alike have when it comes to feeling sympathy for Desdemona’s misogynistic abuse at her husband’s hands while also holding space and extending sympathy for the racial abuse that Othello experiences. Put differently, the affective, powerful depiction of a white woman as innocent victim can make it difficult to not only attend to Othello’s racial degradation, but also to the ways even Desdemona participates in that process.
How, then, can reanimations effectively respond to the Desdemona problem? As my analysis of Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief and Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) reveals, frequently, the impulse is to lean into the Desdemona problem, with creators diminishing or even caricaturing Othello to heighten Desdemona’s plight. Alternatively, the challenge is so hard that reanimations sidestep the issue by excising Desdemona, as do Kill Shakespeare, Othello: The Remix (she is a disembodied voice in both), and even American Moor. The operetta Desdemona, however, offers an alternative approach. In the playtext, Toni Morrison powerfully exposes the misogyny Desdemona experiences within Venetian society, at home with her father Brabantio, and with Othello. Yet by staging confrontations between Desdemona and her servant Emilia, Desdemona and her slave Barbary, who reveals her name is actually Sa’ran, and Desdemona and Othello, Morrison brings to light Desdemona’s classed and racial privilege. In doing so, she reveals that the oppressed can also function as oppressors and suggests that the promise of healing only begins when all parties take accountability for the forms of domination they enact. While no reanimation need exactly mirror Morrison’s tactics, to effectually critique racism and therefore be truly anti-racist, they must account for and effectively respond to the Desdemona problem that troubles so many reanimations of this play.
4. Whose perspective does the reanimation center?
Postcolonial theorist and essayist Ben Okri asserts that in Othello, Shakespeare essentially poured a white man into a Black body.[3] To restate Okri’s assertion, it means that though a Black man technically resides at the heart of the play, Othello nonetheless centers a white perspective because the protagonist is nothing more than a white man’s fantastical creation of Blackness. This centering of whiteness even occurs when Othello gets reanimated much less briefly, such as the short reference to the play in the podcast Serial (Chapter 3). Host Sarah Koenig frames her true-crime investigation of Pakistani American Adnan Sayed’s supposed murder of his Korean girlfriend Hae Min Lee (he has now been exonerated) as an Othello/Desdemona story. I suggest that if Adnan is Othello and Hae is Desdemona, Koenig herself functions as an Iago figure, a narrative orchestrator like Iago who focuses on her perspectives, her affective responses, and her interpretations of each moment over the people of colour on whom she reports. In most versions of Othello, this type of focus on whiteness only directs attention back to figures like Brabantio, Desdemona, and yes, Iago, on almost anyone and everyone but Othello.
Jordan Peele’s film Get Out, however, models alternative possibilities, as I trace in my closing chapter. Get Out’s narrative structure loosely follows Othello’s. Yet while debates still circulate about Othello’s relationship to race, Get Out has been celebrated and widely received as an anti-racist horror film, one that uses music, film angles, plotting, characterization and more to privilege a Black perspective and experience unabashedly. In doing so, the film exposes the horrors of existing in a white supremacist culture without the ambiguity found in Othello. While the details of what centering a Black perspective, Othello’s perspective, will change depending on a reanimation’s given medium, Get Out serves as a vital reminder of how important it is to challenge the perspectival dominance of whiteness in order to make space for new approaches and stories, including new and more racially responsible Shakespearean retellings.
I am not sure which reanimation of Othello will come my way next. Sometimes, I wish the answer were “none,” because despite the anti-racist reanimations I discuss in my book, I am largely skeptical about the need and desire to keep resurrecting this particular play in this day and age. But, if it must be revivified, my hope is that these questions will help us all identify the racial frames that do and do not contest racial inequity in and through Othello so that we can in turn discern which reanimations respond to Othello’s poignant call to “Speak of me as I am” (5.2.352).
Vanessa’s book is available to purchase from Edinburgh University Press. (Use code NEW30 to receive a 30% discount.)
[1] See Ayanna Thompson’s interview “All that Glisters is Not Gold” with NPR’s Code Switch for a discussion of Shakespeare’s toxic plays.
[2] I only recently learned of “colour evasive” as a substitution for “colourblind” thanks to academic twitter. See tweets by professors such as Uju Aynya, Deadric T. Williams, Tina Cheuk, and Darnell Fine that employ the term and suggest it as an effective, non-ableist substitute.
[3] See the essay “Leaping Out of Shakespeare’s Terror: Five Meditations on Othello” in A Way of Being Free (Head of Zeus, 2015).
Header Image: Keith Hamilton Cobb in American Moor.
Call for Papers – Shakespeare Jahrbuch 160 (2024): ‘Shakespeare’s Libraries’
18th January 2023
The 2024 volume of Shakespeare Jahrbuchwill be a special issue on ‘Shakespeare’s Libraries’. The editorial board invites contributions on related themes, concepts and debates, from a variety of perspectives, in particular on the material afterlife of Shakespeare’s work in editions, collections and libraries through the ages. Contributions with a contemporary or historical perspective are equally welcome.
Possible topics include:
Shakespeare’s books
the role of the First Folio: its history as material artefact and cultural icon
book formats: quartos, octavos, folios
typography and the material book
paratexts in early books publishing Shakespeare’s work
Reading Shakespeare
how Shakespeare’s works were read, annotated and extracted by early readers
changing practices of reading Shakespeare: communal/private, orality/literacy, amateur/professional reading
the materiality of reading Shakespeare: the relationship between book, body (cognition, affect, eye, hand, voice), tools and environments
reading Shakespeare in different forms and formats: page/screen, facsimile/modernised, original language/translation, plays/rewritings
famous readers of Shakespeare
Editing Shakespeare
the emergence of Shakespeare as an author: editing, genre-making, canon-formation
early modern syndicates of book-making: printers, publishers, sellers, stationers
kinds of editions: single-text, complete works, compilations; facsimile editions; critical editions; digital editions
the role of the editor across the centuries
editing Shakespeare for the 21st century: new texts, new apparatuses, new readers
Collecting Shakespeare
the material culture of collecting in the early modern period and today
early collectors of Shakespeare’s works
collecting practices: private or public collectors; custom-made collections; material intertextuality; compilations
distributed agencies in networks of authors, publishers, stationers and buyers
Shakespeare’s libraries
the library as material and conceptual space
historical types of libraries: private collections; institutional libraries; circulating and travelling libraries; digital archives
lost texts/libraries and the methodological challenges of the archive
Shakespeare (in) libraries: cultural, intellectual and societal functions
Submissions
Please send an electronic version (as a Word/docx-file) of your article to the general editor of Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Prof. Isabel Karremann (karremann[at]es.uzh.ch). The deadline for submissions (in English or German and of not more than 6,000 words) is 30 April 2023. Please observe the style sheet, which can be downloaded from the website of the German Shakespeare Society.
Articles are selected for publication on the basis of a double anonymous peer-review system.
Daryl Chase – A Social Enterprise ‘Macbeth’ (2023)
10th January 2023
Daryl Chase, director of a new film adaptation of Macbeth, tells us about this socially-minded film project.
Our film adaptation of Macbeth, produced by Screen Northants, is a stunning adaptation of Shakespeare’s tale of ambition and madness. Set not in castles but within the context of feuding estates, magic meets realism in our screen interpretation of Macbeth. The story is brought to life by a young, diverse and award-winning cast and crew within a social enterprise production. Having already focused on Shakespeare’s work, we chose Macbeth for its regular inclusion in the school curriculum, strengthening engagement with younger demographics. Maintaining the original language of the play, we adhered to the text as much as possible, with some adjustments for duration and simplification.
The three year project, delivered by Screen Northants for BBC Children in Need, focused on using film production as a tool to raise pride and aspirations among disengaged and disaffected young people of Northamptonshire. Engaging young people on projects that matter and have an intended and more wide-reaching end goal other than purely as a tool to develop young people has proven to be the most impactful approach. Hence the ambition to create a high quality feature film that will reach wider audiences and make a meaningful contribution to Shakespeare on film. Screen Northants has a core objective to provide opportunities to underrepresented demographics in the film industry, at an age where socio-economic and geographical barriers are most severe. They strive to ensure talented young people from less privileged backgrounds are not missing out on a career in film/tv or the wider creative sector.
Set on a dystopian estate, under the rule of Duncan, Macbeth has lived through countless feuds, loyally defending the kingdom against increasing attacks. When a malevolent force offers Macbeth a future as king, encouraged by Lady Macbeth they seize their fate sooner than promised, with grave consequences.
Our casting age was purposefully younger than many productions of Macbeth and by not providing a brief or having expectations of film experience we allowed for broader cultural and socio-economical diversity, opening the doors to many who may not traditionally audition for Shakespeare. Shot on what would be classed as no-budget, everyone has dedicated their time and talent to making a high-end feature film that has relevance to our engagement with Shakespeare’s play while at the same time having plenty of scope for educational opportunities. The team behind the project were involved in hands-on workshops throughout the production, working with young people of varying ages. An ongoing focus for the project and Screen Northants we plan to continue engagement beyond the films release, including school workshops featuring cast and crew presence.
Screen Northants have delivered a significant number of specialist film-making masterclasses in both mainstream and special education needs settings throughout Northamptonshire as well running free after school and weekend projects for young people from excluded schools, ‘Looked After Children’, and referrals from local police initiatives for early intervention. Screen Northants have also delivered two mentoring schemes for early entrants to industry on behalf of Screen Skills.
The production has attracted a vibrantly diverse cast, mixing incredible new talent and seasoned professionals, from Shaq B. Grant (now featuring in The Flatshare) who plays Macbeth and Aoife Smyth as Lady Macbeth to Joe Sims (Broadchurch) as Duncan. The unique model and incredible story also drew in an amazing crew, combining those with no prior film experience looking for their first break with those with more film heritage. Cinematographer Emily Almond Barr has since been BAFTA Cymru Nominated; composer Rob Lewis is part of the BAFTA talent program, and Olivier Award winner Alessandro Babalola stars as Macduff.
The attraction of the actors and the crew to the project was the undeniably heady mix of Macbeth’s incredible narrative, and the fact this this was a production with a purpose. People opened their hearts and poured out their talents. I don’t think this would have happened so wholeheartedly had it not been built around Shakespeare’s play, which is so familiar to us. Day by day, from pre-production to production, people dedicated their time for free, working in unison to achieve our vision for this adaptation. Jane Clark (who has worked on Harry Potter, Beauty and the Beast and other films) shared her experience with new storyboard artists; production designers turned derelict shopping malls into flat interiors, costume transformed pennies into clothes for armies. Each day I was astounded at how much everyone achieved, and just how much everyone cared.
On set, we often even surprised ourselves given our limited resources… it was happening — we were making a film. Finally, we emerged from the shoot, proud of what had achieved, both in terms of the film we captured and the social enterprise goals. With an edit of the film now in final tweaks, we are looking for additional support to push the film through the crucial last stages of post-production. This includes creating a unique and exciting sound landscape, doing justice to the amazing cinematography, adding further magic with subtle visual effects, and finally quality control and delivery.
Keen to give everyone’s hard work the justice it deserves, festival and cinema screenings await with distributors and sales agents already showing interest. We are on a final push through the closing stages of work on this film project, and would welcome anyone who would like to support us on our journey either via our Greenlit campaign, or any other collaborations, ideas or investment discussions. By helping us to complete the film, you are helping to support all the people involved, from those who benefit from the ongoing workshops, to new talent pushing themselves within the industry.
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