Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English National Identity: Wearing the Codpiece

CROSS-GENDER SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLISH NATIONAL IDENTITY

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CROSS-GENDER SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLISH NATIONAL IDENTITY WEARING THE CODPIECE Elizabeth Klett

CROSS-GENDER SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLISH NATIONAL IDENTITY

Copyright © Elizabeth Klett, 2009. All rights reserved. Klett, Elizabeth. “Many Bodies, Many Voices: Performing Androgyny in Fiona Shaw and Deborah Warner’s Richard II.” Theatre Journal 58:2 (2006), 175–194. © The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. Klett, Elizabeth. “ ‘O How This Mother Swells Up Toward My Heart’: Performing Mother and Father in Helena Kaut-Howson’s Cross-Gender King Lear.” Shakespeare Bulletin 23 (2005), 53–73. © The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. Klett, Elizabeth. “Re-dressing the Balance: All-Female Shakespeare at the Globe Theatre.” Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance, ed. James C. Bulman. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008. © Associated University Presses. Reprinted with permission of Associated University Presses. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61632–5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Adam. “My affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal.”

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CONTENTS

Preface

ix

1. Introduction: Wearing the Codpiece 2. The King’s Many Bodies: Fiona Shaw’s Richard II (1995–96) 3. Playing with Contradictions: Kathryn Hunter’s King Lear (1997) 4. Gender in Exile: Vanessa Redgrave’s Prospero in The Tempest (2000) 5. Staging and Subverting Nostalgia: Dawn French’s Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2001) 6. Vice-Versa: All-Female Shakespeare at the Globe Theatre (2003–04)

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Appendix: Production Details

169

Notes

177

Bibliography

185

Index

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31 57 87 115

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PREFACE

I

first became interested in women’s cross-gender performances of Shakespeare as a graduate student at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. In February 1997, I saw Kathryn Hunter’s remarkable performance as King Lear at the Leicester Haymarket Theatre. In March, I watched Fiona Shaw’s portrayal of Richard II on television. And that same month, I played the role of Hubert in our student production of King John. These experiences stimulated a lasting interest in the topic, and they also provoked a number of pressing questions. How does an audience member read and respond to the presence of an actress in a male role? How does an actress prepare for and embody a male role in performance? This book is an attempt to answer these and other questions raised by this fascinating performance practice that has undergone a renaissance on the British stage. My experience playing Hubert was fraught and anxious. I had been cast in the role out of practical, rather than artistic, concerns; our company was short on men, and I was not the only cross-cast actress in the production. I was certain that I would never be man enough for the role; Hubert has to be frightening enough to convince the audience that he could burn out young Prince Arthur’s eyes with red-hot pokers. The role is usually cast with a large and burly actor, who is often twice the size of every other man on stage. My fears were particularly confirmed when I proved physically unable to pick up Arthur’s body and carry him offstage, and the actor playing the Bastard had to do it instead. The rehearsal process was difficult, as I went through many of the stages that actresses experience when trying to come to terms with a male role: making my physical movements more “masculine,” playing with costume effects to disguise my body, and lowering my voice to convey a more threatening tone. I eventually abandoned all of these devices, walked and talked like myself, and provided my own costume of turtleneck, jeans, and Doc Marten boots. (Like many low-budget student performances, this

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was a modern dress production.) Most importantly, I found the emotional resources within myself to play the scene with Arthur, instead of trying to approximate how a “real man” would do it. Ultimately, the director told me that my performance brought out a different aspect of the character for her: Hubert became a man who had to visibly work himself up to violence, rather than one to whom it came naturally. In each of the productions that I consider in this book, the effects are similar, and I conclude that women’s cross-gender performance has the potential to open up Shakespeare’s plays to new and transformational meanings. I would like to thank two of the personnel from that production of King John for setting me on the road to this book: L. Grace Godwin, who gave me the first newspaper articles on this topic, and Jacquie Walters, who gave me the chance to think far outside my usual sphere of experience. I am also grateful to Fiona Shaw for talking with me about her experience of playing Richard II and to Helena KautHowson, who welcomed me into her home and shared her memories of directing King Lear. I would like to thank the staff at the following libraries and archives: the National Theatre Archive, the Young Vic Theatre Archive, the Globe Theatre Archive, the London Theatre Museum, the Shakespeare Institute Library, the University of Illinois Library, and the Woodson Research Center and Fondren Library at Rice University. In particular, Dr. Jaq Bessell was a great help in arranging research time and tickets at the Globe, and in talking with me about the rehearsal process for The Tempest. My research in Britain was made possible by travel grants from the University of Illinois Graduate College and the Department of English. The Faculty Research and Support Fund at the University of Houston—Clear Lake provided financial support for this project at the publication stage. My sincere thanks are due to Carol Thomas Neely, my adviser at the University of Illinois, who has remained an inspiring mentor, and also to Ania Loomba, Michael Shapiro, and Julia A. Walker. I am grateful to my scholarship group in Houston for keeping me on track with the revisions: Karen Fang, Kasi Jackson, Ann Kennedy, Kat McLellan, Stacey Peebles, and Jeanne Scheper. Thanks are also due to Roberta Barker and L. Grace Godwin for reading drafts of the first chapter. And finally, I owe my most profound gratitude to my parents, Don and Elaine Klett, and my husband, Adam Hodges, whose understanding, encouragement, and love have sustained me through this entire process.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: WEARING THE CODPIECE

I

n The Two Gentlemen of Verona, one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, the heroine Julia and her maid Lucetta contemplate the best way for a woman to convincingly dress as a man:

LUCETTA: What fashion, madam, shall I make your breeches? JULIA: That fits as well as “Tell me, good my lord, What compass will you wear your farthingale?” Why, e’en what fashion thou best likes, Lucetta. LUCETTA: You must needs have them with a codpiece, madam. JULIA: Out, out, Lucetta. That will be ill-favoured. LUCETTA: A round hose, madam, now’s not worth a pin Unless you have a codpiece to stick pins on. JULIA: Lucetta, as thou lov’st me let me have What thou think’st meet and is most mannerly. But tell me, wench, how will the world repute me For undertaking so unstaid a journey? I fear me it will make me scandalized.1

Julia is shocked by Lucetta’s suggestion that she wear a codpiece, a decorative and protective covering for the groin that men buttoned or tied onto their breeches; yet she concedes that it may well be “meet” and “mannerly” to sport the fashionable appendage. Her fear that a woman wearing a codpiece would be “ill-favoured” conveys the codpiece’s associations not only with the male genitalia that it covered but also with the masculine power and virility that it emphasized. For a woman to take on the appearance of possessing male anatomy and authority would be inappropriate, even disgraceful, Julia implies. Lucetta’s insistence on wearing the codpiece is justified by an appeal to the fashions of the times (which included padding the sheaths and ornamenting them with jeweled pins) but is also bolstered by her conviction that Julia should disregard her fears about

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dressing as a man to pursue her lover, Proteus. “Then never dream on infamy, but go” (2.7.64), she says staunchly, dismissing Julia’s misgivings about how others might judge her for violating the strictures of proper feminine behavior. This scene suggests that when women cross-dress as men they can access male power and privilege through their performances. Yet it also portrays the risks that women run when they step outside traditional gender roles. Shakespeare’s first transvestite heroine is the fictional counterpart of the actresses on the British stage today who play male parts in productions of Shakespeare. Like Julia, these actresses sometimes wear the codpiece literally, by taking on male Elizabethan clothing, but more commonly wear it figuratively, by usurping male roles and privileges. Male transvestism was conventional on the early modern British stage ( Julia and Lucetta were, of course, originally played by boys), and is still an accepted part of the British theater, particularly at the new Globe Theatre and in Shakespearean performances by the all-male Propeller Company.2 Yet women’s cross-gender performance is much less common, and is often subject to harsh criticism in the popular press. When Phyllida Lloyd directed The Taming of the Shrew at the Globe in 2003, she included a prologue written especially for the production that openly addressed this disparity: The first time this house hosted Shakespeare’s Shrew All the parts were played by men. Weird, yes, but true. And still today you’ll find our acting brothers Portraying sisters, daughters, and their mothers. Vice-versa’s very rare. But in this odd piece, The girls do get the chance to wear the codpiece. Our new production, crammed with female talents, May help in some way to redress the balance.

This prologue anticipated potential audience objections to the practice of using women in male roles, acknowledging that it is both “rare” and “odd,” but justifying it on the basis of equal opportunity. The fact that Lloyd felt compelled to defend the casting before the performance had even begun indicates the animosity with which women’s cross-gender performance has often been greeted in British culture. Many theater reviewers have attacked the practice, arguing that it adulterates Shakespeare and, by implication, the English cultural heritage that is strengthened by his plays. Wearing the codpiece, then, becomes a risky activity for actresses on the contemporary

Introduction

3

stage. The original purpose of the codpiece was to shield and emphasize male phallic power. By appropriating the appendage, either literally or figuratively, actresses can expose and dismantle the workings of masculinity, Shakespearean authority, and “Englishness,” revealing how all three work to create cultural fictions of identity. This book examines the evolution of women wearing the codpiece in recent British productions of Shakespeare, beginning with Fiona Shaw’s controversial performance as Richard II at the National Theatre in 1995–96. Shaw’s daring interpretation reached a wider audience in a television film, shown on BBC-2 in March 1997, a month after Kathryn Hunter opened at the Leicester Haymarket Theatre as King Lear, in a production that transferred to the Young Vic Theatre in London for a summer run. Subsequently, Vanessa Redgrave took on the role of Prospero in The Tempest at the Globe Theatre in 2000. These three productions, which cross-cast only the central male roles, were followed by four more, which adopted different approaches to cross-gender casting. Dawn French played Bottom as a woman in a 2001 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Albery Theatre that “regendered” a number of the roles from male to female. The Globe then took the practice to the opposite extreme with their all-female productions of Richard III (2003), The Taming of the Shrew (2003), and Much Ado About Nothing (2004). All of these performances tapped into the anxieties raised in Julia’s dialogue with Lucetta about exactly what happens when women acquire male clothing, power, and privilege. The chapters to come, which explore all seven productions in detail, reveal what is released onstage, and what happens to the spectator, to Shakespeare, and to the culture when women dare to wear the codpiece. In looking at live performances, production promptbooks, video recordings, reviews in the popular press, scholarly articles, and interviews with the artistic personnel, it becomes clear that each of these performances is multiple, complex, and often contradictory. Many different voices—of critics, scholars, spectators, actresses, directors, designers—combine with the constantly changing nature of live theater to create a collage of meanings and images surrounding each production. To begin with, there is no common language used to talk about the practice of female-to-male cross-casting. The performances have been variously described as “androgynous,” “butch,” “cross-cast,” “cross-dressed,” “cross-gendered,” “effeminate,” “genderbending,” “in drag,” “sexless,” “transgendered,” “transsexual,” “transvestite,” and “unisex,” among others. Such terms are often used

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interchangeably by reviewers and scholars with little or no attention to the differences between them, creating, in Jennifer Drouin’s words (2008), “a conceptual dead-end” (24). The very proliferation of illustrative terms indicates that the performances are difficult to pin down; as Catherine Silverstone (2007) has noted, “the ‘cross-dressed’ body resists efforts to codify its meaning” (204). It also suggests that there are many different ways of viewing the same performance. For instance, Fiona Shaw’s critics saw many different Richards in her performance: “a homosexual male,” “a dyke,” “an adolescent boy,” “a man-child,” “a woman.” These divergent voices, along with the different versions of each production provided by theater, promptbook, and video, reveal that each actress had not one, but many bodies. This book does not attempt to label these different perspectives “right” or “wrong”; rather, I add my own readings of each production to the polyvocal discourses surrounding women’s cross-gender performances of Shakespeare. I also offer a model for reading and analyzing these performances that cuts through some of the uncertainties presented by the current work on the subject. For example, to eliminate semantic confusion, I have claimed the term “crossgender” to describe these performances, because it allows for the multiplicity of meanings that the actresses created onstage. I take the prefix “cross-” to indicate a fluid movement across a spectrum of gender identities, permitting qualities of masculinity and femininity to be in play simultaneously. Other terms, such as sexless, imply that the performer is neither male nor female, which does not take into account the complex citation of gender identities released by the actresses’ performances. The word transvestite is similarly limited, since it places the emphasis on the exchange of one sex’s clothing for that of the other. Cross-gender, by contrast, implies transgression, the crossing of boundaries, which is eminently appropriate for the actresses’ challenging and unsettling performances. These productions are transgressive because they perform a series of disruptions, albeit in ways that were unique to each performance. First, they disrupt mimetic theatrical production by rejecting the concept of theater as a mirror that reflects reality. Instead, they reveal the theater to be a laboratory where gender can be interrogated and dismantled. Second, they perform this disruption through the use of cross-gender casting, by placing a woman’s body at the center of representation. The productions insist on the importance of the female body as a visible text to be read—a text whose complex and shifting performance denaturalizes gender. Third, the actresses

Introduction

5

intervene in the plays’ performance traditions, and challenge conventional male-centered interpretations. By presenting very different visions of well-known characters and texts, they disrupt the authority that has been ascribed to Shakespeare, as the supposedly omniscient inventor of the human subject. Fourth, through their disruptions of normative constructions of theater, gender identity, character, text, and author, these performances threaten the ideological position of Shakespeare in Britain. By contesting Shakespeare’s authority, these productions—to varying degrees—problematize the concept of English national identity.

The Theater as Laboratory The seven performances analyzed in this book both fulfill and challenge the conventions of narrative theater. In order to be intelligible to its audiences, all theatrical performance must present language, gestures, movements, and interpretations that are recognizable. Jacques Derrida terms this concept iterability: in order to be understood, an utterance must follow a pattern that the spectator can identify from lived experience. In “Signature Event Context,” Derrida (1991) argues that a “performative statement [could not] succeed if its formulation did not repeat a ‘coded’ or iterable statement” (104). Judith Butler (1993) applies the concept of iterability to gender performance, arguing that “it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms,” which allows the gender of an individual to be recognizable (12). All theater performance and all gender performance is iteration, to some extent. When performed in a conventional way, “masculinity” and “femininity” are produced, and continually reproduced, as stable gender identities performed by appropriately sexed bodies. Such performances of gender aim to conceal the extent to which maleness and femaleness are constructions rather than empirical realities. Traditional mimetic theater relies on the iterational practices of performance to produce an intelligible reflection of “reality.” This is the idea of the theater that “hold[s], as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature,” as summarized pithily by Hamlet in his advice to the players (3.2.20). This kind of theater hides the means of its production in order to create dramatic fabrications masquerading as truths. It serves to reinforce social stereotypes, such as normative gender roles, and is the basis for a narrowly defined vision of realism. In the context of Shakespearean performance, the actress is supposed to serve

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the play: she is “the individual who makes the text ‘live’ and through whose exertions the truly complete form of the Shakespearean play is realised” (Buzacott 1991, vii). In the service of this ideal, the gender of the performer must match the gender of the role, encouraging the audience to identify the actress with the character. Looking at theatrical performance as a mirror of reality persists in many productions in the contemporary British theater. Despite the unrealistic nature of all theater experiences, which require suspension of disbelief on the part of the spectator, audiences by and large have come to expect that performance will reflect a recognizable reality. Their expectations are bolstered by most actor training methods, which encourage a close identification between actor and character, by directorial methodologies, which focus on making a play understandable and accessible to its audience, and by theater technology, which in its ever-increasing sophistication can create ever more realistic effects. In particular, many mainstream British productions of Shakespeare, although they feature a plethora of approaches to acting, direction, and stage design, emphasize realistic characters and a linear narrative. As Dennis Kennedy (1993) notes, “The movements to deconstruct Shakespeare’s plays, or to revise their representations by radical visual methods, have been located chiefly in Europe. The traditions of performance in English, dominated and continually reinforced by the two Stratfords, have normally maintained that Shakespearean interpretation and Shakespearean acting should be centered in textual analysis and linguistic appreciation” (288–289). Yet defining performance as exclusively iterable, as merely repeating familiar cultural norms, does not allow for the possible transformation of those norms. Further, it does not accurately reflect the diversity within the British theater; Kennedy cites the work of Michael Bogdanov, Declan Donnellan, and Deborah Warner (whose Richard II is the subject of chapter two) as examples of British directors whose productions are “departures from the dominant observance” (300). It also denies agency to the performer, who becomes simply a body doomed to continually reinforce recognizable patterns of social behavior. At the same time, defining mimesis only as a straightforward reflection of “truth” ignores the vexed meanings of the term. Women’s cross-gender performances of Shakespeare not only challenge our traditional understanding of theatrical mimesis, but can also find room for agency within the idea of iterability. They adapt Derrida’s characterization (1991) of citation as potentially

Introduction

7

liberating: “[E]very sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic . . . can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts” (97). They conceptualize citation in Butler’s words (1993), “not as enslavement or simple reiteration of the original, but as an insubordination that appears to take place within the very terms of the original, and which calls into question the power of origination” (45; emphasis in the original). They also show that the theater is not simply a mimetic mirror that reflects reality. In Elin Diamond’s terms (1997), they propose that mimesis is rather “a trick mirror that doubles . . . in the act of reflection” (vi). These performances reveal that it is possible to cite gender differently: to put gender in quotation marks. They thus re-iterate, rather than reiterate, the text. I use the prefix re- to indicate the distinction between performing an action again and performing it with a difference. The hyphen places distance between the prefix and the verb and implies change. “Reproduce” thus means to produce again, while “re-produce” means to produce differently. As W. B. Worthen (1997) argues, “rather than reproducing the work, stage performance produces it anew” (24). In this view, re-iteration is not a stale repetition of recognized forms; instead, it allows for “insubordination,” and for transformation through the act of re-production. Because women’s cross-gender performances produce both gender identity and Shakespeare anew, they challenge the concept of mimesis as a mirror that reflects reality. They reveal the potential of the theater as a laboratory, in Jill Dolan’s words (1992): The stage, then, is a proper place to explore gender ambiguity, not to expunge it cathartically from society but to play with, confound, and deconstruct gender categories. If we stop considering the stage as a mirror of reality, we can use it as a laboratory in which to reconstruct new, nongenderized identities. And in the process, we can change the nature of theatre itself. (10)

Instead of reflecting back a coherent picture of gender norms, the actresses who wear the codpiece can expose and dismantle the discontinuities of gender identity, and invite their audiences to participate in this imaginative process. These productions remind us that theatrical performance can enforce dominant social paradigms, and can also re-imagine those paradigms. When women perform masculinity on the Shakespearean stage, they reveal the theater as a laboratory in which gender identity can be re-made.

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Cross-Gender Shakespeare

Reading Women’s Cross-Gender Performance Within the theatrical laboratory, cross-gender casting is an excellent strategy for revealing the performativity of gender. When used strategically, it can demonstrate that gender must be repeatedly performed in order to exist. Cross-gender performance does not automatically challenge our notions about gender; putting a man in a dress or a woman in a doublet and hose does not necessarily constitute a transgressive theatrical act. These seven performances, however, show that gender is a verb, not a noun; a doing rather than a being. In Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler describes gender as a process that is continually enacted by the individual. This process tends to conceal the lack of a fixed identity in favor of coherence: “[A]cts, gestures and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body. . . . That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” (136). Because gender is a process that is materialized on and through the body, the cross-gender performer can unmake it and expose the ways in which it works to bolster cultural fictions of identity. Butler claims drag as the means to this end: “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency” (137; emphasis in the original). Drag performance can reveal the workings of gender performativity, creating the possibility for new and differently gendered identities. Butler’s work (1990b) on drag dismisses the subversive potential of theatrical performance, and focuses instead on the uses of crossdressing in everyday life and in gay cultures. “The sight of a transvestite onstage can compel pleasure and applause while the sight of the same transvestite on the seat next to us on the bus can compel fear, rage, even violence. . . . In the theatre, one can say, ‘this is just an act,’ and de-realize the act, making acting into something quite distinct from what is real” (278). Her work also seems to be biased in favor of male drag as the ultimate subversive bodily act. As Judith Halberstam (1998) points out, Butler “takes drag to be a gay male cultural practice and offers butch-femme as the lesbian equivalent” (236). Butler’s work therefore has limited implications for this study, which affirms that cross-gender theatrical performance by women has disruptive potential. The cross-gendered body literally and figuratively occupies center stage in these re-productive performances. The actress’s body is a

Introduction

9

text that must be actively read, which enables the audience to imaginatively participate in making meanings about the performance. These productions stage a dialogue between actress and spectator, in which the multilayered signifiers cited by the former are interpreted and given meaning by the latter. Although in all theatrical performance the spectators must focus on and interpret the bodies of the performers, cross-gender performance invites the audience members to read those bodies in a more complex way. Lesley Ferris (1993) notes that cross-gender performance asks the audience to become “producers” of the event and “to concede to multiple meanings, to ambiguities of thought, feeling, categorization, to refuse closure” (8). These actresses’ bodies are the sites of often confusing and contradictory meanings, which make them difficult to read. They encourage their audiences to speculate on actress, character, body, and voice simultaneously. Phillip Zarrilli’s work (2004) on the actor’s embodiment explores how these different layers signify in performance. He imagines the four bodies of the actor—“the ecstatic surface, the depth/ visceral recessive, the subtle inner bodies, and the fictive body of the actor’s score”—that are “chiasmic”; that is, they intertwine with each other. “None of the bodies is settled or absolute, but always in a constant state of ambiguity. Therefore, the actor’s lived experience within the world of performance engages a constant dialectic between and among these four bodies” (665). The “aesthetic outer body” encompasses what the audience sees onstage, and is usually perceived as the character that the actor plays. The outer bodies of women’s cross-gender performances are made up of many different layers—the actress’s interpretation of the character, her identity as a performer, her bodily and vocal choices—that are chiasmic in the way that Zarrilli describes. The actress’s body in performance is “in a constant state of ambiguity”; her portrayal is constantly shifting, negotiating between the different layers of character, body, and voice. These performances re-produce the text by iterating recognizable tropes of gender identity, but with a difference. Many layers of the actress’s performance can be identified as gendered in terms that are familiar. For instance, Kathryn Hunter’s Lear wore a man’s three-piece suit and Janet McTeer’s Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew effortlessly man-handled Kate during their wooing scene. Each of these aspects of the performance is identifiable as stereotypically masculine to the audience. However, each performance is made up of many different layers of contrasting gender identities.

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Through the simultaneous citation of gendered signifiers that clash with one another the actress confounds the audience’s ability to read her as embodying a coherent and stable gender identity. Perhaps the most striking visual example of simultaneous citation was French’s appearance as Bottom the Ass: the top half of her body was dominated by enormous breasts clothed in a demure polka-dot blouse, contrasting with her bottom half, which sported a huge hairy phallus. The spectator had to read the extreme femininity of her upper body alongside the outrageous, even bestial, maleness of her lower body, so that French became a bizarre androgynous figure. By using simultaneous citation, the actresses embody a number of “contradictory realities” that are “forced to peer into each other’s faces” (Stallybrass 1992, 71). Further, each of these re-productive performances is perpetually shifting, scene by scene, often moment by moment, continually citing masculinity and femininity differently so that the audience is constantly challenged to read the meanings assumed by their bodies and voices. They might convey this shifting materiality through the use of props, changes in costume, shifts in character choices or movements, or repetition of gestures. The way that this works is comparable to Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, which is the technique of alienation. The V-effekt, in Elin Diamond’s words (1997), “defamiliariz[es] a word, an idea, a gesture so as to enable the spectator to see or hear it afresh. . . . [B]y alienating (not simply rejecting) iconicity, by foregrounding the expectation of resemblance, [it exposes] the ideology of gender. . . . [T]he spectator is able to see what s/he can’t see: a sign system as a sign system” (45–47; emphasis in the original). The cross-gendered actress performs gender to reveal that it is a performance. In the process, she denaturalizes gender identity; she questions our perception of gender as a natural, or given, set of characteristics. Denaturalization also means “to make unnatural,” or to make strange. Women’s cross-gender performance can offer new and strange perspectives on gender identity. The audience is an active partner in creating these strange new meanings. While watching the actress in performance, the spectator is prompted to realize that any attempts to fix gender on her body are always “prosthetic,” to use Peter Stallybrass’s term. In a discussion of the “boy actresses” of the early modern period, Stallybrass (1992) writes that their performances made the audience realize that “the body as a whole . . . [is] a fantasy” (79). When the boy actress undressed onstage, the spectator’s attention was drawn back and forth between the costume and the presence of “the body beneath” (76).

Introduction

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These particular theatrical moments revealed the audience’s role in the prosthetic construction of gender. In women’s cross-gender performances of Shakespeare, the process that Stallybrass describes is intensified and expanded throughout the production as a whole. It is not only in particular moments that the audience is made aware of gender as prosthetic; rather, throughout the performance, the spectator is encouraged to fixate variously on the surface and on the imagined body beneath. This produces a “dual consciousness” for the modern-day audience member similar to the experience of spectators at early modern dramatic performances (Shapiro 1994, 2). These re-productive performances complicate the process of “reading” gender even further by exploring androgyny, albeit in a myriad of ways. Androgyny is a concept that has been much debated and often criticized in the academy. Some scholars have championed it as a way of resisting confining gender stereotypes. As Erica Stevens Abbitt (2001) writes, “androgyny has proved useful as a means to navigate unknown spaces in performance—not only the unmapped territory between male and female, or gay and straight, but also the juncture between expectation and reality, history and fiction, other and self” (250). Yet Barbara Gelpi (1997) articulates a major critique of androgyny when she notes that it often “underscores and reifies the [gender] binary it is attempting to transcend” (186). Etymologically the word indicates that an androgynous individual possesses both male and female characteristics; yet often the term has been used— particularly by reviewers of women’s cross-gender performances—to indicate the lack of sexed characteristics, rather than the simultaneous presence of both gender identities. One of the major reasons for the controversy over androgyny is that theorists tend to look at it as either a transcendent union of opposites, or as a subversively embodied sexuality. The former draws on a classical model and on Carl Jung’s psychological theory, in which androgyny represents, in Carolyn Heilbrun’s words (1982), “a spirit of reconciliation between the sexes; it suggests, further, a full range of experience open to individuals who may, as women, be aggressive, as men, tender; it suggests a spectrum upon which human beings choose their places without regard to propriety or custom” (x–xi). The problem with this view of androgyny is that it remains in the realm of the ideal, and does not account for how this vision can or should be embodied. Marjorie Garber (1995) champions the corporeal form of androgyny, which “is sexy when it is the vehicle (the physical form or performance we see) and not sexy when it is the tenor

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(the idea or idealization). When the performance is androgynous, it is frequently erotic, and its eroticism is often bisexual, appealing to both men and to women” (233). George Piggford (1997) in his work on “female androgynes,” such as the singer Annie Lennox, also finds androgyny to be profoundly embodied: “[T]he biological sex of the performer is an important aspect of the attempt to unsettle notions of gender, especially in cultures in which the male is regarded as the norm. These female/androgynous figures do not simply dress as men; rather, they . . . appear as gendered identities that might be placed in a range between masculine and feminine” (40). The actresses who wear the codpiece play with androgyny to create their complex, multilayered performances; yet their denaturalizations of maleness constitute the most challenging and unsettling aspects of their interpretations. When women perform masculinity, they show it to be artificial rather than immanent. Their performances violate the ideology of the male universal human subject, which posits that masculinity is not a construction, but rather “the thing itself.”3 In Halberstam’s words (1998), masculinity depends “on a relatively stable notion of the realness and the naturalness of both the male body and its signifying effects. . . . [M]asculinity ‘just is,’ whereas femininity reeks of the artificial” (234). Alisa Solomon (1993) agrees that “as the presumed universal, maleness is more invisible in its artificiality” (145). Femininity is the deviant Other to the stable, coherent masculine Self; thus, femaleness becomes the ultimate performance: a masquerade that proves the realness of masculinity. Male drag performance has helped to secure the characterization of femininity as all show and no substance; the figure of the stereotypical drag queen, loaded with outlandish signifiers of femininity, demonstrates how easily femaleness can be performed. Masculinity, on the other hand, has been constructed in Western cultures as “nonperformative,” which makes it difficult for women to embody (Halberstam 1998, 234). Male-to-female cross-gender performance can focus on exterior transformations and stylized gestures that have become the vocabulary of camp, while for female-to-male performers, there are no such precedents. Women’s cross-gender performances can be threatening because they reveal that masculinity is not the exclusive property of biologically male bodies. By highlighting the instability of masculinity, these re-productive performances undo the cultural myth that sex, defined as the anatomical differences between males and females, dictates gender, which refers to the cultural meanings that are

Introduction

13

assigned to sexed bodies. Further, women’s performances of masculinity are “a usurpation . . . [of] male preserves” and patriarchal right (Senelick 2000, 270). Female androgynes stimulate the act of reading on the part of the audience, confound the spectator’s interpretations through their indecipherability, and denaturalize gender, showing that it is a spectrum rather than a static binary.

Challenging Shakespeare’s Authority Just as women’s cross-gender performances can disrupt our conventional understanding of gender identity, they can also disrupt the traditional conception of Shakespeare within Western culture. They challenge the authority that has been ascribed to Shakespeare by scholars, critics, actors, directors, and audiences. This authority is based largely in the long-standing idea that Shakespeare is the greatest English-language writer because his plays are “universal”: timeless, unchanging, and encompassing all humanity. By casting a woman in a male role, these productions work against this notion of universality, particularly through the actresses’ disruptions of the iconicity of Shakespeare’s greatest male characters. Although the conception of Shakespeare’s plays as universal has been problematized by scholars, it nevertheless retains significant cultural power. As Sarah Werner (2001) writes, There should be no doubt that Shakespeare’s plays do not espouse universal values. . . . [Yet] popular belief . . . still figures him as our common ground. No matter how many forms he and his plays have taken over the centuries and across the globe, for Anglo-American populations in particular, Shakespeare appears as the founder of our culture and the carrier of our civilization. (2)

The idea that Shakespeare represents essential human nature is centuries old: Samuel Johnson, in the preface to his 1765 edition, wrote that Shakespeare is “the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life,” and his plays are “just representations of general nature” (Wimsatt 1969, 59). More recently, Harold Bloom has brought the ideology of universal Shakespeare to the mainstream reading public in his best-selling books The Western Canon (1994) and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998). In the latter, he takes Johnson’s argument further by claiming that Shakespeare not only represented human nature, but actually invented it. By reading

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Cross-Gender Shakespeare

Shakespeare, Bloom contends, we can better understand not only ourselves, but the very nature of existence: We keep returning to Shakespeare because we need him; no one else gives us so much of the world most of us take to be fact. . . . Our ideas as to what makes the self authentically human owe more to Shakespeare than ought to be possible. . . . The Complete Works of William Shakespeare could as soon be called The Book of Reality. . . . Shakespeare is not only in himself the Western canon; he has become the universal canon. . . . He extensively informs the language we speak, his principal characters have become our mythology, and he, rather than his involuntary follower Freud, is our psychologist. (17)

Bloom’s ideas and scholarship belong to a bygone era of Shakespearean criticism (as he himself admits); yet beyond the academy, his views are echoed throughout Anglo-American culture. They are voiced perfectly, for example, by a homeless black man on the streets of New York City, interviewed by Al Pacino in his 1996 film Looking for Richard. When asked what he knows about Shakespeare, the man launches into an eloquent argument about his virtues: “When we speak with no feelings we get nothing out of our society. We should speak like Shakespeare. . . . We should introduce Shakespeare into the academic [sic]. You know why? Because then the kids would have feelings. . . . [I]f we were taught to feel, we wouldn’t be so violent.” Pacino asks, “And you think Shakespeare helps us with that?” The man responds, “He did more than help us; he instructed us.” Although Pacino’s film takes a nonacademic approach to its subject, the meanings that emerge are identical to those expressed by Bloom: Shakespeare’s plays are so powerful that they speak to us all across our differences, and tell us who we are. As contemporary scholarship has shown, this characterization of Shakespeare as the poet of universal experience is problematic on several levels: first, it depends upon an ahistorical conception of the plays as stable texts; second, it is essentialist and elitist; and third, it locates meanings only within the texts themselves, ignoring the wider cultural context into which Shakespeare has emerged. In order to view the plays as authoritative, we must assume they are texts that incarnate Shakespeare’s voice and original intentions. Scholars have debunked this assumption as an inaccurate representation of the textual history of the plays, most of which exist in different versions published during and immediately following Shakespeare’s lifetime.4 Further, because of the conditions of the early modern theater—in

Introduction

15

which revision and collaboration among playwrights were common—it is difficult to assign Shakespearean authority to a particular version of any of the plays. As Stephen Orgel (1991) writes, “the notion of final or complete versions assumed by virtually all modern editors of Shakespeare is inconsistent with everything we know . . . about Renaissance theatrical practice” (86). Thus, because we cannot claim any version of the plays as original, it becomes difficult to argue that they communicate authoritative meanings about universal truths. Further, the concept of universality as articulated by proponents such as Bloom is essentialist. It assumes, as Terence Hawkes (1996) writes, “that human nature is permanent, one and indivisible regardless of place, race, creed and culture. In the end, under the skin, we are all the same and it is to this sameness that Shakespeare speaks” (10). In particular, this concept of universality also ignores the ways in which the human subject has been constructed as male in Western cultures, and therefore writes gender difference out of the picture. Finally, universalist ideology tends to focus exclusively on how the plays transmit Shakespeare’s authority. Yet, as Michael Bristol (1996) has shown, the word “Shakespeare” refers “equivocally to a particular man, an author, a body of works, a system of cultural institutions, and, by extension, a set of attitudes and dispositions” (ix). Rather than locating meaning only within the plays, it is important to examine the meanings that are released by the uses of Shakespeare in the culture at large; or, as Hawkes (1992) has written, not how the plays themselves mean, but how “we mean by” them (3). Despite the problems with claiming Shakespeare’s work as authoritative and universal, audiences (including theater critics) often go to performances of his plays wanting to see the “real” Shakespeare, and measure the performance by whether or not they feel it has been “true” to the play and its author. What might constitute “the real thing” is, of course, subjective, not to mention historically variable. Yet this does not prevent reviewers, in particular, from coming to the theater with a set of expectations that must be satisfied by the performance. This, in turn, creates a culture in which the choices made by actors and directors can be deemed legitimate (“true to Shakespeare”) or illegitimate (“not Shakespeare”). Given this cultural climate, theater practitioners often justify their work by using discourses of Shakespearean authenticity and authority. As Andrew Hartley (2005) notes, The general rhetorical mode . . . [is] to use Shakespeare the author as a way of authorizing or justifying what is, should be, or should not be

16

Cross-Gender Shakespeare done on stage under his name. Actors, directors, and critics persist in claiming to discover authorial intent, which proves the validity of their work in ways flatly contradicted by the dominant theoretical sense of how theatre actually works. (62)

For example, when Frances de la Tour played Hamlet at the Half Moon Theatre in London in 1979, she told the press that the production had nothing to do with gender or with feminism; rather, the director cast the best actor—male or female—for the role. “He [director Robert Walker] simply wanted certain qualities in his Hamlet and I happened to have them; and if he’d found them in a man, doubtless he’d have given the part to him.” Further, de la Tour argued that since Shakespeare’s great male roles represent general human experiences, a woman should be able to play them just as well as a man: “[Hamlet is] such a universal, expressing all the emotions of youth—and life—and there isn’t another part to match it” (Howard 2007, 267). Therefore, the purpose in casting a woman in a male role was not to highlight gender differences but to mask them, by focusing on the character as a representative of humanity. In making these claims about Shakespeare’s universal humanism, de la Tour and Walker are not alone; the directors and leading actresses of the cross-gender Richard II and King Lear made very similar claims. As W. B. Worthen (1997) writes, “The sense that performance transmits Shakespearean authority remains very much in play. . . . ‘Shakespeare’—sometimes coded as the ‘text,’ its ‘genre,’ or the ‘theatre’ itself—remains an apparently indispensable category for preparing, interpreting, and evaluating theatrical performance” (3). This emphasis on authorial authority enacts a particular kind of mimetic practice: performances aim to reflect a recognizable image of Shakespeare for their audiences, based on a conventional ideology of his universal greatness. Directors and actors continually cite this normative portrait of Shakespeare, audiences go to the theater expecting to see the real thing, and thus much mainstream theater performance does not question the faulty concept of Shakespearean authority. The performances considered in this book are particularly vulnerable, both to specious claims of universality, and to charges that they fail to honor Shakespeare’s authority by doing justice to his plays. As Werner (2001) notes, “Women’s work on the plays as actors and directors has continually been measured by whether or not it lives up to expectations of universality” (18). Women’s cross-gender

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performances pose a particular challenge to the universal ideal because they intervene in the performance traditions of male actors that have “served” the plays, and because they disrupt the iconicity of the male characters they play. Watching Frances de la Tour play Hamlet, for example, the spectator would be deprived of the nostalgic experience described by Martin Buzacott (1991): [F]or lovers of Shakespearean theatre, there is nothing more pleasurable than the memories of performances that have been witnessed over the years, the comparisons between individual actors in the same roles, the witnessing of legendary, distinguished and even notorious occasions in modern Shakespearean interpretation. Lined up in the imagination are all the Hamlets—Olivier, Gielgud, Guinness, Burton, Williamson, Jacobi . . . each a yardstick on which the latest production is measured. (1)

The actresses who wear the codpiece interrupt the litany of revered male actors to discard the well-worn (and notably phallic) “yardstick” on which productions are measured. In catalogs of favorite performances of a particular role (an activity coveted by the mainstream press), the gender of the performers invariably matches the gender of the character. Oliver Ford Davies, when preparing to play King Lear in 2001, listed the performances he had seen for an article in the Daily Telegraph (February 2, 2002): “Wolfit, Gielgud, Laughton, Scofield, and more recently Brian Cox, John Wood, Robert Stephens, Tom Wilkinson.”5 Similarly, when an actress’s performance of a male role is placed next to a performance of the same role by a male actor, the actress almost always suffers by comparison. For example, Vanessa Redgrave’s performance as Prospero was detrimentally compared by the critics to the nostalgically remembered greatness of the late John Gielgud, who played Prospero multiple times over the course of his august career. Not only are actresses usually excluded from lists of “great performances” of a particular role, they are often seen as superfluous to catalogs of legendary actors full-stop. The actor Antony Sher recounted his experiences preparing to play Edmund Kean in an article for the Guardian (May 24, 2007): If I were to quickly jot down the pedigree line of great British actors . . . it would go: Richard Burbage, David Garrick, Kean, Henry Irving, John Gielgud/Laurence Olivier. It’s harder with actresses, but the list probably starts with Sarah Siddons, then may need to include

18

Cross-Gender Shakespeare two non-Brits, Eleonora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt, then continues with Ellen Terry, Sybil Thorndike/Edith Evans, and Peggy Ashcroft.

Sher’s comments reveal that he is tentative in creating a “pedigree line” of actresses, but has no problem naming actors. He does not advance an opinion on why it is “harder with actresses,” but it is telling that all the male actors he mentions are “great” because of their associations with Shakespeare. All the actresses mentioned are also associated with Shakespeare, but for the most part (Siddons’s and Bernhardt’s Hamlets excepted) did not play against gender. There are fewer opportunities for leading roles and star-making performances by women in Shakespeare’s plays, and when women play male roles they are usually seen as interlopers whose interpretations are bizarre. (Both Siddons and Bernhardt, for instance, were mocked in the press for their Hamlets.) Vanessa Redgrave might make the cut for a list of great British actresses, but there is no room for her Prospero on a list that includes male actors such as those mentioned by Sher. The reason why performances like Redgrave’s do not measure up on the theatrical “yardstick” is that they tend to disrupt the iconicity of Shakespeare’s male characters. Elin Diamond (1997) defines iconicity, in the Brechtian sense, as “the conventional resemblance between the performer’s body and the object, or character, to which it refers. . . . [B]y alienating (not simply rejecting) iconicity, by foregrounding the expectation of resemblance, the ideology of gender is exposed and thrown back to the spectator” (45–46). When audiences attend a Shakespearean performance, they not only expect that the production will be true to their version of the play, they also expect that the actor will resemble the character that s/he plays. This does not mean that there is only one way that an actor can look or behave in a particular role; there are as many Lears, for instance, as there have been productions of the play. But for the most part audiences expect that an actor will look like their idea of “Lear,” which means, first and foremost, that the actor will be male. Paul Scofield, acclaimed as “the best ever Lear” by Nicolas Soames in the Sunday Times (December 30, 2001), is praised for his “mountain voice,” his “immense yet quiet charisma,” and by the end of the article, he is Lear: “King Lear and Paul Scofield seem to merge.” In contrast, the announcement of Kathryn Hunter’s casting as Lear was greeted with an article in the Daily Telegraph ( January 17, 1997) titled, “This woman is to play King Lear. Why?” When placed next to male actors such as Scofield, Hunter cuts a decidedly unconventional figure, as

Introduction

19

do all of the actresses considered in this book. In contemplating their performances, the spectator becomes aware of the construction of masculinity, but also of the conventional characterizations of Shakespeare’s male characters by male actors. The actresses’ interpretations show that the theater can open up gender, character, text, and author to new and transformational meanings, which is why they are perceived by the press as threatening to the status of Shakespeare within the culture, and, as a result, to English national identity.

The Threat to English National Identity The critical controversies over these productions in the press confirm their threatening nature. It is evident from reading the reviews that many critics are well aware of the challenges that the actresses pose to mimetic theater, gender, and Shakespeare, and thus use a variety of devices to dismiss them and to make them look ridiculous. They claim that casting a woman in a male Shakespearean role is a device to sell tickets, and should not be taken seriously. They also argue that the performances are simply humorous, because they strain the audience’s suspension of disbelief and push beyond acceptable limits of theatrical realism. Some reviewers call for the expulsion of the performances from the stage, arguing that cross-gender casting has nothing to contribute to audiences’ understanding of the characters or the plays. Further, many critics feel that the actresses do not pay homage to Shakespearean authority, and characterize their performances as “illegitimate.” Because these productions disrupt the critical and performance traditions of the plays and question the stability of the texts, the reviewers find them threatening to Shakespeare’s status and reputation. Such reviews demonstrate this concern by repeatedly invoking Shakespeare’s greatness and critiquing the actress for failing to do justice to the play and to its author. Although none of the reviewers overtly mentions national identity in their attacks on the productions, I argue that at the heart of their anxiety over Shakespeare is a much bigger concern for the integrity of Englishness. Because these performances can re-constitute Shakespeare, showing his plays and characters in new and transformative lights, they can also undermine the ideology of English identity to which Shakespeare has been harnessed. As Krishan Kumar (2003) has shown, beginning in the early 1990s, “there has been a massive and unprecedented inquiry into the national soul” in Britain (251). This inquiry has yielded important questions: What

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Cross-Gender Shakespeare

is national identity? What is Englishness? How is it different from “Britishness”? These questions have no easy answers, and have sparked a crisis in national identity, in which the English have turned to the past for self-definition; in particular, to the Elizabethan era, and to Shakespeare, as monuments of English greatness. When performances of Shakespeare’s plays question this greatness, they also threaten the attempts to define Englishness as a strong, positive identity. Staged during a high point in the crisis of English national identity, women’s cross-gender performances of Shakespeare are an important part of the debate about the nature of Englishness. Any attempt to define Englishness reveals that national identity is a fundamentally unstable concept; under scrutiny, the idea easily breaks down. As Benedict Anderson (1991) writes, “Nation, nationality, nationalism—all have proved notoriously difficult to define, let alone to analyze. In contrast to the immense influence that nationalism has exerted on the modern world, plausible theory about it is conspicuously meager” (3). He goes on to define the nation as “an imagined political community,” implying that nations do not essentially exist, but are rather constructed (6). M. Spiering (1992) agrees that “national identity . . . is what people feel it to be. . . . [A]ny attempt at absolute definition should be recognized as ‘futile’ ” (8). Trying to define English identity is particularly futile, primarily because one must first identify what, exactly, “England” is, and how it relates to “Britain.” Politically speaking, England is one of four nations that make up the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. But semantically, the distinction is far from clear. “English” and “British” are often used interchangeably to describe various populations. More insidiously, as Kumar (2003) has shown, England has often been made to stand in for the whole of Britain, providing “a constant reminder of . . . England’s hegemony over the rest of the British Isles. . . . [The general rule is] to see all the major events and achievements of national life as English” (1–2). So, for instance, it is still common for Shakespearean scholars to write about “early modern England” or for historians to reference “English history,” without taking into account the fact that, as Willy Maley (1997) points out, “When England was not a colony of Rome or France, it held colonies itself—Ireland from the twelfth century, Wales from the thirteenth—and was thus always something more or less than selfcontained” (94). Scholars such as Maley are proponents of the “new British history,” an academic movement that has sought to correct the problem of synecdochially substituting English for British and

Introduction

21

recognizes instead that “British history denotes the historiography of no single nation but of a problematic and uncompleted experiment in the creation and interaction of several nations” (Greenfield 2002, 71). In light of this important work, I use Britain when talking about the location in which these performances took place, and British when describing reviewers writing in the popular press. However, I use English when talking about national identity because it is the fictional ideal of Englishness to which Shakespeare is most often linked, unconsciously or deliberately, in public discourses. If, as Maley (1997) writes, “Shakespeare is English” and “English is Shakespeare” (96), it is necessary to define Englishness during the period—1995–2004—in which women’s cross-gender performances of Shakespeare flourished. To come to terms with this problematic identity, we must look earlier, to the collapse of the British empire. Imperialism, many scholars agree, was central to the construction of English national identity. Jed Esty (2004) has shown that Englishness is “shaped and haunted by forms of imperial experience and knowledge” (6), while Roger Ellis and Liz Oakley-Brown (2001) assert that “English self-definition . . . cannot be understood without reference to the imposition of English culture, first throughout the British Isles, and later across the globe” (5). This thesis is central to Kumar’s The Making of English National Identity (2003), in which he elaborates: The enigma of English nationalism . . . can best be approached by considering it as the nationalism of an imperial state. It helps explain the character of English nationalism over many centuries . . . and it helps to explain why questions of national identity have surfaced so urgently in the wake of empire, and why it has been so hard to find convincing answers. . . . [T]he English have experienced acute difficulty in establishing a sense of themselves. This is the legacy of all examples of missionary nationalism. Who are we when the mission fails, or is aborted? (34–35)

The end of empire has resulted in the loss of self-definition because of the loss of a “mission,” but also because of the relational nature of national identity. The Self needs an Other against which to define itself. Englishness, in this view, is, for example, “not Irish,” or “not Asian.” As Bernard Crick (1991) writes, quoting Philip Dodd, “Any deep exploration of Englishness must begin by seeing it as a relationship. . . . ‘[T]he definition of the English is inseparable from that of the non-English’ ” (94). Esty (2004) cites postcolonial theorist Homi

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Cross-Gender Shakespeare

Bhabha’s conception of this model, in which “the nation, when it is no longer defined against its ‘Other or Outside,’ finds itself foundering on its own internal contradictions, since there can be no effective, positive, or final signification of the people” (15). Therefore, with the loss of empire, and the resulting absence of the “Other,” the English have been forced to gaze inward, to try and figure out who they are. This process of self-contemplation has produced considerable anxiety in British culture, particularly because British (and English) identity after World War II has widely been seen as degenerative. Many factors have contributed to the transformation of Britain into a second-rate nation: the loss of empire, the decline in economic status, the entrance into the European Union, the increasing fervor of nationalist movements throughout the United Kingdom, particularly in Scotland, and the failure of the second Iraq War, among others. Spiering (1992) has argued that the characterization of Britain as a nation in decline has become so commonplace “that it cannot itself sustain a debate” (26). Such a depressing diagnosis prompts Graham Holderness (1995) to query, “If the ‘nation’ in question happens, like Britain, to be an eclipsed world power—no longer a great imperial aggressor, no longer a significant colonial leader, no longer a dominant industrial or economic force—then what basis remains for a particular, quantifiable ‘national’ consciousness?” (219). This crisis is reflected in the popular press as well as academic scholarship. Nicholas Tate, writing in the Sunday Times (August 27, 2000), noted that “the English sense a vacuum at the heart of things.” Confronted with this pressing problem, certain forces within British culture (such as the Tory government of the early to mid-1990s and much of the mainstream press) look to the past for self-definition, finding inspiration in particular in English literary and cultural heritage. As Kiki Gounaridou (2005) writes, “When a nation seeks to be reconnected with a sense of national identity, its cultural celebrations often express nostalgia for a past that defines a cultural high point in its history” (1). Sixteenth-century England—and the Tudor monarchy in particular—is quite frequently the focus of the nostalgic turn in contemporary British culture, primarily because it is seen as the period in which England’s rise as a world power began. Some scholars have argued that the Elizabethan era in particular was the cradle of English nationalism, and that the writers of the period were actively engaged in creating an ideology of Englishness. Richard Helgerson (1992) notes that writers such as Shakespeare created “an experiential and structural model of national self-writing. . . . To men born

Introduction

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in the 1550s and 1560s, things English came to matter with a special intensity both because England itself mattered more than it had and because other sources of identity and cultural authority mattered less” (3). In this view, Shakespeare was an integral part of writing Englishness into being in the later years of the Tudor monarchy. Because of this nostalgic tendency in the search to define English national identity, Shakespeare has become more important than ever to creating a strong and positive conception of Englishness. He is seen as a crucial part of this identity, and has been since the eighteenth century, when the promotion of his greatness was important to the construction of English cultural superiority, particularly in contradistinction to the French. As Jonathan Bate (1997) has shown, “Emergent English nationalism in the period throve on popular Francophobia. . . . [T]he veneration of Shakespeare as English national poet was in the first place a response to a patronizing and disparaging attitude towards his works on the part of French critics and a Francophile court taste” (169). Shakespeare’s status and reputation as the National Poet was officially secured by David Garrick’s 1769 Jubilee celebration in Stratford and London, which associated him explicitly with a particular ideology of England. Michael Dobson (1992) notes: “[B]y the 1760s Shakespeare is so firmly established as the morally uplifting master of English letters that his reputation no longer seems to depend on his specific achievements as a dramatist: a ubiquitous presence in British culture, his fame is so synonymous with the highest claims of contemporary nationalism that simply to be British is to inherit him” (214). This identification of Shakespeare with Englishness—in particular with the superiority of English literature and culture—persists today, although the Shakespeare industry is multinational. His presence is continually felt in British culture, and not only through the performance of his plays in the theater, on television, and in film. He is the foundation of the Western canon and a pillar of the British educational system, in which the study of his plays remains compulsory. He is constantly quoted and invoked by the popular press, even in articles that have little or nothing to do with the plays. He is used by political figures to bolster their causes and to perpetuate a sense of English (and British) nationalism and pride. He was voted the official “Man of the Millennium” by Radio Four’s listeners in 1999.6 He is a staple of the British tourism and heritage industry, with his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon pulling in over a million visitors a year. In discussions of Shakespeare’s place in contemporary culture, pundits argue that he is a crucial part of

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Cross-Gender Shakespeare

English heritage, and the birthright of every English child. An article titled “Thrilling as Shakespeare” in the Daily Telegraph (May 2, 2000) sums up this viewpoint: “No writer has had so profound an effect on our language and, by extension, on the way in which we shape our thoughts. . . . No wonder the Bard was voted Personality of the Millennium. Familiarity with his works binds us together as much as our English tongue.”7 Despite this centrality, Shakespeare’s status is continually challenged and debated in Britain, particularly in battles over the educational curriculum in secondary schools and universities. Academic scholarship by feminists, Marxists, and cultural materialists has questioned the characterization of Shakespeare as universal and attacked the Western canon as promulgating the study of dead white male authors. The British press continually reports such important debates, which appear alongside articles questioning the relevance of Shakespeare to contemporary culture. These articles inspire passionate defenses of the Bard, with repeated invocations that Shakespeare is not only key to any understanding of humanity, but is also an integral part of English identity and heritage. Women’s cross-gender performances are part of these debates about the place of Shakespeare in contemporary British culture. The performances insist that audiences challenge the conception of Shakespeare as universal, and encourage them to read the plays differently. By departing from received interpretations, these productions threaten the ideology of Shakespeare that underpins English national identity. Theatrical performances present a particularly potent challenge to the stability of national identity because of the ways in which they can re-constitute the subjects that they represent. Through the shifting significance attached to the materiality of the actress, these performances reveal the mutability of identity, and make it difficult to claim Shakespeare and Englishness as stable constructs. The potential of the theater to undo national identity is realized through the body of the cross-gender performer, and this creates anxiety on the part of reviewers. These productions have powerfully significant antecedents in the stage performances of early modern Britain, which likewise destabilized national identity through the use of cross-gender performance, albeit male-to-female rather than female-to-male. As with the responses of theater critics today, the most persuasive evidence that the early modern performances were threatening comes from the attacks on the theater written by the radical group known as “anti-theatricalists.” Through a consideration

Introduction

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of their writings, we can see how the theater has long been viewed as transgressive because it has the potential to transform what it represents to its audiences. Women’s cross-gender performances, and the negative reactions to them, are not isolated incidents, but draw on a centuries-old tradition of theater and theatrical criticism that challenges and expands the idea of the nation itself. As with contemporary women’s performances of male Shakespearean roles, the “boy actresses” of the early modern theater threatened the stability of the male/female binary by revealing the performativity of gender. The anti-theatrical writings amply demonstrate that the cross-cast male performer was a source of considerable anxiety because of his destabilizing performances of gender. William Prynne, writing in 1633, expressed the conviction that “stage-playes . . . effeminate their Actors and Spectators, making them . . . unmanly, both in their habites, gestures, speeches, complements, and their whole deportment: enervating and resolving the virility and vigor of their minds” (546). Theatrical performance thus possessed the power to threaten the masculine identities of actors and audiences alike. According to Prynne and his fellow writers, cross-gender playing produced erotic responses in male audience members, “excit[ing] many adulterous filthy lusts” (Prynne 1633, 208), and led to deviant sexual practices between actors and spectators offstage. In the writings of anti-theatricalists, the theater is a space of transgression, in which boundaries of gender, the body, and desire break down, causing social disorder both in the playhouses and in everyday life. The concern over cross-gender performance is linked to fears about the integrity of the nation and national identity; because these writers base their ideology of Englishness in the strict maintenance of normative gender roles, the theater disrupts both gender and national identity. Therefore, the figure of the “boy actress” stands at the center of the controversy about how the theater undoes England, the “Christian commonwealth.” England emerges through the writings of Prynne and other antitheatricalists as a diseased body, corrupted by the poisonous influences of plays and players. The body can only be cured if the offending elements are expunged completely. The writers offer to diagnose the problem, and then deliver it to the magistrates, who will play the surgeons and cut the offending cancer out of the commonwealth. Stephen Gosson, writing in 1582, “beseech[es] God so to touch the heartes of our Magistrates with a perfite hatred of sinne . . . that these wicked artes, may be driven out of Englande, may bee shutt from the

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companie of the Godly, & . . . separated from us by Sea and Lande” (Kinney 1974, 158). The body will only be able to function normally when plays and players are literally outside the bounds of the nation. Gosson and other anti-theatricalists predict that if the magistrates do not expel the players, the consequences will most certainly be disastrous. John Northbrooke (1843) addresses his country directly: “[E]xcepte thou, Englande, amende thy manners, and bring forth better fruites of the gospell, thou wilte . . . perishe” (179–180). His prescription for the health of the country is given urgency by the internal changes that the anti-theatricalists found within society, which threatened the integrity of national identity itself. Because of the corrupting influence of the theater, and of cross-gender playing in particular, the members of the commonwealth are starting to become “un-English,” according to Prynne (1633): “For whence is it that many of our Gentry are lately degenerated into . . . effeminacy . . . so player-like in their deportment; . . . so unmanly, degenerous, and un-English . . . in their whole conversation; is it not principally from their resort to Playes . . . the very Schooles to traine them up in all effeminacy, and fantastique folly? Undoubtedly it is” (546). Instead of behaving like Christians, who reject the theater because it offers a distorted image of truth, the citizens are becoming like players, and hence are becoming beings who are not true Englishmen. Prynne’s words convey the instability of Englishness as an identity, and endow the theater with the power to transform both gender and nation by directly affecting its spectators. The early modern anti-theatricalists as a group decried the theater and simultaneously affirmed its power as a cultural form. Similarly, the theater reviewers today who attack women’s cross-gender performances of Shakespeare confirm the importance of the productions that they discredit and dismiss. Their anxiety over the stability of Shakespeare and England, much like the anti-theatricalists’ fears for the integrity of masculinity and national identity, attests that the theater has the power to disrupt and transform ideologies of gender and nation. While reviewers in contemporary Britain do not seek to banish the theater, as their early modern counterparts did, they do attempt to regulate it. Critics act as self-appointed guardians of theatrical tradition, policing the boundaries of productions and defining what constitutes “legitimate” Shakespeare. Although these critics do not seek to separate offending theater practitioners “by Sea and Lande,” they continually call for an end to women’s cross-gender performances of Shakespeare. Like the anti-theatricalists, they claim that

Introduction

27

the spectators can resist the allure of such productions: for example, Andrew Temple of the Independent, in an article on Fiona Shaw’s Richard II (May 21, 1995), calls upon the audience members to “laugh and throw fruit” to drive Shaw and those like her from the stage permanently. Yet now, as then, the audiences have largely ignored these directives, embracing rather than rejecting the transformative power of the theater.

Women’s Cross-Gender Performances of Shakespeare, 1995–2004 As many reviewers of these seven productions noted, women playing male roles in Shakespeare is hardly a new phenomenon. The tradition dates back to the Restoration theater and became more popular on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stages in Britain and America. Over the course of this period, actresses played a wide variety of male parts, including Hamlet, Romeo, Iago, Richard III, Shylock, Macbeth, and Cardinal Wolsey (Russell 1996, 135). They also played juvenile roles, such as Fleance in Macbeth or the Duke of York in Richard III, as well as more ambiguously gendered roles, such as the Fool in King Lear, Ariel in The Tempest, and Oberon and Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There is some evidence that even when this tradition was at its height in the early nineteenth century it was not considered mainstream; for instance, many actresses chose male roles exclusively for their benefits or other one-off performances. Further, only a handful of actresses achieved real success in these parts; the American actress Charlotte Cushman, who was famous for her Romeo on both sides of the Atlantic, is the exception rather than the rule. More commonly, actresses ran the risk of being mocked and their performances panned. As Tony Howard (2007) has shown, even the great Sarah Siddons was attacked by the critics when she played Hamlet: “The problems opened up by tragic cross-dressing were fraught and the women who followed Siddons as Hamlet needed a degree of courage as well as enterprise. . . . [Women’s cross-gender performance] was delightful when it met male expectations, distasteful when it challenged them” (42). But the fact remains that women’s cross-gender performance of Shakespeare was far more common on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British stage than it has been in subsequent years. The convention began to die out in the late nineteenth century, due to the changing conditions of theatrical performance, and also because of the “rise of variety

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entertainment, specifically burlesque” (Mullenix 2000, 237).8 As Anne Russell (1996) notes, in Britain “by the early twentieth century, tragic crossdressing was regarded as an eccentric, old-fashioned convention which had faded away in the new, realist, post-Ibsen theatre” (139). In the twentieth century there were only a few notable British performances, such as Frances de la Tour’s Hamlet. There have also been some fringe productions that used experimental cross-gender casting: for instance, the Sphinx Theatre Company (formerly the Women’s Theatre Group) has produced an all-female Hamlet (1992) and a gender-reversed As You Like It (2003, in which women played male roles and vice-versa). However, it was not until 1995 that Fiona Shaw’s Richard II revived substantial interest in the practice on mainstream stages in Britain.9 This book begins with Shaw’s innovative portrayal as the subject of chapter two, and traces a chronological narrative, concluding with the all-female productions at the Globe Theatre in chapter six. This structure charts the ideological progression of women’s crossgender performances of Shakespeare between 1995 and 2004. The first three productions—Richard II, King Lear, and The Tempest—all used selective cross-casting, meaning that only the central male role was played by a woman in each production. These productions also posed the most substantial challenges to the equation of Shakespeare with Englishness. In Richard II, director Deborah Warner cast an Irish woman in the role of an English king, deliberately highlighting the colonial issues present in the text and disrupting the association of Shakespeare’s history plays with the creation of English national identity. Helena Kaut-Howson, the director of the 1997 King Lear, also disassociated the play from an English context by taking inspiration from the life of her Polish mother, particularly through Kathryn Hunter’s characterization of Lear as both mother and father. Lenka Udovicki, the director of The Tempest in 2000, likewise dislocated the play to Eastern Europe, characterizing Vanessa Redgrave’s Prospero as a Balkan refugee rather than a magisterial imperialist. All three productions were attacked by reviewers for failing, in various ways and to various degrees, to do justice to Shakespeare. The productions that followed all attempted to recuperate women’s cross-gender performance and mitigate the challenges that the practice posed to ideologies of Englishness. Matthew Francis’ 2001 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream regendered most of the “mechanicals” from male to female, including Dawn French’s Bottom, to bolster a nostalgic production concept—Britain during the Blitz—that would

Introduction

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appeal to conventional English nationalism. The all-female performances at the Globe in 2003 and 2004 also attempted to yoke their productions to a nostalgic sense of English heritage by exploring “original practices”—such as staging, costumes, and settings—that would have been used in Shakespeare’s theater. The critics responded with better overall reviews for Francis’s Dream and the all-female productions, indicating that they were seen as less threatening to masculinity, Shakespearean authority, and English national identity. Despite their differences in performance practices, all seven productions offered new and revelatory possibilities for performing the plays and their leading characters. In chapter two, I show how Warner’s Richard II re-wrote the complex relationship between Richard and his cousin Bolingbroke as a passionate and personal involvement that inflected their political conflicts. Yet the many gendered meanings cited by Shaw’s body meant that it was difficult to read the relationship as either heterosexual or homosexual, just as it was impossible to read Richard as either male or female. Chapter three reveals that Kaut-Howson used the discrepancy between Hunter (a five-foot-tall, thirty-nine-year-old woman) and the aged Lear to estrange the king’s gender, age, and monarchical authority. The production ultimately found particular gendered meanings within a character and play that critical and performance traditions acclaim as universal. Chapter four argues that Redgrave explored gender identity through an emphasis on Prospero as a parent. By bringing together signifiers of masculinity and femininity through her physical performance and her interpretation of the character, she challenged the audience to read Prospero as a complex mother/father figure to Miranda, Ariel, and even Caliban. Despite concessions to convention through its nostalgic production design, Francis’s Dream, the subject of chapter five, transformed French’s Mrs. Bottom into a very male ass by the mischievous Puck. Her performance suggested androgynous physicality and queer sexuality, subverting the production’s nostalgia. Finally, chapter six argues that the three all-female performances were less challenging to normative gender roles than the selectively cross-cast productions. They deliberately diminished the discrepancy between actress and character palpable in productions where the cross-cast actress performs alongside male actors. However, the chapter also shows how Kathryn Hunter’s Richard III and Janet McTeer’s Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew nonetheless disrupted both gender identity and Shakespeare. Hunter’s Richard was continually trying, and failing, to be a real man, while McTeer

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embodied Petruchio’s masculinity with consummate, and rather unsettling, ease. They worked in tandem with the all-female casts to defamiliarize Shakespeare’s plays: by asserting women’s right to re-tell history, and by destabilizing the ending of the problematic Shrew. The actresses in the all-female productions at the Globe were the only performers considered in this book who wore actual codpieces, as part of their Elizabethan costumes. The other actresses took on the appendage figuratively, through their performances of masculinity. Wearing the codpiece, both literally and metaphorically, allows women to simultaneously appropriate and critique male dominance, power, and privilege. Through their performances, they can re-make our traditional ideas about theater, gender, Shakespeare, and nation. These seven performances were staged during a period of crisis, in which “the English find themselves called upon to reflect upon their identity, and to re-think their position in the world. The protective walls that shielded them from these questions are coming down” (Kumar 2003, 16). These actresses invert the original function of the codpiece, removing the protective walls that have been built to shield masculinity, Shakespearean authority, and Englishness from scrutiny. In doing so, they, like Shakespeare’s Julia, expose themselves to ridicule and misogynistic attack. Their courageous performances are sites of conflict over one of the most essential issues in Britain today: how to define the self.

CHAPTER 2

THE KING’S MANY BODIES: FIONA SHAW’S RICHARD II (1995–96)

“

T

hey don’t come more dangerous or daring than this,” wrote critic Carole Woddis about Deborah Warner’s production of Richard II at the Royal National Theatre (Glasgow Herald, June 6, 1995). The “dangerous” element was the casting of Irish actress Fiona Shaw in the title role, and her “daring” performance produced a mixed critical response. While some reviewers responded rapturously, many demonstrated overt hostility to a woman playing a male Shakespearean role. Andrew Temple, writing in the Independent (May 21, 1995), complained, “A female Richard II is the sort of thing you might expect to see at the end of term in a boarding school but there is no history of the part being played by a woman professionally. . . . It is gimmick casting.” Jack Tinker, in a review for the Daily Mail titled “Fiona’s King is a Drag” ( June 16, 1995), dismissed her performance as having mere “curiosity value.” And Julie Burchill, in a piece for the Sunday Times ( June 11, 1995), used the production as an opportunity to lampoon what she termed “Third Sexers”: “It has become an acceptable liberal line in recent years that anything which ‘crosses the gender boundary’ is a Good Thing. . . . This includes transvestites, transsexuals . . . and now ‘Third Sexers.’ As if two hadn’t caused enough trouble!” This sampling of critical responses indicates that the production was dangerous because it challenged the boundaries of legitimate or acceptable choices in performing Shakespeare on the contemporary British stage. Perhaps to downplay the provocative nature of her casting choice, Warner claimed that Shaw was simply the best actor, male or female, for the role: “Fiona for me is the most exciting and suitable Richard I could think of,” she told Claire Armitstead of the Guardian (May 31, 1995). Both women were adamant that their production was

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neither feminist nor about gender. Shaw told Christian Tyler of the Financial Times that “it is not a feminist gesture in any way, and I think all the more poetic for it” (September 12, 1995). She also told me in an interview, “We were trying to push boundaries, but about theater, not gender.”1 They bolstered their assertions by emphasizing the supposedly universal appeal of Shakespeare’s text, which is “not about the nature of gender, it’s about the nature of being” (Rutter 1997, 315; emphasis in the original). Warner and Shaw’s disclaimers seem defensive, designed to deflect the antagonism that the British press aimed at their production. It is understandable that the director and her leading actress would downplay the importance of gender to their Richard II, given the suspicion with which nontraditional gender casting is greeted by theater reviewers in Britain. It is likewise clear why they would disassociate themselves from feminism, in light of Benedict Nightingale’s misgivings that the production would be “the thin end of a great wedge of radical feminists with beards” (Times, June 5, 1995). Although Warner’s approach was not avowedly feminist, she did feel that Shaw’s gender was important to the production and to the characterization of Richard. As she explained, casting Shaw in the role meant that “the one thing you were going to get for free was the discrepancy, the awkwardness, the person unfitted for the role because they were even the wrong gender. . . . I wanted everybody who came across Richard to have a great big problem when they met this person who must be male through virtue of being a king, yet who looked like a woman and was effeminate” (Cousin 1996, 233). Warner’s comments indicate that she cast Shaw to deliberately create a clash of signifiers (male role, female body) in her performance. This quotation was taken from an interview with a theater scholar published in an academic journal, suggesting that when she was not talking to the popular press, Warner was more willing to discuss the gendered implications of her casting choice. Yet Warner and Shaw were not the only ones who found conflicting meanings in their Richard II. In the discourses surrounding the production, many different voices have emerged to confront each other about what they saw in Shaw’s performance. Grace Tiffany (1999), for example, argues that the casting of Shaw “worked to reinscribe age-old stereotypes about ‘womanish’ behavior or effeminacy” (121). Richard II is not an especially “manly” king; the play and its critical and performance traditions link his lack of success as a monarch with his “effeminate” nature: his physical and mental weakness, his

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changeability, and his affinity for words rather than action.2 Tiffany argues that Shaw’s performance did not show the audience anything new about gender; rather, it exploited and reinforced the stereotypically feminine attributes in the character. She uses Shaw’s Richard to make a larger claim: that women’s cross-gender performances of Shakespeare will always be conventional, rather than revolutionary, because the actresses’ interpretations must necessarily be “about” their femininity first and foremost. Tiffany’s appraisal is thus in line with reviewers such as Rhoda Koenig, who dismissed Shaw’s Richard as a “stereotypical girlie . . . [who] doesn’t have enough maleness to play Peter Pan” (Independent, June 5, 1995). Another common response to the production, voiced by scholars and theater critics alike, was that Shaw’s gender “just didn’t matter,” in Deborah Paige’s words (Guardian, January 22, 1996). Carol Rutter’s essay (1997) on the production for Shakespeare Quarterly claims that “mostly . . . gender did not seem to matter” to the production. “It was not the nature of gender that Shaw’s performance was deconstructing so much as the nature of politics—the politics of politics—the nature of kingship” (323). Carole Woddis also took this view in her positive review of the production: “Gender [is not] really an issue here. . . . Shaw’s femaleness becomes subsumed into a quixotic portrait of wanton, flawed kingship.” These conflicting opinions mark the production as profoundly ambiguous, and provoke some larger questions. What did the audience members see in this performance, and what did Warner and Shaw intend for them to see? The answers are many and varied. Scholar H. R. Coursen (2001) saw “a homosexual male” (37), while reviewer Martin Spence saw “a dyke” (Midweek, June 12, 1995). Robert L. King and Benedict Nightingale emphasized Richard’s youth, calling him “an adolescent boy” (1995, 41) and “a man–child,” respectively. Gerald Berkowitz (1996), on the other hand, saw “a woman. . . . [Shaw was] always fully female” (9). Warner and Shaw intended for their Richard to be seen as neither male nor female. As Shaw explained in an interview with Richard Covington of Salon.com, “King Richard is not really a man, he is a god. . . . I am a non-man playing someone who perceives himself to be a non-man.” Along with these varied visions of Richard’s gender and character, the production itself also changes depending on which version one views. The television film, originally broadcast on BBC-2 on March 22, 1997, begins with a close-up of Shaw’s face, eyes closed, lips murmuring in prayer as liturgical music plays. In the first scene, her Richard is composed, elegant, and

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regal, while in the stage version her first entrance came at a childlike run, giggling and joking with her attendant lords.3 The many voices of the critics, the actress, and the director, along with the different versions of the production itself, produce the many different bodies that make up Shaw’s performance. My reading of the production incorporates certain elements from the reviews and from Warner and Shaw’s stated intentions; yet my response departs from those quoted earlier in its insistence on the centrality of gender to the production. Like Catherine Silverstone (2007), I find that the production “actively work[ed] to interrogate ideas about gender and sexuality” (205). I argue that Shaw’s Richard was androgynous, embodying a wide spectrum of gender identities. In Warner’s production kingship and gender were intimately connected through Shaw’s performance. Rather than showing that gender did not matter, the production placed it front and center, asking that the audience read the body of the actress as a multiply situated, perpetually shifting dramatic script. Shaw’s performance alienated both gender and text, inviting audiences to read Shakespeare differently: not as transmitting an essentialist “universality,” but as open to new, particular meanings arising from Shaw’s presence in the title role. Warner focused on making the relationship between Richard and the usurper Bolingbroke both political and intensely personal. More tragedy than history, the production depicted the dissolution of a passionate bond between the two cousins. Although twentiethcentury performance traditions have institutionalized the reading of Richard as homosexual, Warner intended to negate such overtones in the play by casting Shaw. She told John Whitley of the Daily Telegraph ( January 17, 1997) that “when [the characters] are played by a man and a woman we are freed from that [homosexual] agenda.” Some of the responses to the production, such as Peter Holland’s review (1996) for Shakespeare Survey, agreed that the presence of a female actor “remov[ed] any of the frisson that displays of homosexual emotion produce for a mostly heterosexual audience” (266). Yet others, such as Carl Miller (1995), detected “more than a whiff of sexuality . . . from [Shaw’s] Dick” (21). My own response to the production finds that the performance offered a queer reading of the relationship between Richard and Bolingbroke. Gender and sexuality not only mattered; they assumed a centrality that broke new ground in the performance history of the play. Further, Warner and Shaw re-wrote British history by placing an Irish woman’s body in the role of the King, thereby offering a potent challenge to stable

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cultural notions of “Englishness.” Because of these disruptions of masculinity, Shakespearean authority, and national identity, the critics reacted negatively, confirming the power and importance of the production.

A “Framework for Freedom”: Re-Configuring Theatrical Space Richard II opened at the Cottesloe Theatre in London on June 2, 1995, and played in repertory until February 17, 1996. The production was a defining moment in the careers of Warner and Shaw, who have collaborated repeatedly since their production of Sophocles’s Electra for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1988. Their work, which is focused on new readings of the classics, is known for being challenging, experimental, and risky.4 As a director, Warner is known for her intensive textual work; an article on the top British directors in the Independent ( July 19, 1995) identifies her hallmark as “textual and thematic clarity. She illuminates texts with highly intelligent readings produced with and through actors rather than imposing ideas upon them. . . . [She] eschews high-concept theatre, opting instead for deceptively simple staging.” Warner herself has long expressed a desire to transform theatrical experience, particularly in terms of how audiences perceive the classics. She said in an interview with Tim Teeman of the Times (February 2, 2001) that she is drawn to canonical texts “because I can have a really major experiment. . . . I think that we have to make a new kind of theatre. . . . We’ve got bored with it being so linear and narrative driven.” Like her director, Shaw is known for her experimental style and her willingness to take on risky projects. “I’ll do anything that’s dangerous,” she has said. “I have a mortal terror of boredom. . . . I love going into unknown territory” (Oddey 1999, 157). Like Warner, she also feels a responsibility to create new and challenging theater, claiming that “we live in an incredibly banal time in England, where people put on productions that are like other productions. That is why theatre hasn’t much meaning in the city anymore. . . . [V]ery few people are really moving the theatre as an experimental force forward” (155). The brilliant careers of Warner and Shaw (who were both well-established and working for the nation’s leading companies before they were thirty) have produced both awe and envy among critics, and they have earned “a reputation in the British press as the ‘terrible twins’ ” (Coen 1997, 13). However, Claire Armitstead notes

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that they have also been called “one of the great partnerships of the last 10 years in the English theatre: love them or hate them, you can’t ignore either their choices or their approach.” Warner and Shaw’s Richard II reflected their working methods and their philosophy of text-based minimalist theater. Their production disrupted conventional mimesis through the configuration of the theatrical space; they neither separated the audience from the actors nor used a realistic design to create the illusion of a recognizable world for the play. Rather, they used the Cottesloe’s flexible space to place the audience in close proximity to the actors, making them a part of the performance and blurring the boundary between the world of the play and the space of the audience. The Cottesloe Theatre is the smallest of the National’s three spaces, seating up to 300 spectators (while the Olivier Theatre seats 1,150 and the Lyttleton 890). From its inception, this space was intended to nurture cutting-edge creative work: “The Cottesloe is a theatre that cherishes . . . its physical and artistic separateness, even as it contributes to and fertilises the work of the National as a whole. . . . [It] offers an hospitable space, endlessly adaptable to the needs of a great variety of drama from the classics to new writing” (Mulryne and Shewring 1999, 9). The configuration of the space itself is important to its adaptable nature: the room has two tiers of pillared galleries on three sides, but the ground floor space is bare, and can be used in a wide variety of stagings. Because the space is flexible, it prioritizes the freedom and creativity of the artists who work in it. The theater’s designer, Iain Mackintosh (1999), calls the space “a simple and unpretentious framework for freedom” (31). This open and imaginative space played an important role in Warner’s working methodology, and allowed the director and her leading actress to use the theater as a laboratory. The flexibility of the Cottesloe permitted Warner and her designer Hildegard Bechtler to stage the play in traverse, with the main playing space as a long narrow corridor with banks of seating on either side. The audience occupied the seating on the ground floor as well as in the three-sided galleries above. The actors moved in the space between the seats, which was mostly bare except for a few set pieces, such as benches and Richard’s throne, that were brought in and out. There was also a small golden bridge hung against the upstage wall, on the same height as the first level of the audience gallery seating, which served as the walls of Flint Castle. Below the bridge was a “backstage” area that indicated the royal palace, masked by a translucent curtain. The floor was paneled in wood and brass, worn to

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a dull finish in the center of the corridor, and buffed and golden at the end near the wall. The setting was simple, and the overall effect was of a medieval church. Ronnie Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (1999) note that “the graceful slim avenue formed between the seat banks shimmered with the light of candles and torches, evoking a church setting, and with the selective introduction of furniture lent itself to interiors as well as exteriors, including a garden and a castle courtyard” (149). As this description implies, the set worked through suggestion of place and time rather than direct representation. The openness of the space and the minimalism of the settings allowed for both the actors’ and the audience’s imaginations to create the performance. Warner’s use of traverse staging placed the audience close to the action, particularly those who were seated on the ground floor, and made the highly visible spectators an integral part of the performance. The configuration of the theater space highlighted the confrontational aspects of many of the relationships and scenes, with the audience members in seats that resembled “slightly oversized jury boxes, apt places for evaluating competing speech” (King 1995, 41). Peter Holland (1996) commented that Warner and Bechtler created “a particular and flexible space for actors and audience to share” (267). The audience members could see each other clearly, and were aware that the actors could see them as well; in a sense, the spectators on the ground floor were “onstage” with the actors, as participants in the action. Warner used the flexible space, the traverse staging, and the minimalist design to foreground the sense of the production as theater. Within the “framework for freedom” provided by the Cottesloe, Warner, Shaw, and Bechtler showed their audience how the theater can be a laboratory, in which the theatrical process itself can be dismantled.

“Thus Play I in One Person Many People”: Performing the King’s Many Bodies In this theatrical laboratory, Richard II became an androgynous figure who was simultaneously masculine and feminine. Shaw’s straight dark hair was cropped severely short in back and front, in a style that was more masculine than some of the male actors. (For example, Julian Rhind-Tutt, who played Aumerle, wore his thick red hair shoulder-length.) Her body was tall and slim, with no feminine curves visible under her kingly robes. Yet her large, expressive eyes,

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her lyrical voice, which critic Nicholas de Jongh placed “in a no-man’s land between male and female” (Evening Standard, June 5, 1995), combined with audience awareness of her as an actress to complicate her gendered display. The various aspects of her presentation spanned a continuum of gender identities, rather than coming together in a coherent whole. Her physical performance augmented her androgyny, as she displayed both masculine and feminine signifiers through her movements. This was particularly evident in the way she walked. She added a slight swagger when Richard was feeling at ease (mostly in the first half of the play), and moved with rather stiff legs, squared shoulders, and loosely swinging arms. She noted in an interview with John Whitley that she tried some costume effects—“like doublets or a kimono”—to help her feel more at home in the part. “In the end, I wore bandages which kept my legs tight so that my walk was more like a man’s.” Her movements were markedly different from the few women in the cast, particularly Queen Isabel (Brana Bajic), whose movements were confined, her arms kept close to her body, and her walk sedate. Yet her physicality also set her apart from the men with whom she shared the stage, because she often undercut her more “manly” movements by coupling them with gestures or character choices that read as feminine. In her first entrance in the stage production, for example, she bounded athletically onstage like a boisterous young man, but was also giggling, which worked against the hyper-masculinity of her body movements. Her performance alienated gender in moments like these, when her body movements and vocal choices combined to create a multilayered impression of Richard. The costumes also emphasized her androgyny and complicated the layers of meaning taken on by her body. Her clothing’s mutability from scene to scene continually challenged the audience to fix her as either masculine or feminine. At the beginning of the play, Shaw entered wearing her kingly robe over a short-skirted tunic and leggings that resembled bandages wound about her legs. These wrappings were part of many of her costumes: for her visit to the deathbed of John of Gaunt (Graham Crowden), she wore a shorter open robe over the same leggings but with a different tunic that displayed her chest bound tightly in gauze. This tunic emphasized Shaw’s concealed femininity: by showing the audience the bindings, the costume at once hid and acknowledged her breasts, which suggested the presence of her female body. She also wore a long white robe in several scenes that was cut with a full skirt, in a style more feminine than masculine. These costume choices encouraged the audience

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to speculate on Shaw’s body beneath the clothes and to attempt to fix gender upon her mutable body. While certain costumes combined with the male character may have indicated masculinity, the imagined appearance of Shaw’s body beneath the wrappings provided both presence (of female breasts) and absence (of male genitalia). This collision of presence and absence was also embodied by Kathryn Hunter and Janet McTeer in later cross-gender performances. Hunter, like Shaw, bound her breasts, but left the wrappings hidden; yet she brought her concealed body to the spectators’ attention by beginning to remove her clothes in one scene. McTeer, on the other hand, did not bind her breasts, and hinted through stage business at the contents of Petruchio’s trousers, allowing the visibility of her feminine body to play against the implied (albeit impossible) presence of male genitalia. Shaw’s androgynous physical presence defamiliarized the character as well as gender identity by disrupting the iconicity of Richard. As a female androgyne in a male Shakespearean role, Shaw did not look or act like a conventional Richard II; rather, her performance “emphasized the discrepancy between the character and the role,” as Geraldine Cousin has observed (1996, 232–233). Her alienation of Richard’s iconicity enabled her to expand Ernst H. Kantorowicz’s seminal reading of Richard II as the drama of the “King’s two bodies.” Her portrayal revealed that Richard’s identity as King depended upon his successful performance of masculinity; yet she also used her androgynous physicality to explore the character’s many different bodies. The opening moments of Warner’s stage production foregrounded the performativity of Richard’s “two bodies”: the King and the man. In a short dumbshow, glimpsed by the audience behind the transparent upstage curtain, Richard was ceremonially dressed in his robes of state. This prologue captured the construction of kingship and masculinity at the same time, since the spectators got a look at the bandage-like wrappings and tunic that Shaw wore underneath her kingly trappings. Over these simple garments the attendant lords dressed her in the robe and crown, and handed her the scepter and orb. The audience was thus able to see the simultaneous transformation of Fiona Shaw into Richard and Richard into the King. Right from the beginning this production asked its audience members to speculate on how both masculine and kingly identity, like Shaw/ Richard’s clothes, must be put on; that is, they must be performed in order to exist.

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The theme of performance runs through Shakespeare’s depiction of the monarch; Richard self-consciously manipulates the pageantry that is part of kingship. According to those around him,5 he is very good at playing his role; as the Duke of York observes at Flint Castle: Yet looks he like a king. Behold, his eye, As bright as is the eagle’s, lightens forth Controlling majesty. Alack, alack for woe

That any harm should stain so fair a show! (3.3.67–70) York’s words emphasize the “show” that Richard is presenting to the assembled lords, as does Richard’s subsequent characterization of himself as the Sun God: “Down, down I come, like glist’ring Phaethon, / Wanting the manage of unruly jades” (3.3.177–178). In prison at the end of the play, Richard openly acknowledges his role as the player–king: “Thus play I in one person many people, / And none contented” (5.5.31–32). The deposition scene foregrounds this theme most explicitly, when Richard calls for a mirror, “that it may show me what a face I have / Since it is bankrupt of his majesty” (4.1.256–257). The mirror allows Richard to perform his dissolution before the court: Was this the face That like the sun did make beholders wink? Is this the face which faced so many follies, That was at last outfaced by Bolingbroke? A brittle glory shineth in this face; As brittle as the glory is the face, [He shatters the glass] For there it is, cracked in an hundred shivers. Mark, silent King, the moral of this sport: How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face. (273–281)

Richard’s performance serves a double purpose: to dramatize his sorrow and suffering, and to warn Bolingbroke that kingly identity is fragile. Shaw observed, “Richard discovers that the whole thing has been a complete illusion. There isn’t anything real about being a king” (Rutter 1997, 322). The theme of acting is connected with Richard’s identity crisis once he has been deposed: bereft of the role that has defined him, he must start to discover himself, moving from god-like ruler to all-too-human “nothing.”

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Kantorowicz historicized Richard’s dissolution of identity in The King’s Two Bodies (1957), a work that has become central to the play’s critical and performance tradition. According to medieval doctrine, the King culturally and legally had two bodies: the body natural, and the body politic, which were united in the person of the monarch. The body natural was human and fallible, while the body politic encapsulated the King’s identity as God’s representative. Kantorowicz argues that Richard II dramatizes the breaking apart of these two bodies: beginning in 3.2, when Richard returns from Ireland, “the universal called ‘Kingship’ begins to disintegrate; its transcendental ‘Reality,’ its objective truth and god-like existence, so brilliant shortly before, pales into a nothing, a nomen” (29). In 3.3, the scene at Flint Castle, Richard is still able to act the role of King; however, both he and his audience become more aware of the performance. As the scene continues, “the fiction of the oneness of the double body breaks apart. Godhead and manhood of the King’s Two Bodies, both clearly outlined with a few strokes, stand in contrast to each other. . . . [F]rom the shadowy name of kingship there leads . . . the path to new disintegration” (31–32). Richard realizes that he must lose “the name of King” and resolves to “let it go” (3.3.145). Despite this resolution, Kantorowicz finds the definitive moment of Richard’s identity crisis in 4.1 when he shatters the mirror: “The splintering mirror means, or is, the breaking apart of any possible duality. All those facets are reduced to one: to the banal face and insignificant physis of a miserable man” (40). Shaw’s performance drew on this reading of the play by emphasizing the pull between the divine and the human bodies of the King. In the first scene of the stage production she showed the audience the young and irreverent Richard, who flippantly declared, “Forget, forgive, conclude and be agreed; / Our doctors say this is no time to bleed,” to the appreciative laughter of her attendant lords (1.1.156–157). But she was also the King, who subdued her subjects with a magisterial “We were not born to sue, but to command” (196). In the television film, she is carried in on the shoulders of her lords at the beginning of 1.3, her crown glowing halo-like around her face. Minutes later, this godlike image collapses as, panic-stricken, she frantically throws down the warder to stop the duel between Bolingbroke and Mowbray. Yet Shaw’s presence did more than simply enact the theme of the King’s two bodies, which had been explored by male Richards before her; she also expanded it. By placing an androgynous female body in the role of the King the production showed the importance of gender

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to the performance of kingly authority. The production continually undermined the notion of a stable self, and in fact presented a proliferation of selves in Shaw’s physical presence, so that the King’s two bodies became the King’s many bodies. This theatrical multiplicity of Shaw’s physical presence enriched the production’s deconstruction of Richard’s identity crisis, which proceeds from his realization that his power can be taken away. When he “undoes” himself by giving the crown to Bolingbroke, he gives away his identity, which was defined solely through the ideal of kingship. By having a woman play Richard, Warner deepened this crisis of identity, revealing the extent to which both kingship and masculinity are performative. As Catherine Silverstone (2007) neatly puts it, “her body can thus be read as a metaphor for the crisis Richard experiences when he is deposed: he is neither king nor man but caught, oscillating between, but not fully embodying either identity” (208). Shaw’s performance defamiliarized gender through alienation; she continually asserted and retracted gendered signifiers, so that her body had many layers for the audience to read. Shaw used props to signify both maleness and kingship, but emptied out those signifiers by contradicting the meanings that we associate with them. This highlighted one of the central themes in Shakespeare’s play: the hollowness at the core of kingship. The most important props that Shaw used to represent the King’s power were the crown, robe, scepter, and orb. In the first scene, beginning with her ceremonial robing behind the translucent curtain, Shaw used the various props strategically, to signify when she was exercising power and when she was not. She wore the crown through most of 1.1, taking it off only after she had told Bolingbroke (David Threlfall) and Mowbray (David Lyon) that they were to “be agreed” (156). She took up the orb and scepter twice in the scene, sternly representing the power and authority of the King: when the two antagonists began to fight, and when she ordered them to reconcile. At all other times, the courtiers that stood around her throne held these authoritative props. Shaw also used her long robe, draped over her left arm, to add weight to her words, often making sweeping gestures with it. When she was on the walls at Flint Castle with the Duke of Northumberland (Struan Rodger) below, Shaw took off both robe and crown, sliding the crown onto the robe and dropping them on the ground to signify acquiescence. The crown is a particularly powerful symbol of both the authority and the emptiness of kingship, as Richard realizes: “For within the hollow crown / That rounds the

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mortal temples of a king / Keeps Death his court” (3.2.156–158). Just as Shaw constantly removed the crown to distinguish between her roles as King and man, Richard realizes that it is easy for a usurper to literally remove his crown and kill him, destroying both bodies. Shaw’s manipulation of the symbolic props to indicate the roles of “king” and “man” combined with her androgynous physicality to alienate both gender and character. By examining the many conflicting meanings that were created by her performance as Richard, we can see why most of the critics responded with hostility. Her performance was unsettling because the spectator could not immediately categorize who and what Richard was, and thus had to accept the fact that there was no underlying “truth” with which they could feel comfortable. The audience, in reading the meanings embodied by Shaw’s Richard, could not unproblematically embrace any kind of certainty or stability. Both her performance and the production were, in Phillip Zarrilli’s words (2004), in “a constant state of ambiguity” (665).

Secret Language, Secret Histories: Queering Richard and Bolingbroke Just as Shaw’s androgynous alienation of gender called attention to “the gap between actor and character” (Tiffany 1999, 121), Warner’s production disrupted the scholarly and performance traditions of the play through a queer reading of Richard and Bolingbroke’s relationship. Warner and Shaw did not intend for the relationship between the two men to be interpreted as homosexual; in fact, Warner cast Shaw partly “to counter the long tradition of interpreting [Richard] as homosexual” (Forker 2001, 21). Yet Shaw’s androgyny, which was rooted in gender, sexuality, and the body, eroticized the interactions between her Richard and David Threlfall’s Bolingbroke. Their relationship was “queer” in the sense that it did not fall into an easily defined category, such as heterosexual, homosexual, or even bisexual. The scenes between Shaw and Threlfall were queer because they showed “the impossibility of any ‘natural’ sexuality” and called into question the idea of “stable sexes, genders, and sexualities” ( Jagose 1996, 3).6 Warner placed the Richard/Bolingbroke relationship at the center of her production, showing that the play is about their tragic loss of intimacy. The audience was asked to continually re-read the meanings conveyed by their shifting relationship, and to reflect on the secret language spoken by their bodies in performance.

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The passionate and personal involvement between Richard and Bolingbroke departed from both critical and performance traditions surrounding the play. Some performances have emphasized the similarities between the two characters, such as John Barton’s 1973 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, which alternated Ian Richardson and Richard Pasco in the roles. Yet much of the scholarly work on the play has focused on their differences, arguing that Richard is feminine (passive and emotional) while Bolingbroke is masculine (violent and aggressive). Andrew Gurr (1984) sums up this viewpoint: “Richard’s descent from Act Two onwards is passive, ‘patient’ and fatalistic, while Bolingbroke’s ascent is active, bloody, and materialistic” (17). The critical tendency to polarize the two characters is emblematic of the generic pull between tragedy and history within the play. If we accept that both characters are essentially self-interested—Richard with finding his identity, Bolingbroke with attaining the crown—then the two men exemplify the tragic and the historical, respectively. The relationship between Richard and Bolingbroke was at the heart of Warner’s production, in ways that were both conventional and unconventional. While certain aspects of the Richard/ Bolingbroke polarity were evident in Warner’s production, for the most part Warner chose to emphasize the similarities between King and usurper. The most striking way the production accomplished this was through the physical resemblance between Shaw and Threlfall. The photograph on the cover of the program accentuated this likeness: the image was a head shot of the two actors, both in profile, smiling at one another. Each had short straight dark hair worn in the same style, and similar facial features. As reviewer Irving Wardle of the Independent observed ( June 4, 1995), the actors “magnetically circl[ed] each other like a platonically divided creature seeking to unite its two halves.” As the photograph suggested, these “two halves” were both androgynous; their resemblance to each other indicated the simultaneous presence of masculinity and femininity in each character. The lack of a clearly gendered distinction between the two actors complicated the Richard/Bolingbroke relationship from the very beginning, anticipating the queer sexuality that would develop throughout the production. This sexuality was also implied by the program cover,7 which underscored the physical intimacy between Richard and Bolingbroke. Because their faces were so close together, it looked as though they were about to kiss, suggesting the possibility of an

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erotic attraction between them. Further, the photo on the program was cropped to show only their heads; the original, preserved in the archives of the National Theatre in London, reveals that Shaw is cradling Threlfall in her arms, his head slightly below hers, which presents a combination of erotic and familial signifiers. The emotional and physical bond between Richard and Bolingbroke was a major part of this production. Shaw’s performance showed that her love for Bolingbroke and her desire to retain the crown were inseparable. The decline in her political fortunes paralleled the demise of her loving relationship with her cousin. Warner’s production added a personal dimension to a play that has been primarily seen as either historical (concerned with politics) or tragic (concerned with Richard’s loss of identity). Through the intimate and erotic relationship of Richard and Bolingbroke, this production showed how for Richard the personal is political and the political is personal. This intimacy was expressed openly within the performance itself, and the physical demonstrations of affection between the two actors—which included kisses, embraces, and caresses—were apparent from the first scene. Threlfall’s Bolingbroke addressed Shaw’s Richard with affection and praise in his voice, and Shaw responded by leaning down to tenderly kiss her kneeling cousin on the lips. At Bolingbroke’s next line, “Now, Thomas Mowbray, do I turn to thee” (1.1.35), Threlfall became harsh and challenging. Shaw beamed at him approvingly, and laughed appreciatively at his skillful use of language: “Since the more fair and crystal is the sky, / The uglier seem the clouds that in it fly” (41–42). Their relationship was set up as very close and affectionate from the beginning, and Shaw was swayed politically by her emotional bond to her cousin. Although she told Mowbray that “impartial are our eyes and ears,” (115) it was clear that her love for Bolingbroke affected the performance of her kingly duties. Bolingbroke was the first to trespass on their relationship in the play’s opening scene when he charged Mowbray with the Duke of Gloucester’s death. At this, Shaw’s tender and playful attitude changed; there was a long pause, as she realized that Bolingbroke was accusing Mowbray unjustly. Bolingbroke forced Richard to become complicit with his suit, and exploited their intimacy for political gain. The love between the two was gradually destroyed by a series of mutual betrayals, each larger than the last, culminating in Richard’s deposition. Even as Richard was destroyed by Bolingbroke politically, the audience watched the dissolution of their love for each other.

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Their next scene, 1.3, had Shaw overseeing the trial between Bolingbroke and Mowbray. Her demeanor was initially detached; she seemed to be willing herself to refrain from emotional involvement with Bolingbroke. When her cousin demanded to “kiss my sovereign’s hand / And bow my knee before his majesty” (46–47), Shaw responded coolly, air-kissing him on both cheeks. Yet the moment of crisis came when, as Richard turned away, Bolingbroke said, “My loving lord, I take my leave of you” (63). Threlfall played this line softly, almost tenderly, with an emphasis on “leave.” Warner made a decisive change here: in the text used in her production, Bolingbroke addresses this line to the Lord Marshal.8 By addressing this line to Shaw, Threlfall was appealing to her personal feelings. Shaw removed her crown, momentarily putting aside the political to focus on the personal, and guiltily turned back to give him a long kiss on the lips. As the two lords prepared to fight offstage, the lighting and sound emphasized the psychological turmoil that Richard was experiencing; the lights darkened to a single shaft of brightness and the sounds (of the lords banging on the floor and the wall paneling and encouraging the combatants vocally) became cacophonous and confusing. These choices provided a clear reason for why Richard throws down the warder to stop the duel. Shaw was clearly shaken by the experience of the trial, and left abruptly, shaking her head rapidly as though trying to clear it. When she re-entered, she kissed the kneeling Bolingbroke on the top of the head, before pronouncing sentences of banishment on both men. Despite her demonstration of affection for Bolingbroke, she punished him to assert power in their relationship. When Shaw commuted his sentence of ten years down to six, Bolingbroke tearfully embraced her as he said “such is the breath of kings” (208), and she kissed him on the forehead and cradled his head against her, in a motherly fashion of comforting a distraught child. The physical displays of affection between the two actors up to this point in the production enriched Shaw’s alienation of gender, as Richard assumed a variety of gendered roles in relation to Bolingbroke. The meanings changed moment by moment, so that Shaw seemed like a lover one moment as she kissed Threlfall on the lips, and like a mother the next, kissing his forehead and patting him comfortingly. The balance of power between the cousins shifted as well through the ways in which they related to one another physically. Shaw’s long anguished kiss with Bolingbroke before the tournament emphasized the degree to which she was emotionally in thrall, while

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her motherly cradling of Bolingbroke’s head after she pronounced banishment reasserted her dominance. These shifting citations of gendered relationships created a number of layers that the audience was asked to read simultaneously. Shaw and Threlfall added another layer to their interactions: they augmented their emotional involvement with each other by creating a backstory for the characters—a shared past in which they played games together. As Shaw described it to Carol Rutter (1997), “I made up all sorts of secret games in my head about their childhood. . . . It was one of those languages . . . that exists underneath language. Not a subtext. A secret language that discloses secret histories” (320). When Bolingbroke returned from banishment to claim the crown, this secret language increasingly rose to the surface of their encounters. Shaw’s sensual displays of affection toward Bolingbroke were transformed into sadness at his betrayal of this past connection in two significant scenes: the encounter at Flint Castle (3.3) and the deposition scene (4.1). The former scene comprises Richard’s realization that he must resign his crown, since his armies have defected to Bolingbroke. In this scene, Shaw both reminded Bolingbroke of their bond and mocked him by invoking their childhood innocence. When Bolingbroke told his servants to “show fair duty to his majesty” (3.3.186), Shaw gave a wry laugh and an ironic little wave at her cousin. She made a similar gesture on “Up, cousin, up. Your heart is up, I know, / Thus high at least” (192–193), whereupon she put her hand behind her crown and waggled her fingers at him mockingly. Yet she performed these playful gestures with sadness and an undertone of longing. Before she departed, Shaw stood behind Bolingbroke, put her arms around his neck, in an embrace that was also like a stranglehold. She kissed the top of his head, and on “Then I must not say no” (207), she exited the stage with a childlike gallop, riding on an invisible horse. In this scene, Shaw’s physical choices created a number of gendered meanings in rapid succession: her embrace/stranglehold both alluded to her erotic bond with Bolingbroke and threatened him with a possible display of strength; her kiss on the top of his head recalled the motherly way she comforted him in the banishment scene; and her mocking wave and childish gallop indicated Richard’s lack of power, his defiance of Bolingbroke’s betrayal, and the childhood he had left behind. Shaw thus challenged the audience to fix Richard in a particular role; rather, she showed how he is not just the king, but also a man, a lover, a woman, a mother, and a betrayed child.

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The use of the “secret history” for Richard and Bolingbroke underscored the depth and importance of their emotional connection. In the deposition scene, Shaw again threw their childhood bond in Bolingbroke’s face to shame him. She took the crown and set it on the floor in front of her cousin. When she instructed Bolingbroke to “seize the crown” (4.1.172), she made a mocking gesture with her hands, as of an animal pouncing on prey. When Bolingbroke did not move, Shaw stood in front of him and challenged him to pick up the crown, performing a childlike routine that the two obviously shared: a pat-a-cake game of clapping her hands and slapping her knees. She looked at Bolingbroke expectantly, then they both did the routine and picked up the crown at the same time. Shaw circled Bolingbroke, still holding on to the crown, and Bolingbroke put his arm around her, almost cradling her, as she compared them to two buckets plumbing the “deep well” of the crown (174). When she placed the crown on Bolingbroke’s head, saying “God save King Henry” in a trembling voice (210), she lay down at his feet, arms outstretched, showing that she had sacrificed herself and their bond for the crown. The mirroring of the two characters through the physical resemblance of the actors, combined with the destruction of Richard’s “shadow” in the mirror, indicated that Richard was losing his other half. The scene in prison before Richard’s death (5.5) epitomized the way in which the personal and political were intertwined for Richard: the scene was played as a eulogy for the loss of Bolingbroke, the crown, and Richard’s sense of identity. The television film links these personal and political losses visually, by allowing the audience to hear Shaw’s soliloquy in voice-over, while showing us what she sees as she ponders her outcast state. The camera moves slowly toward Shaw, seated on the floor of a dark prison with a single shaft of light coming from a grated window. When she admits, “Thus play I in one person many people, / And none contented” (5.5.31–32), the shot cross-fades into her getting up and walking toward the grate. The light falls on her face as she climbs up to put her hand on the grate and another hand comes through to clasp it. The camera holds on the two hands as Shaw says that she is “unkinged by Bolingbroke / And straight am nothing” (37–38), at which her thumb grasps the other hand, as the person gets up to leave. The camera lingers on Shaw’s hand unclasping and extending, waving but also reaching out for the other who is gone. Although we never see anything of this enigmatic other except the hand, we know that it must be Bolingbroke. The brief visual addition to this scene implies that Richard has become nothing because

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he is no longer king, but also because he is bereft of Bolingbroke, his spectral double and other half. The physical intimacy of the relationship between Shaw and Threlfall was unsettling because it resisted categorization. When Shaw kissed Threlfall, the meanings released by her action changed depending upon where she kissed him: on the lips, on the forehead, on the top of his head. Even when the two kissed each other on the lips, it was not possible to decisively fix the relationship as either heterosexual or homosexual because the kiss was performed by two androgynous actors who resembled each other, which blurred the lines between the “male” and “female” halves of the couple. As Shaw told Richard Covington (1995), “if two men played this part, it would be reduced to just a homosexual story, which is not what the play is. By my playing it, you can’t name it. It’s not homosexual. How can it be homosexual? I’m a woman. . . . It confuses in a way that the mind needs to be confused because morality gets thrown in the air.” The intimacy between the two characters, like the gender of Shaw’s androgynous body, was indecipherable: it could not be pinned down. Rather, the relationship problematized the very process of labeling sexuality, and presented a queer take on Shakespeare’s play. Later cross-gender performances, particularly those of Dawn French, Kathryn Hunter (in Richard III), and Janet McTeer, would likewise present queer perspectives on their characters, albeit in ways that were markedly different from Shaw and Threlfall’s Richard and Bolingbroke.

Playing with the “Sacred Cow”: The Critical Response to Richard II Warner and Shaw’s Richard II also disrupted the idea of English national identity that Shakespeare helps to secure through performances of his plays. History plays, in particular, contribute to national identity through dramatizations of Britain’s past. The negative reactions to the production in the British press confirmed the significance of these challenges. Yet by writing against the performance, the reviewers inadvertently confirmed its power and importance. Further, when the production toured to Paris and Salzburg, the critics responded positively, which suggests that the British reviewers attacked the production, in part, because it threatened their sense of national identity. Warner and Shaw ultimately challenged that identity by presenting an Irish woman performing the role of an English king.

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In the reviews of Richard II, many critics wrote off Shaw’s performance, arguing that she did not do justice to Shakespeare’s play. These reviewers had fixed ideas about how the play and the character of Richard should be performed, which were centered in a reverence for Shakespeare’s language and for the theme of the King’s two bodies, which has become central to the performance history of the play. Clive Hirschhorn of the Express mourned the lack of emphasis on “the breathless poetry of the text” ( June 11, 1995), while Nicholas de Jongh wrote that “her conception of Richard, as a little-boy lost in Peter Pan land, diminishes and sentimentalizes.” Jack Tinker claimed that Shaw’s performance “robs the play of its great twin themes: the sacrilege of dethroning God’s anointed king and also Richard’s inner struggle as a displaced sovereign . . . to discover the man within.” More specifically, many critics found fault with the way Shaw spoke Shakespeare’s lines. Charles Spencer opined in the Daily Telegraph ( June 5, 1995), “The great Richards, from Kean to Gielgud, have all been praised for the beauty of their speech. And here we run into the Fiona Shaw problem. . . . [M]ost of the poetry counts for nothing.” Richard Hornby (1996) agreed, deploring Shaw’s “inept delivery of Shakespeare’s verse” (642). Peter Roberts’s dismissal of Shaw’s performance was particularly grounded in gender: he complained that “Shaw’s voice is too light and insufficiently varied to deliver the marvelous formal poetry of the middle section” (Stage, June 8, 1995). He implied that her voice is not up to the challenge of Shakespeare’s language, and the part is therefore best left to real men. In the predictable litany of great male interpretations—“from Kean to Gielgud”—Shaw’s femaleness does not allow her to make the cut. Several critics went further in rejecting Shaw’s performance by mocking her. Andrew Temple and Benedict Nightingale both strove to make cross-gender casting look ridiculous by comparing Shaw’s presence as Richard with other, more absurd, examples of how the practice might be used onstage. Temple imagined “Dawn French’s Falstaff, Beryl Reid’s Lear and Susan Hampshire’s Othello.” Nightingale quipped, “After colour-blind casting . . . is gender-hazy performance the next step? For a moment the mind fills with panicky images: the Maggie Smith Falstaff, the Nicol Williamson Desdemona, the Raquel Welch Titus Andronicus.” Carl Miller followed suit, asking, “What next—Germaine Greer as Henry IV opposite Suzanne Moore as Hotspur?” This kind of comparison was so popular that it spawned a ditty by comedienne Maureen Lipman (1995) that became

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part of the touring production of The Shakespeare Revue. The song begins with a reference to Shaw’s performance and concludes, Oh give Ian Holm Cleopatra in Rome For Octavia summon Tom Hanks Cast Dame Thora Hird as Richard the Third Alan Bennett can rewrite it in Lancs. (57)

While some reviewers ridiculed the production, others downplayed the effects of the cross-gender casting, arguing that Shaw’s performance (unlike Welch’s imaginary Titus) did not pose any threat. Michael Billington of the Guardian wrote that Warner’s use of cross-casting was “not a radical innovation [but] a return to ancient practice” ( June 5, 1995), rendering the actress’s sex immaterial and causing gender to disappear as an important issue within the production. This strategy was adopted by most reviewers of the production: they placed Shaw’s performance within its historical tradition to make it seem less threatening, and then argued that her gender did not really matter. In an interview with Warner and Shaw, Claire Armitstead wrote, “Cross-gender casting, of course, is nothing new: didn’t Sarah Bernhardt play Hamlet? And with a wooden leg?” Although Georgina Brown conceded that “as King Richard in Warner’s production . . . [Shaw] will break new ground,” she nonetheless felt compelled to add, “Not that there’s anything new about cross-dressing in the theatre” (Independent, May 26, 1995). Beneath the critics’ strategies of dismissal and mockery, there lurked a persistent fear: that Shaw’s performance would start an alarming trend, in which actresses would take over the roles usually played by men. As Andrew Temple wrote, “The show is apparently part of a long-term experiment in which Fiona Shaw and Deborah Warner, old collaborators, will attempt over the coming years to ‘appropriate’ Shakespeare’s male characters on the grounds that he didn’t write enough decent parts for women.” His characterization of Shaw and Warner as “collaborators” intent on takeover was shared by many of his colleagues, who perpetuated the stereotype of the women as “radical feminists with beards” bent on changing the British theater irrevocably, leaving no room for classical interpretations of Shakespeare. While the reaction of the British press was, for the most part, hostile and challenging, the French, Austrian, and German critics welcomed the production with open arms. Warner was invited to

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tour the production during its original run in January 1996, at the Maison de la Culture de Bobigny, just outside Paris. The high-profile Salzburg Festival also engaged the production after it had closed at the National, reuniting the director and acting company (without David Threlfall, who was replaced by Richard Bremmer) for a brief run in July 1996. The press in both locations not only embraced the production as a whole, but enthusiastically lauded Shaw’s performance and the concept of cross-gender casting. In Paris, Christiane Duparc commented in a review for L’Express ( January 18, 1996) that Shaw’s performance was “Fascinant. Ni homme ni femme, Fiona Shaw est Richard, être charmant et capricieux, monarque instable privé par surprise de ses prérogatives sacrées. Tour a tour gaie, despotique, douloureuse. Magnétique” (“Fascinating. Neither man nor woman, Fiona Shaw is Richard, charming and capricious, an unstable monarch usurped of his sacred rights. By turns gay, despotic, anguished. Magnetic”). Frédéric Ferney, in a review for Le Figaro ( January 16, 1996) titled simply “Éclatant” (“Brilliant”), wrote, “Avec Fiona Shaw, Richard apparaît dans sa radieuse et vacilitante suprématie . . . [Elle] est splendide dans ces scenes cruciales de l’Acte V: a la fois rebelle et consentante, émotive et sereine” (“With Fiona Shaw, Richard appears in all his radiant and vacillating glory. . . . [she] is splendid in the crucial scenes in Act V: at the same time rebellious and consenting, emotional and serene”). In Salzburg, Hansjörg Spies of Die Kleine Zeitung ( July 27, 1996) called for “Jubel und Standing ovations” (“Rejoicing and standing ovations”) and noted that “Fiona Shaw begeisterte . . . als Richard II” (“Fiona Shaw enthralls . . . as Richard II”). With this kind of unqualified approbation, it is no wonder that Warner and Shaw found it liberating to be in Europe, away from the slings and arrows of the London critics. “It’s quite a relief being [in Paris],” Warner told Alan Riding of the New York Times ( January 26, 1996). “I was immensely disappointed by the London critics because I think this Richard is an infinitely more serious and fascinating experience than they were willing to tackle.” Even the Londonbased Daily Telegraph ( January 27, 1996) noted that the Paris run was “something of a vindication for both production and cast, which were greeted with a degree of bafflement and hostility in the British press.” There is a cultural difference between the British and European critics that accounts for the different responses that Richard II received at home and on the continent. Shaw has said that she realizes how important Shakespeare is to the English and how defensive critics can become when they feel that a performance violates their national

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poet: “I think the production of Richard II frightened the English sensibility as somewhere the plays hold history for the English rather than pure theatricality. . . . In Paris and Salzburg they had no such possessiveness about the actual content” (Potter 2000). She also told Alan Riding that “Shakespeare is an enormous sacred cow to the English, so it’s slightly provocative to play with it.” Her comments suggest that the critics reacted negatively to the production because of its implied threat to Shakespeare and to English national identity. Warner made this threat palpable by casting an Irish actress in the role of an English king, which highlighted the colonial issues present in the text and disrupted the association of Shakespeare’s history plays with the creation of Englishness. Richard II is less problematic than the other plays in the second tetralogy in its positive construction of English identity. Whereas in the two parts of Henry IV and Henry V, Shakespeare presents a “profound engagement with the issue of the uncertainties and fragmentation of national identities” (Murphy 2004, 46–47), in Richard II he creates a more positive view in John of Gaunt’s famous and oft-quoted “This England” speech. In this passage, ubiquitous in affirmations of English identity within British culture today, the dying Gaunt offers a lengthy elegy for his country: This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house Against the envy of less happier lands; This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England . . . (2.1.40–50)

In figuring his country as bounded on all sides by the sea, Gaunt’s speech imagines England as occupying the entire island of Britain, effectively negating Scotland and Wales. Further, as Andrew Murphy (1999) has observed, “the problematic territory of Ireland is essentially excluded. . . . The definition of national identity offered is simple (albeit in very obvious ways flagrantly false, ignoring, as it does, the existence of Scotland and Wales as distinct political and cultural entities): the nation coincides with a certain bounded geographic

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space” (114). This conflation of England with Britain—the part standing in for the whole—still happens in Britain today, and Gaunt’s speech is often used by politicians and in the media to invoke nostalgia for “Shakespeare’s England.” As Graham Holderness (1995) has pointed out, “a text which was originally the expression of an inconsolable nostalgia for another time, is mobilized as an authoritative voice enjoining on us all an active commitment to the glamour of backwardness” (223). Contemporary citations of Gaunt’s speech, such as John Gielgud’s highly emotive recording of the passage that is part of the exhibition at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, ignore the fact that it alludes to a mythical past, and focus instead on its usefulness in creating a positive conception of English identity based in the poetic genius of the national Bard. Gaunt’s omission of Ireland in his speech underscores its “otherness” in Shakespeare’s play. Richard II expresses an antipathy toward Ireland and the Irish that was common at the time. Andrew Hadfield (1997) writes that Shakespeare’s plays as a whole provide a portrait of the Irish “as brutish, dirty, primitive, savage, eccentric and unreliable, an overall description which was common currency in Elizabethan England” (48). Richard himself, in expressing his decision to lead a campaign to subdue the Irish rebels, describes them as: “[T]hose rough rug-headed kerns, / Which live like venom where no venom else / But only they have privilege to live” (2.1.157–159). On his return to England, he says he feels as if he were “wand’ring with the Antipodes” while away, which highlights Ireland as a foreign and distant Other (3.2.45). Richard’s Irish wars are unsuccessful and expensive, and his absence allows Bolingbroke to return to England, raise an army, and threaten his crown. As Murphy (2004) observes, Ireland “is associated with a catastrophic draining away of [England’s] strength, leading to Richard’s loss of power, and ultimately to his death” (46). In depicting a monarch whose power is threatened by disastrous Irish wars, Shakespeare may well have been offering a critique of Elizabethan foreign policy. He probably wrote Richard II in 1595, during the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603), in which Queen Elizabeth’s forces struggled to subdue Irish rebels, led by Hugh O’Neill, a former British agent. This war, which did not end until after Elizabeth’s death, was expensive, a problem that is mirrored in Shakespeare’s play by Richard’s inadvisable seizure of Gaunt’s “plate, coin, revenues, and movables” to finance his expedition to Ireland (2.1.162). As Christopher Highley (1997) has argued, Richard II “depicts Ireland

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as an expensive and dangerous distraction to England’s rulers—an idea surely not lost upon the queen and her government at a moment when English control in Ireland looked increasingly fragile” (65–66). The implicit connection between Richard and Elizabeth was augmented by the Earl of Essex’s rebellion, particularly his probable command performance of Richard II on February 7, 1601, which prompted the Queen to declare to her councilor William Lambarde, “I am Richard II. know ye not that?” (Montrose 1996, 79). We do not know whether Shakespeare intentionally drew a comparison between Richard and Elizabeth through his portrayal of the King’s irresponsible Irish wars and their culmination in his deposition; yet it is clear that Elizabeth made the connection regardless. Shaw’s presence as Richard in Warner’s production heightened these historical connections. Her Irishness highlighted the colonial issues in the play, while her femaleness alluded to Queen Elizabeth’s connection with Richard. She was simultaneously female and male, Irish and English, representing the margin and the center. Shaw herself noted the Richard/Elizabeth parallel in an interview with Michael Coveney of the Observer (May 21, 1995), suggesting that perhaps this connection played into her performance. Yet her Irishness was a palpable and disruptive presence during certain scenes of the production. As Warner told Alan Riding of the New York Times, “It’s much more shocking that an Irish person should be playing an English king than a woman.” Although Shaw modified her natural County Cork accent to received pronunciation to play Richard, many audience members were no doubt aware of her origins, because she is a very well-known actress. If some spectators were not aware of her Irishness, the press coverage made sure to mention it. Georgina Brown notes in an interview that “Shaw couldn’t possibly be English. Her facility with language and bold lack of restraint would instantly establish her Irishness if her delicious accent didn’t give it away.” Although this description is designed to be more complimentary than Elizabethan characterizations of Irishness, it nonetheless plays into the stereotype of the “wild Irish” by emphasizing Shaw’s “bold lack of restraint.” Brown also assumes that there are distinct entities called “English” and “Irish,” and excludes Shaw categorically from the former, much as John of Gaunt’s speech bars Ireland from the boundaries of the English nation. Shaw played up the parts of Shakespeare’s text that referred to Richard’s role in the Irish wars. “We will make for Oireland presently,” she exclaimed (1.4.51), deliberately exaggerating the accent,

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and with her lords proceeded to make mocking animal noises, indicating their contempt for the Irish peasants. This business became more developed over the course of the run; initially, the promptbook notes, Shaw chose to dance a mocking Irish jig. The production video, recorded six months into the run, captures the more extended business of Shaw and her lords making sheep, pig, and cow noises. Shaw and her fellow actors clearly had a lot of fun with this moment, indicating that they intended to make the references to Ireland laden with double meanings visible to the audience. Shaw also emphasized the reference to the Irish as “rough rugheaded kerns,” inflecting the line with irony. She knew her audience was aware of her Irishness and were, in her view, rather uncomfortable with the dissonance between her ethnicity and the Englishness of the character she was playing. In a small item published in the Evening Standard (November 17, 1995), Shaw noted that the audience was not laughing at her speeches as much as she thought they would: “The thing is . . . they quiver with sensitivity because I’m Irish, and they don’t make any noise at all.” Shaw’s Irish identity worked alongside her androgyny to highlight the gap between herself and Richard. The presence of an Irish woman’s body in the role of the English king highlighted the ways in which “Britishness” has been constructed to mean Englishness, and to exclude the “wild Irish” from the definition of national identity. By casting Shaw as Richard, Warner revealed not only the performativity of gender, but the constructed and unstable nature of English national identity.

CHAPTER 3

PLAYING WITH CONTRADICTIONS: K ATHRYN HUNTER’S KING LEAR (1997)

H

elena Kaut-Howson’s 1997 production of King Lear, which featured Kathryn Hunter in the title role, followed in Warner and Shaw’s footsteps in certain ways. Kaut-Howson and Hunter, like their predecessors, denied the relevance of feminism and gender issues to their production; yet the meanings created by Hunter’s performance as Lear surpassed their stated intentions. Like Richard II, this King Lear was an experimental production in which the director used cross-gender casting to emphasize the gap between the actress and her role. However, the similarities between the two productions end there; as the primary focus of their production, Kaut-Howson and Hunter created an interpretation of Shakespeare’s tragedy that was rooted in an exploration of the contradictions of King Lear’s critical and performance history, in which “many voices confront each other” (Rosenberg 1972, 5). Although gender was a crucial factor in Kaut-Howson’s King Lear, the director and her leading actress were anxious to prove that gender issues were not a major component of their production. KautHowson told Dan Glaister of the Guardian ( June 23, 1997) that she cast Hunter simply because she was the best actor for the role, male or female: “We cast Kathryn Hunter because I believe the part is about old age and not about gender. It should be available to women and men.” Like Shaw and Warner, both women explicitly rejected the label “feminist” for the project. Kaut-Howson told Elizabeth Schafer (2000) that “both Kathryn Hunter and myself were adamant about it being nothing to do with feminism at all. If I hadn’t known an actress like Kathryn Hunter . . . I would never have thought of casting a woman in that part” (141–142). When I spoke with KautHowson in 2001, she acknowledged that she was very reluctant to

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have her production associated exclusively with feminism, since she felt like that would mean a limited and “trivializing” interpretation of Shakespeare’s play.1 Rather than focusing on gender, Kaut-Howson and Hunter claimed that they wanted to emphasize the supposedly universal meanings of the play. Hunter described Lear to Heather Neill of the Times (February 18, 1997) as “not just a great giant of a man, but an expression of the human spirit.” Kaut-Howson was concerned with showing the audience that the play was about human experiences that were not necessarily gendered: she told Francis Gee of the Asahi Evening News (November 6, 1997) that the “defining message” of the play, for her, was that “man or woman . . . needs more than a bowl of soup and a piece of clothing to keep warm.” Further, as she told John Whitley (Daily Telegraph, January 17, 1997), “it’s a play about despotic behavior, about power and the terrible struggle of relinquishing that power. . . . [T]hat can just as easily be . . . a father or a mother.” KautHowson’s intention was to make the play a tragedy to which audience members—regardless of their gender—could relate their own experiences. As with Shaw’s Richard, many of the production’s critics noted that the gender of Hunter’s Lear did not ultimately matter. Robert Hewison wrote in the Times (March 9, 1997) that “Hunter’s volcanic performance sustains the claim that her gender is irrelevant: it is the rage of age that matters.” Jeremy Kingston, also of the Times ( July 4, 1997), agreed: “In the final scenes, decked with flowers or dressed in a white robe, the voice is that of a little, old, and trembling creature, now briefly comical, now piercing in the pain of its hard-won wisdom. The sex of the actor is immaterial before such capacity to reach the core of an experience.” Both of these critics claimed that gender was unimportant both to Hunter’s performance in particular and to the production as a whole. The greatness of Hunter’s performance, in this view, allowed gender to disappear. Yet neither the director’s stated intentions nor the critics’ erasures of gender can account for the meanings that the performance itself created. Although Kaut-Howson told me that as Lear Hunter was “completely genderless,” she also said in her interview with Whitley, “I think you get something richer if a woman does it and also, in this case, it presents an insight into an aging man.” There is a contradiction in Kaut-Howson’s interpretation: on the one hand, she felt that casting Hunter in the role helped to shift the focus from gender to age. On the other hand, she also felt that Hunter brought something

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to the role that a man could not possibly have done: her gender, which allowed her to play the maleness of the character and to use her own femaleness to create a Lear that embodied both gender identities. Onstage, Hunter played with this contradiction, exploring the tension between Lear’s polarized roles of hunter and hunted, father and mother, king and man. As a thirty-nine-year-old, five-foot-tall woman, Hunter did not “fit” the role of Lear, which is nearly always played by an older (and usually larger) male actor; yet it was precisely because of her singular, even strange, physical presence that she was able to embody the contradictory nature of the character. Both actress and director staged a dialogue with the competing traditions in scholarly and performance interpretations of the play, focusing in particular on undercutting the so-called universal readings of Lear with the experiences of their own lives. Kaut-Howson drew on a very particular history for her production concept: her Polish/Jewish heritage, shown through the play’s Eastern European location. The use of her history allowed her to explore the contradictions between the post–World War II nihilistic readings of the play articulated by Jan Kott and Peter Brook, as well as the redemptive interpretations of A. C. Bradley, Maynard Mack, and Grigori Kozintsev. Specifically, she developed the contrast between the hunter and the hunted as a dominant metaphor for this clash between nihilism and redemption. Kaut-Howson also took her mother’s life as inspiration for the character of Lear, which allowed Hunter to explore the King as both father and mother. Further, they played with two competing traditions in their conceptualization of Lear: while historically many male actors have played the role as either a titanic macho patriarch or a feeble old man, Hunter’s Lear was both powerful King and aged man. As with Shaw and Warner’s Richard II, many British critics responded negatively to this Lear. Their reviews revealed the production’s potent challenges to Shakespearean authority and national identity, particularly through Kaut-Howson’s relocation of an English historical chronicle to war-torn Eastern Europe and Hunter’s decidedly nontraditional presence in the role of the King.

Hunter and Hunted: King Lear in Poland King Lear ran at the Haymarket Theatre in Leicester from February 21 to March 15, 1997, and was revived for a London run at the Young Vic Theatre from June 25 to August 2, 1997. Despite some critical

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indignation over the Leicester performances, the production was successful—and controversial—enough to interest the adamantly alternative Young Vic to pick it up for a run in London. The Young Vic Theatre is small, and focused primarily on attracting young audiences with new versions of the classics and premieres of cuttingedge work. The production marked the third collaboration between Kaut-Howson and Hunter2; both women are known for their unconventional projects and methodologies. Kaut-Howson has been described by theater critic Nicholas de Jongh (Evening Standard, July 3, 1997) as “a bracing director who regularly challenges stale conventions,” particularly in her productions of Shakespeare. Adrian Turpin notes in the Independent ( June 9, 1997) that Kaut-Howson is “a distinctly leftfield artist, who cheerfully calls herself a ‘foreigner,’ and she delights in the darkness and complexity of Shakespeare’s vision.” Hunter is well-known in Britain for her work with the experimental company Theatre de Complicité, which focuses on physical theater.3 Lyn Gardner observes in the Guardian (November 19, 1997) that Complicité “has always embraced a kind of otherness. . . . [I]t is attracted to the marginal and the dispossessed, and takes them into the center.” She notes that the company often works with disabled actors such as Hunter, who walks with a limp. Hunter is also renowned in the British theater world for her ability to transform herself, becoming any number of characters: old and young, male and female.4 Paul Taylor of the Independent (February 27, 1997) has written that “if any female performer deserves the adjective ‘protean,’ it’s Kathryn Hunter. . . . [S]he has an uncommon ability to shape shift and play either women or men.” It is not surprising, given Hunter’s mutable strengths as an actress, that Kaut-Howson would think of her for King Lear, and that Hunter would be able to transform herself into the aged monarch. As with Shaw and Warner’s Richard II, this King Lear was partly the product of a lengthy and fruitful partnership between an actress and a director. Kaut-Howson’s approach to King Lear was characteristic of her work: she took a strong interpretive line on the play, cut and shaped the text to further her interpretation, and challenged traditional mimetic theater through her staging. She used a wordless expressionistic frame story to shape and prefigure the events of the play. She also used minimal props and set pieces that fulfilled a variety of needs: a table became both throne and bier, a bathtub served as hovel and means of escape. The setting was simultaneously abstract and particular, as Kaut-Howson incorporated her own Polish/Jewish

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background into the visual aspects of the production. She was very influenced by the work of another Polish, Jew Jan Kott, who read the play, in the wake of his experiences in World War II era Poland, as nihilistic rather than redemptive. Like Peter Brook, whose production was influenced by Kott, Kaut-Howson cut Shakespeare’s text to emphasize the bleakness of the play’s wartime world. She also used the metaphor of hunting throughout the production to reinforce her focus on the pitilessness of human society, with Lear in particular occupying the roles of both hunter and hunted. Yet although her emphasis was primarily on “the loss of love and the injustices of the world,” she offered her audience glimpses of compassion, primarily through her direction of Hunter in the role of Lear. As Jack Jorgens (1977) has noted, there are two major (if overly simplistic) ways of looking at King Lear: the redemptive reading and the nihilistic reading. The former is “the story of man’s journey from unfeeling ignorance to self-knowledge and pity. It is a tale of losing oneself to find oneself.” The latter “depicts an irremediable crack in nature, an apocalyptic decline and fall of an archetypal kingdom and its rulers” (236). The first interpretation has been developed by critics such as A. C. Bradley (1976), who reads the play as “The Redemption of King Lear” (235), and sees Lear’s death as “not one of pain but of ecstasy” (241). Maynard Mack (1965) calls the play a “tragedy for our time” because of the “strong undertow of victory in the play which carves . . . Lear’s ‘new acquist’ of self-knowledge and devotion to Cordelia, the majesty of his integrity and endurance, the invincibleness of his hope” (87). Many theater practitioners have echoed this positive reading of Lear’s sufferings and death. Brian Cox (1992), who played Lear in Deborah Warner’s 1990 production at the National Theatre, wrote in his diary of the production that “a play like Lear essentially affirms life, saying that it is amazing, wonderful, extraordinary” (6). Further, he declared the widespread appeal of such a message: “the beauty of the play is its simple accessibility: it’s about children and parents, fathers and daughters, fathers and sons—within the realm of all our experience. It’s a great play because it’s true. . . . [I]t reflects the humor and poignancy of our own lives” (30–31). In contrast, Jan Kott (1964) perceives the play’s universality in terms of the absence of meaning and the pervasiveness of injustice, violence, and cruelty. His influential essay “King Lear, or Endgame,” first published in 1960, compares Shakespeare’s play to the works of Samuel Beckett and the Theater of the Absurd, and provides a

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completely different take on a text often associated with redemption. He writes: In Shakespeare’s play there is neither Christian Heaven, nor the heaven predicted and believed in by humanists. King Lear makes a tragic mockery of all eschatologies: of the heaven promised on earth, and the Heaven promised after death; in fact—of both Christian and secular theodicies; of cosmogony and of the rational view of history. . . . In King Lear both the medieval and the Renaissance orders of established values disintegrate. All that remains at the end of this gigantic pantomime is the earth—empty and bleeding. (147)

There is no redemption in Kott’s vision of Lear’s world, and the ending of the play brings a breakdown in social order and the disintegration of human bonds: Cordelia is hanged, Lear dies of grief, and Edgar and Albany are the only ones left to bury the dead. Edgar’s final lines do not seek to explain what has happened, nor do they offer much hope for the future: “The oldest hath borne most; we that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long” (5.3.324–325).5 This interpretation had an enormous effect on theatrical performances of the play, particularly Peter Brook’s production for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962 with Paul Scofield in the title role. Brook had read Kott’s essay, and came to think of King Lear as “the prime example of the Theatre of the Absurd” (Leggatt 1991, 46). He cut and interpreted the play to emphasize its cruelty, as well as the distance and isolation of the characters.6 He also sought to make Lear far less sympathetic than had many previous productions; his Goneril, for instance, was justified in her rage over Lear’s unruly behavior with his hundred knights, who left her home in an uproar. Generally, his production “aimed to disrupt, disturb and detach” his audience rather than draw them in (Leggatt 1991, 43). Kaut-Howson was very influenced by Kott’s interpretation and Brook’s staging of the play; she told Schafer (2000) that “[the play’s] outlook is so complex; it destroys all values and doesn’t suggest anything in their place. That’s why Jan Kott or Peter Brook could relate it so easily to the Beckettian world, the Post-Holocaust world of existentialism where there are no values other than what we human beings create” (143). She connected with Kott’s interpretation because of the ways in which it intersected with her own Polish/Jewish background.7 Although she felt that the play could speak to everyone in the audience, the inspirations that she used were particular and personal. As a director, Kaut-Howson tends to place theatrical texts in

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a historical, usually postwar, context: as she told Turpin, “I always see the human situation within the larger context of history or social upheaval. . . . I never see the life of the individual as abstracted from the historical context.” Born in Poland during World War II, KautHowson was raised by her Marxist mother, after her father, a Jewish tailor, was killed by the Nazis. This experience pervaded her work on King Lear, for which she created an abstract Eastern European setting with her designer, fellow Pole Pawel Dobrzyski. Kaut-Howson was concerned with flesh[ing] out the world, the society and cultural world in which the characters lived. . . . I placed it in the world of my mother . . . the wars and the hiding places. My mother, being Jewish and Polish, spent the war being hunted and continually running from place to place, hiding, and working in the fields, and then being recognized again. So the theme of hunting and being hunted in King Lear was very strongly fleshed out in our production. (Schafer 2000, 145)

This was balanced with an emphasis on the nightmarish landscape of war-torn Eastern Europe, evoking not only World War II, but also the more recent conflicts in Bosnia. On one hand, the setting was meant to evoke the generalized concept of war, suffering, and human brutality; on the other, the setting was also highly particular, related both to an Eastern European context and to Kaut-Howson’s family history. The staging was meant to suggest this context without precisely pinning it down, reflecting Kaut-Howson’s focus on expressionistic theater. The set consisted of two huge steel doors upstage center, which were flanked by scaffolding at stage right and left.8 The furniture was minimal and mobile: a wheelchair for Lear, a table on wheels that became everything from the map table for the first scene to a banqueting table in Goneril’s house to a bier for dead bodies. There was also an old bathtub on wheels that represented Poor Tom’s hovel, and a leather armchair in which Gloucester was bound and blinded. The Eastern European wartime context was suggested primarily through the costumes and sound effects. The costumes were modern dress: Lear and most of the lords wore dark three-piece suits, the Fool was clothed in tartan cap and baggy trousers held up by suspenders, and the daughters wore simple A-line skirts and dresses. The costumes placed the characters in an extremely cold Eastern European winter through the use of fur hats and coats for Goneril and Regan, and Soviet-style army greatcoats and large Russian-looking fur caps

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for Lear and his knights. Snow flurries often accompanied entrances and exits, and the sound of fiercely barking dogs offstage gave rise to a dominant sense of barely restrained savagery and cruelty. Kaut-Howson cut the text carefully to emphasize the play’s bleakness. She used an edition of Shakespeare’s play that conflated the 1608 Quarto and 1623 Folio versions, and pruned and shaped this text to reflect her interpretation. In particular, she cut down the encounter between the blind Gloucester and the disguised Edgar in 4.1. Although, unlike Brook, she retained the servants who aid Gloucester after he is blinded, she eliminated the Old Man, the loyal tenant who guides him, so that Gloucester entered alone, stumbling and groping helplessly, an emblem of solitary, suffering humanity. Kaut-Howson cut the scene heavily, but significantly retained Gloucester’s line, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: / They kill us for their sport” (4.1.37–38); she placed it at the end of the scene. By having this line come last in the exchange between Gloucester and Edgar, and giving Edgar no reply to his father’s pronouncement, Kaut-Howson emphasized the absence of divine or human justice. She continued to focus on this theme in her cutting of 5.3. She greatly reduced the encounter between Edmund and Edgar in order to negate the presence of the gods and to undermine an investment in Edgar as the King who will restore order to England. She cut Edgar’s line, “The gods are just” (5.3.169), and removed Albany’s praise of Edgar: “Methought thy very gait did prophesy / A royal nobleness” (174–175). Although again she did not follow Brook in removing Edmund’s order to repeal the death warrants for Lear and Cordelia, she did cut Edmund’s protestations of repentance: “This speech of yours hath moved me” (198) and “Some good I mean to do, / Despite of mine own nature” (242– 243). Kaut-Howson’s ending emphasized the harshness of Kott and Brook’s vision of the play. In addition to the cuts, Kaut-Howson developed the dominant metaphor of hunting and being hunted throughout the production, with various characters assuming the roles of hunter and hunted. Lear, significantly, played both roles: he was part of a literal hunting party with his knights in Act 1, but found himself in the role of the prey as Edmund’s army hunted him down in Act 5. In 1.4, KautHowson showed Lear in his role as patriarch when he and his attendants returned from hunting. Their entrance through the large center doors was accompanied by a fall of snow and the sounds of barking dogs. Lear stood on top of the table wheeled in by his knights, playing the victorious hunter returning from the kill and drinking from a

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tankard as his knights urged him on. His boisterous lords encouraged him to continue the hunt by pretending to shoot one of their number. Lear took careful aim with his rifle at one of the hunters (played by Hayley Carmichael, who also played Cordelia) creeping stealthily stage right like an animal. When Lear “shot” him, he jokingly fell flat, and the rest of the hunters applauded. This business introduced the theme of hunting that pervaded the production, savagely reenacted Lear’s rejection of Cordelia, and connected this rash act to the cold, brutal environment inhabited by the characters. The treatment of Edgar reinforced the theme of hunting; he ran from his father’s house into the forest, pursued by dogs and soldiers. The forest was represented by thick smoke, and the dogs by sound effects. Edgar eluded them long enough to deliver his soliloquy, which Kaut-Howson cut and reworded. When he appeared at the top of 2.3, he had not yet escaped the hunt; Kaut-Howson cut his lines: “I heard myself proclaimed; / And by the happy hollow of a tree / Escaped the hunt” (2.3.1–3). Instead he said, “I will preserve myself. To escape the hunt I will / Take the basest and most poorest shape” (6–7). As he spoke these lines, he tore off his clothes, smeared his face and hair with dirt, until he proclaimed “Edgar I nothing am” (21), naked, filthy, and unrecognizable. Yet nine soldiers snuck up and surrounded him, armed with whips and rifles. They formed a semicircle downstage of him, snapping their whips and tapping their guns on the ground, while slowly closing in on him. One of the hunters lunged at him mockingly, Edgar jumped, and the rest of the hunters laughed maliciously. He escaped, just barely, down a trap upstage center, and later emerged from the same hole in 3.4, transformed into Poor Tom. The brutality of the hunters was elaborated in the depiction of the war between England and France. Kaut-Howson showed the war’s material effects upon the working people, not simply the nobility. At the beginning of 5.2, after Edmund made an appearance with his army, a group of peasants in kerchiefs and work boots entered with pitchforks. They set the table stage right, and loaded sacks of grain onto it, providing a brief tableau of the work that needed to be done in order for the kingdom to operate. As they worked, the battle began offstage: an explosion went off, and they hurriedly wheeled off the table and exited upstage right. Edgar and Gloucester entered through the center doors, running from the battle, and Edgar helped Gloucester to sit downstage left. After Edgar exited, there was a huge explosion, with smoke and a flash of light through the doors, and

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the peasants were blown out, and lay dead or dying upstage. When Edmund entered in the next scene, his line, “Some officers take them away” (5.3.1), referred to the dead peasants, and was delivered with disgust and scorn. It is significant that Kaut-Howson chose to show the battle through the peasants’ murder, rather than through clashing of soldiers. The peasants, like the hunted Edgar, were innocent bystanders, caught up in the inhuman brutality of war. Despite Kaut-Howson’s main focus on the nihilistic interpretation of the play, she also offered glimpses of compassion, if not redemption. Her production showed that the nihilistic and redemptive readings of the play are overly simplistic ways of viewing King Lear. Her interpretation found a more complex position: although much of the world that she created was bleak, without meaning or hope of finding meaning, she showed that compassion and dignity had still survived. In his encounters with Gloucester and Cordelia late in the action of the play, Lear offered and received tenderness and found the means to preserve his dignity, if not his hope. When Lear met Gloucester and Edgar in 4.6, he was both utterly mad and completely lucid, “reason in madness,” in Edgar’s description (4.6.169). Gloucester wept, and Lear comforted him, saying “Now, now, now, now” (166) as though to a small child and taking Gloucester in his arms throughout his next two speeches. They sat on the ground, clung to each other, and reached a moment of great tenderness when Lear said, “When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools” (176–177). Despite the pessimism of the words, Hunter played the moment as one of compassionate connection, in which both Lear and Gloucester acknowledged the meaningless of existence and found momentary solace in each other. Lear found a similar moment with Cordelia when he was reunited with her in 4.7. Cordelia knelt by the side of his wheelchair to ask for his “benediction” (4.7.58), and Lear stroked her face on “I think this lady / To be my child Cordelia” (70–71). He comforted her as she wept, and she took his hand and placed it on her cheek to assure him that she had “no cause” (77) to hate him. They played their reunion very tenderly, supporting each other emotionally and physically, with Cordelia helping to restore her father’s battered dignity. Lear comforted Cordelia in a similar manner before they were taken away to prison in 5.3, joyously envisioning their future together, where they “will sing like birds i’ the cage . . . / And take upon ’s the mystery of things” (5.3.9, 16). Lear hugged Cordelia the same way he had embraced Gloucester, cradling her head carefully, as though

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she were a baby. Although the moment passed swiftly, it was given weight by the tender bond between Lear and Cordelia. Finally, KautHowson allowed Lear a last moment of transcendence before dying: Hunter played his last lines, “Look on her, look, her lips, / Look there, look there!” (308–309), as though he could see Cordelia reviving, so that he died in ecstasy rather than agony. Although these moments were small and isolated, and although they were outweighed by the production’s emphasis on the absence of divine or human justice, they nonetheless show how Kaut-Howson portrayed both cruelty and compassion. Her production took root in the contradictions between the competing performance traditions.

Mother and Father: “She had the mother in her also” The scenes that Lear played with Gloucester and Cordelia affirmed the importance of cross-gender casting to the production. As Hunter cradled Gloucester and Cordelia’s heads and comforted them, it became difficult to read Lear solely as a father. Just as Lear was both the patriarchal hunter and the victimized hunted, he also became both father and mother through Hunter’s simultaneous citation of masculinity and femininity. Kaut-Howson foregrounded this interpretation by creating a frame story for the Leicester production that began and ended in a hospital room, in which the Lear figure was a dying mother. When the lights came up, the audience saw an old woman (played by Hunter) in a wheelchair in an old-age home, watching the British soap opera East Enders on television. Her three daughters sat near her looking bored, while a hospital orderly swept the floor. Suddenly the old woman suffered a heart attack, and was hustled behind screens by doctors and nurses with a life-support machine. Alarm bells rang and machines bleeped wildly for a few moments, then the sound effects ceased, and the screens parted to reveal Hunter, garbed as Lear in a three-piece suit, seated on a chair that was placed on top of the hospital table. The orderly became the Fool, who sat on the floor at Lear’s feet. There was silence as Lear surveyed the assembled guests (who now included the lords as well as the daughters), and began slowly, “Know that we have divided / In three our kingdom” (1.1.35–36). The action of King Lear proceeded from there, until the end of the play, when the screens were drawn around the dead Lear, the heartbeat monitor flatlined, and Dr. Edgar, clothed in a white coat, delivered the last lines to the old woman’s family. The frame story created the impression that the

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entire action of King Lear was a dream or hallucination in the mind of the old woman as she died: perhaps a fantasy of revenge on the children who neglected her, or a reflection back on her life, in which she was cast in the role of the wronged Lear.9 This frame story was supplemented by an essay in the program, entitled “Old Age, Power, and Nature,” which offered “one version of the story of King Lear.” In this version the central figure is an old woman, living out the end of her life in a nursing home, neglected by her children, forgotten, and alone. “This woman has lived through much,” the program noted. “In her lifetime there have been a huge number of changes. There have been horrifying wars, fratricidal wars, too. Nature has been devastated by ruthless exploitation, the bonds between parents and children have been severed.” She wrestles with the central questions of existence, primarily “the fundamental, unanswerable question: why live, and why give life?” Although the woman does not find an answer to this question, she might find “a glimmer of humanity to justify her life. She may well realize that all one can hope to do is survive, create life, just carry on. But with dignity and resilience. She may find some minimal kind of meaning.” These notes captured both the nihilistic and compassionate readings of the play that Kaut-Howson emphasized in her production. The notes and the frame story also took the focus off gender and placed it on age and the tragedy of dying. Kaut-Howson changed the frame story considerably for the production’s London run, presumably because of the critical antipathy that it inspired in Leicester. Michael Billington of the Guardian, for instance, wrote that the frame story went “right against the Shakespearean grain” (February 27, 1997), while Charles Spencer of the Daily Telegraph condemned it as an “irritating gimmick” and found it to be “monstrous arrogance to ‘explain’ King Lear in this way” (February 27, 1997).10 Kaut-Howson said of the critical response, “I generally think that about King Lear they were really vicious, especially in Leicester.” At the Young Vic, she cut the nursing home frame story and instead created a prologue to the action. The set remained the same, so that the first thing the audience saw were the enormous steel doors upstage center. While ominous music played, the doors opened slowly, and a spotlight picked out the figure of Lear, sitting in his wheelchair, looking very small, old, and frail. The Fool (Marcello Magni) wheeled his chair to center stage, then closed the heavy doors with a clang. At the noise, Lear winced, and the music intensified, becoming louder and harsher. The lights slowly

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came up on the rest of the playing area, and two tableaus played out behind Lear: in one, Edmund ( Jeremy Brudenell) pushed Gloucester (Robert Pickavance) and Edgar (Simon Roberts) across the space in a wheelchair, with Edgar waving one of his arms in slow motion, giving the impression of someone being carried off against his will. In the other, Burgundy ( Jonas Finlay) and France (Michael Hodgson) entered pushing Cornwall (Glyn Pritchard) in an old bathtub with his shirt pulled up around his neck, exposing his naked back. As they slowly crossed toward center stage, Oswald (Nick Cavaliere) and Albany (David Acton) entered from upstage left, removed the sheet from the table, and crossed toward the bathtub group. France slowly got into the bath with Cornwall and pulled his shirt over his head, while Oswald and Albany flourished the sheet above them, like a sail, and the whole group crossed and exited stage left. As the bathtub exited, Goneril (Kate Seaward), Regan (Gabrielle Reidy), and Cordelia (Hayley Carmichael) entered from stage right, pushing the leather armchair. They set the chair stage right of Lear, and then knelt next to it, Goneril and Regan upstage and Cordelia downstage facing them. Goneril was the first to rise, looking meaningfully at Regan, who also got up. They put on their fur coats, which were piled on the chair, and crossed behind Lear’s wheelchair, looking at him. Cordelia watched them, then rose and slowly followed. As they formed themselves into a group stage left of Lear, the lights dimmed on them and came up strongly on Lear, who rose very slowly, holding out his right hand and looking off downstage right, away from his daughters. He crossed down right, leading with his hand, as if calling to someone, although there was no one there. He gradually exited, as the lights came up on the playing area and the daughters were greeted by Gloucester, Kent (Colin McCormack), Edmund, Albany, Cornwall, Edgar, and Oswald. They bowed to each other, and then walked around the stage, arranging themselves for the King’s arrival. Kent and Gloucester then spoke the play’s opening lines (which were cut in the Leicester production). This revised opening retained the nightmarish quality of the hospital setting, but made it more abstract. Lear was still at the center of everything that was happening, but the events were no longer taking place explicitly inside of his head. Instead, the prologue functioned like an early modern introductory dumbshow, establishing the characters’ relationships to each other and previewing the events of the play. Gloucester entered in a wheelchair to emphasize the parallels between himself and Lear, and the business with Edmund and Edgar

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displayed, through actions rather than words, the way in which Edmund took advantage of his father and half-brother. The scene with the bathtub anticipated the scenes on the heath with Lear, the Fool, Kent, and Poor Tom. The bathtub represented the hovel in both scenes, and the half-naked men inside it became the “poor naked wretches” in the “pitiless storm” (3.4.29–30). Finally, the ways in which the daughters were positioned and grouped in the prologue set up how they would behave throughout the play. Goneril took the initiative and persuaded Regan to follow her, while Cordelia refused to follow them immediately, taking her own path across the stage. For Kaut-Howson, the inspiration for the frame story (in both of its forms) came from personal experience: the recent death of her aged mother, about eight months before she began work on King Lear. Kaut-Howson went back to Poland to be with her mother during her last weeks, and the experience stirred up powerful emotions: When she was dying . . . I could see that she was thinking, and I could see that she was going through all her past, which was terrible and very stormy, full of enormous, incredible struggles and sacrifices and kind of Lear-like delusions as well. . . . So I saw her going through all this in her head. . . . And then when she died I slept in the house where she lived and . . . I dreamt [of] her shaking the walls of it from outside, like Lear . . . like Lear in the storm.

Although Kaut-Howson didn’t connect this dream to King Lear at the time, she said that she must have been thinking of it in the back of her mind, because soon after, when the artistic director of the Leicester Haymarket asked her to choose a play to direct, she immediately said, “Lear. Just without thinking. . . . Because it was so like . . . what I thought she was going through.” Kaut-Howson made the connection between her mother and Lear because she felt that their journeys through life were similar, and that they ended up asking the same kinds of questions toward the end. As she told Heather Neill, “Her preoccupations were the same as Lear’s obsessions: What makes humanity devour itself? What causes wars?” She felt that the resemblance between her mother and Lear was nothing to do with gender; rather, she looked upon her mother as “completely asexual,” particularly when she was dying. She described her mother in her last days as “completely genderless, a sort of . . . ancient humanity, broken, on the rack.” When casting for King Lear she thought of Hunter, who she thought could represent this idea of androgynous old age and “the point of view of an old parent.”

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Like Kaut-Howson, Hunter connected King Lear with personal experience. As she told John Whitley, “I’ve had this secret wish since I was thirteen to play Lear,” which was prompted by an inspiring teacher who read parts of the play out loud with great passion. Unlike her director, Hunter felt the need to play Lear as a man. Kaut-Howson told me that she “never for a moment thought that [Hunter] should speak to the audience as a man. In fact it was Kathryn who wanted to wear that suit and have the little beard. . . . [She] felt it was absolutely crucial. . . . I thought it wasn’t necessary.” (In 2000, Vanessa Redgrave expressed a similar desire to play Prospero in a wig and mustache, perhaps indicating both actresses’ anxieties over being “manly” enough for their roles.) Through a combination of Kaut-Howson’s desire to have Lear resemble her “genderless” mother and Hunter’s desire to play Lear as a man, the character emerged as a complex composite figure. The resulting performance made gender matter intensely to the characterization of Lear. Hunter used her body and her voice to offer a multilayered impression of the character, and her performance was difficult to mark as either definitively male or female. However, her performance was also not genderless; rather, her Lear was androgynous, playing with and destabilizing both masculinity and femininity. She therefore brought gendered nuances to the role that would not have been possible with a male actor. As Kaut-Howson put it, “I don’t know if I would have been happy if it were a man playing this part. . . . Kathryn was in a way more majestic, because she had the mother in her also.” Certain aspects of Hunter’s physical performance signified masculinity: costume, movement, and gesture all contributed to an impression of Lear as a man. For most of the play, Hunter wore a tiny, wispy, white goatee and a three-piece suit, consisting of a dark jacket, threebutton vest, pants, striped tie, and a white button-down shirt. For traveling and hunting, she was dressed like the male knights that attended her: in a black greatcoat and fur hat. The promptbook notes indicate that Hunter also wore a girdle to flatten her chest, presumably to give the drape of her clothes a more masculine look. As she revealed to Neill, she also took some pains to find the physicality of the character by “trail[ing] old men into Leicester supermarkets” when preparing for the role during rehearsal. She felt this was necessary to take her into the part because, at five feet tall, she initially felt “too small” to play a king. “Then, one lunch hour, there was a turning point. I saw this old man, about my size, in his eighties, and

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I followed him into Iceland [the supermarket]. . . . I thought, if they all parted before him now, he could be Lear. . . . The point is, Lear is big in spirit.” She adopted the old man’s physicality and dignity to play the role and overcame her reservations about her height. Her vocal performance also contributed to the characterization of Lear as masculine, since her natural speaking voice is deep, guttural, and at times raspy. Although Hunter used her body and voice to indicate masculinity, there were also certain aspects of her performance that marked her as feminine. First, there was the presence of her body beneath the costume, which, although never explicitly displayed, was an undeniable aspect of her performance. When I saw the production in Leicester, I registered a brief frisson of anxiety when Hunter began to remove her clothing during the storm scene, crying “Off, off, you lendings” (3.4.100). In that moment, I wondered what would happen if Hunter did in fact strip down (as some male Lears have done) to become “the thing itself” (98). How would the audience reconcile the disjunction of her female body with the male character? However, we were not given the opportunity to explore the issue further: Kent and the Fool quickly stopped Hunter from removing her clothes. Yet the moment inevitably produced speculation upon the body beneath. Although the body itself was never fully revealed to the audience, the very act of undressing called attention to its presence, forcing the spectators, even just momentarily, to read Lear as a multiply-gendered character. There were also many elements of the costume design that encouraged the audience to read Lear as female. Hunter wore a wig that was long, slightly below shoulder-length, in a style more stereotypically feminine than masculine. This wig played against the tiny white goatee and the three-piece suit to create a clash of signifiers. Although Lear wore the suit throughout most of the production, in various stages of distress as he became homeless and mad, when he awakened to be reunited with Cordelia in 4.7, he was dressed in a long white robe that he wore until the end of the play. (This robe was similar in style to the robe worn by Fiona Shaw in the second half of Richard II.) With the long hair, the dress-like robe, and Hunter’s small size, Lear appeared more female than male, which underscored his virtual helplessness in the final scenes of the play. The visual coding of his weakness reinforced stereotypes of femininity; yet Hunter’s deep voice continued to work against the femininity signified by the clothes and wig, and thus undercut the stereotypes invoked by

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her physical display. Like Shaw’s Richard II, Redgrave’s Prospero, and Janet McTeer’s Petruchio, in particular , Hunter’s Lear was difficult to fix as either male or female: through the combination of the costume effects, movement and vocal choices, and the presence of a female body in a male role, Lear never appeared to be genderless. Rather, the audience was encouraged to continually speculate upon the fluctuating, ever-shifting signifiers that composed Hunter’s performance. Hunter played with the contradictions between Lear’s roles as father and mother by highlighting certain moments in performance when her female body clashed with the male role. In 2.4, for example, Lear identifies his mounting anguish and madness as feminine: “O, how this mother swells up toward my heart! / Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow, / Thy element’s below!” (2.4.54–56). Feminist psychoanalytic criticism has emphasized this and similar moments to characterize the play, in Coppélia Kahn’s words (1986), as a “tragedy of masculinity,” in which Lear attempts, and fails, to maintain his masculine identity, which “depends on repressing the vulnerability, dependency, and capacity for feeling which are called ‘feminine’ ” (36). In psychoanalytic terms, the play dramatizes the return of the repressed mother; although literal mothers are absent from the text, Lear discovers her within himself. Janet Adelman (1992) argues that this process begins when he acknowledges Goneril and Regan as his own: “[T]hou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter; / Or rather a disease that’s in my flesh, / Which I must needs call mine” (2.4.216–218). This acknowledgment prompts him to recognize an “equally terrifying femaleness within himself—a femaleness that he will come to call ‘mother’ ” (1992, 104). Literally, when he mentions “hysterica passio,” he is referring to hysteria, which comes from “below,” from the womb. When Hunter played these lines, she used her hands to convey this sense of the womb rising to choke the heart by making a gesture to frantically try and push it back down. This called attention to her female body beneath the masculine clothes and the male character. In such moments, Hunter’s body became a site of conflicting meanings, in which presence and absence coexisted and gave off complex messages for the audience. Later in the performance, in 4.6, when Lear denounces female sexuality, Hunter made another specific gestural choice that complicated the meanings created by the scene. As she described “yon simpering dame,” Hunter pointed at an imaginary figure, which made it seem as if Lear were talking about

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someone specific that he could see: Behold yon simpering dame, Whose face between her forks presages snow; That minces virtue and does shake the head To hear of pleasure’s name; The fitchew, nor the soiled horse, goes to’t With a more riotous appetite. Down from the waist they are Centaurs, Though women all above. But to the girdle do the gods inherit. Beneath is all the fiends’; there’s hell, there’s darkness There’s the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, Stench, consumption! (4.6.115–126)

In performing this speech, Hunter turned the language onto her own body. The words “there’s hell, there’s darkness” were accompanied by an emphatic gesture: Hunter pointed to her own genitalia to illustrate Lear’s words. This moment was complex: on one level, Lear the character was simply illustrating his point. He could also have been referring to his own reluctant and fearsome identification with the female in his madness. Yet the audience knew that they were watching a woman, and even though they could not see her body beneath the clothes, they were asked to imaginatively construct it when Hunter gestured to it. Absence collided with presence, and demanded that the audience read Lear’s body as multiply situated: female as well as male, mother as well as father. Another such moment came earlier in the production, when Lear cursed Goneril with barrenness. On “Hear, Nature, hear! Dear goddess, hear!” (1.4.252), Hunter took hold of Goneril suddenly and roughly by the back of her head and forced her backward to sit on a bench. She placed her other hand on Goneril’s stomach, while invoking Lear’s curse: “Into her womb convey sterility! / Dry up in her the organs of increase” (255–256). Hunter intoned the speech quietly at first, gradually building volume and momentum, as Goneril trembled and wept. Kaut-Howson intended for this moment to be intense and frightening: “when a woman curses, or when a woman speaks with revulsion about women’s anatomy . . . it’s very frightening, because it’s like the earth devouring its own creation, and deciding to crush it.” She felt that this moment attained a whole new level with a woman as Lear, because “when a man does it, it’s just a vicious little man, cursing a woman, hating her,” but when a mother curses her daughter, it

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becomes a terrifying moment. Hunter’s body was a crucial part of this scene, asking the audience to read her as both father and mother, male and female. Because Hunter continually played with gender identities and signifiers, she called attention to the distance between herself as an actor and the role of Lear. Paul Taylor comments upon this gap in his review, in which he observes: [T]he actress’s performance is, by and large, as mannered and distancing an impersonation of male old age as Clive Dunn’s used to be in [the television sitcom] Dad’s Army. . . . With long grey locks and a dwarfing three-piece suit that might as well be a placard screaming “woman in drag,” she looks more like some eccentric midget in a freakshow than a king.

Taylor’s use of the loaded term “freak” operates on two levels: first, it serves to reject the production by comparing it with a near-defunct relic of “low culture,” the freak show. With its connotations of exploitation, voyeurism, and the grotesque, the freak show is the polar opposite of mainstream Shakespearean performance, which is linked firmly to “high culture.” By designating Hunter’s performance as a freak, Taylor banishes the production to the realm of the sideshow. Second, by calling Hunter a “midget in a freakshow,” he abjects her body, making it freakish, “less ‘human’ . . . humanly unthinkable,” in the words of Judith Butler (1993, 8). Butler argues that in the construction of gender, the abject is crucial to the formation of the subject, simultaneously occupying both the inside and the outside as it helps to define the subject by showing what it is not. Similarly, Taylor uses the abject Hunter (“the freak”) to define and construct the true subject of Shakespeare’s play: “the king.” By calling her a freak, Taylor also betrays a sense of anxiety that her performance inspires in him. This sensation, as Elizabeth Grosz (1996) has argued, is because the freak “imperil[s] the very definitions we rely on to classify humans, identities, and sexes—our most fundamental categories of self-definition and boundaries dividing self from otherness” (57). Although Taylor does not acknowledge it, Hunter’s very freakishness allowed her performance to denaturalize Lear’s gender identity; as Butler (1993) writes, “the limits of constructivism are exposed at those boundaries of bodily life where abjected or delegitimated bodies fail to count as ‘bodies’ ” (15). Far from proving that gender did not matter, Hunter’s abjected yet dignified body

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offered resistance to confining gender norms. Further, by offering a disabled, freakish, “unthinkable,” unstable body in place of the Lear that resides in many audience members’ imaginations, Hunter challenged spectators to wrestle with Shakespeare’s play.

King and Man: “Every inch a king” Because of the considerable traditions of scholarship and performance that surround King Lear, Hunter faced immense challenges when she took on the role. Playing Lear has often been compared to climbing Everest; Oliver Ford Davies (2003), who played the role at the Almeida Theatre in 2002, takes the metaphor even further: “No actor can claim Lear lies within his range, it doesn’t lie within anyone’s range. Paul Scofield once suggested that the heights of the play must be reached by parachute rather than by mountaineering” (3). For an actor, being offered the role of Lear is one of the highlights of a theatrical career. Davies revealed in an article for the Daily Telegraph (February 5, 2002) that “actors don’t say no to . . . Lear. It’s some sort of ultimate . . . what? Test, accolade, exploration of the human condition?” The role provides a serious challenge for an established, older male actor, and British theatrical history is full of famous names who have become associated with Lear: David Garrick, William Charles Macready, John Gielgud, Charles Laughton, Laurence Olivier, Paul Scofield, and Ian Holm, to name a few. Kaut-Howson and Hunter played with two dominant approaches to the character of Lear that have persisted throughout the play’s performance history: Lear the King and Lear the Man. First, there is the titanic vision of the powerful monarch that many critics have seen in Lear. Hugh Richmond (1998), for instance, finds Lear to be “the Beowulfian kind of warrior we identify in Old Hamlet. His behavior in the opening scene has an epic thunder that allies him to the primitive gods whom he treats as equals in the storm scenes, which also demand great emotional energy, not to mention vocal dynamics” (116). Many actors have played the role with this ideal in mind, placing the emphasis on kingly majesty. Michael Gambon, who played Lear in 1982 at the Royal Shakespeare Company, was the epitome of this tradition: as Alexander Leggatt (1991) writes, “he was an oak, down to the roots. His stage presence was massive, his voice powerful” (74). Although the emphasis on Lear the King still persists in contemporary interpretations of the role, this approach is somewhat old-fashioned, according to Leggatt, and it is more common for actors to focus on

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Lear the Man. Whereas most nineteenth-century productions draped Lear in red robes and kingly ceremony, many productions now choose to present him as either partly mad from the start, or as a crotchety, demanding old geezer. R. A. Foakes (1997) describes the Lear of this tradition as “an old pensioner with nothing royal about him, whitehaired, rather senile . . . and losing the last shreds of an uncertain dignity early on” (24). These productions tend to emphasize the theme of Lear as Everyman, which sees the action of the play in universal terms. In this interpretation, Lear is fragile, old, and weak, inspiring pathos rather than fear. Olivier’s performance in the 1984 Granada television film, in which he was too weak to carry Cordelia’s body in the last scene, is a prime example of this tradition, as is Yuri Jarvet’s delicate Lear in Grigori Kozintsev’s 1970 film. Hunter’s performance played with both of these traditions, and created meanings out of the contradictions between them. Just as her Lear was both hunter and hunted, father and mother, he was also king and man. Her performance thus captured the dialectical nature of the character described by Marvin Rosenberg (1972): “Lear’s design can never be caught in single terms. . . . [T]he character is a dynamic equation, the terms of which are constantly changing, new terms drawn in, vanished ones reengaged” (20). She used both her physical appearance and her interpretation of the character to convey these two contrasting roles. Her singular, “freakish” physical presence, however, marked her out as clearly different from the many male actors who had played Lear before her. Theater reviewers came up with all kinds of inventive, hyperbolic descriptions of her appearance. The critics compared her to “the Alec Guinness [character] of The Lady Killers” (Kingston, Times), “a cross between a tottering Haile Selassie and an embalmed Lenin” (Hewison, Times), “Deng Xiaoping mutates into Howard Hughes as played by Edward G. Robinson. . . . [A] compressed version of Burl Ives as [Big Daddy], the Tennessee Williams redneck titan” (Michael Coveney, Observer, March 2, 1997). These wildly divergent, slightly bizarre comparisons attempted to capture the oddity of Hunter’s physical appearance, particularly her size. At five feet tall, Hunter was dwarfed by every other actor onstage (even Hayley Carmichael’s tiny Cordelia), and her diminutive stature was emphasized by her suit, which was slightly too big for her. Her wig left the top of her head bald, and although her face was powdered to make her seem pale, nearly as white as her hair, she wore little in the way of age makeup: there were no lines or creases to make her seem older. She indicated Lear’s age through

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her body and the use of props. When not traveling by wheelchair, Lear carried a cane, which Hunter used to walk with a slight limp. Her movements indicated frailty and extreme age; this Lear was definitely “four score and upward” (4.7.62), and his twitchy, often uncertain movements underscored his physical vulnerability. Yet her Lear could also effectively wield power and authority, at least at the beginning of the play, and chose strategic moments to do so. After the prologue, Lear entered with a distinct lack of ceremony; although he was wearing a crown, he walked amidst his kneeling courtiers casually, almost jauntily, gesturing to them to rise. Hunter began the first speech quietly, with no kingly flair, and no excess dramatics when Lear said he wished to “unburthened crawl toward death” (1.1.39). This Lear presented himself to his court simply and honestly, as a fond old man, anxious to be told how much he is loved. “Tell me my daughters . . . / Which of you shall we say doth love us most” (46, 49) was delivered with some trepidation; Hunter paused after the line, looking around at the daughters nervously, clearly expecting an answer. When none was immediately forthcoming, he tapped his fingers nervously on his knee and continued, “That we our largest bounty may extend / Where nature doth with merit challenge.—Goneril!” (50–51). He looked at his eldest daughter and asked her to “speak first” (52), to save some face. Goneril was clearly unprepared for this demand, and paused after “Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter” (53). Lear looked at her encouragingly, indicating that he wanted to hear more. As she continued, Lear rose with some difficulty, and crossed downstage, listening, his back to the audience. His anxiety during the scene was expressed by his right hand, clenched behind his back, which never stopped moving, the fingers tapping nervously. He was clearly relieved when Goneril finished, and when Regan followed suit. He rushed through his speech allocating Regan’s portion of the land and turned happily to Cordelia: “Now our joy!” he exclaimed, crossing toward his youngest daughter (81). “Although our last and least” was accompanied by a gesture indicating Cordelia’s small stature, affectionately (82). “What can you say to draw / A third more opulent than your sisters?” was delivered softly, rather conspiratorially, to Cordelia, in the manner of a doting old parent (84–85). When Cordelia answered, very softly, “Nothing” (86), Lear laughed delightedly, thinking she was joking with him. “Nothing will come of . . . nothing” (89), he replied, imitating her soft tones on the final word. Up to this moment, Hunter played Lear as an extremely old, doting, loving parent.

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It was immediately clear, however, that his gentleness only lasted while Lear was obeyed. When Cordelia refused to give him the answer he wanted, he backed away from her, released her hand, and said warningly, “How, how Cordelia! mend your speech a little, / Lest it may mar your fortunes” (93–94). Lear was very aware that he was being embarrassed publicly; he looked around at the lords and at his other daughters who were watching, and this made him angrier. When she continued to defy him, Hunter transformed from a doting old man into an enraged monarch over the course of one speech (108–120). Her voice conveyed the power and fearsomeness of Lear’s anger, so that when she warned Kent to “come not between the dragon and his wrath” (122) the effect was frightening. Although Colin McCormack, who played Kent, was much taller than Hunter, and easily dominated her physically, Hunter asserted Lear’s authority vocally, forcing Kent to kneel through the power of her voice on “Hear me, recreant! / On thine allegiance, hear me!” (167–168). She also displayed her anger physically, overturning the wheelchair while calling Kent a “miscreant” (161). Hunter’s Lear could assert kingly authority with his lords and his daughters when needed, and could also play the role of the manly patriarch who engaged in activities such as hunting and drinking with his attendant knights. Yet in his relationship with the Fool, he willingly relapsed into the role of the old man. In 1.4, immediately after playing the hunting game with his knights, Lear began calling petulantly, almost childishly for his Fool. When the Fool finally entered, he was greeted with great delight by Lear and with laughter and appreciation by the knights. Marcello Magni’s Fool was a forty-something man, slightly balding, given to bawdy humor but also playful lazzi designed to amuse his master. He genuinely loved Lear and sought to gently alert him to his folly without hurting his feelings. On “how now, nuncle!” (89–90), the Fool kissed Lear’s hand, his shoe, and his cane. He then offered Lear his hands to slap, which Lear did, responding “How now, boy!” The Fool helped Lear out of his chair and led him through a soft-shoe dance, which Lear performed haltingly but with eagerness, trying to keep up. Magni’s grace and physical agility contrasted sharply with Hunter’s nowfrail and childlike Lear. This business provided humor for the onand off-stage audiences, but also created sympathy for Lear that was expanded in 1.5. After leaving Goneril’s house, Lear was very subdued, sitting forlornly on his suitcase. The Fool tried throughout this scene to cheer him up, with no success. Although the Fool

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continually reminded Lear of his mistakes in dealing with his daughters, he functioned mainly as a tender, supportive, and loving companion with whom Lear could relinquish the role of king and become all-too-human. Although in the early scenes of the play Lear occupied different roles with different characters, his descent into madness was a plunge into a state wherein these roles became mingled, and ultimately destabilized through Hunter’s simultaneous citation of both power and vulnerability. In 2.4, when Lear found the disguised Kent in the stocks, he concurrently asserted his roles as both king and father: “The king would speak with Cornwall; the dear father / Would with his daughter speak” (2.4.95–96). Hunter made it clear that this was the King speaking: “Go tell the duke and’s wife I’d speak with them, / Now, presently!” (110–111) was imperious, commanding Gloucester in no uncertain terms. Yet through her attempts to quiet her “rising heart” (115), she also showed Lear’s state of distress, the emotionally vulnerable human trembling below the surface of the powerful king. The contrast between Lear’s large, powerful voice and his vulnerable, tiny body materialized the ways in which he was both king and ordinary human; this clash of roles was brought out particularly in his speech that began “O, reason not the need!” (259). Kaut-Howson staged the scene with Hunter in the center, barred in by Goneril, Regan, and Cornwall on three sides. Lear raged ineffectually, struggling with impending madness and realizing his total lack of power. He tried to threaten his daughters—“I will do such things” (275)—but could not come up with anything to say, and his body began to tremble violently. The pathos of the small figure, which contrasted with the raging, powerful voice, showed that Lear’s descent into madness was marked by the destabilization of both his identities: the powerful king and the vulnerable human. Lear’s developing madness in the scenes on the heath placed the emphasis on his humanity, particularly as he made discoveries about the nature of suffering from his encounters with the disguised Edgar. When he met Edgar and the blind Gloucester in 4.6, Hunter showed that Lear’s madness allowed him to play out and explore the contradictions between his identities as both king and man. In particular, she used Lear’s description of himself as “every inch a king,” and the following fantasy of pardoning the adulterer to embody both roles simultaneously. When Gloucester asked, “Is ’t not the king?” Hunter replied “Ay, every inch a king” (4.6.105), and paused, looked down at her tattered attire, and smiled ruefully, acknowledging the disparity

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between her tattered attire and the former title of King. Yet in the next moment, her Lear took on the role of king in playing out his fantasy: “When I do stare, see how the subject quakes” (106), and spoke the rest of the speech in the role of the king. Again, Hunter’s physical presence underscored both roles simultaneously: her tiny, freakish body made the assertion that Lear was “every inch a king” ridiculous, even laughable, but her vocal command and power allowed Lear to regain the fantasy of being the king again, even just momentarily. Her performance also worked to acknowledge the gap between herself, a diminutive actress, and the role of Lear.

“The English are Very Peculiar about Shakespeare”: The Critical Response to King Lear In the press coverage of the production (in both Leicester and London), Kaut-Howson, Hunter, and many of the critics tended to downplay the importance of gender, claiming that the play is about old age and the tragedy of dying. For the director and her leading actress, this emphasis on the “universal” meanings of the play came partly from a desire to disassociate themselves from director and drama teacher Helen Alexander’s call for “regendering” Shakespeare to provide more roles for women. As Dan Glaister reported in the Guardian, Alexander wrote an article for the June 1997 Equity Journal, the magazine of the professional actors’ union, that argued in favor of “the rewriting of plays to change the gender of a character”: “Approximately three-quarters of theatre roles in Britain are reserved for male actors—thus depriving women actors and women theatre-goers of the equality they deserve. . . . The key to change is in the casting of existing texts. . . . Isn’t it time that the audience were challenged to accept the authenticity of a Queen Lear or a female Doctor Faustus?” Alexander’s argument applies the logic of affirmative action to theater, and Glaister compares her strategy to the gradual acceptance of “color-blind” casting in Britain. Yet Kaut-Howson was anxious to prove that her King Lear was not simply part of a trend to “regender” Shakespeare, perhaps because she feared it would be interpreted as “a meaningless exercise in modish casting,” as Charles Spencer described her production. Or perhaps she wanted to avoid criticism from hostile reviewers who felt that women’s cross-gender performances were “sheer perversity,” in the words of Nicholas de Jongh. With Shaw’s performance as Richard II fresh in their minds, many theater critics wondered whether cross-gendered Shakespeare

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would become the norm rather than the exception. Jeremy Kingston wrote, “Since Fiona Shaw has recently played Richard II, are we witnessing the start of a new trend? Which black actress will be the first to play Othello?” Once the production opened, some critics found much to admire about Hunter’s performance, but many argued that she could not possibly be Shakespeare’s King Lear. The critics on the whole were kinder to Hunter and KautHowson than they were to Shaw and Warner; yet even in the positive reviews, they still demonstrated similar tendencies to downplay the importance of gender to the production as a whole. Hunter’s body disappeared, figuratively speaking, into genderlessness, so that the critics could focus on how her performance illuminated the greatness of Shakespeare’s play. Shaun Usher wrote in the Daily Mail (February 28, 1997) that the production and Hunter’s performance “stated[d] the obvious—inhumanity is eternal and Shakespeare speaks to the ages.” He praised Hunter for her portrayal of Lear as “a tormented mortal rendered androgynous by extreme age.” In Usher’s opinion, both the production and the leading performance emphasized Shakespeare’s timelessness and universality. He also used the term “androgynous” to emphasize the absence of gendered characteristics, rather than the simultaneous presence of masculinity and femininity in Hunter’s performance. The director Annie Castledine also praised Hunter for honoring the text in an article for the Guardian ( July 30, 1997): “She approached the role with such humility and understanding. There was no narcissism or ego, just a tremendous empathy and a desire to be Lear. You felt she had a huge emotional connection with the text, and she gave it to us with such intelligence and discernment that it became luminous.” Her description of Hunter’s performance collapsed the distance between actor and role, noting that the actress wanted to “be Lear,” not simply play him. Castledine praised Hunter for subjugating herself to the greater authority of Shakespeare’s play, which, she implied, is the right way to play King Lear. While many of the critics who praised Hunter focused on how she illuminated the greatness of Shakespeare’s play, those who criticized her considered her “unfit” for the role of Lear, and compared her unfavorably with male actors who have played the part. As Paul Taylor complained, “We associate the role of Lear with titanic actors in their late fifties, not with diminutive actresses in their late thirties.” Michael Coveney wrote, “She has neither the dotty grandeur of John Wood nor the heart-breaking majesty of Robert Stephens, the

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two best Lears of recent years.” John Whitley went even further: To every schoolboy, Lear is the embodiment of the masculine principle, a tyrannical old man with a long white beard who is domineering, impetuous and macho. . . . It’s the great role that all actors look forward to playing at the end of their careers . . . from Donald Wolfit to Robert Stephens. So won’t audiences be distracted from the play when the tottering monster is portrayed by a 39-year-old, 5ft 1in woman with the black hair and small bones of her Greek origins?

These responses indicate that Hunter’s performance disrupted the iconicity of Shakespeare’s Lear and the legacy of the great male actors who have embodied him. Further, Whitley’s focus on the catalog of great male actors revered by generations of “schoolboys” signifies the boys’ club from which actresses are most certainly excluded. In particular, Kaut-Howson’s production drew negative comparisons with two male-directed Lears that ran contemporaneously with the Young Vic performances: Peter Hall’s production for the Old Vic Theatre starring Alan Howard, and Richard Eyre’s production for the National Theatre starring Ian Holm. Robert Smallwood’s review article for Shakespeare Survey (1998) places the three performances alongside each other, to Hunter’s distinct disadvantage. Although he softens Taylor’s designation of Hunter as a freak to a mere “curiosity” (246), he critiques her performance for not being moving, emotional, and just plain big enough: “on anger, majesty, rage, pathos, grief, we were seriously short-changed” (247). Significantly, he finds that cross-gender casting is the reason for this “oddly distancing” performance: “What it lacked, for me, was any vestige of emotional engagement, and that derived, I think, from a constant awareness of the visual, and vocal, unexpectedness and oddity of what one was experiencing. . . . One watched fascinated, but never (for me, anyway) in serious danger of suspending disbelief” (246). Although Smallwood finds Alan Howard’s Lear to be “rarely moving . . . a performance merely,” he does not ever ask, as he does of Hunter’s Lear, “Why bother?” (247–248). His real approbation is reserved for Holm’s Lear, which he declares to be “undoubtedly a major performance” (252).11 Interestingly, like Hunter, Holm was also a particularly tiny Lear; as Leggatt (1991) writes, he “would have seemed odd casting to anyone looking for a titanic Lear” (164). Yet unlike Hunter, his size was not seen as a barrier to his performance. Smallwood disqualifies Hunter from being ranked with the “great Lears” because of the disjunction in performance between actress and character. For him,

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and for some other critics of the production, her gender obstructed the “realness” of the character. This tendency to dismiss Hunter’s performance on the grounds of gender reveals a reverence for Shakespeare’s text and for the iconicity of Lear; reviewers rejected Hunter’s portrayal because her physical and vocal performance clashed with their vision of how Lear should be played. This desire to protect Shakespeare’s works from theatrical intervention is at its most virulent in Britain, where the plays are connected with national identity. Lear, in particular, is an important component of that identity, not only because it is considered one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, but because it portrays ancient British history. As Lisa Hopkins (2005) notes, “King Lear, although invariably referred to as one of the four great tragedies, is equally classifiable as a history, as indeed the varying titles of the Quarto and Folio versions make clear: its genesis in a story in Holinshed makes it, in this respect at least, no different from King John or Richard II” (126). Along with the story’s origins, many scholars have explored its relationship to Jacobean politics, particularly to King James’s campaign to unite England, Scotland, and Wales into “Britain.” Such readings of the play theorize that it manifests a warning about “the dangers inherent in dividing the kingdom” (Maley 2003, 28). The map produced by Lear in 1.1 thus becomes a physical representation of the tripartite division between Scotland (Goneril’s portion), Wales (Regan’s portion), and England (Cordelia’s “more opulent” portion [1.1.85]).12 This map is a potent symbol, as certain critics of the play have suggested; Richard Helgerson (1992) writes that “the cartographic representation of England . . . strengthened the sense of both local and national identity” (114), while John Gillies (2001) compares Lear’s map to John of Gaunt’s “This England” speech in Richard II, calling them both “Shakespearean nation-scapes” (110). In this light, the play presents a “pro-British” argument, revealing an investment in a national identity based on unity, rather than on “the division of the kingdom” (1.1.3–4). Willy Maley (2003) therefore calls King Lear “perhaps Shakespeare’s most British play” (11). In Britain today, the distinction between “British” and “English” often gets confused or blurred. For proponents of Shakespearean authority, “Englishness” is the order of the day, even though the nation is often referred to as Britain and national identity coded as “Britishness.” King Lear has a privileged place within the Shakespearean canon, vying with Hamlet for the title of Greatest

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Tragedy, and therefore embodies some of the most positive aspects of English identity. Hopkins (2005) points out that the action of the play converges on Dover, and suggests that Shakespeare sets his “examination of a formative moment in English history at the geographical spot which emblematizes the very essence of Englishness. . . . Not only nationality itself but also specifically English (and specifically Renaissance) inscriptions of nationality become a part of the play’s theme” (128). Although coincidentally Kaut-Howson’s Lear was originally staged in Leicester (which means “Leir’s Castle”),13 the production estranged the idea of Englishness through the Eastern European setting and the interpretation of Lear as the director’s Polish mother. These inspirations were particular and personal, and appealed neither to the sense of English identity incarnated in the text nor to the male-dominated performance traditions surrounding the main character. Further, Hunter herself, as was repeatedly emphasized in the press, is not English but Greek; she was born in New York City and came to Britain at age two. “We had a double culture at home and went to Greece for holidays. . . . We spoke Greek at home and went to Greek Orthodox church for weddings, christenings, and funerals,” she told Alison Oddey (1999, 144). Whitley’s article also noted her “Greek origins,” and added them to the list of reasons why Hunter was unfit to play Lear. Just as Shaw and Warner took Richard II to Europe, Kaut-Howson and Hunter took King Lear to Japan, for a tour of Tokyo and Osaka, in November and December 1997. Like Shaw and Warner, they were stunned by the praise they received, which was so different from the responses their production generated at home. Kaut-Howson told me that the change made a world of difference in Hunter’s performance: “In Japan, where there is no prejudice against it being a woman playing the part, or her being so small, or young, or whatever, she really came into her own. She was really splendid there.” Kaut-Howson said that the Japanese performances allowed her to speculate on the reasons why many of the British critics had been so “amazingly against [the production].” Like Shaw, she concluded that “the English are very peculiar about Shakespeare. . . . [Their reaction] was really a sign of real intolerance about Lear, that a woman should play this part.” Because she is Polish, she said, “I tend to be freer with Shakespeare than most directors, I guess, because I don’t have this protective feeling towards him.” On tour in Japan, both the director and her leading actress could finally relax. Hunter’s performance was

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hailed as “utterly convincing” and “spine-chilling” by Francis Gee in the English-language Asahi Evening News, and received excellent notices in the Japanese papers as well. Given the ways in which Hunter’s gender, age, ethnicity, and height were so completely different from conventional ways of playing Lear, the reaction of the British critics was perhaps inevitable. Their critiques came out of an investment in maintaining received interpretations of Lear in particular and Shakespeare more generally. The disparity that some reviewers saw between actress and character, as well as the startling oddity of Hunter’s presence onstage, was precisely the point of Kaut-Howson’s production. Rather than impeding the characterization of Lear, the fact that Hunter was a woman in a man’s role actually enhanced her portrayal. Kaut-Howson’s production called into question the criteria that we use to evaluate Shakespeare’s King Lear, showing us instead a highly personal, gender-inflected reading of the text and the leading character. Her staging of the play as her mother’s life, and Hunter’s portrayal of Lear as both mother and father, did not exclude the larger dimensions of the play, as Kaut-Howson herself noted. “Critics tended to think that if you use your own mother it’s more personal, and therefore it could not be . . . so cosmic. In fact, my thinking about it was cosmic and my thinking about my mother was entirely cosmic.” Because of this potent challenge that Kaut-Howson and Hunter posed to the interpretations surrounding the play, the critics were right to find their production threatening to the masculinist tradition.

CHAPTER 4

GENDER IN EXILE: VANESSA REDGRAVE’S PROSPERO IN THE TEMPEST (2000)

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ike King Lear, the role of Prospero in The Tempest is considered by critics and performers to be one of the greatest Shakespearean roles, and is associated with eminent male actors in the twilight of their careers. Many scholars and theater practitioners, believing that The Tempest was Shakespeare’s last play, have associated Prospero with the author himself. D. G. James, writing in 1967, discerned in the play “the marks and manner of a fully deliberated final creation and of a farewell” (1), and opined that “Shakespeare slyly saw himself in Prospero: the god, the poet, and the man obscurely joined in one” (167). According to this autobiographical reading of the play, Prospero’s speech that begins “Our revels now are ended” (4.1.148) articulates Shakespeare’s farewell to the theater, and the association between the author and the magician means that the play represents “Shakespeare’s last and best expression of human reality” (Vaughan 1999, 89). This interpretation has been contradicted by much of what we now know about the last part of Shakespeare’s career. Recent scholarship has shown that The Tempest was not Shakespeare’s last play; he later wrote The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII in collaboration with John Fletcher. Yet the correlation between Shakespeare and Prospero has persisted, and is often invoked in the popular press. When Vanessa Redgrave stepped into the role for the Globe Theatre’s 2000 production of the play, she faced a significant challenge. As a woman, taking on a role with many associations—of great male actors, of “universal humanism,” of Shakespeare himself—Redgrave cut a strange figure indeed. Yet the expectations that greeted her performance were different from those surrounding Shaw’s Richard II and Hunter’s Lear, primarily because Redgrave is an international star and is widely

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considered to be one of Britain’s greatest living actresses. She is wellknown for her Shakespearean performances, and is a member of a theatrical dynasty that includes her parents, actors Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, her sister Lynn and brother Corin, her niece Jemma, and her daughters Natasha and Joely Richardson. Therefore, Vanessa Redgrave’s Prospero at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre was expected to unite many figures into a satisfying whole: the famous Shakespearean actress, her equally famous father who had also played Prospero (at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1951), the benign magus of romanticized theatrical and critical tradition, and, finally, Shakespeare himself, present through the reconstruction of his “original” theater and through his identification with Prospero. Although Redgrave’s performance called up each of these figures for certain reviewers, they were hardly integrated into a seamless and magical whole. Her Prospero eschewed the polarized theatrical traditions that conceptualize the character as either benign or tyrannical. In fact, because of the unusual actor/audience relationship at the Globe, her performance disrupted the conventional characterization of Prospero as the powerful center of the play; rather, she ceded the spotlight to Caliban, Ariel, and Miranda. Like the Cottesloe and the Young Vic, the Globe disrupts traditional mimetic theater through the configuration of its space and its lack of realistic design elements. However, the Globe differs from the other two theaters in the highly interactive relationship between its actors and spectators. In The Tempest, the audience’s responses to Jasper Britton’s comic yet sympathetic Caliban, Geraldine Alexander’s watchfully resistant Ariel, and Kananu Kirimi’s feistily enthusiastic Miranda shifted the balance of power away from its traditional location with Prospero. Redgrave not only allowed this shift to happen, leaving the spectacular performances to her fellow actors, but actively encouraged it through her interpretation of Prospero. Neither benevolent white magician nor vengeful imperialist, her performance materialized the conflicted and dialectical nature of the character, who was both father and mother to his two daughters, Miranda and Ariel, as well as both the ruler of and participant in the island community. The director, Lenka Udovicki, emphasized the importance of exile to the character of Prospero, and Redgrave’s performance showed how the condition of exile forced him to fulfill conflicting roles. Cross-gender casting was crucial to Udovicki’s exploration of the transformational effects of exile: Redgrave’s presence as Prospero embodied his androgynous qualities, his domineering

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and loving tendencies, and his roles as a powerful ruler and an interactive member of his community. Although he relinquished magic, desire for vengeance, and gruffness at the end of the play in favor of community, forgiveness, and love, these renunciations did not signal his disavowal of a stereotypically “masculine” position in favor of a more “feminine” one. Instead, by showing the audience continuously through her performance that she was effectually playing herself, Redgrave demonstrated how a particular body can exist in the tensions between binary oppositions—and hence challenge and unsettle them. By giving an understated performance and allowing audience sympathy to reside primarily with Caliban, Ariel, and Miranda, Redgrave refused to comply with the expectations of many theater reviewers, who wanted a performance that would bolster Shakespearean authority and English national identity. Udovicki’s Balkan-themed production subverted the potentially “magical” combination of Redgrave, Prospero, Shakespeare, and the Globe Theatre, creating instead an interpretation of the play that was personal, particular, and political.

Performance Space and the Balance of Power at the Globe Theatre Staging a Shakespearean play at the new Globe Theatre constitutes an intervention in two histories: the history of the sixteenth-century structure and the more recent history of the construction of the twentieth-century building. The early modern Globe complicates the concept of the “original,” as it was built from the timbers of the older Theatre playhouse. Yet the modern reconstruction of the Globe is heavily invested in ideas of originality and authenticity, as the project aims to recreate what it would have been like to perform and attend a play in the late sixteenth century—at least as much as contemporary scholarship and modern safety codes will allow. Certain plays seem to have more resonance than others in this space: Henry V, for instance, which was chosen as the first production of the 1997 opening season, makes explicit reference to the theater, “this wooden O” (Prologue 13). Similarly, in Prospero’s “revels” speech in The Tempest, he refers to “the great globe itself,” which “shall dissolve; / And . . . Leave not a rack behind” (4.1.153–156). While Prospero refers literally to the fate of the world, when Redgrave spoke these lines standing on the stage at the new Globe, and looked around at the audience seated within the wooden O, the double meaning was clear.1 Udovicki’s production

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of The Tempest derived additional authority from the probability that the play was most likely staged at the first Globe.2 Many reviewers of the production claimed that the theater possesses a magical ability to bring audiences the true essence of Shakespeare. Charles Spencer of the Daily Telegraph (May 27, 2000) wrote that “[here] you feel closer to the spirit of Shakespeare than anywhere else,” and Georgina Brown of the Mail on Sunday ( June 4, 2000) concurred that “the atmosphere is extraordinary: the more uncomfortable and inclement the conditions, the more authentically Elizabethan the places feels, and the closer the spirit of Shakespeare seems to hover.” W. B. Worthen (2003) places this rough magic in a more commercial context: “like Plimouth Plantation, the battlefields of Gettysburg and Antietam, perhaps even like the Magic Kingdom itself, Shakespeare’s Globe is a field of dreams. If we build it, he will come” (116). Worthen’s comment alludes to the dialectical nature of the Globe, which negotiates the tensions between opposing forces: old and new, authentic and inauthentic, tourism and high art. As Dennis Kennedy (1998) notes: The Globe is both historical and modern: it looks like a lateElizabethan structure; yet we know from the start that it’s a copy from the late age of the second Elizabeth. It is both authentic and inauthentic; it is carefully built using reconstructed Tudor oak carpentry and hair-and-lime plaster; yet it is as counterfeit and synthetic as any theme park. (185)

As such, the Globe project has been both rapturously embraced and unequivocally condemned by audiences, academics, critics, pundits, and theater professionals. These two contrasting visions of the efforts to build the new Globe are exemplified by Barry Day’s triumphal narrative This Wooden “O” (1998) and John Drakakis’s essay (1988) critiquing the Globe Trust’s interactions with the Southwark Borough Council in the mid-1980s. Day’s book, which characterizes the project as the fulfillment of “an American’s dream,” takes the Globe founder, American actor and director Sam Wanamaker, as its plucky hero and argues that the reconstruction succeeded despite “political advantage and apathy at national and local level” and “a national ennui which takes heritage for granted” (1998, xiv). By contrast, Drakakis’s account (1988) of the legal dispute over the piece of land where the Globe was eventually built questions the motives and tactics employed by Wanamaker and the Trust in order to ensure

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that the Globe would be built on the original site (or near it, anyway). Drakakis calls the project an act of “cultural imperialism . . . in which culture and a philanthropic international capital combine to engage in an act of urban renewal upon their own hegemonic terms” and at the expense of the people of Southwark, “the third poorest borough in England” (38–39). These two vastly different analyses of the politics underlying the Globe reconstruction add to the paradox that is the new Globe: it is simultaneously a living monument to Shakespeare, a celebration of national heritage, and a culturally imperialist anomaly in the midst of Southwark. The Globe is also both an extremely popular tourist attraction and a serious repertory theater that despite the lack of state funding has proved to be a major financial success.3 As Diana E. Henderson (2002) has observed, the Globe “hovers, sometimes in schizoid fashion, between theme park entertainment and mystified Bardic tributes, on the one hand, and attempts at something closer to re-creation of early modern staging and dedication to repertory theatre, on the other” (121). Although the theater depends upon the cultural capital of Shakespeare’s reputation in order to draw its massive crowds each year, Mark Rylance, the first artistic director, made it clear from the beginning of his tenure that he saw theatrical production at the Globe as both historical and contemporary. His policies, most of which have been adopted by his successor, Dominic Dromgoole, who took over in 2006, include producing at least one “original practices” production each year, which usually use all-male acting companies, live musicians playing period instruments, costumes constructed of early modern materials and designs, and minimal settings and props to explore the playing practices that were used in the first Globe. Yet the company also produces “modern practices” productions, such as the 2000 Tempest, that employ methods and materials of the present. Further, Rylance demonstrated a commitment to staging both non-Shakespearean early modern drama and the work of new playwrights. The Globe has performed such little-seen plays as Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy, Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Brome’s The Antipodes, and Marlowe’s Dido Queen of Carthage, as well as new works by Peter Oswald, Howard Brenton, Jack Shepherd, Glyn Maxwell, and Ché Walker. Thus, although the Globe is certainly a major tourist attraction, it is also a theater that does new and innovative work. Like the productions of Richard II and King Lear at the Cottesloe and Young Vic Theatres, performances at the Globe challenge the

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ideology of theatrical realism through the configuration of the space and the lack of theatrical effects, which encourages the audience to focus on the bodies of the actors onstage. When audience members enter the Globe, they find themselves in a round, roofless building that feels both open and intimate. The building is one hundred feet in diameter, and the stage is unusually broad: it measures forty-four feet wide, twenty-five feet deep, and five feet high. The yard, which is the area around the stage for the standing spectators (or “groundlings”), measures nearly eighty feet in diameter, and there are three levels of gallery seating for additional audience members. The theater can accommodate up to sixteen hundred spectators, seven hundred of them standing. Yet despite the theater’s size, the spectators feel remarkably close to the action, since no one is more than fifty feet from center stage. The experience of seeing a particular production changes depending on where one sits or stands; I, for instance, gained three quite different perspectives on The Tempest as a groundling standing close to the stage, seated in the stage left lower-level gallery, and seated in the “Lords’ Rooms” above the stage. The configuration of the space works together with the lack of the usual theatrical trappings to undercut the conventions of realistic theater. Performances are illuminated by natural light during the day and by unobtrusive lights that simulate daylight at night, which means that directors cannot use lighting to direct the gaze of the audience or to create dramatic effects. Similarly, all music and sound effects must be created live, and each production usually has its own original score, played by musicians who are visible to the audience, either on the balcony or, occasionally, onstage. Finally, productions at the Globe generally use very little in the way of settings or props. The result of this scenic minimalism is that, as Jaq Bessell, the Globe’s former head of research, told me in an interview, “All the plays are essentially set in the theater. . . . [I]t’s an intensely theatrical, nonrealistic world.”4 The Tempest amply demonstrated the ways in which the Globe space can be used to disrupt mimetic theater conventions, primarily through sound and settings. The actors performed certain sound effects themselves; for instance, in scenes where Prospero demonstrated the power of his magic, actors who were not involved with the scene would sit in the Lords’ Rooms and make noises that simulated rushing wind, growling animals, or groans of pain. They also appeared at the close of the first half to sing and clap their hands along with Caliban’s “Freedom, high-day” song (2.2.177). The actors

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and musicians were visible at all times, so that the audience could always see the sources of the music and sound effects. The production also used very little in the way of settings and props to create a sense of place. The ship in the opening scene was indicated by a wooden wheel that rose from the trap in the stage floor and a length of rope rigging that fell from the trap in the “heavens.” Ariel created the storm by entering with a small paper boat that she manipulated, and the actors responded by swaying and falling to the floor. The island was indicated only by two translucent, multifaceted blocks that resembled crystals, one large and one small, which the actors could use to sit, stand, or crouch upon. The only other substantial set pieces were the banquet table for tormenting the lords in 3.3 and a chess board for Miranda and Ferdinand in 5.1. The props were likewise minimal and of necessity: Prospero’s staff, cloak, and magic book, logs for Ferdinand to haul, a tabor for Ariel, swords for the lords, a bottle for Stephano. Rather than working to create a specific, detailed world for the play, the production focused the audience’s attention on the bodies of the actors. On the Globe stage, the body is the primary means of conveying information. Pauline Kiernan (1999) writes that the play and the actors are the only elements there to “work on the playgoers’ imaginations” (11), and because of this they “are compelled to concentrate on the voices and bodies of the actors” (19–20). Rylance (1997) concurs: “the presence of the actor’s physical being, how he is seen, remains very important” at the Globe (172). Cross-gender casting in this space can work to reveal the performativity of gender, rather than asking the audience to overlook the “anomalous” gender of the performer. Bessell has said that she believes the lack of realism at the Globe allows cross-gender casting to “work well,” implying that the audience will accept a man in a woman’s role (or vice-versa) more easily in this space. Presumably, the spectator will be able to suspend disbelief more readily and focus on the character, rather than speculate on the meanings presented by the actor’s body in an unfamiliar role. Yet cross-gender casting in the Globe Tempest had precisely the opposite effect: because of the audience’s heightened awareness of Redgrave as Prospero, they were not able to forget that they were watching a cross-gender performance. The Globe differs from spaces like the Cottesloe and Young Vic in the unusually interactive relationship that it cultivates between the actors and the spectators. The presence of the audience is impossible to overlook in this space, partly because spectators are not

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hidden in darkness, but also because the groundlings stand so close, often with their elbows resting on the stage. This proximity gives rise to byplay between actors and audience that is unlike anything in mimetic theater. Actors can use direct address to the spectators during soliloquies and asides, and sometimes initiate physical interaction with audience members. The actors frequently acknowledge the presence of spectators; in The Tempest, for example, Redgrave spoke Prospero’s epilogue directly to the audience, addressing them on “Please you, draw near” (5.1.322). Her performance of the epilogue broke down the barriers between the audience and the world of the play; taking a cue from the speech itself, in that moment she was Vanessa Redgrave humbly asking the audience for their “indulgence” (20). Although Redgrave established a relationship with the audience from the beginning of the play, often addressing them during asides, she was not the primary focus of audience engagement. Rather, the interactive nature of the playing space allowed Britton’s Caliban, Alexander’s Ariel, and Kirimi’s Miranda to offer resistance, in individualized ways, to Prospero’s power, shifting the locus of sympathy away from the magician and toward those he sought to control. Britton was the most successful at drawing audience sympathy, emphasizing the comic yet poignant elements of Caliban’s character. He took full advantage of the opportunities provided by the Globe’s space, engaging repeatedly with the audience from his first entrance. His appearance and much of his behavior was designed to provoke laughter and mild disgust: he was stripped to the waist and caked with mud, with shells and barnacles affixed to his clay-encrusted hair. He threw raw fish into the crowd, made ape noises at the groundlings, and used a spectator’s spiky hairstyle to demonstrate the “hedgehogs, which / Lie tumbling in my barefoot way” (2.2.10–11). Although some of these interactions were set pieces that he performed during every show, he also improvised; during his “Freedom” song on June 2, he spontaneously grabbed a beer can that was sitting on the stage, showered himself with its contents, and crushed it, to the audience’s considerable delight. On June 10, he took a spectator’s sunglasses, put them on, and strutted around the stage like a rock star. The audiences at every performance that I saw responded rapturously; not only were they clearly enjoying being part of the production, their approbation encouraged Britton to become more and more outrageous throughout the run. Yet Britton’s Caliban was not simply a crude stage clown; he was also a freedom fighter with a sensitive soul.

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The first half of the production ended with the extended set-piece of his “Freedom” song, which Britton used to whip the audience up into a frenzy of support, encouraging them to clap their hands and sing along with his cry of resistance. At the performances I attended, the atmosphere in the theater was positively electric during this song, with a packed house shouting “Freedom, high-day!” in unison with Caliban. In the second half of the performance he revealed his love and admiration for Miranda: he spoke of her beauty (3.2.93–98) with respect and agreed to her potential alliance with Stephano with sadness and regret. In the last scene, before his exit, he kissed her hand gently and walked out looking very dignified. Britton’s skillful use of the theater space ensured that he was at the center of the play, winning the audience’s laughter and admiration, and offering a challenge to Prospero’s power, and to Prospero’s conception of him as a mere “savage.” Kirimi and Alexander also used the space to shift focus from Prospero to the resistance of Miranda and Ariel, albeit more subtly than Britton. Kirimi was a feisty, outspoken Miranda, who loved her father but also did not hesitate to enlist the audience’s support in her resistance of him. Like Britton, she used direct address to gain their sympathy: when Prospero chastised her for her interest in Ferdinand, she turned to the audience to ask, “Why speaks my father so ungently? This / Is the third man that e’er I saw” (1.2.448–449). Her question, posed in tones of indignation, combined with her attempts to restrain her father physically during this scene, drew supportive laughter from the audience. The spectators’ admiration of Miranda’s spunkiness was confirmed in 3.1, in which Kirimi effortlessly lifted one of the logs that Ferdinand strained to carry over her head and carried it to the pile, saying “I should do it / With much more ease” (3.1.29–30). Kirimi earned applause for this moment at all the performances that I attended. Alexander’s Ariel also gained audience sympathy and drew the focus away from Prospero with her resistance to his commands, albeit without using direct address to the spectators. She was a small, slight, doll-like Ariel with whitened face and limbs and pale blonde hair. She was a watchful presence in many of the play’s scenes, standing poised and unmoving with her head cocked to one side to spy on the Italian lords and on the alliance between Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo. She took advantage of the “hot spots” on the Globe’s space to pull audience focus, countering the static position of watching by placing herself at the stage corners outside the pillars.5 Alexander’s

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performance made it clear that although Ariel served Prospero and spied to do his bidding, she observed her master’s behavior with equal watchfulness, and continually registered resistance to his plans for revenge. In particular, in her performance as the harpy, she was clearly not enjoying her role chastising the “three men of sin” (3.3.53). She demonstrated her dislike for Prospero’s strategy by starting to remove her black costume before she was offstage, showing both the lords and her master that she would play her part, but only up to a point. Her unwillingness to play the roles demanded by Prospero was also employed to comic effect during the masque in 4.1: she appeared as Ceres, wearing an unsteady headdress made of corn, which she kept adjusting irritably. Visibly uncomfortable and unable to sing properly in this role, Ariel’s antics contrasted humorously with the grace and lovely voices of Juno and Iris. Her plea for the release of the imprisoned lords—particularly for “the good old Lord Gonzalo” (5.1.15)—was the result of her watchful resistance, and led Prospero to conclude that “the rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance” (27–28). The performances of Britton, Kirimi, and Alexander all demonstrated how actors can use the Globe space to interact with the audience and draw their focus. In the case of The Tempest, these three performances shifted the play’s balance of power, which has traditionally resided with Prospero, whether he is played as benign or tyrannical. Caliban, Ariel, and Miranda enlisted audience support to enact their resistances to Prospero’s power, moving their perspectives, particularly Caliban’s, from the margins to the center. Redgrave’s performance as Prospero encouraged this shift, relinquishing control of the play to focus on the dialectical nature of the character.

The Dialectic of Prospero: Redgrave’s Performance of Gender Much like King Lear, critical and performance interpretations of The Tempest have tended toward either a “sentimental” reading of the play and its leading character or a “cynical” reading. The former emphasizes the text’s magical qualities, its focus on “virtue” rather than “vengeance,” its avoidance of tragedy, and reads Prospero as a benign white magician. The latter reading focuses on the abuses of power exercised by the tyrannical Prospero, who robs Caliban of the island, controls his daughter’s sexuality, and

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ruthlessly manipulates the action of the drama. Virginia and Alden Vaughan (1999) point out that the ways in which critics and performers have responded to Prospero have tended to dictate how they respond to the play as a whole: “In the eighteenth century, when the magus was perceived as an enlightened and benign philosophe, the play seemed a magical comedy; by the late twentieth century, when Prospero had come to be viewed as a tetchy, if not tyrannical, imperialist, the play itself seemed more problematic” (24). Many recent productions have emphasized the complexities of the play, and interpretations of Prospero have become less monolithic: Lois Potter (2001) notes a range of interpretive choices in late twentieth-century Prosperos, from “saddened but apparently hopeful” to a study in “aged bitterness” to an emphasis on his “comical human fallibility” (371–372). Many contemporary productions of the play explore both its magical comedy and its darker undertones, steering a course between the sentimental and cynical readings. Similarly, many leading actors play Prospero as a profoundly conflicted character, “as a human being as complex in his strengths and weaknesses as a Shakespearian tragic hero, one whose attitudes are capable of significant change and whose responses to changing circumstances can be volatile, even mercurial” (Hapgood 2001, 421–422). Redgrave is one of the performers who chose to explore the character’s complexities, combining a gruff authoritarianism with a great generosity of spirit. Yet in her performance, Prospero’s conflicted nature was played out through an exploration of gender identity. Her interpretation revealed the dialectical nature of the character, showing how Prospero continually negotiated between the various roles that he assumed with respect to Miranda, Ariel, and Caliban. He was both domineering and loving, controlling and generous, powerful and weak. The presence of a woman’s body in a male role materialized the tensions between these roles, so that it was impossible to fix Redgrave as either father or mother, male or female, at any particular moment of her performance. Instead, she incorporated both roles through her androgynous physicality and characterization. Psychoanalytic criticism of The Tempest has read Prospero as simultaneously embodying the mother and the father by focusing on the language that he uses to relate to his literal and figurative children. As Stephen Orgel (1988) has noted, Prospero’s wife is absent from the world of the play, but the magus “presents himself as incorporating her, acting as both father and mother to Miranda” (220).

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In particular, he envisions the voyage from Milan to the island as a birth fantasy: When I have decked the sea with drops full salt, Under my burden groaned: which raised in me An undergoing stomach, to bear up Against what should ensue. (1.2.155–158)

In this passage, Prospero envisions himself as a pregnant mother, who is delivered of his “burden” in landing on the island. David Sundelson (1980) points out another passage in which Prospero characterizes himself as both male and female; he tells Miranda that his brother Antonio was “the ivy which had hid my princely trunk / And sucked my verdure out on’t” (1.2.86–87). Sundelson (1980) writes that “the metaphor makes Prospero androgynous: the second clause suggests a mother drained by an insatiable child, while the hidden ‘princely trunk’ is an image of male strength defeated or replaced” (35). He goes on to argue that while Prospero is androgynous and vulnerable in Milan, on the island his role as father becomes exalted and held up in contrast to Caliban’s mother, the “blue-eyed hag” Sycorax (1.2.271). Ultimately, according to Sundelson (1980), Prospero is the “father whose life-giving power defeats the vindictive mother, Sycorax” (39). Yet Prospero is also identified with Sycorax’s demonic magic through his speech of renunciation in 5.1.33–57. This speech, as many critics have noted, alludes to a speech of Medea’s in Ovid. Orgel (1988) writes, “In giving up his magic, Prospero speaks as Medea. He has incorporated Ovid’s witch, prototype of the wicked mother Sycorax, in the most literal way” (227). In these readings, the distinction between the evil mother Sycorax and the benign father Prospero is troubled, and Prospero incorporates both mother and father, good and evil. Andrew Hartley (2008) problematizes Prospero’s gender further, pointing out that “there is relatively little that asserts the character’s essential maleness,” and that if the magus is played by an actress, “much that seems ‘male’ about Prospero changes” (140).6 Redgrave’s performance placed a female body in the role of a male character, showing that Prospero was both father and mother simultaneously. She also departed from tradition by showing the ways in which he parented not only Miranda but Ariel and Caliban as well. Redgrave was the androgynous parent who was eager to reassume power and authority as Duke of Milan but recognized that this would come at

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a price: the loss of her children. She accomplished this reading of the character by simultaneously citing stereotypes of masculinity and femininity through her physical appearance and body movements. Because she played herself as Prospero, she showed how the conflicting aspects of the character were all part of herself, and revealed how a particular body in the non-illusory space of the Globe can unsettle and ultimately discard the gender binary. Redgrave’s first appearance as Prospero in Udovicki’s production immediately conveyed the impression of both masculinity and femininity in play. As the ship’s wheel sank into the trap center stage, the upstage center doors swung open and Redgrave emerged from the “discovery space,” staring fixedly ahead and twirling a long and thick wooden staff, giving the impression of both watching and controlling the tempest. She was dressed in black jodhpurs tucked into tall black riding boots, a black shirt with rolled-up sleeves, an olive green combat vest with numerous zippered pockets and compartments, a small black cap, and black fingerless leather driving gloves. She wore her magic cloak inside out and strapped to her back, like a camping pack. She wore her dark gray hair loose, falling to just below her chin, and no visible makeup. The sixty-three-year-old Redgrave cut an imposing figure, primarily because of her height; she is just under six feet tall. She moved athletically, manipulating her long staff with confidence, but did not make any effort to walk like a man. Nor did she attempt to sound authentically masculine; she lowered her voice a bit to achieve a deeper sound, but her persistent smoker’s cough (painfully present during the June 2 performance) signaled that her natural cadences were already fairly deep. In fact, her physical appearance and movements were characterized by a lack of illusion; she looked, moved, and sounded like Vanessa Redgrave wearing combat gear. Yet both her costume and her movements conveyed a more ambiguous impression. Her clothes registered as masculine more than unisex, according to the descriptions employed by theater critics, who compared her to “a blooming farmer” (Michael Coveney, Daily Mail, June 2, 2000), “a Balkan guerrilla” (Benedict Nightingale, New York Times, June 25, 2000), and “a blend of Gypsy, warlord, explorer, and Robinson Crusoe” (Nightingale, Times, May 27, 2000). While her costume indicated masculinity, this jarred with the fact that she was immediately recognizable as herself, since Redgrave did not disguise her hair, face, walk, or voice. The audience was thus invited to read the contradictions in this Prospero, whose attire indicated a variety of masculine roles from farmer to warrior, but who was clearly

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a woman, and a famous actress at that. Her costume also incorporated a small detail that asked to be read androgynously: she wore a dangling earring in her left ear, in a fashion that can be read as both masculine (wearing an earring in one ear rather than two) and feminine (wearing long earrings). Her initial appearance also presented another clash of signifiers in the way she handled her staff: Redgrave studied Aikido to learn how to twirl the staff and to give it a combative look, but her movements also conveyed a more stereotypically feminine impression of a baton twirler. This was shown through two contrasting interpretations of her handling of the staff: while Charles Spencer wrote that she “wield[ed] her magician’s staff like a samurai sword,” John Peter of the Sunday Times ( June 4, 2000) said she “twirl[ed] her staff like an aging drum majorette.” In Redgrave’s hands, the staff was both samurai sword and majorette’s baton, and conveyed masculine and feminine signifiers simultaneously. Redgrave’s preparations for her role, like those of Shaw and Hunter, revealed her anxieties about playing a male part. While Shaw bandaged her legs to help her “walk like a man,” and Hunter wore a suit and a little beard to feel more masculine, Redgrave initially also felt the need of some assistance to access Prospero’s gender. In a post-performance discussion with audience members at the Globe on June 10, she confided that she had decided in rehearsals that Prospero should be a very masculine man, and decided to play the role “as though [burly Scottish comedian] Billy Connolly were playing Prospero.” She requested a big mustache and curly wig to help her feel more masculine, and adopted a thick Scottish accent to emulate Connolly. She noted wryly that Udovicki and Rylance gently let her know that her choices weren’t working, and so she decided to find the ways in which her own life and experiences overlapped with Prospero’s. “To begin to play Prospero,” she told the audience, “I mustn’t play Prospero; I must play me. I must imagine what I would do as though I were in his shoes. Which is not the usual way of working, but that’s what I did.” When she approached Prospero from this standpoint, she found that Miranda was the most important thing in his life: not his magic, or power, or revenge, but his role as father to his daughter. Redgrave said that she brought her own experiences as a mother of daughters to the role, and ultimately placed the parenting aspect of the character first in her performance. Yet certain aspects of Redgrave’s ultra-masculine Prospero remained beyond the rehearsal period. Although she dropped the mustache and wig, she retained the Scottish accent, and used it to create

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a sense of the character as a gruff, bluff, no-nonsense parent. Her Prospero was often impatient and could treat those beneath him— which included Miranda as well as Ferdinand, Ariel, and Caliban— quite roughly, dominating the weaker characters physically as well as through the power of her voice. This side of Prospero’s character showed fierce anger at Antonio’s treachery, and forgave him unwillingly. Yet he also had tender and loving relationships with Miranda and Ariel, and even showed some affection to Caliban at the end of the play. These two sides of the character intensified throughout the run of the production, and often jarred and clashed with each other within the same moment, just as the signifiers presented through Redgrave’s physical appearance demanded to be read on multiple levels simultaneously. In responding to her performance, it was difficult to exclusively associate her physical strength, gruffness, and anger with masculinity, and her tenderness and affection with femininity. Because these signifiers were in play simultaneously, and because the body that assumed and relinquished them had in itself many layers of gender identity, Redgrave’s performance showed that gender is a process and a construction, not a fixed and stable entity. The relationship between Prospero and Miranda was central to the production, and Redgrave brought out both sides of the character in the way that Prospero interacted with his daughter. It was immediately clear in 1.2 that Prospero loved his daughter with extreme devotion and tenderness. Miranda appeared and acted very young, clutching a stuffed toy unicorn, and her father soothed away her distress over the tempest by hugging her, stroking and kissing her forehead, and comforting her by saying, “Be collected. / No more amazement. Tell your piteous heart / There’s no harm done” (1.2.13–15). Prospero wore Miranda’s baby shoe around his neck, and as he remembered his daughter as a little girl “not / Out three years old” (40–41), he looked at it fondly and kissed it. When he told Miranda how they escaped from Milan in a leaky boat, Redgrave emphasized the tenderness in Prospero’s lines, “O, a cherubin / Thou wast that did preserve me” (152–153). She wrapped Miranda in a big hug and lingered over the “O,” laughing with delight as she told how “thou didst smile, / Infused with a fortitude from heaven” (153–154). Her Prospero also demonstrated considerable pride in his lovely daughter through audience interaction in this first scene. When Miranda asked, “Wherefore did they not / That hour destroy us?” (138–139), Prospero said proudly, “Well demanded, wench; / My tale provokes that question” (139–140). Redgrave looked out at the audience,

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gesturing to Miranda and nodding her head approvingly, inviting them to admire her daughter’s cleverness. Yet Redgrave could also be severe with Miranda in this scene, repeatedly admonishing her to listen: “Dost thou attend me?” (78); “Thou attend’st not!” (87); “I pray thee mark me” (88); “Dost thou hear?” (106). She said all of these lines sternly, despite the fact that Miranda was listening attentively. As in Hunter’s performance as Lear, Redgrave conveyed the impression that Prospero was a man who could be harsh if he thought he were being disobeyed. These two sides of Prospero were also apparent in his dealings with the romance between Miranda and Ferdinand (Will Keen). It is clear from the text that Prospero engineers this relationship, and he tests Ferdinand’s worthiness by placing the (illusory) obstacle of parental dissent in his way. Redgrave played up Prospero’s supposed disapproval of Ferdinand, treating him roughly during 1.2. She used her magic staff to control Ferdinand’s movements, and easily dominated the smaller man physically. When she threatened to “manacle thy neck and feet together” (465), she grabbed him by the collar and backed him up against the stage left pillar. In this scene, Miranda’s support of Ferdinand was rewarded with impatience. “What, I say, / My foot my tutor?” he snapped at her harshly (472–473). When she impulsively caught hold of his cloak, crying, “Beseech you, father” (477), Prospero smacked at her hands until she let go, roaring, “Hence! Hang not on my garments!” (478). He shouted “Silence!” to quiet Miranda’s further objections and rebuked her very sternly in the following speech (479–484). Miranda, cowed, crept behind the stage right pillar, but feistily declared that “I have no ambition / To see a goodlier man” (486–487). Prospero showed that he was proud of his daughter’s boldness in 3.1, in which he watched the encounter between Miranda and Ferdinand. Here Redgrave again gestured to Miranda and looked out at the audience, inviting them to admire her. The relationship between Prospero and Ariel mirrored his relationship with Miranda in certain ways: he was both a tyrannical master and a loving parent to the sprite, and registered sadness at losing her at the end of the play. The idea of Ariel as a second daughter to Prospero was enhanced by the fact that an actress, Geraldine Alexander, played the role. Although Ariel is gendered male in the text (1.2.194), there was a lengthy stage tradition of casting an actress in the role that held sway from the Restoration into the early twentieth century. Most actresses who played Ariel were cast for their singing and dancing ability, and emphasized the character’s delicate,

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fairy-like qualities. However, in the last half-century most Ariels have been male, following the designation in the text. Christine Dymkowski (2000) has argued that the prevalence of female Ariels in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries corresponded with the characterization of Prospero as a benign magus that demanded Ariel be “a gossamer female fairy” (37). In the twentieth century, as the conception of Prospero began to shift into a more tyrannical figure, male actors started to play Ariel because “the service of a female Ariel was too culturally normative to be disturbing,” according to Dymkowski (44). Despite the prevalence of male Ariels in contemporary British productions of the play, a number of actresses have played the role. Alexander’s delicate, waif-like physical presence linked her to the gossamer Ariels of the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury stage, but she also undercut those associations through her stylized, puppet-like movements, her tenor voice, and her deliberate lack of singing ability. Her Ariel presented a striking physical contrast to Redgrave’s tall, sturdy Prospero, but they were linked visually by their similar tall black boots. Prospero’s pride in his “brave spirit” (1.2.207) and his pain at letting her go paralleled his relationship with Miranda, indicating that this magus had two beloved daughters. When Ariel did her “spriting gently” (1.2.300), she was rewarded with loving care; when she resisted, however, Prospero punished her harshly. In 1.2, when Prospero reminded Ariel of Sycorax’s torments, Redgrave used her considerable height to dominate the tiny Alexander physically, grabbing her by the scruff of her neck on “Thou liest, malignant thing” (1.2.258). She also used the staff to pinion Ariel’s arms behind her back to simulate her imprisonment in the “cloven pine” (279). Ariel ended up slumped on the floor in front of the enraged Prospero, and said, “I thank thee, master” (295), with visible resentment. Yet her relationship with Prospero was also tender and loving; as with Miranda, Prospero was clearly very proud of his spirit and her abilities and loved her like a second daughter. In 1.2, as Ariel described how she created the shipwreck, Prospero continually interjected with exclamations of pride, such as “Why, that’s my spirit!” (1.2.216). Redgrave played these moments by appealing to the audience to admire Ariel, just as she did with Miranda. When Prospero praised her, he would often stroke her face and hair affectionately. In 4.1, he said very lovingly, “This was well done, my bird” (4.1.184), and kissed the top of Ariel’s head. These tender moments culminated in his moving release of Ariel at the end of the performance, just before the epilogue. Redgrave unbuttoned Ariel’s jacket and took it off to

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reveal an ethereal, floor-length dress, figuratively releasing her from her bonds. With a wistful backward glance, Ariel slipped down from the stage and walked away through the groundlings in the yard, a free, earth-bound spirit. Redgrave watched her go, suffused with emotion, and it was clear that Prospero was losing a daughter. Prospero’s relationship with Caliban was more traditional in that he acted as an oppressive and cruel master to the “hag-seed” (1.2.368). Redgrave controlled him with her magic staff in 1.2, stamped forcefully on the stage, bellowed insults, and dominated the not-so-fearful monster with her formidable physicality. Yet even this relationship softened at the end of the performance: when Caliban resolved to “seek for grace” (5.1.298), he extended his hand tentatively toward Prospero, who shook it heartily. Caliban then admitted ruefully, “What a thrice-double ass / Was I to take this drunkard for a god, / And worship this dull fool!” (299–301). The two laughed together, and then Prospero gave Caliban his fedora hat, showed him how to cock it jauntily to one side, gave him a thumbs-up, and said almost affectionately, “Go to, away!” (301). Caliban, humanized by being treated like an equal at last, stooped to kiss Miranda’s hand respectfully before leaving through the center doors. Redgrave’s Prospero was thus androgynous in his relationships with Miranda, Ariel, and Caliban. Her characterization was at once demanding, tyrannical, loving, forgiving, and affectionate, which made it impossible to define this Prospero exclusively as either father or mother. Instead, Redgrave asked her audience to read these roles simultaneously throughout her performance, and questioned the construction of masculine and feminine. Further, by playing herself rather than playing a role, she showed how conflicting meanings can adhere to a particular body in the non-illusory space of the Globe.

Exile and Community: A Balkan Tempest When Mark Rylance announced that Redgrave would be playing Prospero in January 2000, he explained his casting choice by referring to the actress’s reputation for left-wing political causes, specifically her recent activism on behalf of Balkan refugees. As Dalya Alberge wrote in the Times ( January 19, 2000), “He felt that Prospero . . . was appropriate for an actress ‘who has always had a passionate interest in people in exile.’ ” David Lister also reported on Rylance’s reasoning in the Independent ( January 19, 2000): “He said Redgrave . . . wanted to lean on her experiences visiting the Balkans

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during the recent conflicts and make the role a study in being a refugee.” The actress suggested Lenka Udovicki as director for the production; the two had been friends since Udovicki and her husband stayed with Redgrave for seven months after escaping from war-torn Belgrade. Both women were very interested in making their production political, albeit with a different agenda from many recent productions of The Tempest, which have focused on colonial or postcolonial readings of the play. The Globe Tempest was not part of this tradition, which sees Prospero as the oppressive imperialist and Caliban as the victimized native. Instead, the production subliminally suggested the Balkan crises through its design and original music, and Prospero and Miranda became exiles from their native Milan who were eager to regain a sense of community on the island and beyond. Although it began with scenes of chaos, the production emphasized reconciliation, forgiveness, family, and community rather than anarchy, disorientation, revenge, and abuses of power. Prospero and his extended family were transformed by their exile into more tolerant, loving, and community-oriented beings. Redgrave’s performance also showed how Prospero’s dialectical nature was a result of the state of exile, which necessitates transformation, forcing Prospero to be both father and mother to his daughter(s), and to be both ruler of and participant in the island community. Despite the production’s focus on the politics of exile, certain reviewers and scholars criticized the absence of the colonialist readings that have characterized so many recent Tempests. Nicholas de Jongh wrote in the Evening Standard (August 11, 2000) that the production “disappointingly steers a reactionary rather than pioneering line. Miss Redgrave’s perverse theory about the testy, exiled magician harks back to Victorian notions of Prospero as noble colonial ruler. It ignores modern belief that The Tempest was Shakespeare’s critique of Elizabethan and Jacobean empire-building.” Lois Potter (2001) agreed that the production lacked “any obvious intellectual or political agenda” (124). These critics rightly pointed out that the production did not attempt to engage with the discourses of colonialism that have so marked the recent scholarship and performance traditions surrounding the play. de Jongh’s review helpfully summed up one of the ways in which the text has been read: as Shakespeare’s critique of early modern British imperialism. Nor did the production portray what Meredith Skura (1989) terms the “revisionist” colonialist reading: that “The Tempest itself not only displays prejudice but fosters and even ‘enacts’ colonialism by mystifying or justifying

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Prospero’s power over Caliban” (45). These arguments have situated the play at the center of a vibrant debate about early modern imperialism and racism, and have debated the statement that Shakespeare intended to make in writing the play. These interpretations have intervened in traditional scholarship that saw the play as “concerned with the opposition of Nature [represented by the savage Caliban] and Art [represented by the cultured Prospero]” (Kermode 1958, xxiv), or as “a romance of reconciliation” or a “Christian allegory of forgiveness” (Lindley 2002, 1). The fact that certain critics of the Globe production felt the absence of the colonialist reading of the play indicates how important these interpretations have become to the performance traditions of The Tempest. Yet despite the lack of colonial themes, the production was by no means apolitical. Rather, Redgrave and Udovicki chose to explore the different set of political crises in the Balkans that affected them both on a personal level. The association of the world of the play with the Balkans was rendered primarily through the costume design and the music. The costumes, which were designed by Bjanka Ursulov (who, like Udovicki, is from Belgrade), were intended to reflect “a world of fantasy, not anchored to one place or time. The clothing scheme featured a number of different silhouettes from across the ages, to set the play in its own world, rather than a particular time period” (Bessell 2001). To this end, the mariners wore modern blue naval uniforms, the Italian lords wore Renaissance-style garb in satins and velvets, the spirits were white, ethereal, and primarily clothed in papery fabric, and Miranda and Ferdinand wore cabled sweaters and wide-legged pants in cream and gold. The Balkan style was suggested through the costumes of the musicians, who wore tall cylindrical hats, sashed tunics, and wide-legged trousers, and Prospero’s “Balkan guerrilla” combat gear. Ariel’s appearance as the “harpy” in 3.3 underscored the contemporary Balkan feel; as Alan Dessen (2001) noted, she was dressed “as a black-clad terrorist or partisan wearing a bandoleer of cartridges,” a black helmet, and black jodhpurs (6). The costumes for the island’s inhabitants contrasted sharply with the sumptuous attire of the lords, which contributed to the sense that Prospero was an exile from the world of the court. The island’s music, its “sounds and sweet airs” (3.2.131), were also Balkan in flavor. The production’s composer, Nigel Osborne (2000), noted in the program that he was influenced by “music from the shore regions of Dalmatia and Albania; the throbbing, irregular pulse of the South Serbian and Macedonian Roma, the deep resonance of Serb Orthodox chant, and the airy

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vocal dissonances from the mountains of Eastern Hercegovina” (11). The arrangements prominently featured a mournful clarinet and an accordion that blended Balkan rhythms with a tango for the entrance of the spirits in 3.3. The production also featured a Yugoslavian singer Besa Berberi who sang a number of the songs, including “Full Fathom Five” and “Come Unto These Yellow Sands,” and played the role of Juno in the masque. These design and music elements worked with a focus on Prospero and Miranda as exiles to register a subliminal connection between the world of the play and the contemporary crises in the Balkans. The production began in a state of confusao, or chaos, which Udovicki introduced during rehearsals as a key term for her approach to the play. She drew the word from the book Another Day of Life written by Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski about the war in Angola. Bessell (2001) notes that the term is used “to describe a state of confusion, a mess, a state of anarchy and absolute disorientation; though created by humans, ‘confusao’ eventually destroys them. Prospero, agreed Lenka Udovicki, has the power to perpetuate or ultimately reverse this kind of ‘confusao’ ” (2001). Prospero and Miranda are refugees from Milan, and so are tossed into a state of confusao, and Prospero recreates the chaos and disorientation he experienced when he brews the tempest for those responsible for his exile. The movement of the production was from confusao—both that of the exiled duke and his daughter and that of the lords and mariners upon the island—to conciliation and ultimate reunification of the community. Throughout the action of the play, the audience saw what exile meant for Prospero and Miranda; Udovicki (2000) conceptualized exile as a state of profound transformation, which, as she noted in the production program, brings out many things in a person; things that would not be revealed in everyday life. As an exile you have to establish yourself in a completely new environment without the usual references of family, place, and society; you have to rediscover yourself, ask yourself who you are. Some answers are frightening. Prospero changes on the island. He keeps studying his books, but he also has to survive on his own and take care of his child. The chief thing is that he learns greater humanity and manages to break the circle of violence by forgiving those who have wronged him. (10–11)

Redgrave’s performance revealed that, for Prospero, exile necessitated him becoming androgynous, incorporating both parenting roles in his relationship with Miranda.

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Yet Redgrave also showed that Prospero, severed from “the great public organs which characterize one’s own place and give one a social as well as an individual being” (Sewell 1975, 131), strove to both exert power and to create a cohesive community on the island. Although exile often involves separation from mothertongue as well as mothercountry, Prospero and Miranda’s exile is different; they force Caliban to learn and speak their language, at which he registers resentment: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!” (1.2.266– 268). As Elizabeth Sewell (1975) points out, Prospero’s exile is not marked by deprivation of power: “The island affords him power, of a kind. He is, in his own words, ‘lord on’t,’ and what he does there is govern” (131). Yet although Redgrave’s Prospero was clearly both the lord of the island and the severe master to Caliban, he also placed an emphasis on creating a cohesive community, through active parenting of Miranda and Ariel, enthusiastic participation with the spirits, and his reconciliation with Gonzalo and Alonso at the end of the play. This Prospero clearly enjoyed his magic, as his vigorous participation in the wedding masque demonstrated. After Juno, Iris (Kate Fleetwood), and Ceres performed the sung “marriage-blessing” (4.1.106), the spirits (some dressed in papery garments and others as reapers with scythes) entered to perform an energetic dance to a fast drumbeat. Redgrave stepped into the action to conduct the musicians briefly, then threw off her jacket and raised her staff above her head to perform a clog dance, joining in the festivities with exuberance and delight. This scene indicated that her Prospero had created a community of spirits over whom he exercised control, but with whom he clearly loved performing magical feats. He was also demonstrably ready to reunite with the human community at the end of the play, as Michael Billington observed in the Guardian (May 27, 2000): he wrote that Redgrave “constantly suggests the exile’s longing for human contact. . . . This is no detached, didactic Prospero, but one who obviously can’t wait to rejoin the human race.” Accordingly, his transformation back into the Duke of Milan was made triumphantly, but in tandem with his enthusiastic embracing of Gonzalo (Robert McBain) and Alonso (Terry McGinity). After relinquishing magic cloak, staff, and book in a ceremonious fashion, Redgrave took off her combat vest and donned a long leather trench coat, fedora hat, and sword. When the lords awoke from their trance, Redgrave declared, “Behold, sir King, / The wronged Duke of Milan, Prospero” (5.1.108– 109). She shouted the name triumphantly, spun around once and held

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up a clenched fist. She then laughed at the amazement of the lords and tenderly embraced Gonzalo and Alonso. She even gave away a piece of her “royal” regalia when she gave her hat to the repentant Caliban. This transformation—from combat-clad Balkan guerrilla to forgiving Duke—emblematized the production’s journey from confusao to community. Although Prospero began the play inflicting chaos and disorientation on his enemies, his exile, along with the resistance of his watchful daughter Ariel, taught him to emphasize virtue rather than vengeance. The production thus focused on the importance of community and connection that can come out of the state of exile. Despite the primarily positive outcome, however, the production’s last scene carried traces of the discord that characterized its beginning. This was particularly evident in the lack of reconciliation between Prospero and Antonio (Martin Turner). While addressing the enchanted lords in 5.1, Redgrave dipped her fingers in a bowl of water and bathed their faces, symbolically blessing and releasing each of them. “Holy Gonzalo” (5.1.62) received a reverent benediction, Alonso and Sebastian (Sam Parks) were pardoned, but Redgrave took a long pause when she came to Antonio. “I do forgive thee, / Unnatural though thou art” (78–79) was played reluctantly, and instead of gently bathing Antonio’s face, she flicked the water at him roughly. Later, when asking for her dukedom to be “restore[d]” (136), they shook hands, but Redgrave quickly drew her hand away as if loath to touch him too long. Antonio (as in the text) made no reply, but sullenly relinquished a medal, presumably the symbol of his office, to Prospero. Along with the loss of Ariel and Miranda, the continued ill will between the brothers contributed to Prospero’s dejection at the end of the production. Redgrave’s performance of the epilogue was muted and sad, placing an emphasis on her “faint” strength (3), her “want” of “spirits to enforce” (13–14), and her potential “despair” if the audience refused to applaud (15). Although the overall emphasis was on reconciliation and community, the production also reminded its audience of the loneliness, isolation, and conflict that can haunt the exile.

Refusing This “Rough Magic”: Redgrave’s Prospero and Critical Expectations When the casting for The Tempest was announced in January 2000, critical expectations ran high. David Lister predicted, “Vanessa

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Redgrave as Prospero is likely to draw huge number[s],” which was confirmed when the Globe preseason sales topped £1 million, as reported in the Times (May 1, 2000). The preseason buzz and the reviews of the production revealed that the critics generally expected that Redgrave would work her legendary magic in the role of Prospero, and that as the powerful magus she would do justice to certain icons of “Englishness”: one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, one of his greatest characters, and the heritage of great male actors (including her father) who had played the role. The initial critical reactions to the use of cross-gender casting in The Tempest were quite different from that of Richard II and King Lear; instead of anticipating disaster and dismissing the casting with ridicule, many reviewers expressed eagerness to see Redgrave’s Prospero. It is evident that women’s cross-gender performances of Shakespeare can be rationalized and deemed acceptable only if they are seen as potentially bolstering Shakespearean authority and English national identity. When the production opened, however, it became immediately clear that neither Redgrave nor Udovicki were interested in creating a production that appealed to traditional ideologies of Englishness. The reviewers’ high expectations were dashed, and the production received generally poor reviews. The strategies that Redgrave adopted for her performance—ceding dominance to her costars, focusing on the issues of gender and exile, playing the character as herself—defied critical expectations that her Prospero would be authoritative, magical, and, above all, focusing primarily on the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. The negative reviews of the production showed many of the same tendencies and strategies that colored the critical responses to Richard II and King Lear: the critics argued that Redgrave failed to illuminate the greatness of Shakespeare’s play, they made her performance look ridiculous, and they compared her interpretation unfavorably with previous performances by male actors, particularly John Gielgud. Redgrave’s verse-speaking was commented upon by nearly everyone, even those reviewers who praised certain aspects of her performance, primarily because no one could place her accent. As Ian Shuttleworth complained in the Financial Times (May 31, 2000), “Scots? Newfoundland? . . . Ireland? Who can tell from vowel to vowel?” The negative comments about her verse-speaking were merciless: John Peter described it as “lifeless, colorless, and monotonous,” while Susannah Clapp of the Observer ( June 4, 2000) wrote that she “jettison[ed] whole banks of verse in a barely inflected

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growl.” In nearly every case, the critics pointed out the ways in which her speech undercut Shakespeare’s poetry. Carole Woddis of the Glasgow Herald (May 31, 2000) bemoaned Redgrave’s performance of “one of the most famous speeches in all drama” (“Our revels now are ended”), which she “announce[d] as you might the delay of the Number 39 bus.” Katherine Duncan-Jones of the Times Literary Supplement ( June 2, 2000) was similarly worried about the effects of her speaking on “the great speeches,” which were “descended to a gruff nasal whine.” Stephen Fay likewise commented in the Independent on Sunday (May 28, 2000) that “nothing suffers more than the verse, which dribbles out in broken-backed sentences.” Nicholas de Jongh tellingly remarked, “Perhaps gender-bending damages at least one vital organ—the voice.” In his view, Redgrave’s apparent failure to speak the verse well was a direct result of playing against gender, which underscores the popular perception that women’s cross-gender performances of Shakespeare will always be inadequate or “illegitimate.” For many critics, Redgrave’s lack of focus on the poetry of the text went hand-in-hand with her understated reading of the character. Her performance did not comply with the tradition of playing Prospero as the explosive center of the play, and delved very little into the sense of magic conveyed by both character and text. Both Georgina Brown and Stephen Fay commented on the “lack . . . of enchantment,” with Fay writing that “the mystery of Vanessa’s Prospero turned out not to be in the magic, but the lack of it.” Woddis was altogether harsher in her criticism, noting the effects of Redgrave’s underplaying of the character: “She moves, she speaks, but scarcely conveys either maleness, revenge, or malicious controlfreakery making a journey back to humanity through forgiveness. Indeed, there is not much of anything. . . . [The production] has a void at its center.” Many reviewers placed the perceived inadequacy of Redgrave’s performance alongside the legacy of John Gielgud, who died the week before the Globe production opened. Prospero is “a role indelibly linked with Sir John Gielgud,” as Michael Coveney noted, and Gielgud’s five Prosperos, over the course of his considerable career, had a significant effect on how the part is viewed by critics, actors, and scholars.7 H. R. Coursen (2000) calls Gielgud “the great Prospero of modern times” (148), and Dymkowski (2000) notes that the actor broke down the Victorian notions associated with the role with his highly influential interpretations that “freed the character

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from the double preconceptions of old age and wise omnipotence” (18). Gielgud, widely considered one of the century’s greatest Shakespearean actors, and thus strongly connected with a positive English identity, was known for the beauty of his verse-speaking. As Orgel (1987) notes, his performances as Prospero were “built around the setpieces” and gave “great emphasis to the richness and beauty of the verse throughout” (80). Redgrave’s performance suffered by comparison with this nostalgically remembered ideal; as Peter Roberts (2000) wrote, “inevitably in the immediate wake of his death, one recalled Gielgud’s various assumptions of the part and all the subtle meanings and colorings he wrung from the lines. An unfortunate if, in the circumstances, inevitable comparison” (18). Redgrave also had to contend with the memory of another formidable Prospero: her father, Michael Redgrave, who played the role at Stratford in 1951 to generally excellent reviews. When her performance was compared with these powerful antecedents, her Prospero seemed to many critics unworthy of her lineage. On the other hand, those reviewers who found positive things to say about her performance usually invoked Redgrave’s reputation as a great Shakespearean actress, exempting her from criticism because of this status. Often, these critics would also undercut the concept of women’s cross-gender performance by observing that gender did not matter to the production. David Nathan wrote in the Jewish Chronicle ( June 2, 2000) that “this . . . is good Prospero, not great Prospero. It is relaxed, humorous and never dangerous. . . . But the performance carries the authority of a great actress.” Similarly, Billington wrote that “what you notice is Redgrave’s authority” in her performance. For both of these reviewers, Redgrave’s reputation as a great actress authorized her portrayal of Prospero. Perhaps the most revealing comment made about Redgrave’s performance came from reviewer Sam Marlowe, who wrote in What’s On ( June 7, 2000), “[Q]uite what the intention behind casting her in the role might have been is anyone’s guess. Nobody could claim there’s anything authentic about her performance, in any sense of the word.” Certainly Marlowe is correct in pointing out that the presence of a woman at the Globe Theatre is not an authentic theatrical practice, since no women appeared onstage in Britain during Shakespeare’s lifetime. Yet his remark makes clear that he is not only concerned with theatrical authenticity; presumably, he is critiquing her lack of authentic maleness as well. Implied, too, is an indication that her performance is not authentically Shakespearean, reinforcing the idea

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that women’s cross-gender performances are not “real” Shakespeare. Marlowe’s insistence on authenticity—perhaps understandable given the Globe’s well-known interest in exploring “original practices”— points up the ways in which Redgrave and other actresses who wear the codpiece manifest a challenge to the idea of real or “legitimate” Shakespeare. Despite the wide array of reasons reviewers marshaled to dismiss Redgrave’s performance, there were a few critics that took her seriously enough to analyze the effects of cross-gender casting on the play and its central character. Benedict Nightingale, for instance, explored the ways in which Redgrave conveyed multiple gender identities through her performance: he noted in his London Times review that she was both “a tough, weather-beaten duke” and a “touching, tender” parent to Miranda and Ariel. Further, Nightingale and Michael Coveney both commended Redgrave for bringing qualities to the role that could not have been conveyed by male actors. Nightingale wrote in the New York Times that “Ms. Redgrave is the first Prospero I have seen who might have nurtured a daughter from babyhood to adolescence. . . . [F]or once, you sense the warmth and tenderness that has sustained this unlikely duo.” Coveney noted that Redgrave’s performance proved that “there are parts of [Prospero] that the chaps can’t quite reach.” These reviews indicated that the critical discourses surrounding women’s cross-gender performance of Shakespeare were expanding to analyze the complexities of performances like Redgrave’s. Further, they affirmed the power and importance of women’s cross-gender performance; these critics not only noticed the gendered meanings created by a female body in a male role, they began to explore the significance of those meanings to the production. Scholar Penny Gay (2002) concurred with Nightingale and Coveney in her assessment of Redgrave’s Prospero: “The performance offered a hopeful image for the new millennium: a concept of gender that no longer confines men or women to predetermined roles, either in life or on the stage” (172). Despite critical objections to her interpretation, Redgrave successfully disrupted the associations that have clung to the role: her Prospero was both a complex and multiply situated mother/father figure as well as an exile who affirmed the importance of reconciliation and community. Ultimately, her performance staged a refusal to comply with the expectations that the critics imposed upon her. Instead of offering a bravura star turn, she underplayed the role, steering between the serene and magical Prosperos of the “sympathetic” tradition

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and the tyrannical imperialist Prosperos of the “cynical” tradition. This interpretation, in the non-illusory space of the Globe, revealed how the theatrical event, the gendered body, and Shakespeare are constructed through performance. Further, the responses of certain critics to Redgrave’s Prospero show how women’s performances of male Shakespearean roles can transform our perceptions of the character, the play, the author, and the theater itself.

CHAPTER 5

STAGING AND SUBVERTING NOSTALGIA: DAWN FRENCH’S BOTTOM IN A MIDSUMMER NIGHT ’S DREAM (2001)

W

hen Matthew Francis announced in 2001 that he had cast the popular television star Dawn French as Bottom in his new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Albery Theatre, he was clearly drawing on the recent history of female-to-male cross-gender casting. Yet he also made a number of choices that differentiated his production from its predecessors. First, he changed the gender of French’s character from male to female: Bottom the weaver became Mrs. Bottom the housewife. Second, he also changed the genders of four of the “rude mechanicals” (3.2.9): Quince, Starveling, Snout, and Snug were all played by actresses. Third, he came up with an elaborate production concept to go with the gender-swapping: the human world of the play was transposed to World War II–era Britain, and the mechanicals became members of the Women’s Voluntary Service. Finally, he and his designer, Lez Brotherston, created a romantic, beautifully detailed forest for the fairy world that recalled the spectacular Victorian stagings of the play. The result was a production that was far more conventional than those of Warner, Kaut-Howson, and Udovicki. Ironically, Francis was the only director to use the term “feminist” to describe his approach to the play. A press release for his Dream called the production “a feminist staging of Shakespeare’s most popular comedy.”1 This phrasing was echoed by several reviewers of the production: Tina Jackson of the Big Issue (March 12, 2001) called it “a new, radical feminist version” of the play, and Amber Cowan of the Times (March 17, 2001) described it as a “fresh, feminist production.” The feminist aspects of the production were Francis’s decision to increase the number of women’s roles, and to center his re-vision of

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the play around the female mechanicals. Francis also told Pete Clark in the Evening Standard (March 15, 2001) that he wanted to direct the play because he was inspired by tales of all-female amateur theatricals during World War II: “The stories . . . sounded so like the kind of things that happened to Quince’s troupe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that I thought this would be a wonderful idea.” He used this initial inspiration to flesh out the 1940s concept, indicating that his production was certainly woman-centered, particularly because of the star presence of French as Mrs. Bottom. Despite its claims to be feminist and “radical,” this Dream in fact marked a return to a more conventional mode of mimetic theater, partly because of the proscenium-arch space in which it was performed, and partly because of the use of stage design to create illusionistic worlds for the play. Francis and Brotherston used the World War II setting and the elaborate forest to create a sense of nostalgia in their audience: both for a time of national unity in Britain, and for the spectacular traditions of the Victorian theater. Casting Dawn French as Bottom furthered these goals: while she was once primarily known for her feminist comedy as part of the duo French and Saunders, French is now more widely known and loved for her portrayal of the title character in the series The Vicar of Dibley (1994–2000). Although the show presented a modern take on religion (French played a female priest) it also gave the actress a reassuring and thoroughly domesticated persona. Francis’s decision to cast French was not a radical or a feminist move, but rather used her comfortable, appealing television persona to market the production. Francis’s production also attempted to erase any contradictions that arose from French’s presence in the role of (Mrs.) Bottom, just as it tried to ignore any suggestions of the play’s undercurrents of sexuality that have been amply explored by scholars and theater directors such as Jan Kott and Peter Brook. To avoid placing Mrs. Bottom in the awkward position of having a lesbian encounter with the fairy queen Titania, Mrs. Bottom became a male ass, complete with a large phallus. Francis took pains to ensure that the production would be about comedy and spectacle, rather than about gender and sexuality. Although Francis actively tried to erase contradictions and anxieties, they arose nonetheless, and primarily because of French’s presence in the role of Bottom. The production’s radical nature emerged, not through the 1940s production concept, but through the very particular presence of French, whose translated Bottom was a bizarre, even grotesque, hermaphroditic figure that challenged the

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boundaries of erotic passion in her relationship with Titania. The engagement between this hybrid Bottom and the sexually eager fairy queen presented a queer reading of this relationship. Like Shaw and Threlfall’s Richard and Bolingbroke, it was impossible to define the sexuality of Bottom and Titania’s interactions. At the same time, along with the particularity of her body, French’s performance presented Bottom as a comedic Every(wo)man who drew together her on- and off-stage audiences through the power of laughter. Thus, the production both staged and subverted nostalgia through the intervention of a female Bottom.

Staging Nostalgia: The Production Design While Warner, Kaut-Howson, and Udovicki used their theater spaces and their designs to undercut the ideology of conventional mimetic theater, Francis did not. The space in which he staged his production, the Albery Theatre, is a far more traditional venue than the Cottesloe, the Young Vic, or the Globe. The Albery is a proscenium-arch West End theater that was built in 1903. Unlike the National, the Young Vic, and the Globe, the Albery houses the work of various theater companies, or of independent production companies; there is no artistic director, and the theater does not have a particular mission or identity, as producing theaters do. In the case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Katharine Doré’s production company financed the play, and found a home for it at the Albery, where it ran for a limited eight-week engagement from March 16 to May 12, 2001. There is, therefore, much less of a correlation between production and theater space at the Albery than there is at the National, the Young Vic, or the Globe. In proscenium-arch theaters such as the Albery, the configuration of the space invites directors to emphasize the concept of the “fourth wall” between the actors and the audience, and to uphold an ideology of theatrical realism. It is therefore perhaps understandable that Francis chose to create highly detailed settings for the human world and the fairy kingdom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He set Acts 1 and 5 of the play in World War II–era Britain, and Acts 2 through 4 in a stunningly lifelike wood. Both settings staged nostalgia for their audience: the human world of an English country estate during the Blitz drew on the popular memory of “the People’s War,” and the beautifully detailed fairy forest recalled the vogue for stage spectacle popularized in Victorian productions of the Dream. These design concepts—both the World War II and the Victorian—used nostalgia to

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reinforce a sense of “Englishness.” The 1940s setting showed its audience an idealized England, as a nation that transcended differences of gender, class, and politics, and aimed to create a feeling of nostalgia for this time of unity against adversity. The spectacularly English forest setting recalled the performance history of Shakespeare’s play, and invoked a nostalgic sense of an old-fashioned, appealing Dream full of romance, magic, and moonshine. This setting thus bolstered the image of Shakespeare that underpins English national identity. When the curtain rose on Francis’s Dream, the audience found themselves in “Athens House,” a stately English country house.2 The mansion’s name was announced by a plaque on the wall, which was adorned with Grecian columns, in a nod to the play’s original locale. The setting represented a wood-paneled drawing room with a large fireplace, which had been requisitioned for military purposes, as boxes, ammunition, and supplies were stacked inside the room. The period was indicated by the music and the actors’ costumes: Francis used a swing number, “I Double Dare You,” by Larry Clinton and his Orchestra, to open the play, and the appearance of Theseus (Michael Siberry) and Hippolyta ( Jemma Redgrave) left no doubt as to the 1940s setting. Theseus was presented as the country lord in a well-cut tweed suit, and Hippolyta was his upper-class fiancée dressed in a sweater set and tasteful skirt.3 Demetrius (Stephen Campbell Moore) and Lysander (Will Keen) were dressed in Army and Royal Air Force uniforms, respectively, while Hermia (Gillian Kearney) and Helena (Tilly Blackwood) wore period dresses, heels, hats, and red lipstick. The mechanicals—all female except for the rather anomalous presence of Paul Rider’s Flute—were members of the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) stationed at Athens House. The WVS, an organization that still exists today, is staffed primarily with “part-time unpaid helpers, many of them housewives.” During World War II, the WVS had over a million volunteers, whose tasks included “helping with evacuee children, running social events for servicemen on leave, providing and altering clothing for civilians and servicemen, and organizing soup kitchens for people whose homes had been bombed” (Isaacs and Monk 1986, 474). In Francis’s production, the mechanicals (apart from Flute) were housewives who addressed each other as “Mrs. Bottom” and “Mrs. Quince,” and who wore domestic and working-class clothing. Joanna Scanlan’s Snug, for instance, was dressed in “Rosie the Riveter”-style overalls and head kerchief, while Debbie Chazen’s Snout and French’s Bottom wore hats and pearl earrings and carried handbags. Quince, played

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by Selina Cadell as an uptight control freak, was the only member of the group in the official WVS uniform. Overall, the Athens House setting, the music, and the costumes created a sense of the detailed, realistic world occupied by the humans in Francis’s Dream, locating the action firmly in an English country house during World War II. Further, at the end of Act 1, it became clear that the play was set during the Blitz, as a bomb blew a massive hole in the center of the set, revealing the forest world beyond. The house was magically restored for Act 5, in which the mechanicals ended their production of Pyramus and Thisbe with a bergomask dance set to Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing),” during which the cast—mechanicals and gentry alike—danced happily around the stage. Francis did a good deal of research to flesh out the 1940s concept, and found that not only did WVS members stage amateur theatricals, but that they occasionally would do so for members of the aristocracy. Further, he found that “during the war, England was stuffed with minor, dispossessed royalty living in requisitioned country houses” (Edwardes 2001, 145), which gave him the idea for setting the human world in “Athens House.” The production program defended Francis’s choices by providing context on the setting and quotes from historical sources. The four pages of prefatory material contained black and white photos of women volunteers during the war: nurses dispensing medicine, “land girls” working in the fields, women collecting scrap metal, fighting fires, and painting tanks. Portions of bold red text scattered around the pages justified the production concept: one noted that “several monarchs took refuge in Britain during the war,” another (from Brideshead Revisited) pointed out that country houses were requisitioned by the Army, and yet another quoted volunteer Jean Emerson’s story of a successful amateur theater piece mounted by the Women’s Land Army. Several of the other quotes focused on the WVS and the success of women’s work during the war. These quotes explained the presence of the “foreign” Duke and Duchess in the requisitioned country house, the transformation of the male mechanicals into female WVS members, and the reasons behind their production of Pyramus and Thisbe. Once Francis began to develop this concept, he found that the other advantage to setting the play during the War was that “it’s a very handsome and exciting period,” as he told Pete Clark: All the books we read painted a picture of an atmosphere in that time and place that was very conducive to the setting of this play. The

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feeling of sudden adventure, romance in the air, living life for the moment because you didn’t know what was going to happen to you tomorrow—all that is very much to do with the world of the forest and what happens on that night.

Francis was clearly drawing on an idealized vision of World War II, and placed the emphasis on romance and style over violence and politics in his conceptualization of Shakespeare’s play. His production perpetuated the myth of the war as the People’s War and as “the Good War.” As Lucy Noakes (1998) has written, The dominant popular memory of the Second World War, the memory found on the public stage . . . remains predominantly a memory of national unity in a time of adversity. . . . The unity of the nation has become a thing of myth, a cultural theme of the popular memory of the war. It appears as a war in which internal divisions, notably those of class and politics, were overridden as the nation coalesced behind the high ideals to fight a just war. (23)

She goes on to explode this myth, noting that Britain was fragmented along social and political lines, particularly before the Blitz began; the national unity that eventually emerged “had to be both shaped and won” (26). The Blitz has been seen as a catalyzing experience for the British, as a time in which the people on the home front became like the soldiers on the front lines. As Noakes continues, “If the Second World War can be seen as . . . representing a moment when all the imagined values of the British nation were widely articulated and shared, then the blitz is a key moment in the war: the moment when ‘the people’ became ‘the nation’ ” (29). The war was crucial in shaping British national identity, and characterizing that identity in terms of heroic unity against a common evil: “[S]tanding alone, the British were told—by the government, by other agencies, by individuals . . . and by each other—who they were; so that, for example, the projected heroism of these early war years became a defining episode, which through repetition, was etched into our national consciousness where it remains today” (Hayes 1999, 2). Francis’s production drew upon this “national consciousness” to create a powerful sense of nostalgia for the war era, encouraging his audience to participate in the fiction of a unified England. In his vision, the nobility (Theseus and Hippolyta), their bourgeois subjects (the four lovers), and the working classes (Mrs. Bottom and the WVS members) survived the Blitz to “pull together” and celebrate,

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transcending class differences and affirming the centrality of heterosexual union. The production used nostalgia to unify its audience in the celebration of this vision. Nostalgia, as David Lowenthal (1989) has written, “envisage[s] a time when folk did not feel fragmented, when doubt was either absent or patent, when thought fused with action, when aspiration achieved consummation, when life was wholehearted; in short, a past that was unified and comprehensible, unlike the incoherent, divided present” (29).4 Nostalgia is particularly important during times of crisis in national identity, such as the current period in Britain, which, since the 1990s, has prompted widespread cultural debates about the nature of Englishness. As M. Spiering (1992) notes, “Postwar Britain has, almost without exception, been portrayed as a nation in decline” (26), prompting a desire to return to an earlier period of supposed national strength. Francis’s production tapped into this desire through its World War II setting, particularly by placing the human world of the play in “Athens House,” which became a symbol for England. As Robert Hewison (1987) has argued, “the country house is the most familiar symbol of our national heritage,” a symbol that “by a mystical process of identification . . . becomes the nation” (53). Country houses are “symbols of continuity and security,” as well as repositories of the finest in European artifacts (71).5 By setting the first act of the Dream in a country house, the world of Shakespeare’s play became an idealized, nostalgic England, in which the audience could both lose and find themselves. However, the theater critics who reviewed the production by and large did not wholly approve of the 1940s setting, primarily because they either felt it strained the limits of theatrical realism, or because they felt it did not “work” for Shakespeare’s play. Antony Thorncroft opined in the Financial Times (March 28, 2001) that “the updating is intensely irritating, not least in the opening scene, set in a country house which seems to attract more than its fair share of bombardment, where actors dressed as modern officers prattle on about condemning Hermia to death under old Athenian custom.” Nicholas de Jongh wrote in the Evening Standard (March 23, 2001) that the concept “struck me with all the force of a limp gimmick. . . . Francis’s production seemed more like a box of flashy tricks than of revelations.” Many critics were fond of pointing out the problems embedded in the concept; Michael Dobson (2002), in his review for Shakespeare Survey, offered the most comprehensive list. Attacking the production for “middlebrow literal-mindedness,” he pointed out that the bomb

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damage from Act 1 was magically repaired in Act 5, that although Lysander and Demetrius were officers their desertion into the woods remained unproblematic, that a mostly female troupe of actors were unlikely to cast their only male member in the leading female role, that the mechanicals’ props, in particular Pyramus’s comedy breastplate, were too lavish for a period of rationing, and finally, he wondered “in what theatre of the conflict [Theseus] had defeated Jemma Redgrave’s perfectly English-sounding Hippolyta” (311–312). Of the London critics, only Paul Taylor of the Independent (March 24, 2001) and Kate Bassett of the Independent on Sunday (April 1, 2001) came out fully in favor of the 1940s setting, calling it an “ingenious framework,” and “refreshing and intelligent,” respectively. Significantly, those critics who disliked the World War II setting felt that the production improved immeasurably once the action relocated to the forest. Robert Butler of the Mail on Sunday (April 1, 2001) noted that “when the play heads off into the woods, freeing itself from its tiresome Second World War trappings, the action picks up.” Certain critics who expressed this opinion, such as Anthony Thorncroft, felt that “Shakespeare regain[ed] control” in the forest setting. This implies that the 1940s setting was an imposition upon the play, while the woodland setting allowed Shakespeare to resume his authority. Francis’s use of a highly detailed forest in the middle acts of the production drew on a recognizable stage tradition that began in the Victorian period and still persists today. This tradition associates the play with the romance, magic, and mystery of a forest setting, and productions that follow this tradition have either created a realistic wood on an indoor stage or performed the play outdoors. On the night that I saw the production, the appearance of the woods elicited an appreciative “Ooh” from the spectators. The bombed country house set flew out to reveal what looked like a real forest: the stage was filled with large trees, their branches intertwining to create a canopy through which shafts of moonlight fell. A full moon could be glimpsed through the branches, illuminating a pond surrounded by mossy banks and rocks. At first sight, the forest was filled with mist, giving the setting a mysterious atmosphere. Brotherston cleverly gave the forest the illusion of depth by suspending angled mirrors along the top and sides of the set, which reflected the branches of the trees and created the impression that the set was larger than it actually was. The set extended to the back of the Albery’s considerable stage, so that the fairies could lurk among the

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trees at a distance to watch the humans acting out their struggles in the playing area close to the edge of the stage. The forest’s colors—all rich greens, blues, and purples—were matched by the fairies, who were costumed to blend with their environment. Oberon (Siberry) and Puck (Lee Ingleby) wore green breeches that appeared to be made out of leaves, and Titania (Redgrave) wore a gauzy, wispy long green skirt that also suggested foliage. The props used in these scenes were minimal: a large blanket served as Titania’s bower, and the mechanicals brought in two ornate chairs (presumably salvaged from the mansion) for their rehearsal in 3.1. The overall effect was of looking through the proscenium-arch into another world. Brotherston’s set provided a window on the past as well: a glimpse into the nineteenth-century stage history of the Dream. Victorian productions of the play were known for lavish spectacle, including elaborately staged songs and dances, and focused in particular on creating a beautiful aesthetic for the fairy kingdom. A mid-nineteenth century watershed in productions of the play was Charles Kean’s staging at the Princess Theatre in London in 1856. He included a fairy maypole ballet and a final spectacle of ninety fairies “tripping up and down the stairs of Theseus’s palace, waving bell-like lanterns while the fairy chorus sang Mendelssohn’s ‘Through this house give glimmering light’ ” (Halio 1994, 28). The aesthetic of his production was indebted to the classical ballet, as his fairies (including Oberon and Puck) were played by women costumed in long white gauzy dresses. Yet his production pales in comparison with Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s 1900 extravaganza at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London. Tree’s production epitomized the Victorian tradition; he combined “authentic” Athenian settings for the human world with an elaborate fairy forest and included liberal doses of Mendelssohn’s music and balletic fairies. His production is perhaps most famous for including live rabbits in the forest scenes. He also included mechanical birds twittering atop English beeches, a troupe of forty-seven fairies to sing Titania to sleep, battery-operated glowing lamps for Puck’s scene with the four sleeping lovers, and intricately painted backdrops representing the exterior and interior of Theseus’s palace. The Victorian stage tradition still continues, to a certain extent, and can be seen in some recent productions of the play. For instance, the Open Air Theatre at Regent’s Park in London produces the Dream nearly every year, using its natural setting to create a very real atmosphere for the play. However, much of the twentieth century performance history of the play consists of reactions against this

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tradition. In particular, Peter Brook’s famous 1970 Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company represents the definitive break from the Victorian tradition, with its white box set, fairies clad in jumpsuits, and coiled-wire trees. Brook’s designer, Sally Jacobs, noted that they wanted to reject the nineteenth century concept of “a big production number with fogs, forests, and Athens,” and aimed instead to “just keep it very simple and make it a presentation of actors performing a play” (Halio 1994, 56). The production’s set, with its bare white walls and floor, was the stylistic opposite of the scenic excesses employed by Tree and other pictorialists. Brook’s Dream was important thematically as well as aesthetically; drawing upon the work of Jan Kott, he incorporated a new awareness of the play’s undercurrent of dark and anxious sexuality. Kott’s essay on the play in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964) reads the Dream as “the most erotic of Shakespeare’s plays. In no other tragedy, or comedy, of his, except Troilus and Cressida, is the eroticism expressed so brutally” (212). His reading of the relationship between Titania and Bottom is particularly disturbing: In this nightmarish summer night, the ass does not symbolize stupidity. From antiquity up to the Renaissance the ass was credited with the strongest sexual potency and among all quadrupeds was supposed to have the longest and hardest phallus. . . . The love scenes between Titania and the ass must seem at the same time real and unreal, fascinating and repulsive. They are to rouse rapture and disgust, terror and abhorrence. (220–221)

Kott’s interpretation has had its detractors,6 but it has also been extremely influential for scholars and directors of the play. Brook staged the exit of Titania and Bottom at the end of 3.1 as a phallic celebration, set to the ironic strains of Mendelssohn’s wedding march. Bottom was hoisted onto the shoulders of a male fairy, who thrust his arm upright between Bottom’s legs to indicate the sexual congress to come. Kott’s reading has also inspired critics such as David Bevington (1978) to comment further on the “dark side” of the play. Although Bevington finds Kott’s views “too forceful[l],” he concedes that there is “a fundamental tension in the play between comic reassurance and the suggestion of something dark and threatening. . . . The forest itself is potentially a place of violent death and rape” (81). This conflict between light and dark can be felt in many productions of the Dream in the contemporary British theater, marking the shift in

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the play’s performance history from the beautiful spectacles of the Victorian tradition. Francis’s production signaled a return to the aesthetic and the interpretive values of the pictorial tradition; just as his romantic wood recalled the legacy of Kean and Tree, his interpretation of the play focused primarily on its comedy and romance, rather than on its dark and erotic undercurrents. Although Brotherston’s wood was misty and mysterious, and Puck sported small devilish horns, the forest and its inhabitants were predominantly nonthreatening. Titania’s four attendant fairies were played by youthful actors costumed to look like impish refugee children. Peaseblossom (Hannah Young) wore a winged backpack and rubber boots, Cobweb (Alex McIntosh) was dressed in tattered flannel trousers, Moth (Laura Wilson) had pigtails and owlish glasses, and Mustardseed ( Jonathan Broadbent) wore a schoolboy hat and frayed jacket. Puck, played by Ingleby as a roguish Cockney lad, was dressed in an unraveling fair isle sweater that linked him to the other young fairies. These elfish sprites were a far cry from the white-clad graceful children that often played fairies on the Victorian stage; in fact, Peaseblossom and Moth’s raggedy tutu skirts offered a deliberately ironic contrast with this tradition. Yet Francis’s fairies were far more mischievous than malevolent, childishly naughty rather than nasty. Francis also used his program notes to underscore his emphasis on the comic and romantic themes of the play, and further, characterized these themes as experiences common to everyone. His notes argue that the play is “an image for life. For what we do. The five acts of a man’s life. The part he plays. The attitude he strikes.” He unifies the audience through his use of “we,” noting that life is a performance in which we all play our part: “the jobs we do, the moralities we believe in, the relationships we construct.” His notes do acknowledge the darker realities of life as expressed in the Dream, such as “woe, barren singleness, melancholy, death.” The action of the play mingles light and dark, and turns the world upside down: “Your dearest love now says he hates you. Admirable Mrs. Bottom has been changed into an ass. . . . Headless bears chase you. Your lover turns on you.” Francis finds that the two reasons for this slippage are love and imagination, both of which cause these problems but also redeem and heal them. His notes repeatedly use we and “you” to encourage the spectator to find himself in the world of the play.7 Although he acknowledges the dark side of Shakespeare’s Dream, the upsidedown world of the forest, he does not mention eroticism or sexuality.

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Further, his notes close by affirming the redemptive powers of love and the imagination, figuratively uniting the audience in the appreciation of Shakespeare’s comedy. Francis’s production staged nostalgia for an old-fashioned, and hence apparently universal Dream through its production design. The World War II and the forest settings connected the production and Shakespeare’s play with nationalism through an evocation of an idealized England of two different eras. The production created an ideology of Englishness rooted in the past by bringing together the continuing Victorian stage tradition (which itself perpetuated a particular nationalist ideology)8 and the popular memory of the “People’s War” of the 1940s. Both settings envisioned a unified England that transcended differences to create a totalizing vision. The production also presented a traditional reading of Shakespeare’s play, in which the darker side of love and imagination gave way to redemption, comedy, and romance. Dawn French’s central performance as Bottom aided and abetted this goal by focusing on the idea of Bottom as an Everyman, someone to whom everyone can relate, and by emphasizing the comedic potential of the role. Yet she also subverted the nostalgic, old-fashioned Dream through her physical presence as Bottom the Ass and her queer relationship with Titania.

Subverting Nostalgia: The “Rare Vision” of French’s Bottom In an article for the Times that was published just after the opening of Francis’s Dream, Amber Cowan offered rapturous praise for the woman who would be Bottom: Few comedians are blessed with the natural gifts of Dawn French. . . . [S]he is a comic about whom the term “funny boned” truly does justice. . . . One of the most popular comedians of her generation, French has become as adored as the characters that she portrays. . . . French uses her status to strike a blow for voluptuous women. A proud size 26, she set up Sixteen-47, her own clothing label for bigger women in 1991, and posed naked for Esquire magazine in 1994. “Why should we have to starve to be beautiful?” she protests.

As Cowan indicates, French is a popular comedienne, but is also known for her major political cause: promoting the idea that big is beautiful, and critiquing the diet and fashion industries. Her roots

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were in cutting-edge comedy: French and her longtime writing partner Jennifer Saunders were founding members of the influential “alternative” Comic Strip group in 1980,9 and brought their irreverently feminist humor to the BBC in four seasons of French and Saunders (1987–1991). They each went on to separate projects: Saunders to write and star in the successful series Absolutely Fabulous, and French to leading roles in the sitcoms Murder Most Horrid and The Vicar of Dibley. Of the development of French’s career, Tina Jackson has argued that despite the feminist nature of French’s early comedy, her work has now become characterized by an “air of smug domesticity”: Whereas . . . Jennifer Saunders . . . has retained a spiky, anarchic edge to her work, Dawn French has turned into Middle England’s favorite Mrs Blobby. . . . French was one of modern comedy’s radicals, a roly poly harpy with a sharp wit who’s paved the way for a rash of bolshy, outspoken female funnywomen. Which makes it really quite disappointing that she’s now the comfy, cosy face of light entertainment, with her name indelibly associated with sitcoms.

An analysis of both phases of French’s career—represented by French and Saunders and The Vicar of Dibley—proves Jackson’s point: French’s comedy has grown tamer, safer, and more domestic over the years, and it was this image that characterized her performance as Mrs. Bottom. French and Saunders uses a feminist methodology to challenge the status quo in a number of key ways. First, French and Saunders confront the ways in which women’s bodies are fetishized by the media. They repeatedly place their own (large) bodies in roles usually occupied by rail-thin models or actresses. In one episode, French poses alongside waif-like model Kate Moss in a spoof of Calvin Klein’s “Obsession” ads; in another, French and Saunders appear as Baywatch babes with body doubles, until their own real bodies are deliberately revealed. Anne Hole (2003) analyzes the way such sketches comment on gender performativity: “By juxtaposing ‘on-screen’ bodies that are glamorous and spectacular with ‘off-screen’ bodies in extreme discomfort, French and Saunders point up the gap between appearance and reality. Screen femininity, they tell us, is false, a game, a masquerade, and one that is damaging and painful to women” (322). Second, French and Saunders perform and parody masculinity by impersonating ordinary men and celebrities. In a recurring sketch, they play two fat, randy middle-aged men, who spend their days humping the

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furniture and telling each other that every woman they see is “begging for it.” In one of their well-known film spoofs, French plays Mel Gibson as William Wallace in Braveheart, while Saunders appears as Liam Neeson playing Rob Roy. Sporting detachable chest and arm hair, they deliberately overdo the battle cries and other conventions of the masculine action genre. Third, French and Saunders distance themselves from mainstream entertainment and “serious” art. In a spoof of Madonna’s Truth or Dare, they play themselves as petulant, self-important comediennes on tour, complaining about how hard it is not to compromise artistic integrity. When an audience member brings her little boy backstage after the show and compliments them on their “good all-around family entertainment,” they both mime puking behind her back. Finally, French and Saunders continually mock traditional views of femininity and female roles, even while they simultaneously acknowledge their own complicity with these roles by featuring their husbands—fellow comedians Lenny Henry and Adrian Edmondson—in a sketch where they play two couples at a disastrous dinner.10 In all their work, French and Saunders display a continual willingness to step out of character, creating an ironic distance between themselves and the characters they play, rather than producing seamless impersonations. This, along with their feminist methodology, differentiates their work together from the sitcom roles that French took on in the 1990s. An analysis of The Vicar of Dibley, in which French plays the title role of the Reverend Geraldine Granger, reveals that the series is as conventional as French and Saunders is radical. The show offers a sanitized and beautified vision of England; the opening credits, for instance, provide aerial views of the English countryside, with an emphasis on rolling green hills and thatched cottages. Each episode presents a different sight gag at the end of the credits: in one, a man thatching a roof slides off with a comic yelp; in another, a man waits patiently for a pig to vacate a phone booth. These gags, and the series as a whole, are intended to reveal the sweetness and innocence of the country and its inhabitants. Although the main conflicts in the series bring up issues of gender and class, they are always smoothed over rather than directly confronted, according to the sitcom formula. In the opening episode, the rich David Horton (Gary Waldhorn) opposes Geraldine’s appointment because she is a woman, and because he wants to run the town’s parish council unopposed. The major conflicts in the series arise out of Horton’s disapproval of Geraldine and out of class tensions between him and the

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other council members. Yet Geraldine proves to be the force that brings everyone together at the end of each episode, transcending differences to create a vision of harmonious unity.11 French is extremely charming in the role of Geraldine, and even though the vicar is given to telling bawdy jokes, she is always a nonthreatening, reassuring presence in this series. Francis used her cheery image to sell his production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; as the star, French was featured prominently in the publicity. She is the dominant figure on both the poster and the program cover, positioned in the lower left-hand corner of the frame. She is the picture of appealing housewifely domesticity, in an apron, polka-dot blouse, wedding ring, and string of pearls, with a large purse slung over one arm. She clasps her hands to her chest and smiles delightedly at the camera, suggesting that Mrs. Bottom will be modeled on her winning role as the lovable Geraldine. She pulls the viewer’s focus not only because she takes up nearly a third of the photo, but because Snout, Flute, Starveling, and Snug are shown in the background all looking at her. They are pictured in black and white, while French is in vibrant color. In the upper right hand corner, Puck peeps through a tear in the paper, looking out at the viewer, with a full moon and rich purple sky behind him. The poster conveys French’s star power, her domestic and friendly image, the retro 1940s design, and the romantic, dreamy forest setting, all of which work to create the impression of a light-hearted, comic Dream. In this light, French’s presence in the role of Bottom is neither radical nor feminist; rather, her performance as Mrs. Bottom drew on her popular persona by incorporating slapstick physical comedy and fat jokes. She wrote a piece for the Evening Standard (March 16, 2001) about her take on the character: “Basically, I’m making Bottom a noisy character, a confident, slightly misguided person, who really wants to play every part.” Her approach to the role was apparent from her very first entrance: in 1.2, when the mechanicals assembled in the drawing room for rehearsal, Mrs. Bottom entered late, wearing a gas mask, and barking, “You were best to call them generally, man by man, according to the scrip” (1.2.2–3). She then whipped off the gas mask and laughed at Mrs. Quince’s consternation, and the rest of the mechanicals joined in with her laughter. She established Mrs. Bottom as a prankster in this scene, as she expressed her willingness to play Thisbe and the lion as well as Pyramus. Yet she was clearly well-liked by her fellow thespians (apart from the uptight Quince), who applauded appreciatively at her “tyrant” speech (24–31)

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and her gently roaring lion (67–68). The theater audience was likewise enthusiastic about French’s comic antics in this scene: at the performance I attended, she drew applause for her bombastic tyrant speech and gales of laughter for nearly every move she made. Mrs. Bottom was the unifying principle for both her on-and off-stage audiences: she drew the mechanicals and the theater audience together through laughter. Her performance as Pyramus in the interlude also unified the disparate groups—the amateur players, the bourgeois lovers, and the aristocrats—into a cohesive whole. The interlude was heavily slapstick, with Bottom drawing the lion’s share of the laughs. As Pyramus, French wore an enormous breastplate that made her arms stick out comically from her sides. During Quince’s prologue, she fell to the floor for her death scene and was unable to get back up because of the breastplate, which left her flailing about on her back, arms and legs waving wildly, until one of her fellow players helped her up. Her death scene—“Thus die I: thus, thus, thus” (5.1.289)—was also made comic when she could not find an opening in the front of her breastplate to “wound / The pap of Pyramus” (285–286) and stuck her sword down the side of her armor in desperation. Despite her bombastic performance as Pyramus, French also showed that Mrs. Bottom was eager to please her aristocratic auditors: stepping out of character to assure Theseus that Thisbe will enter and “it will fall pat as I told you” (184), she dropped a little girlish curtsy that contrasted hilariously with her huge martial costume. French’s Bottom was a practical joker, enthusiastic, and funny, and thus was in line with many scholarly and performance interpretations of the character. As Peter Holland (1994) writes, “Bottom is foolish, vain, and arrogant; he is also gentle, lovable and admirable” (81). Similarly, Harold F. Brooks (1979) notes that although Bottom is “the clown of the play . . . with our laughter there mingles admiration and affection. . . . None of the things which make Bottom ridiculous deprives him of our liking or even of the admiration we have for him” (cxiv–cxv). Certainly this was the case with French’s Bottom; she encouraged the audience to laugh at but also with her, and on the night I saw the performance it was clear that the spectators had great affection for her, because of their delighted and eager responses to her performance. French drew the audience members together through laughter and invited them to identify with her, showing her Bottom to be “an embodiment of earthy humanity who remains splendidly himself [or herself, as the case may be] whatever happens to him or around him, and a character with whom an audience can readily engage”

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(Foakes 1984, 35). As such, Mrs. Bottom became an Every(wo)man figure, “a comic image of ourselves, Everyman-as-Fool,” with which her audience could identify and laugh (Miller 1975, 262). By emphasizing Bottom’s comic nature, French played into the construction of the fat female body as “to-be-laughed-at,” to use Frances Gray’s phrase (1994, 9). Gray argues that fat female bodies invite laughter rather than a fetishizing male gaze, and that this laughter is a defense mechanism against the threat that their bodies pose to traditional gender identities. Hole (2003) elaborates by describing this threat: the fat female body is actually an excessive sign, a grotesque sign, which carries an overabundance of meanings that are themselves contradictory and opposed. The fat female body is that mixture of disparate parts that overflows its allotted space in signification that cannot be confined to the category of “Woman.” Hence, the fat female body is not only “less-than-Woman,” she is also “more-than-woman.” (318)

While French’s Mrs. Bottom certainly played into the “to-belaughed-at” role traditionally occupied by fat female bodies onstage, she also presented an embodiment of “gender ambiguity and instability” and refused “to perform a consistent gender identity,” particularly in the scenes with Titania (319). Although Francis regendered Bottom female, at least some of the audience retained an awareness that French was playing a role that was usually played by a male actor. More than one theater critic wondered in advance of the production’s opening what Francis would do about Bottom’s relationship with Titania. Benedict Nightingale wrote in the Times (March 17, 2001), “I can’t say how Francis will cope with the scene in which Jemma Redgrave’s Titania makes hay with the donkey-eared weaver. A lesbian encounter would seem improbable, at least for a pop production in the West End. But, with luck, we shall be laughing too much to worry about the sexual implications of what is, after all, a comedy.” Francis attempted to negate the possibility of a “lesbian encounter” between Mrs. Bottom and Titania by transforming the former into a male ass, complete with phallus. Despite this choice, the meanings that French’s performance as Mrs. Bottom the Ass created were far more ambiguous. French became a humorously grotesque hybrid figure, whose relationship with the fairy queen went beyond attempts to categorize it as either heterosexual or homosexual. Further, the eroticism expressed in

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Mrs. Bottom’s interactions with Titania subverted the production’s emphasis on the traditional, de-sexualized reading of the play, and placed it in the context of the more recent, post-Brook interpretations of the Dream. When French made her entrance as the transformed Mrs. Bottom in 3.1, she created a stir both onstage and in the audience. She burst out of the woods, bellowing, “If I were fair, Thisbe, I were only thine” (3.1.92), and her appearance prompted horror from the mechanicals and laughter and applause from the theater audience. As Mrs. Bottom, she wore a red blouse with large white polka dots and ruffles at the wrists and neckline, a red pleated skirt, a red hat with a feather, and a plaid jacket for her trip into the forest. As the ass, she still wore her frilly polka-dot blouse, but the rest of her clothing had been exchanged for a pair of bulky, furry trousers with a long tail in back and a hairy phallus in front, a matching thatch of chest hair that peeked over the ruffled neck of her blouse, a hairy headdress with two long ears that covered her 1940s coiffure, and footwear that resembled large hooves. Her face was uncovered, her make-up and red lipstick still clearly visible. French created a truly bizarre image as the ass, simultaneously citing femininity, masculinity, and animality in a clash of signifiers. The top half of her body was dominated by the visibility of her made-up face and her enormous breasts, prominently displayed in her fitted polka-dot blouse. Although her feminine hairstyle was covered, the headdress contributed to a sense of femaleness because it included a back section of coarse long hair that hung down to her shoulders. These visual signifiers of femininity were undercut by the presence of the chest hair, which was thick, dark brown, and came up to her neck. The effect of the chest hair poking out of her frilly, ultra-feminine blouse was incongruous in the extreme. The bottom half of her body was dominated by the animallike trousers, but in particular by the long tufted phallus swinging between her legs. The fact that Brotherston’s costume design deliberately allowed her face and breasts to remain visible indicates that the clash between feminine and masculine signifiers was intentional. Both halves of her body were excessive, the huge breasts playing against the oversized phallus, and the audience was asked to read all of these signifiers simultaneously. Although Mrs. Bottom’s phallus was readily apparent to the spectators both onstage and off, she herself did not discover it right away. She was initially unaware of her transformation, as she strutted around the stage singing. She plunked herself down to wonder, “who

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would set his wit to so foolish a bird?” (119). Redgrave’s Titania—a very femme fairy queen in a long blonde wig, elaborate earrings, corset, long skirt, and high-heeled shoes—was clearly enthralled and sexually excited by Mrs. Bottom, and took this opportunity to climb on top of her, saying lasciviously, “Mine ear is much enamored of thy note; / So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape” (122–123). Mrs. Bottom’s reaction to this attention was surprised, but not frightened or disgusted. Her practical reply—“reason and love keep little company together nowadays” (127–128)—summed up her view of this seemingly lesbian come-on from the fairy queen. It was only when Titania said to her fairies, “Be kind and courteous to this gentleman” (146), that Mrs. Bottom discovered her genitalia and realized that Titania perceived her as a male ass. French did a double take here, and gave a look of alarm at the audience, who responded by laughing and applauding. Yet she also looked intrigued by her new equipment, playing with the appendage and twanging at it like a double bass. At the prospect of luxurious treatment by Titania, who instructed her fairies to “feed him with apricots and dewberries, / With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries” (148–149), it became clear that Mrs. Bottom began to feel some sexual stirrings in her newly acquired male parts. She began waggling her hips slightly and laughing, and giving little encouraging gasps of pleasure. At the end of the scene, just before the intermission, the attendant fairies wrapped the blanket that served as Titania’s bower around Mrs. Bottom and the fairy queen. Titania knelt down, saying suggestively, “The moon, methinks, looks with a wat’ry eye, / And when she weeps, weeps every little flower, / Lamenting some enforced chastity” (179–181). She then bent down into Mrs. Bottom’s lap, hidden by the sides of the blanket. Mrs. Bottom said “Oooh,” appreciatively, leaving no doubt as to Titania’s attentions to her male parts, which prompted the fairy queen to resurface, saying, “Tie up my love’s tongue; bring him silently” (182). The interaction between Titania and Mrs. Bottom during 3.1 indicated that their relationship was most definitely sexual, which was confirmed at the top of the production’s second half: the two were reclining in the blanket/bower that was pulled by the fairies, Mrs. Bottom panting with exhilarated exhaustion and Titania swooning in ecstasy. Mrs. Bottom was enjoying herself enormously in this scene, and Titania indulgently lavished attention and affection on her “gentle joy” (4.1.4). The attendant fairies’ attitudes toward their queen’s bizarre consort were in keeping with their images as naughty

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schoolchildren: they were polite to Mrs. Bottom’s face but stuck out their tongues and scowled at her behind her back. Their antics did not get much of a response from the audience, who reserved their laughter and applause for French. Mrs. Bottom, cheerily oblivious, was perfectly happy to be indulged by Titania, indicating that she experienced certain aspects of male privilege through her translation. The way in which French played both scenes suggested that Mrs. Bottom was able to act as both woman and man as the ass: initially unaware of her male parts, she was evidently still herself, but once under the influence of Titania, her body became that of a functional male. She was also very much aware of her sexual desire for the fairy queen; yet this desire, as it was experienced by a female character with a fully functional penis, could not be categorized as either male or female. French’s performance showed that sexual desire is not gendered, nor does eroticism correspond to genitalia. The scenes between Mrs. Bottom and Titania demonstrated that Shakespeare’s play carries within it a distinctly queer potential, providing “resistance to prevailing definitions of sexual identity [and] . . . gender identity” (Turner 2000, 11). This queer reading was accomplished through cross-gender casting; by having Bottom played by a woman as a woman who remains herself, with some added male parts, during the encounter with Titania, the production took the relationship between the weaver and the fairy queen into a new direction. It was clear, however, that Francis did not intend a queer reading in his direction of the relationship between Mrs. Bottom and Titania. In his view, French played the scenes as “a beery, demanding, chauvinist male . . . under the influence of an enormously indulgent Titania” (Edwardes 2001, 145). I do not know whether French resisted this interpretation, but it was not present on the night that I saw the production, at least not in my impression of her performance. Rather than a male chauvinist pig, Mrs. Bottom the Ass was a hybrid creature, both visually and in terms of character choices. Her physical presence, with the heightened contrast between her huge breasts and prominent phallus, never allowed Mrs. Bottom’s femininity to be subsumed into a portrait of stereotypical masculinity. Further, French continually showed her character’s curiosity, wonder, and excitement at her experiences with the fairy queen. Even in 4.1, in which Titania offered her sex, cuddling, head scratching, musical entertainment, food, and sleep in rapid succession, French’s performance did not become the stereotypical portrait of masculinity indicated by Francis’s words. The director’s concern to emphasize that

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Mrs. Bottom “becomes a chauvinist male” in the forest indicates his intentions to make the relationship between Titania and the ass heterosexual. French’s performance went far beyond heterosexuality, or homosexuality, and explored instead the queer nature of desire. Once the spell on Titania’s eyes had been lifted, however, and Mrs. Bottom had been returned to her former self, the production, and French’s performance, sought to undercut the queer sexuality of the scenes between the fairy queen and the grotesque hermaphroditic ass. French played Bottom’s “rare vision” speech (4.1.196–211) primarily for laughs, struggling to express the nature of her dream, and growing panicked when she realized what “methought I was” (202). When she said, “methought I had” (203), she trailed off, her eyes growing wide with shock, and then she turned her back on the audience abruptly and pulled up her skirt, looking for the now-absent penis. When she found herself sans phallus, she turned back to the audience, and said “Phew!” and wiped her hand across her forehead in relief. Her performance of this moment in the soliloquy included the audience as the only other witnesses of her interactions with Titania, and encouraged them to laugh at her relief to find herself safely back in her fully female body. Mrs. Bottom and the audience laughed off the experiences in the forest, and associated her transformation exclusively with her acquisition of a male member. Although these choices could not erase the exciting and erotic energies of Mrs. Bottom’s scenes with Titania, they encouraged the audience to dismiss them as merely a comic interlude. The audience members in attendance at the performance that I saw mostly seemed willing to laugh uproariously at French’s performance as Mrs. Bottom the Ass, thereby confirming the production’s emphasis on comedy over issues of gender and sexuality. The reactions of the theater reviewers indicate that while many of the critics denied the importance of gender and sexuality to the production, some were nonetheless aware of the erotic undercurrents of French’s performance. Certain reviewers commented on the lack of sexuality between Mrs. Bottom and Titania. Nicholas de Jongh wrote, “There’s nothing remotely lesbian, absurd or comic about the passionate attraction of this female Bottom and Titania.” John Peter of the Sunday Times (March 31, 2001) agreed: “The idea that there might be anything sexual going on between [Mrs. Bottom] and Jemma Redgrave’s wooden Titania is preposterous.” Michael Coveney of the Daily Mail (March 30, 2001) noted that the actor playing Bottom “has to make you think of the . . . experience of a donkey having sex

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with Titania, queen of the fairies. This, to be fair, Dawn French does not accomplish. Nor, to be honest, does she even come close. . . . [She is] not a lesbian thespian. . . . [S]exual bestiality goes out the window.” For these critics, French’s interactions with Redgrave’s Titania did not convincingly convey any kind of sexuality, whether heterosexual, homosexual, or bestial. Yet these observations were balanced by the anxiety that certain reviewers expressed about French’s appearance in these scenes: Thorncroft described her extra “tail” as “disturbing,” while Peter, in the same paragraph in which he declared the lack of sexuality between Titania and Bottom, found French’s “ass’s outfit . . . grotesque rather than funny, with what looks like two bushy tails, front and back.” These critics focused on the “grotesque” phallus on French’s costume, indicating that despite their denials about the erotic energies of these scenes, Mrs. Bottom’s body was nonetheless deeply disturbing because of her excessive body and hermaphroditic sexuality. A few reviewers of the production were willing to read the relationship between Mrs. Bottom and Titania as erotic, even as adding “a lesbian aspect to the taboo-breaking,” in Kate Bassett’s words. Roger Foss went further, arguing in his review for What’s On (March 28, 2001) that the production did not take the sexuality of this relationship far enough: “With a whiff of the trannie about it, French’s Bottom is indeed a ‘rare vision’; it’s just too squeaky-clean for my liking.” Yet most of the critics glossed over, denied, or repressed the sexuality of the Bottom/Titania relationship, focusing instead on the comedy that was provided by French’s size, and made innumerable puns about the fact that a woman with a big bottom was playing a character called Bottom and was turned into an ass. Robert GoreLangton noted in the Express (March 30, 2001) that “the woman with the biggest behind in showbiz is, of course, playing the butt of the gags, Bottom.” Charles Spencer self-consciously addressed the tendency toward ass jokes in his review, which he promised would “contain no cheap jokes about Dawn French exposing her Bottom. Yes, it’s enormous. Yes, the first thing you think of when you hear her name is her mighty posterior. . . . Butt, sorry, but we are here to discuss her art, not her arse.” Nearly every review contained similar jokes, as critic after critic ignored the gender issues in the production to focus on the “to-be-laughed-at-ness” of French’s Bottom. The critical reception of Francis’s Dream was similar to those of Richard II, King Lear, and The Tempest in that most of the critics ignored the importance of gender to the production. Yet the reviews

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were also quite different from previous performances, primarily because Francis’s Dream received mostly positive reviews. Reviewers called the production “enjoyable” (Foss), “good-natured and userfriendly” (Butler), “a real pleasure . . . beguiling” (Spencer). Despite the unfortunate plethora of fat jokes in the reviews, French also drew good notices for her Bottom, even from the few critics who were less than enamored with the production, such as Shakespeare scholar Michael Dobson (2002): “French worked very hard to carry what she could of [the show] . . . and when left to herself was very funny: she has a great deal of presence, speaks Shakespeare very well, and can warm up an auditorium just by walking onto the stage” (312). Carole Woddis noted in the Glasgow Herald (April 1, 2001) that in her opinion French was perfectly cast: “Dawn French’s appeal has always resided in her air of cheery, slightly bumptious anarchy. Here, it’s put to perfect use as a gleefully posturing, ‘bully’ Bottom. . . . French endows this scenario with a wonderful comic irreverence.” Despite a few dissenting voices, the production and French’s performance were well-received by the reviewers, which differentiates this particular experiment in cross-gender casting from those that came before. The critical success of Francis’s Dream indicates that the director’s decision to change the gender of French’s character to Mrs. Bottom paid off. It was also clear in the reviews of the production that Francis’s emphasis on the themes of romance, magic, and comedy was likewise successful. A number of critics commented on the ways in which the production was faithful to Shakespeare, and focused in particular on the effect of Brotherston’s magical and romantic wood as well as the laughs provided by French and the ensemble. Gore-Langton spoke for many reviewers when he wrote that the production “comes with warmth and moonshine, [and] the story of transformations and romance works its magic.” Spencer likewise claimed that the production was “true to the spirit of Shakespeare’s great comedy. . . . [T]he show is both infectiously funny and genuinely magical, the two key requirements of any production of The Dream.” These reviews suggest that Francis’s production captured the essence of Shakespeare’s play. Unlike the productions directed by Warner, Kaut-Howson, and Udovicki, Francis’s Dream did not threaten Shakespeare and English national identity. Rather, according to the reviews, his production respected the authority of Shakespeare’s play and thus could be accepted by the critics. On the surface, the lesson that one can learn from Francis’s choices is that women’s cross-gender performance is more palatable to the

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theater critics when it is used in a comedy, in which the audience can be encouraged to laugh at the antics of the cross-cast actress, and when the gender of the character is altered to match that of the performer. When a director makes this kind of change, “cross-gender casting” would seem to be an inaccurate term. Yet Francis’s production not only staged nostalgia, but subverted it through French’s unsettling appearance as Mrs. Bottom the Ass. Although Francis wanted the relationship between Bottom and Titania to be contained within the confines of heterosexuality and stereotypical masculinity, the meanings created by the actors’ bodies onstage transgressed the limitations of his stated intentions. Despite the production’s attempts to gloss over, deny, or repress the queer eroticism of French’s scenes with Redgrave’s Titania—and the general willingness of the theater critics to aid and abet this—the production re-wrote Bottom’s journey as a very particular narrative of transgressive desire.

CHAPTER 6

VICE-VERSA: ALL-FEMALE SHAKESPEARE AT THE GLOBE THEATRE (2003–04)

I

n 2003, women’s cross-gender performances of Shakespeare entered a new phase with the announcement of the Globe Theatre’s summer season: the then artistic director Mark Rylance unveiled his plans for a brand new all-female company to complement the theater’s long-standing all-male company. The Women’s Company, composed of fifteen actresses, performed Richard III, with Kathryn Hunter in the title role, and The Taming of the Shrew, with Janet McTeer as Petruchio. This experiment was successful enough that Rylance repeated it the following year, staging an all-female Much Ado About Nothing, with Josie Lawrence as Benedick, this time without an accompanying all-male production. Yet the all-female companies proved controversial enough that the artistic staff at the Globe decided to justify their decision to the press and to their audiences. Both Rylance and director Phyllida Lloyd defended the casting by championing equal opportunity. As Rylance told Benedict Nightingale in the Times (February 4, 2003), “it’s unjust that men should get many more opportunities than women to show their strengths in classic roles. . . . ‘Isn’t there an enormous waste when women achieve [Ian] McKellen’s or [Michael] Gambon’s ability yet haven’t a King Lear to play’?” Lloyd included a prologue to her production of Shrew that emphasized the prodigious “female talents” of the cast, and offered a hope that the use of “vice-versa” casting would help to “redress the balance” by giving women the chance to wear the codpiece. It is, of course, typical for women’s cross-gender performances to be justified in terms of affirmative action (creating more opportunities for actresses) and artistic expediency (the actress is simply “the best person for the role”). The Globe press materials introduced a

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new way of defending the practice: by repeatedly underscoring the idea that such casting was fundamentally respectful of Shakespearean authority. The press release announcing the 2003 season proclaimed, “Shakespeare’s original actors were not limited by the gender of the parts they played but enjoyed a revolutionary theatre of the imagination where commoner played king, man played woman and, within the plays, woman man.”1 This formulation implies that these performances will bring us closer to the mythical Shakespearean original. This claim is in keeping with one of the Globe’s objectives: to explore staging conventions of the early modern British theater. The three all-female performances were designated “original practices” productions that used clothing, music, dance, props, and settings that might have been employed in Shakespeare’s time. As many commentators on the Globe have noted, the idea of an “authentic original” is problematic. In particular, there is no way to justify an all-female cast as an “original practice.” The absence of women in Shakespeare’s theater was carefully glossed over in the press materials to focus instead on the Globe’s invitation to its audience to use their imaginations, as in the Chorus’ opening speech in Henry V: “[L]et us, ciphers to this great account, / On your imaginary forces work” (Prologue 17–18).2 Women’s cross-gender performance was therefore subordinated to bolstering the nostalgic ideal that underpins “Shakespeare’s Globe.” Given this context, the all-female performances at the Globe were less disruptive of gender, Shakespearean authority, and national identity than the selectively cross-cast productions by Warner, KautHowson, and Udovicki. Like Francis’s regendered production, they diminished the gap between actress and character that can challenge entrenched ideas about gender and encouraged the audience to see the character, not the cross-gender performer. While all-female casting might seem like a radical innovation, in practice at the Globe it often worked to erase troubling concerns over cross-gender performance. The productions also mitigated the ahistorical presence of women on the Globe stage by paradoxically emphasizing the significance of the original practices. This focus on the Shakespearean original appeals to a traditional sense of national identity by equating a trip to the Globe as a way for audiences to access a strong and positive sense of Englishness. Despite these problematic adherences to tradition, Kathryn Hunter’s Richard III and Janet McTeer’s Petruchio offered significant challenges to stable conceptions of gender identity and

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Shakespeare. Particularly in the highly charged performance space of the Globe, these male characters that seem so thoroughly familiar to modern audiences became defamiliarized through the actresses’ bold portrayals. In both cases, the meanings created by Hunter and McTeer went far beyond the assumption of male (Elizabethan) clothing. Both actresses used their bodies to denaturalize gender, and to create new readings of the characters; yet they did so in very different ways. Their differences arose out of the particularity of their bodies in the roles of Richard and Petruchio. Hunter’s performance emphasized the difficulties that Richard had in successfully performing masculinity; severely physically disabled, her Richard was continually trying, and failing, to be a “real” man. McTeer, on the other hand, embodied Petruchio’s masculinity with consummate ease, presenting him as both intensely sexy and outrageously sexist. Her performance simultaneously cited masculinity and femininity, and ultimately showed how a particular body can exist in the tensions between gendered identities.

“Original Practices”: The Globe and English National Identity The actresses in the all-female companies in 2003 and 2004 were not, of course, the first women to play male roles on the Globe stage; they were preceded by Vanessa Redgrave’s performance as Prospero in 2000 (as well as a single performance of an all-female Damon and Pythias in the 1996 Prologue Season). Udovicki’s Tempest used “modern practices,” however, while the three all-female performances explored original practices, using handmade clothing, period music and dance, and properties and hangings that could have been used in the original productions of Richard III, The Taming of the Shrew, and Much Ado About Nothing. The Globe publicity materials, particularly the programs, focused much of their attention on these physical aspects of the productions, while generally neglecting ideological issues that arise when attempting to claim “originality” or “authenticity.” Responses to the original practices productions have varied widely. Some critics and scholars, such as Charles R. Forker (2003) in his review of the 2003 all-male Richard II and Edward II, applaud the Globe’s “attention to historical detail. . . . [B]oth the Globe revivals were sumptuously costumed in ‘Jacobethan’ style, the rich brocades, velvets, taffetas, and linens offering a magnificent re-creation” of period fashions (71). Others, such as W. B. Worthen (2003), have

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pointed out the problem with claiming the productions as original: “the Globe can only be a complex contemporary undertaking, one that evinces an understanding of the working of history that is full our own, that shares our ways of understanding and performing the past” (81). Or, as James C. Bulman (2008) more bluntly puts it, “How could one expect to replicate the experience of an Elizabethan audience when cultural contexts have changed so radically?” (233). In terms of cross-gender casting, Bulman goes on to argue that locating the productions under the sign of the Shakespearean “original” disguises the more subversive potential of the Globe’s performances: calling the use of an all-male cast an “original practice” is in fact a tactical ruse by which Rylance coaxes audiences to divest themselves of essentialized notions of gender and sexuality. . . . [T]he Globe’s “original practices” productions advance a culturally transgressive agenda rendered safe by the distancing device of historical recuperation. They offer up a subversive sexual politics which, under the conservative guise of doing archeological work, are made palatable as popular entertainment. (233)

Many analyses of the Globe’s all-male productions—particularly of Rylance’s controversial performances as Cleopatra (1999) and Olivia in Twelfth Night (2002)—have endorsed Bulman’s view, arguing that such productions highlighted gender performativity and queer sexuality. To some extent, I find a similar process at work in the branding of the all-female productions as original practices. By focusing on the ways in which the productions paid homage to Shakespearean authenticity—even to the extent of characterizing women’s cross-gender performance as part of Shakespeare’s “theatre of the imagination”—Rylance and other Globe personnel drew attention away from the potentially transgressive aspects of an all-female cast. However, I want to temper Bulman’s argument by observing, along with Catherine Silverstone (2005), that “the original practices productions . . . locate the Globe as an institution which alternately admits the potential for homoeroticism and works to restrict or limit such representations” (39). While certain aspects of the all-female productions challenged traditional notions of gender and sexuality, they also used the concepts of originality and Shakespearean authenticity to mitigate or erase the potentially troubling presence of female bodies in male roles.

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The materials prepared by the Globe personnel—which include the production programs and the interviews with cast members available on the GlobeLink research website—place great emphasis on the physical aspects of original practices, particularly clothing, music, dance, and properties. Of these elements, clothing receives the most attention, and is made to carry an enormous amount of ideological weight in the Globe’s inquiries into historical accuracy. From the opening season, the work of clothing designer and historian Jenny Tiramani, in particular, has drawn focus in the press for its unique attention to period detail. Clothing for original practices productions is made by hand, using materials and techniques from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The clothes are also worn and cleaned as they would have been in the early modern period. As deputy wardrobe manager Jemimah Tomlinson (2003) notes in the program for The Taming of the Shrew: The clothes have been handmade out of silk, wool, or linen, and interlined with either wool or horsehair. Most of them are very expensive to produce and so, in common with sixteenth-century practice, many items are shared between, and even within, productions. . . . Quick changes of reconstructed sixteenth-century costume are never easy. Poppers [snaps] and velcro are prohibited in the Globe wardrobe. Ruffs and cuffs are literally pinned onto doublets, and so minor lacerations are common. . . . Every repair is done by hand and we endeavor to use sixteenth-century practice whenever possible. (23)

Such devotion to historical accuracy is in service of approximating the conditions of Shakespeare’s theater, as much as is possible, often in the hopes of gaining some insight into the processes of performance at the original Globe. For Richard III, the Masters of Clothing, Tiramani and Luca Costigliolo, wanted to “explore the idea that the players may have pulled some older items of clothing out of the Globe wardrobe and used them for a play like Richard III” to stage events from English history that would have been some 110 years in the past. They characterize this decision as “an exciting new development in our exploration into the kinds of dress which may have been used at the Globe—and theatres like it—400 years ago” (16). They bolster their historical inquiry by presenting a quotation from one of the documents of the Rose Theatre: an inventory of “antic sutes” written up by Edward Alleyn that inspired their own designs for Richard III.

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Many of the actors who work at the Globe are full of approbation for how the clothing helps them to get into character. In the interviews with members of the Women’s Company on the GlobeLink website, the actresses exclaim over and over again about how excited they are to get into the period costumes. Sarah Woodward (2004), who played Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, notes, “the costumes are probably one of my favorite things about original practices: they feel great and improve the way you stand.” Mariah Gale (2004), who played Hero in the same production, enthuses about the research that went into her costume: “It’s absolutely amazing to hear about how the clothes are made. . . . Luca [Costigliolo] likes you to know about the clothes you’re wearing—where the material has come from, why a certain color or cut has been used, and how much different things cost.” Pauline Kiernan, in Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe (1999), also notes the “almost uniformly positive” responses of the actors in the 1997 production of Henry V to their costumes: “Re-created clothing of the period which allows for freedom of movement and the all-important body-language required by the new Globe space has shown that what an actor wears, and how he or she wears it can have specific dramaturgical consequences” (86). Yet it is worth noting that historical accuracy can only go so far: Rachel Sanders (2004), who played Clarence in Richard III and Don John in Much Ado, recalls, “Last season I wore a sports bra underneath my doublet which was less than Elizabethan.” Tomlinson (2003) also says wryly that original practices are not always practical: although early modern actors did not wear underwear beneath their costumes, it is not something she recommends, lest “the groundlings ge[t] more than they bargained for.” Along with essays on clothing, each program includes information on the music and dance used in the original practices productions, and, in the case of the Much Ado About Nothing program, an essay on the properties and hangings as well. All three productions incorporated early modern music, played live by musicians dressed in period clothing, and dance, particularly through the jigs that closed each performance. Kiernan (1999) comments on the significance of music to productions at the Globe: “with no stage design . . . music becomes much more important in the creation of mood and meaning” (85). All of the program essays are careful to reference historical research, from Costigliolo’s narrative of his travels through Italy to research Renaissance fashions for Much Ado, to William Lyons’s exposition of how his choice of music for The Taming of the Shrew

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is rooted in English ballads and Italian courtly tunes of the era. For Much Ado, Paul Burgess (2004), the master of properties and hangings, writes about how his design attempted to “find a balance between [the Sicilian setting of the play] and the uniquely English setting of an Elizabethan theatre,” theorizing in the process about “the way Italian style was appropriated in England at the time” (29). From these essays, and from the physical aspects of the productions themselves, the audience members receive the impression that each aspect of the original practices productions are engaged in bringing them as close to the conditions of the original Globe as possible. Elizabeth Paul’s review of Much Ado for the Southwark News ( June 10, 2004) reveals that at least some audience members bought into these claims of authenticity wholesale: “this production is one that would have been seen through the eyes of Shakespeare. . . . [T]he costumes are absolutely fantastic—very sumptuous, colorful and accurately researched.” The women playing male roles in the 2003 and 2004 seasons often credited the original practices, particularly the period clothing, with helping them to access an authentic sense of masculinity. Ann Ogbomo (2004), Much Ado’s Claudio, noted of her first costume fitting, “It’s not that hard to look like a man once you’re in costume because obviously you’re wearing men’s clothes, and in some ways being dressed like that helps you access the character’s maleness.” Rachel Sanders (2004) expressed similar feelings on getting into Don John’s “tight black doublet”: “I feel much more masculine wearing these clothes: very solid and bullish.” These claims reveal how the original practices helped to erase potentially unsettling concerns about cross-gender casting by encouraging the actresses and their audiences to read the characters, via their costumes, as male. Although the historical clothing varied to some degree across the three productions—Richard III was designed to look like a sixteenth century recreation of fifteenth century style, while Shrew and Much Ado incorporated Italian and Spanish fashions into the design—by and large issues of gender and sexuality were subjugated to concerns of authenticity. The codpieces worn by many of the actresses in these productions (particularly in Richard III and Much Ado) were there to signify maleness, supported by the scrupulous historical research manifested in the production programs. The focus on original practices helps to connect the Globe with a strong and positive sense of English national identity. Original practices productions use the concept of an authentic Shakespeare

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as a continual reference point: they theorize that if the designers, directors, and actors immerse themselves in early modern practices, the result will be a theater experience that is closer to the mythic Shakespearean original than is available anywhere else. As Silverstone (2005) notes, the Globe “has become a showpiece . . . for asserting that British Shakespeare is the most ‘authentic,’ where visitors are promised a nostalgic slice of the past for easy consumption in the present” (32). Sheridan Morley’s review of Much Ado for The Lady ( June 29, 2004) enthusiastically buys into this nostalgic idea: he describes the Globe as “the greatest theatre built in my lifetime, an authentic Elizabethan performing space where it does not take much imagination to see the Bard loitering in one of the galleries, checking that the actors are sticking to the script.” Given the current crisis of national identity in Britain, the Globe plays an important role in creating a concept of Englishness that is nostalgically connected to Shakespeare’s England. Attending a performance at the new Globe purportedly gives audience members a chance of accessing that “golden age” of English history, and provides a sense that Shakespeare’s greatness is still alive and well in twenty-first-century Britain. Crystal Bartolovich (2001) also connects the Globe project to English national identity: Given its self-representation as “England’s most important theatrical heritage” . . . the simulated “Shakespeare’s Globe” appears at first glance to be a made-to-order defense against the identity crisis which has troubled postwar Britain, offering its people a chance to discover, and, above all, possess, once again that ancient and settled national identity that the very name of “Shakespeare” is supposed to conjure up. Indeed, since “Shakespeare” and the “Globe” are widely taken to be metonyms for “England” . . . the politics of the Globe can be seen to participate in a signification of England’s place in the world. (190)

As Bartolovich implies, under scrutiny, this idealistic linkage between the Globe, Shakespeare, and Englishness breaks down. For one thing, as Paul Prescott (2005) has observed, the Globe often seems more American than British, given the high proportion of American tourists that attend performances and the exhibition, the fact that its founder, Sam Wanamaker, was American, and “the importance of the dollar in establishing the Globe—and global—economy.” Prescott concludes that “anyone expecting the kind of one-nation, microcosmic little-England-Globe . . . would be jolted by the contemporary reality of the multinational and heterogeneous Globe

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audience” (366–367). Just as the emphasis on original practices often tends to downplay the homoerotic potential of cross-gender casting, the association of the Globe with Englishness conceals the extent to which this identity is constructed, fictive, and unconnected to the actual workings of the theater itself.

Downplaying Gender: All-Female Casting Unlike the selectively cross-cast productions by Warner, KautHowson, and Udovicki, the all-female productions at the Globe often tended to downplay the gap between the actress and the character. This does not mean that the productions caused gender to “disappear”; rather, they worked to naturalize the presence of women in male roles and thus legitimize the casting. This was particularly evident in the sixteenth-century costuming and makeup of Richard III and The Taming of the Shrew. Whereas most modern male actors would need to wear wigs to achieve the long-haired Elizabethan look, the actresses simply wore their own hair loose, in most cases flowing to or beneath their shoulders. For example, Meredith MacNeill, as Lucentio in Shrew, had long, straight brown hair that, along with her ornately patterned sea-green doublet and hose, emphasized the character’s youthful romanticism.3 In Richard III, the women playing men, who wore no makeup, 4 appeared more natural than the women playing women, who were dressed like early modern “boy actresses.” Here MacNeill, who played Lady Anne, wore her hair piled on top of her head in an elaborate style, along with white makeup, red rouge, and a tightly laced black dress. The artificial appearances of the actresses who played female roles was culturally normative in the sense that it reinforced the sense of femininity as drag, as something “put on.” But it also rendered the actresses who played male roles more real by comparison, which helped to justify the casting. Richard III went through some changes early in its run that, like the costuming and makeup, tended to narrow the gap between the actresses and their male roles. These changes, which served to downplay the potentially homoerotic meanings created by an all-female cast, primarily concerned the presence of Jane Shore (Laura Rogers) and her relationship with Hastings (Anna Healy). In the preview performance I saw on May 25, 2003, Jane and Hastings shared a lovemaking scene at the beginning of 3.2. A large bed occupied center stage, with Jane and Hastings under the covers kissing and embracing. The dialogue between Hastings, the Messenger, and Catesby

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took place with Hastings still in bed, while Jane, clad in underwear, reclined beside him, her arm slung languidly over her head. As Hastings got up to leave for the meeting, Jane tried to tempt him back to bed, putting her arms around him and kissing him. When he resisted, she rolled over huffily and went to sleep. This business, which was met with an uncomfortable silence, had changed by the time I next saw the production on May 30. Although the bed still dominated the setting, at the top of the scene, Hastings was pacing the stage reading papers while Jane slept. The staging kept him separated from her throughout, cutting all of the sexual business present in the earlier performance and in the production promptbook. The change in stage business was evidently permanent: it is absent from the video recordings of the July 12 and September 17 performances in the Globe archive. It is not difficult to guess why the relationship was made less explicit: with two women playing the scene, the eroticism took on a potentially lesbian tone. By deemphasizing the sexual play between Jane and Hastings, the director, Barry Kyle, attempted to both eliminate homoerotic tension and close the gap between the female actress (Healy) and the male character (Hastings). The fact that Kyle originally included the erotic business for Jane and Hastings could mean that he was interested in using the all-female cast to explore subversive meanings about gender in performance. Alternatively, it could simply mean that he included Mistress Shore (who is mentioned but does not appear as a character in the text) to follow a lengthy performance tradition of “illustrating the sensuality of the court of Edward IV” (Richmond 1989, 6) and that the interplay was not intended to be homoerotic. Tamara Harvey followed Kyle’s lead in downplaying the potential for homoeroticism in her 2004 production of Much Ado About Nothing. The intimate moments between Benedick ( Josie Lawrence) and Beatrice (Yolanda Vazquez) encouraged the audience to see Benedick the male character, rather than Lawrence the female actress. Lawrence shared three embraces with Vazquez’s Beatrice that charted the development of their relationship during the second half of the production. First, in 4.1, Lawrence, at center stage, opened her arms to Vazquez, who rushed into them from the downstage right corner in an exuberant movement, joyfully proclaiming, “I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest” (284–285). They nearly kissed during this embrace, but Lawrence instead knelt with a flourish, emphasizing Benedick’s courtly manners. This almost-kiss was repeated in 5.2; wary of getting caught, Lawrence and Vazquez

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sprang apart as Ursula (Lucy Campbell) entered to tell them the news about Hero. The two finally came together in the very last moments of the play. On “Peace, I will stop your mouth” (5.4.96), Lawrence took Vazquez into her arms, bent her backward, and they shared a long, passionate kiss, to the delight of the audience, who cheered and applauded.5 The audience’s response to the Benedick/Beatrice relationship suggests that they were seeing the characters and not the actresses in play during this intimate moment. By continually setting up and then delaying the kiss, Harvey whetted the audience’s appetite for the moment, and when it finally came, for the most part they responded positively.6 Yet this is the only example, in my experience, of a kiss between same-sex actors at the Globe that has received an overtly positive audience response. In the other all-female productions, as well as some of the all-male productions, same-sex intimacy was often met with laughter, derision, disgust, or silence. Rylance has famously remarked that an audience member yelled out during one of his performances as Cleopatra, “What’s wrong with real women? Why do I have to watch these fairies?” (Silverstone 2005, 42). Similarly, there were often gasps of shock or disgust during Kyle’s Richard III, when Hunter’s Richard lingeringly kissed Vazquez’s Queen Elizabeth in 4.4 (although these shows of disapproval could have been as much related to the scene itself as to the fact that they were watching a same-sex kiss).7 Consequently, when Lawrence and Vazquez’s kiss provoked open approval on the part of many of the spectators, it indicated that they were seeing Beatrice and Benedick, not two women, in a romantically satisfying consummation. Harvey’s production also used other methods to obscure gender as an issue, despite the presence of an all-female cast. First, she avoided overt expressions of sexuality as much as possible. Just as Beatrice and Benedick only shared a single kiss, so too did Hero (Mariah Gale) and Claudio (Ann Ogbomo), who kissed chastely during the final scene. Their embrace was not the center of focus, but was played while other characters were speaking. Although a kiss between Hero and Claudio is implied and often staged in 2.1, when Beatrice instructs Hero to “stop his mouth with a kiss” (272), Harvey chose not to have them kiss here. Ogbomo was, in my opinion, the only member of the cast who might be able to convincingly pass as male; she is tall and slim with a fairly deep voice, and wore her hair in short, spiky dreadlocks. Kate Kellaway noted in the Observer ( June 6, 2004) that she “managed to look like a man of elegant dimensions,” while

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Claire Allfree agreed in her review for the Metro ( June 4, 2004) that “Ogbomo is the only performer who makes the audience believe she is a man.” Therefore, it was in keeping with the production’s eschewal of sexual ambiguity that Ogbomo was given very minimal intimate moments with Gale. Second, Harvey generally favored broad comedy in her approach to the play, glossing over its violence, misogyny, and the laddish behavior of the male characters. Although the production featured strong and forthright characterizations by Vazquez as Beatrice and Gale as Hero, this was somewhat overwhelmed by the comic posturing of the women playing male roles. Nearly all the cross-cast actresses wore facial hair, which proved to be a source of humor for audiences and critics alike. Patrick Marmion, in a review titled “Bearded ladies—and much hair-do about nothing” (Daily Mail, June 4, 2004), wrote that the only effect of an all-female cast on the play is that it “makes for an eye-catching range of artificial facial hair.” Benedict Nightingale similarly commented in his review for the Times ( June 4, 2004) that it was only the actresses’ beards that represented a “spurious masculinity,” and described the hair as “indecently indebted to borzoi dogs, badgers and bits of Pekinese.” Apart from the laugh-inducing beards, the actresses playing men were often directed to play their scenes for comedy, even ones that could be taken seriously. In 5.1, for instance, when Leonato and Antonio accuse Don Pedro and Claudio of killing Hero and threaten them with violence, the tone was comic, despite the subject matter. Antonio (Penelope Dimond) was ridiculously belligerent, growling, “Come follow me boy, come sir boy, come follow me, / Sir boy, I’ll whip you from your foining fence” (5.1.83–84), while Leonato (Penelope Beaumont) tried to calm him down, holding his arm and continually entreating, “Brother Antony” in an embarrassed tone (92). The audience laughed uproariously at the broadly comic portrayals of the two old men. Most prominently, however, Lawrence played Benedick primarily for laughs, characterizing him as a man whose attempts at courtly behavior were humorous and who was easily dominated by Beatrice both physically and verbally. Lawrence cut a believably masculine figure as Benedick; she is tall, and looked solid, rather than slight, in her period clothing: a doublet with padded shoulders, breeches (with an attached codpiece), hose, boots, and a hat with a feather. She wore her strawberry blonde hair shoulderlength, and was outfitted with matching sideburns, mustache, and beard. Yet she chose to play Benedick as physically awkward, often striking courtly poses that were rather over the top, and sometimes

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looking like he did not know what to do with his hands. (Given the assurance of Lawrence’s performance, I am certain this was a character choice, rather than her own awkwardness.) She also assumed a Northern accent, creating an impression of Benedick as somewhat unpolished and uncouth: a big lug who tried to emulate the smooth manners of Don Pedro (Belinda Davison) but continually failed. His antics were constantly mocked by the other characters, particularly his fellow soldiers. In 2.1, after Beatrice abused him during the dance, he huffily reported to Don Pedro that she called him “the Prince’s jester” (2.1.213), and waited for a corresponding exclamation of indignation from his friends. When none came, he went on with less assurance, and his audience (both on- and offstage) laughed. In 3.2, after he had resolved to be in love with Beatrice, he strutted on smelling a posy, putting on perfume, and waving a handkerchief affectedly, to the great amusement of Claudio, Don Pedro, and Leonato, who were spying on him. And in 5.2, having failed to compose a suitable poem for Beatrice, he tried instead to show his love by bowing to her elaborately and blowing her a kiss, which she “caught” ironically, holding up her hand to stop him as he tried to extend the business. Vazquez’s powerful Beatrice easily dominated Lawrence’s Benedick. Although the latter was bigger physically, Vazquez had no problem asserting herself. In their opening “skirmish of wit” (1.1.51), Beatrice grabbed his arm and forced him to turn back to her, crying angrily, “You always end with a jade’s trick. I know you of old” (118). It was only Don Pedro’s intervention that stopped the argument from becoming more serious. During the dance at the masked ball in 2.1, Beatrice was clearly leading: she threw his arms around, jigged around him so that he was utterly confused, dipped him, and spun him until he was dizzy. Her physical dominance of him in this scene was mirrored by her verbal dominance, effortlessly penetrating his ineffectual disguise and skewering him with her wit. She literally ran rings around him after Hero’s wedding in 4.1; as she raged against Claudio, Benedick stood awkwardly center stage while Beatrice circled him. His attempts to stop her strides and her speech failed equally. Along with the strength of Vazquez’s Beatrice, Lawrence and Harvey also chose to downplay the misogyny of Benedick’s character. Some of his references to marriage as a “yoke” (1.1.163) and a state of cuckoldry for men were cut, and Lawrence’s broadly comic portrayal of the character took the sting out of the barbs that were left in. By undercutting the misogyny of Benedick in particular and the play in general, Harvey’s production

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tended to obscure gender issues, encouraging the audience to focus on the romance plot, and to see the male characters rather than the female actors. The actresses themselves also claimed that they put gender aside when rehearsing for Much Ado, as the interviews on the GlobeLink website attest. Actresses who played both male and female characters noted repeatedly that they did not approach their parts from the standpoint of gender. As Woodward (2004) said of her rehearsal process for Dogberry: I don’t know if we’ll be doing any sort of work on “male” physicality: as Josie [Lawrence] was saying today, when you’re concentrating on understanding a complete character, their sex seems by the by. Initially I really wanted a male part in the female company because I thought it would be a huge challenge, but after just two days I’m starting to think about that differently: I’ll get on with Dogberry as a character rather than a “male” type.

Similarly, Gale and Vazquez both claimed that they overlooked gender differences in creating their relationships with Ogbomo’s Claudio and Lawrence’s Benedick. Gale (2004) acknowledged, “Initially it’s strange to have an all-female cast but then you stop seeing the actor and you start just seeing the characters—for example, as soon as Ann steps onstage as Claudio I just see Claudio.” Vazquez (2004) agreed: “I haven’t thought about playing opposite a female Benedick. As far as I’m concerned, I’m playing against a male. I don’t look at Josie and think ‘She’s a female, how in the world am I going to do that?’ I just play the character and the scene.” These descriptions of working methods are typical of women playing male roles in Shakespeare; Shaw, Hunter, and Redgrave all made similar remarks in various contexts that downplayed the importance of gender to their characterizations and to the productions as a whole. However, their performances often belied these stated intentions. In the case of Much Ado About Nothing, in particular, the actresses’ approaches to the all-female cast mostly seem congruent with the end result: a production that encouraged its audience to read the character, not the actress. Critic John Gross’s appraisal of the performance for the Sunday Telegraph ( June 6, 2004) echoes the language used by the actresses themselves: “Much of the time you forget (at least I did) that the male characters are being played by women: you simply concentrate on the characters themselves.” Interestingly,

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Amanda Harris (2003), who played Buckingham in Richard III and Tranio in The Taming of the Shrew, presented a different opinion on the GlobeLink site: When actors play a character of a different gender to themselves, they often say that this difference doesn’t affect how they approach creating that character. In many ways, this is true; one of the worst things I could do in rehearsals would be to try and “act like a man.” Instead, I am focusing on my character’s intentions and objectives. Having said that, I am beginning to find that Buckingham’s gender is affecting the way I move in character . . . because the world of the play is, essentially, a man’s world. At court, it is predominantly the men who have influence and who move in the highest circles of power. Throughout the play, Buckingham is looking to fulfill his ambitions and advance his own position at court, but it is because of his gender, (together with his high social status), that he is able to do this. If he were a woman, he would not be able to fulfill his intentions and objectives in this way and as a result, the fact that I am playing a man is having an effect on the way I move in character.

Harris’s analysis is, as she acknowledges, rare in its willingness to take gender into consideration, and it also suggests that other actresses’ denial of gender differences are possibly defensive, and probably inaccurate to the ways in which they do their work.

Highlighting Gender: Kathryn Hunter’s Richard III and Janet McTeer’s Petruchio Although the all-female Shakespeare productions at the Globe often worked to obscure gender and homoeroticism, the performances by the leading actresses also revealed the performativity of gender. In particular, Kathryn Hunter’s Richard III and Janet McTeer’s Petruchio provided interpretations that challenged normative gender identities. Both actresses brought their unique physicalities to their roles: the diminutive Hunter showed Richard’s difficulties with achieving masculinity, while the six-foot-tall McTeer embodied and parodied manliness simultaneously. Their deconstructions of gender were augmented by the unique space of the Globe, which, due to the lack of the usual theatrical conventions, focuses attention on the actor’s body as a primary means of creating meanings. As Hunter’s and McTeer’s performances demonstrate, cross-gender casting in this space can sometimes work to reveal the performativity of gender,

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rather than asking the audience to overlook the anomalous gender of the actress, even within an all-female cast. In taking on the role of Richard III, Hunter drew on her past experience playing Lear, but also on her particular talent for physical transformation. Perhaps the most disabled Crookback since Antony Sher’s spider-like performance for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1984,8 Hunter developed her physicality through a literal adherence to the description of the character in 3 Henry VI, 3.2.153–162, which she spoke as part of her opening soliloquy. Her right arm appeared to be shrunken, “like a withered shrub” (3.2.156), which created a hunch—an “envious mountain” (157)—on her back, and her legs were “of an unequal size” (159), the right one longer than the left. When her Richard walked, it was with a skipping gait, his right leg out in front and bent at the knee, leaning on the ball of the foot. In order to use his right hand, which was concealed in a black leather glove, he employed his left hand to pull it upright. When he took off the glove at 3.1.195, the hand he offered to Buckingham (Amanda Harris) to kiss was bluish and painfully shriveled. These physical impairments, combined with Hunter’s small stature, created the impression of Richard as extremely deformed, even grotesque. Hunter drew on her own disabilities in creating Richard’s physicality. She walks with a slight limp and used her right arm, which she noted “was once broken and set wrongly,” as Richard’s withered arm. She told Carole Woddis (2003) in an interview printed in the production program that she had disability rights issues in mind when preparing for the role: “By finding his heart and his mind and what drives him, I hope we’ll begin to see how the disabled person can be unreasonably maligned and marginalised and then begin to see Richard as a complex human being rather than a cursed person whose external deformities explain his inner evil” (21). Accordingly, her performance emphasized the ways in which Richard’s disabilities affected him psychologically: he laughed at those who mocked or insulted him, but underneath his surface bravado he clearly felt pain. For instance, in 1.2, he moved hesitantly to kiss Anne (Meredith MacNeill), and she spat in his face at close range, invariably provoking a shocked gasp from the spectators. As he turned away to wipe it off, the audience could see pain and embarrassment on his face. Similarly, when Margaret (Linda Bassett) called him an “elvishmarked, abortive, rooting hog” (1.3.225), Richard laughed at her, but then turned toward the audience, who could see on his face that her words had hurt him deeply.

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Hunter’s performance showed that Richard found masculinity problematic and difficult to achieve; in order to counter the limitations of his crippled and stunted body, he was constantly striving to perform the part of a swaggering, cocky, sexually successful man. He continually stroked his codpiece when talking about women: in his opening soliloquy when referring to the “lady’s chamber” (1.1.12), in his conversation with Hastings about “Shore’s wife” (1.1.93), and after kissing Queen Elizabeth (4.4.361). When describing the “wanton ambling nymph” in his first speech (1.1.17), he leered at a young female groundling standing near the stage. He also engaged in loutish behavior with Buckingham and Hastings, guffawing loudly at Elizabeth’s proclamation that she would rather be a “country servant-maid / Than a great queen” (1.3.107–108, presumably because of the emphasis on the first syllable of “country”). The only character he could dominate physically was the little Duke of York (played by the only actress close to Hunter’s size, Liza Hayden), with whom he roughhoused in 3.1, pummeling him on the back and eventually losing control and banging York’s head against the ground. When Hunter’s Richard engaged in all these displays of “manly” behavior, it made him seem both pathetic and rather gross, like a child pretending to be a man. Hunter used her body to simultaneously cite both femininity (through her slight stature and her undisguised face and hair) and masculinity (through her costume, gestures, and cocky, aggressive characterization) to denaturalize gender. She also revealed a powerfully challenging reading of the character. The audience, with whom Hunter cultivated an active relationship from the very beginning of the production, were privy to her Richard’s strenuous efforts at conveying masculinity. There was even a suggestion that Richard aspired to the masculine example set by Buckingham and Richmond, both of whom were played as graceful, well-spoken, smooth, and physically attractive politicians by Amanda Harris and Louise Bush, actresses whose blonde hair, big eyes, and regal posture were the polar opposite to the hunched, dark-haired figure cut by Hunter. “My other self!” (2.2.121) Hunter’s Richard exclaimed of Harris’s Buckingham, stepping back and appraising him approvingly, indicating that Buckingham not only was Richard’s perfect partner in crime, but also a better, more beautiful version of himself. The production as a whole often pointed up the disparity between the actresses’ bodies and their characters. After successfully seducing Anne, for instance, Richard turned to the audience to exclaim, “Upon my life she finds, although I cannot, / Myself to be a marv’lous

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proper man” (1.2.240–241). The way that Hunter played these lines indicated both the character and the actress: as Richard, she conveyed delight at achieving a sexual conquest, and as herself, she satirically underlined the word “man” to remind the audience that they were watching a woman. More generally, the production highlighted the text’s numerous disparaging references to femininity. Richard, for instance, tells Hastings, “Why thus it is when men are ruled by women” (1.1.62). The First Murderer, later on, exclaims, “Relent? No. ‘Tis cowardly and womanish” (1.4.245). In pretending to persuade Richard to accept the crown, Buckingham refers to Richard’s “gentle, kind, effeminate remorse” (3.7.201). All of these lines took on heightened and comic meaning when delivered by women. The actresses usually gave them vocal emphasis or said them while looking meaningfully at the audience. These are moments where the actresses placed ironic distance between their bodies and the characters they played. The Women’s Company also presented an alternative perspective on a play that is usually seen as exclusively masculine. As Michael Dobson (2003) notes in an essay in the production program, Richard III is “a play concerned with women’s right to represent history” (15). The use of an all-female cast allowed the actresses to tell a familiar story in a markedly different way. Rather than using their bodies and voices to merely imitate masculinity, the Women’s Company highlighted how female bodies can appropriate male privilege: by claiming the right to re-tell English history. In the preseason press on the production, many critics were dubious about an all-female Richard III. Jane Edwardes (2003a) wrote that “as much as I admire Hunter . . . I feel fairly certain that if Shakespeare had been asked to write a play for Elizabeth and her ladies-in-waiting, the history of Richard III would not have sprung to mind. . . . [I]t’s hard not to shy away from the idea of women fighting the Battle of Bosworth” (149). Phil Stone, chairman of the Richard III Society, also expressed doubt over the casting in an article by Richard Brooks of the Sunday Times (February 9, 2003): “It is a particularly male play. Having an all-female cast seems very odd. There is also a lot of sexual chemistry, with Richard making it out with several women. He’s a very hetero chap.” Both these opinions imply that having a Women’s Company perform a play about power and violence is inappropriate, as the subject matter strays too far from the realm of the feminine. Stone’s comment also manifests a homophobic anxiety that an all-female cast would challenge Richard’s heterosexuality and masculinity. The Taming of the Shrew, however, seemed to some

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critics to be a more understandable choice, because it is a comedy specifically about gender issues. Yet Shrew is notoriously problematic for modern audiences, not least because of Katherine’s final speech of submission to Petruchio. Director Phyllida Lloyd and the Women’s Company—with the addition of Janet McTeer—created a highly comic, swift-moving production that burlesqued the play’s misogyny. The actresses playing male roles followed McTeer’s lead in “gently satiriz[ing] men by exaggerating male behavior” (Neill 2003, 16). There was a great deal of boorish masculinity on display; for instance, Petruchio and Hortensio (Yolanda Vazquez) continually performed a ritual bit of manly posturing, simultaneously strutting and thrusting their pelvises forward while grunting, “Hey—hey— hey!” In 4.6, after Kate (Kathryn Hunter) finally capitulated about the sun and moon, Petruchio and Hortensio both got down on one knee, clenched their fists, and growled triumphantly. Yet the production also had its serious side; Lloyd wanted to show Padua to be, in McTeer’s words, a “macho, competitive society in which marriage is a matter of mercantile transaction” (Neill 2003, 16). This was manifested powerfully in 2.1, when Baptista (Anna Healy) ceremoniously led in the decorously pretty Bianca (Laura Rogers) to silently watch Gremio (Penelope Dimond) and Tranio (Amanda Harris) try to outbid each other for her hand in marriage. Bianca’s presence, which is not in the text, highlighted the role of women as powerless objects in a system of exchange run by men. As G.B. Shand (2005) notes, although early in the production’s run Bianca faced out to the audience so that they could see her facial expressions, later she was “turned to face upstage, so that her back was to the house . . . and she was even more objectified” (558). While Hunter’s performance as Richard showed how masculinity was difficult for him to perform, McTeer embodied Petruchio’s masculinity with admirable ease. Her first entrance in 1.2 was deliberately sensational. McTeer emerged through the trap in the center of the stage floor, breeches unbuttoned, shirt unlaced, vest hanging off by one sleeve, kissing and fondling Verona (Liz Kettle), a heavily pregnant wench, to whom she addressed her opening line, “Verona, for a while I take my leave” (1.2.1). As she spoke her first speech and subsequent dialogue with Hortensio, she fastened her disarranged clothing, drained a glass of wine, and kissed and flirted with the Widow (Rachel Sanders, who appeared briefly with Hortensio to serve the drinks). This was an unambiguously macho Petruchio: he swaggered, blustered, and even urinated during this scene. He

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was unapologetically crude, waggling his tongue suggestively as Hortensio described “a wife . . . / young and beauteous” (81–82), and emphasizing the sexual meanings in lines such as “I will board her” (91). Everyone that came in contact with this Petruchio—particularly the less manly characters such as the aged Gremio—was clearly awed by his masculine presence. McTeer, at six foot one, easily dominated every other actress onstage physically, and along with her deep, commanding voice and confident posture, she embodied the standard of manliness that governed the world of the play. McTeer drew many laughs for her physical and vocal choices, but did not hesitate to present Petruchio as brutish as well as charming. She was clearly concerned with emphasizing both sides of his character: “You want Petruchio and Kate to get on, but sometimes you really hate him too. It is a matter of keeping balance” (Neill 2003, 16). In the wooing scene, 2.1, during a scuffle with Hunter’s tiny Kate, McTeer dangled her upside down, skirts over her head and stockinged legs waving wildly, and then dropped her on her head, where she lay briefly, saying “Ow—ow—ow.” At their wedding, there was a “stag party” among the groundlings, as noted by the promptbook, at which Petruchio, with two dead rabbits hanging over his shoulders, caroused drunkenly with his friends, including the pregnant wench Verona. He was also brusque in refusing to stay for dinner, telling Kate’s family roughly to “be mad and merry, or go hang yourselves” (3.3.97). He grabbed Kate around the waist, drew her close to him, and said the following lines right into her face: I will be master of what is mine own. She is my goods, my chattels. She is my house, My household-stuff, my field, my barn, My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything. (100–103)

He then picked her up and tossed her into the arms of his servants waiting in the yard, who bore her out, shrieking, through the standing spectators. The taming process, although not as brutal as some productions have depicted,9 was also not romanticized. In one particularly pathetic moment, the starving Kate, dressed only in her muddy corset and petticoat, was reduced to stealing a bone from Petruchio’s spaniel Troilus (hilariously played by Rachel Sanders).10 Despite her emphasis on the more repellent aspects of his character, McTeer’s presence in the role of Petruchio was intensely magnetic and sexy, in ways that problematized normative gender

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ideologies. Her physical performance denaturalized gender by simultaneously citing masculinity and femininity. The combination of her height, her relatively deep voice, and her appropriation of masculine garments and behavior created an impression of masculinity. Yet these signifiers were presented alongside signifiers of femininity: McTeer did not disguise her face or her hair, which fell to her shoulders in tousled golden waves. She also did not flatten her chest; the contours of her breasts were clearly visible due to the cut of her doublet and vest. Like Fiona Shaw, who bound her breasts with gauze as Richard II, and Kathryn Hunter, who wore a girdle under her clothing as Lear, the actresses playing male roles at the Globe often wore corsets beneath their period costumes to more realistically resemble men (particularly in Harvey’s Much Ado). Yet McTeer—perhaps deliberately—did not try to conceal her breasts. The simultaneous presence of both masculine and feminine signifiers made it difficult to read McTeer’s body as exclusively either male or female. Rather, the citation of both gendered identities showed how her body could exist as a site of tension, and continual negotiation, between the two. McTeer heightened this tension between masculinity and femininity by calling attention to the contents of Petruchio’s trousers throughout the production. She did not literally wear a codpiece (as Hunter’s Richard and Lawrence’s Benedick did), but McTeer made Petruchio’s penis an absent presence through three pieces of stage business. In 1.2, she mimed urinating against the stage left pillar during Grumio’s speech (103–110); to the somewhat shocked delight of the audience, she unfastened her trousers, leaned up against the pillar, and even gave an authentic shake when done. Although there was no physical evidence that Petruchio was actually despoiling the Globe pillar, from behind it looked real enough. Then, in the wooing scene, Kate temporarily disabled Petruchio by kicking him in the balls on “That I’ll try” (2.1.215). McTeer hobbled around the stage in pain during a good deal of the next exchange, again quite convincingly. Finally, after kissing her passionately in 5.1, Petruchio gathered Kate up into his arms, her legs around his waist, and as the setting began to change into the banquet scene of 5.2, he backed her up into the stage right pillar and performed a few mischievous thrusts, to Kate’s slight shock but obvious pleasure. In these moments, McTeer’s body took on conflicting meanings: the audience read both the presence and absence of the penis; Petruchio’s (figurative) codpiece was both filled and unfilled. These choices recalled Shaw’s visible/ invisible bound breasts in Richard II, and the scenes in King Lear

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where Hunter alluded to the female body beneath her male clothing. The citation of these meanings by one particular body revealed the cross-cast actress’s playful ability to denaturalize gender. McTeer’s dynamic and ambiguously gendered Petruchio worked with the rest of the all-female cast to destabilize the meanings of Shakespeare’s problematic comedy. This was especially apparent in the staging of the final scene. The men—particularly Petruchio and Hortensio—were gleeful and rowdy during the banquet, continuing in the tradition of back-slapping bonding that characterized male interaction in the play as a whole. They pounded the table rhythmically and shouted while waiting for the servants to return with their wives, and even MacNeill’s relatively gentle Lucentio became posturing and aggressive in this atmosphere. When Kate began her speech of submission, she seemed sincere, Petruchio looked triumphant, and the men applauded his success. She pretended to have finished, and the men began congratulating Petruchio, Baptista in particular giving a manly hug to his son-in-law. Kate began again with “such duty as the subject owes the prince, / Even such a woman oweth to her husband,” this time with irony gradually creeping into her words (5.2.159–160). Her speech became more and more mocking, and her auditors grew more and more embarrassed. When describing women’s bodies as “soft, and weak, and smooth” (169), she got up on the table and pulled up her skirt to reveal her legs, at which the mortified Petruchio tried to cover her up with his cloak. She finished spread-eagled on the floor, offering to put her hand “below [her] husband’s foot” in a deeply sarcastic tone (181). By this point, Petruchio sat slumped with his face in his hands, wishing he were anywhere else. “Why there’s a wench,” was clearly an attempt to salvage his dignity, which was undermined yet again as Kate exited behind his back, leaving him hanging on “kiss me, Kate” (184). Bianca and the Widow were laughing uproariously, but all the men joined with Petruchio in trying to save face and failing miserably. These choices ensured that the final emphasis was on the mockery, not the bolstering, of male dominance, and provided a potentially feminist reading of Shakespeare’s play. G.B. Shand’s essay on the production presents a markedly different interpretation: he argues that although Lloyd’s choices appeared to enact a “ ‘feminist’ interpretive intention,” in fact they constituted “less a critique than a licensed carnivalesque celebration.” The actresses’ broadly comic portrayals, which, in McTeer’s words “gently satirize[d] men” (Neill 2003, 16), were not subversive in Shand’s view,

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but rather “harmlessly playful stuff. . . . The effect was, very successfully, to amuse the audience without inspiring thoughtful discomfort. . . . The production housed a relatively safe critique of the early modern playtext, but did not extend into acts of criticism that representatives of contemporary masculinity might actually feel palpably and take to heart.” Further, McTeer’s remarkably sexy Petruchio “may well have been complicit in commuting the production’s critique, for . . . he was undeniably attractive, and it’s a critical commonplace that an attractive Petruchio clouds the play’s abusiveness” (Shand 2005, 559–561). Shand’s critique suggests that far from posing a transgressive reading of the play, Lloyd’s production and the allfemale cast actually licensed the text’s misogyny, making it palatable, amusing, and, in the case of McTeer, even attractive. His argument reveals the ways in which this production, and all of the Globe’s allfemale productions, worked to close down on subversive meanings even as Hunter’s and McTeer’s performances created them.

Reviewing Gender: The Critical Response Shand’s interpretation of The Taming of the Shrew is justified by some of the production’s reviews. A number of critics directly equated the all-female casting with a perceived “softening” of the play’s sexism. Kate Bassett observed in the Independent on Sunday (August 31, 2003), “The cross-gender casting . . . helps make Petruchio seem more playful and less overbearing for a post-feminist audience,” while Liz Hoggard wrote in the Observer (August 24, 2003), “The fact that [the final soliloquy] is delivered by one woman to another slightly removes the sting.” Rhoda Koenig elaborated in the Independent (August 25, 2003), “Too much of the fun depends on our awareness that there’s nothing in those codpieces,” implying that if the parts were played by men the production might have been able to take a more serious approach to the problematic text. Many reviewers approvingly noted that Lloyd and her cast emphasized broad comedy rather than engage with the play’s problematic gender issues. As Sarah Hemming reported in the Financial Times (August 23, 2003), “Rather than struggle with this troublesome piece . . . the girls’ strategy is to have fun with it. . . . It works a treat. Rather than hammer home the fact that the men’s attitudes are outrageous . . . it gently sends them up.” Several critics began their reviews by describing their initial trepidation at seeing an all-female Shrew, expecting, in Charles Spencer’s words, a “dour, stridently feminist staging” (Daily Telegraph, August 25, 2003), and,

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in Benedict Nightingale’s terms, a “shrewish revenge on the Bard” (Times, August 23, 2003). In every case, these critics were delighted to find themselves wrong, acclaiming Lloyd’s emphasis on comedy and McTeer’s sexy performance. These responses support Shand’s claim that the production evaded a serious gender-based critique. Some of the reviews also bolster the idea that McTeer’s interpretation of Petruchio helped to license the play’s misogyny rather than subvert it. Shand (2005) notes that “McTeer’s Petruchio was constructed in part from extremely stereotypical performance choices. And yet some (or even many) straight women found the product sexy” (561). There are many reviews, a number of them written by women, that endorse this reading. Jane Edwardes (2003b) described McTeer’s Petruchio as “heart-stoppingly handsome” (138), Hoggard gushed, “in Janet McTeer’s Petruchio, we have one of the sexiest romantic heroes I’ve seen on the stage in a long time,” and Bassett wrote, “handsome, strapping Janet McTeer makes an amazingly sexy Petruchio.” Some male critics also responded rapturously: Nicholas de Jongh exclaimed in the Evening Standard (August 22, 2003), “what a convincing sexy man, with the looks of a young Peter O’Toole,” while Mike Parker in the Morning Star (August 28, 2003) imagined male audience members “fall[ing] to their knees in subservience at the click of this Petruchio’s fingers,” regardless of their sexual preferences. Certainly the range of sexual identifications, roles, and orientations implied by these comments enhance my reading of McTeer’s body as multiply-situated in terms of gender identity. Yet if we consider their impact on the portrayal of Petruchio, they also seem to suggest both male and female admiration of the misogynistic shrewtamer. Overall, the Globe’s experiment with all-female Shakespeare drew mixed responses from the critics. The Taming of the Shrew received mainly positive reviews, perhaps because of the ways in which it simultaneously seemed to endorse and undercut a feminist reading of the text and presented a multivalently eroticized Petruchio. The critics were more divided on Richard III and Much Ado About Nothing; although many admired Hunter’s performance as Richard and some acclaimed the comic ensemble playing of Harvey’s cast, there were still a significant proportion of negative reviews for both productions. The reviews for all three productions nonetheless manifest a number of the same tendencies that generally characterize responses to women’s cross-gender performances of Shakespeare: raising questions of “legitimacy” and anxieties over fidelity to the Shakespearean

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original, discrediting the leading actress in favor of male predecessors, and making the casting look ridiculous or opportunistic. Yet in general the response to the all-female Globe productions was kinder and gentler than the more virulent attacks on the selectively crosscast productions of Warner, Kaut-Howson, and Udovicki. Along with the ways the productions themselves tended to downplay the significance of gender, the more positive critical response also suggests that these all-female productions, together with Francis’s regendered Dream, were less disruptive of gender, Shakespeare, and national identity. None of the three Globe productions, regardless of the overall critical response, was invulnerable to one of the most frequently used images deployed to denigrate all-female casting: comparisons to amateur theatricals at a girls’ school. Melissa Aaron (2008), in her essay on all-female Shakespeare companies, observes that “one way in which all-female productions and companies have historically been marginalized is by identifying them with school productions, whether they are or are not” (155). This kind of comparison is apparent in reviews of all three Globe productions. Lyn Gardner’s review of Kyle’s Richard III in the Guardian ( June 13, 2003) noted that there were moments that made her “think of a school play at some posh girls’ school.” Peter Hepple of The Stage (August 28, 2003) said of Lloyd’s Shrew, “Too often there are echoes of a girls’ high school end of term production.” The Much Ado reviews contained a positive epidemic of references: Paul Taylor described Harvey’s production as “end-of-term drama at a girls’ school” (Independent, June 7, 2004), Charles Spencer compared it to “a mediocre production at a girls’ boarding school” (Daily Telegraph, June 4, 2004), and Nicholas de Jongh concluded that “this all-female Much Ado makes it seem as if some talented senior girls at a smart public school had decided to have a shot at seriously acting Shakespeare and missed their target” (Evening Standard, June 3, 2004). The critics also invoked other absurd imagery to make the all-female casting seem ridiculous: Benedict Nightingale feared that the battle scenes in Richard III might come off as “a hockey-field brawl between Roedean and Cheltenham Ladies College” (Times, June 12, 2003), while Spencer huffily dismissed the same scenes by observing, “a hen-night fight with handbags would be more exciting” (Daily Telegraph, June 15, 2003). Apart from the omnipresent comparisons to girls’ school productions, the reviewers also consistently raised concerns about the legitimacy of the actresses’ performances, particularly Hunter’s Richard III

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and Lawrence’s Benedick. Such reviews incarnate assumptions about authorial intention; that is, they present an idea of what the “real Richard” or the “real Benedick” should look like, according to what they believe “Shakespeare intended,” or to what the male-centered performance tradition has dictated. The critics praised Hunter for her physical characterization, vivacity, wit, and acknowledgment of the role’s theatricality. Yet they also critiqued her for failing to capture other elements of the character that they felt were necessary. Spencer wrote that “she may make the audience laugh, but she rarely makes them shiver. The essential touch of the psycho is largely absent from this performance. . . . [S]he fails to do justice to the character’s spiritual and psychological disintegration at the end.” Susannah Clapp agreed in her review for the Observer ( June 15, 2003): “The important note that is missing here is of villainy, of large-scale malevolence and dire consequences.” Similarly, some reviewers of Much Ado found that Lawrence failed to measure up to the role of Benedick. Marmion revealingly commented, “Lawrence not only has to top Beatrice’s wise-cracking salvos, but also has to persuade you of her character’s swashbuckling masculinity. . . . Lawrence doesn’t hack it. . . . However, Shakespeare’s wit gifts her some easy laughs and towards the end she becomes more convincing as Benedick turns more serious.” In Marmion’s view, Lawrence’s performance was “saved” by Shakespeare’s wit, which made up for her own inability to fulfill the demands of the part. Along with this critical tendency to pinpoint the actress’s perceived failure to live up to Shakespeare’s text and characters, another common feature of these reviews was comparisons with male actors that highlighted the actress’s inadequacy. Reviews of Hunter’s Richard often mentioned male predecessors such as Antony Sher, Ian McKellen, and Laurence Olivier. Even Nightingale’s positive appraisal of Hunter’s performance nonetheless added that she was “almost as convincing as Antony Sher’s famous version two decades ago” (my emphasis). In his evaluation of Lawrence’s Benedick, Nightingale was at it again: I’ve seen some terrific actors as Benedick, among them Roger Allam, Derek Jacobi and the most crustily comical of them all, Donald Sinden, and it’s doubtless unreasonable to expect Josie Lawrence to rival them. But does she fail to do so because she hasn’t their abilities or because she isn’t a man? I really don’t know. . . . I have to wonder if she’s suited to the role. . . . [S]he hasn’t much of a clue what it means to be a confirmed bachelor.

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Although he admitted that his comparisons to male actors were “unreasonable,” this did not stop him from invoking them anyway, to Lawrence’s detriment. Further, he implied that because she is not a man, Lawrence is ill-equipped to play one. In the case of The Taming of the Shrew, which received the most positive reviews of the three productions, there were still comparisons with the work of male performers and directors that served to downplay the achievements of Lloyd, McTeer, and the rest of the allfemale cast. Interestingly, McTeer herself told Nicholas de Jongh, “I can never match up to Richard Burton,” perhaps indicating her own awareness of how her performance would be compared with male predecessors (Metro, May 29, 2003). More pervasively, a number of reviewers compared Lloyd’s production unfavorably to Gregory Doran’s Shrew, which had been performed at the Royal Shakespeare Company earlier in 2003 (and which subsequently transferred to the West End). Carole Woddis observed in her review for the Glasgow Herald (August 27, 2003), “Humanism, a sense of equality between the sexes brought out in Greg Doran’s subtler, more moving RSC production earlier this year, is muted. Instead, Phyllida Lloyd . . . brings out all the playfulness of [the] piece.” Similarly, Bassett noted, “I missed the psychological depth and real grief of Alexandra Gilbreath’s unloved Kate in Greg Doran’s current RSC production. . . . [I]n Doran’s RSC Shrew, Jasper Britton makes Petruchio sympathetic by more fully probing this newly orphaned man’s emotional problems. With Lloyd, the potentially dark heart of the play seems lightweight and slightly puzzling.” Just as reviewers in 1997 invoked Richard Eyre and Ian Holm’s King Lear to reveal the perceived inadequacies of Kaut-Howson and Hunter’s production, critics in 2003 referred to Doran’s production and Britton’s Petruchio to point up the supposed limitations of Lloyd’s Shrew. Although generally speaking the reviews of the three all-female productions at the Globe (and Shrew in particular) were more positive than those of their selectively cast predecessors, it is clear that critical tendencies to mock, dismiss, and delegitimize women’s cross-gender performances of Shakespeare were still very much in play. When looking at the evolution of critical discourses between 1995 and 2004 through the lens of individual reviewers’ responses to the practice of female-to-male cross-casting, we can trace two parallel trajectories. Critics such as Benedict Nightingale of the Times, Nicholas de Jongh of the Evening Standard, and Paul Taylor of the Independent seem to have generally softened their views on women’s

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cross-gender performances of Shakespeare, whereas Charles Spencer of the Daily Telegraph and John Peter of the Sunday Times have, with a few exceptions, steadfastly maintained an opposition to the practice. Nightingale’s initial response to the phenomenon in 1995 was “panicky images” of “gender-hazy” performances and of “radical feminists with beards” taking over. By 2000, he had become willing to see the “warmth and tenderness” in Redgrave’s Prospero, and in his review of the 2003 Richard III, he noted, “Thanks mainly to Kathryn Hunter’s lively Crookback, Barry Kyle’s revival goes some way to justifying the theatre’s claim, which is a) some actresses merit a go at the big classical roles, and b) audiences relish having their imaginations stretched and stretched.” Similarly, de Jongh criticized Shaw’s Richard II for “diminish[ing] and sentimentali[zing] the character,” and claimed in 1997 that women’s cross-gender performances were “sheer perversity.” But in his reviews of the Globe’s all-female productions, he proved to be one of their strongest champions. In his preview article on the 2003 Globe season, he wrote, “Even the thought of what we will soon see on the Globe stage makes me smile in anticipation. . . . Never before has our modern stage been so full of sensational cross-dressers in single-sex productions.” His review of Richard III bore out his anticipatory enthusiasm: “A daring troupe of actresses exposed themselves to the threat of ribaldry and ridicule last night, and emerged in triumph, having written themselves into theatrical history. . . . Kyle’s production demonstrates how unfair this discrimination [against all-female casts] has been. His Richard III suggests actresses play men far more convincingly than men do women. . . . [I]t strikes a fine blow for actresses’ liberation.” And finally, Taylor, who called Hunter’s Lear a “freak” and Redgrave’s Prospero “bizarre” had changed his tune by 2003, noting in his review of Richard III, “the principle [of all-female casting] is excellent. . . . The Globe’s Season of Regime Change spiritedly redresses the balance” (Independent, June 12, 2003). Spencer, on the other hand, was, to use his own word choice, “sniffy” about nearly all of the productions discussed in this book, with the notable exceptions of Francis’s Dream and Lloyd’s Shrew. In 1997 he described Kaut-Howson’s casting of Hunter in the role of Lear as “a meaningless exercise in modish casting,” and reiterated in his review of the 2003 Richard III that he “devoutly wished [Hunter] hadn’t [played Lear].” He even ended the same review by echoing his previous language condemning women’s cross-gender performance: “the whole production seems like a perversely modish exercise in

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political correctness.” His appraisal of Harvey’s Much Ado anticipated “an angry postbag from the monstrous regiment” for his opinion that “women are less persuasive and offer fewer fresh perspectives when they play men than men do when they play women.” As further evidence for this view, he cited the response of his eleven-year-old son, “who was entranced by Edward Hall’s recent all-male Midsummer Night’s Dream, [but who] seemed stoically bored for most of [Harvey’s Much Ado].” John Peter’s reviews of these productions were even more consistently negative: he described Redgrave’s Prospero as “lifeless, colourless, and monotonous,” and found French’s Bottom “grotesque.” His responses to the all-female productions were little more than rants. “This is a ridiculous production,” began his review of Richard III ( June 22, 2003), which went on to ask, “What is the point of this cross-casting? . . . [T]he whole thing is a self-indulgent exhibition of expensive incompetence, a cross between an end-ofterm play in a dreary girls’ school and Blackadder on a very bad day.” As one of the few dissenting voices in the general acclaim for Shrew, he called Lloyd’s production “pointless and dreary. . . . [N]one of the cast knows how to play men” (August 31, 2003). He repeated his question in his Much Ado review: “What is the point of single-sex casting? . . . Female voices issuing from bearded faces sound bizarre” ( June 13, 2004). These seemingly contradictory discourses—the increasingly positive responses of Nightingale, de Jongh, and Taylor, and the stalwart negativity of Spencer and Peter—in fact support two of my central claims. The general trend toward viewing women’s cross-gender performances of Shakespeare in a better light was precipitated by Francis’s regendered Dream and the all-female Globe productions, bolstering my argument that selectively cross-cast productions are more threatening to entrenched critical ideas about mimetic theater, gender, Shakespeare, and national identity. Thus critics who attacked Warner, Kaut-Howson, and Udovicki’s productions tended to soften their views when appraising Francis’s nostalgic Dream and the original practices productions at the Globe. On the other hand, the presence of critics who generally maintained their negative views indicates that despite the different ways of deploying female-tomale cross-casting, the practice still remains threatening. Spencer and Peter’s insistence that “women do not know how to play men” speaks to the perceived threat to gender identity and the integrity of masculinity. The continued presence of ludicrous comparisons (e.g., to girls’ school productions) to make women’s cross-gender

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performances look ridiculous and the constant detrimental comparisons to the male performance tradition speak to the perceived threat to Shakespeare’s authority and the integrity of his texts and characters. By characterizing these productions as threatening to Shakespeare, such reviews implicitly signal their concern for the stability of “Englishness” and national identity. The all-female productions at the Globe in 2003 and 2004 have seemingly marked the end, at least for now, of significant interest in women wearing the codpiece on the London stage. Regime change at the Globe partly accounts for this shift: in 2006, Dominic Dromgoole became the new artistic director, taking over from Mark Rylance, and has chosen not to use cross-gender casting of any kind (all-male, all-female, or selective cross-casting) in his productions so far. This is perhaps understandable; Dromgoole may, after all, want to distance himself from an artistic policy that has often been denoted a “Rylancean oddity,” to use Bryan Appleyard’s phrase from an article in the Sunday Times (April 25, 2004). All-male Shakespeare companies, such as Edward Hall’s Propeller Theatre, continue to thrive, but at the moment women’s cross-gender performance of all kinds (selective cross-casting, regendering, and all-female companies) seems to be on the wane. It is unclear why this has happened. Now that Rylance and other directors have “redressed the balance” by creating more roles for actresses, has the demand for this “affirmative action” imperative been satisfied? Are actresses and directors tired of weathering bad reviews and continually justifying themselves to the press? In my view, the answer is inevitably connected to Shakespeare’s status and reputation in Britain today. In a cultural climate that constantly debates the nature of Englishness, Shakespeare plays a crucial part in shoring up the shaky concept of national identity. Productions that use women’s cross-gender performance are too threatening to Shakespeare and English national identity, perhaps accounting for the current drop-off in the practice. Despite this lull, the seven productions analyzed in this book offer hope for the future of the British theater: that despite the often hostile, mocking, and patronizing responses of critics, women will continue to appropriate male power and privilege by daring to wear the codpiece.

APPENDIX: PRODUCTION DETAILS

Richard II May 26, 1995–February 17, 1996 The Cottesloe Theatre (Royal National Theatre, London) Cast (in order of speaking) Richard II: Fiona Shaw John of Gaunt: Graham Crowden Henry Bolingbroke: David Threlfall Thomas Mowbray: David Lyon Duchess of Gloucester: Paola Dionisotti The Lord Marshal: John Rogan Edward, Duke of Aumerle: Julian Rhind-Tutt First Herald: Jonathan Slinger Second Herald: Jem Wall Sir Henry Green: Henry Ian Cusick Sir John Bushy: Nicholas Gecks Edmund of Langley, Duke of York: Michael Bryant Queen Isabel: Brana Bajic Henry, Earl of Northumberland: Struan Rodger Lord Ross: Richard Bremmer Lord Willoughby: John McEnery Duke of York’s Serving Man: Jem Wall Sir William Bagot: Danny Sapani Harry Percy: Jonathan Slinger Sir Stephen Scroop: Jude Akuwudike A Welsh Captain: Danny Sapani Earl of Salisbury: David Lyon Bishop of Carlisle: John Rogan First Lady: Paola Dionisotti Second Lady: Elaine Claxton Head Gardener: John McEnery First Gardener’s Man: Henry Ian Cusick Second Gardener’s Man: Jem Wall Lord Fitzwater: Jude Akuwudike

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Thomas, Duke of Surrey: Nicholas Gecks The Abbot of Westminster: Richard Bremmer Duchess of York: Paola Dionisotti Sir Piers of Exton: Richard Bremmer Exton’s Man: Henry Ian Cusick Keeper at Pomfret Castle: John McEnery Music played and sung by Eleanor Alberga (music director), Rebecca Arch, and Irita Kutchmy, with Elaine Claxton (soprano) Director: Deborah Warner Designer: Hildegard Bechtler Lighting: Peter Mumford Music: Arturo Annecchino Company Voice Work: Patsy Rodenburg Sound: Freya Edwards Richard II played in repertory with David Hare’s Skylight during its run in the Cottesloe. The production toured to the Maison de la Culture de Bobigny (Paris) from January 13 to 28, 1996, with the same cast. The production also played at the Salzburg Festival at Perner Insel Hallein from July 25 to 28, 1996, with one change to the cast: Richard Bremmer replaced David Threlfall in the role of Bolingbroke.

King Lear February 21–March 15, 1997 The Haymarket Theatre (Leicester) Cast (in order of appearance) Earl of Kent: Colin McCormack Earl of Gloucester: Robert Pickavance Edmund: Jeremy Brudenell Lear: Kathryn Hunter Duke of Cornwall: Glyn Pritchard Duke of Albany: David Acton Goneril: Kate Seaward Regan: Gabrielle Reidy Cordelia: Hayley Carmichael King of France & Gentleman: Michael Hodgson Duke of Burgundy & Curan: Jonas Finlay Edgar: Simon Roberts Oswald: Nick Cavaliere Fool: Marcello Magni Directed by: Helena Kaut-Howson Chorus Work: Marcello Magni Designed by: Pawel Dobrzycki Lighting Design by: Jenny Cane

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Sound Design by: Paul Bull Voice Coach: Mel Churcher Fight Director: Renny Krupinski This production transferred to the Young Vic Theatre, London, from June 25 to August 2, 1997, with the same cast. It subsequently toured to the Panasonic Globe Theatre in Tokyo (November 21–29, 1997) and the MID Theatre in Osaka (December 2–4, 1997).

The Tempest May 12–September 10, 2000 Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (Bankside, London) Dramatis Personae, The Red Company Prospero: Vanessa Redgrave Miranda: Kananu Kirimi Antonio: Martin Turner Alonso: Terry McGinity Sebastian: Sam Parks Ferdinand: Will Keen Gonzalo: Robert McBain Adrian: Tas Emiabata Francisco: Jonathan Oliver Trinculo: Paul Chahidi (subsequently replaced by Steven Alvey) Stefano: Steffan Rhodri The Master of the Ship: Tas Emiabata Boatswain: Jonathan Oliver Ariel: Geraldine Alexander Caliban: Jasper Britton Juno: Besa Berberi Iris: Kate Fleetwood Nymphs, Reapers, Spirits, Mariners: Victoria Nolan and members of the Company Violin: Steve Bentley-Klein/Joe Townsend Drummer: Michael Gregory/Phil Hopkins Double-Bass: Andy Lewis/Dave Ayre Clarinet: Merlin Shepherd/Dai Pritchard Accordion: Kevin Street/Mark Bousie Master of Play: Lenka Udovicki Master of Verse: Tim Carroll Master of Design: Bjanka Ursulov Master of Music: Nigel Osborne Master of Dance: Laurie Booth Masters of Movement: Viktor Bischoff, Jackie Matthews, Glynn McDonald Master of Voice: Stewart Pearce Research Officer: Jaq Bessell

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This production played in repertory with the Globe Theatre’s three other productions of the 2000 season: Hamlet and The Antipodes (both performed by the White Company) and The Two Noble Kinsmen (performed by the members of the Red Company, except for Vanessa Redgrave).

A Midsummer Night’s Dream March 16–May 12, 2001 The Albery Theatre (London) The Company Helena: Tilly Blackwood Mustardseed: Jonathan Broadbent Quince: Selina Cadell Demetrius: Stephen Campbell Moore Snout: Debbie Chazen Egeus: Julian Forsyth Bottom: Dawn French Puck: Lee Ingleby Hermia: Gillian Kearney Lysander: Will Keen Cobweb/Philostrate: Alex McIntosh Starveling: Geraldine McNulty Titania/Hippolyta: Jemma Redgrave Flute: Paul Rider Snug: Joanna Scanlan Oberon/Theseus: Michael Siberry Moth: Laura Wilson Peaseblossom: Hannah Young Presented by: Katharine Doré Management Ltd. Directed by: Matthew Francis Designed by: Lez Brotherston Lighting Design by: Mark Henderson Original Music Composed by: Mia Soteriou Sound Designed by: George Glossop Choreography by: Etta Murfitt Additional Music Act One: “I Double Dare You” (Larry Clinton and his Orchestra) Act Five: “Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing)” (Benny Goodman)

Richard III May 25–September 28, 2003 Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (Bankside, London) Queen Margaret/Messenger/Ghost of Henry VI: Linda Bassett

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Lord Stanley: Penelope Beaumont Sir Robert Brakenbury/Lord Grey/Earl of Richmond: Louise Bush Duchess of York/Sir James Blunt: Penelope Dimond Duke of Buckingham: Amanda Harris Murderer 2/Sir Richard Ratcliffe/Richard, Duke of York: Liza Hayden Lord Hastings/Messenger/Earl of Surrey: Anna Healy Richard III: Kathryn Hunter Edward IV/Bishop of Ely: Liz Kettle Lady Anne/Young Elizabeth: Meredith MacNeill Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers/Sir James Tyrrel/Scrivener/Messenger/Duke of Norfolk: Jules Melvin Murderer 1/Sir William Catesby: Ann Ogbomo Jane Shore/Marquess of Dorset/Edward, Prince of Wales: Laura Rogers Duke of Clarence/Executioner/Lord Mayor/Sir William Brandon: Rachel Sanders Queen Elizabeth: Yolanda Vazquez Hautboy/Voice: Sarah Humphrys/Nick Perry Field Drum/Hautboy/Voice: Sharon Lindo/Nick Perry Field Drum/Voice: Gillian McDonagh/Corrina Silvester Sackbut/Trumpet/Voice: Abigail Newman/Kate Rockett Musical Director/Hautboy/Voice: Belinda Sykes/Nick Perry Sackbut/Trumpet/Voice: Emily White/Laura Sherlock Master of Play: Barry Kyle Masters of Clothing: Jenny Tiramani, Luca Costigliolo Master of Properties and Hangings: Jenny Tiramani Master of Historical Music: Keith McGowan Master of Theatre Music: Claire van Kampen Master of Singing: Belinda Sykes Master of Dance: Siân Williams Masters of Fights: John Waller, Jonathan Waller Master of the Words: Giles Block Master of Movement: Glynn MacDonald Master of Voice: Stewart Pearce This production was staged as part of the Globe Theatre’s “Season of Regime Change,” and played in repertory with Richard II, Edward II (both performed by the Men’s Company), Dido Queen of Carthage (performed by the Men and Women’s Company), and The Taming of the Shrew (performed by the Women’s Company, with the addition of Janet McTeer).

The Taming of the Shrew August 10–September 28, 2003 Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (Bankside, London) Grumio: Linda Bassett

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Vincentio: Penelope Beaumont Tailor: Louise Bush Gremio: Penelope Dimond Tranio: Amanda Harris Biondello: Liza Hayden Baptista: Anna Healy Katherina: Kathryn Hunter Pedant: Liz Kettle Lucentio: Meredith MacNeill Petruchio: Janet McTeer Curtis: Jules Melvin Joseph: Ann Ogbomo Bianca: Laura Rogers Widow: Rachel Sanders Hortensio: Yolanda Vazquez Musical Director, Sackbut: Abigail Newman/Kate Rockett Shawm, Bombard, Recorder, Bagpipes: Belinda Sykes/Catherine Latham Shawm, Recorder: Sarah Humphrys Shawm, Bombard, Bagpipes: Sharon Lindo Tabor, Frame drum: Gillian McDonagh Theorbo: Elizabeth Pallett/Linda Sayce The production was conceived and cast by Barry Kyle and staged by Phyllida Lloyd. Master of Play: Phyllida Lloyd Masters of Clothing: Imogen Ross, Jenny Tiramani Master of Properties and Hangings: Jenny Tiramani Master of Historical Music, Research, and Musical Arrangements: William Lyons Master of Music: Claire van Kampen Master of Dance: Siân Williams Master of the Words: Giles Block Master of Movement: Glyn MacDonald Master of Voice: Stewart Pearce Trainer in Comedic Play: Marcello Magni

Much Ado About Nothing May 23–September 25, 2004 Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (Bankside, London) Leonato: Penelope Beaumont Antonio: Penelope Dimond Hero: Mariah Gale Beatrice: Yolanda Vazquez Margaret: Joy Richardson

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Ursula: Lucy Campbell Don Pedro: Belinda Davison Benedick: Josie Lawrence Claudio: Ann Ogbomo Balthasar: Joyce Henderson Don John: Rachel Sanders Conrade: Hannah Barrie Borachio: Gabriel Reidy Dogberry: Sarah Woodward Verges: Jules Melvin George Seacoal: Joyce Henderson Second Watchman: Joy Richardson Third Watchman: Penelope Dimond A Sexton: Lucy Campbell Friar Francis: Jules Melvin Musical Director/Bombard/Recorder: Belinda Sykes Bombard, Recorder: Sharon Lindo Hautboy, Recorder: Sarah Humphrys Sackbut: Abigail Newman Theorbo: Elizabeth Pallett Percussion: Gillian McDonagh Master of Play: Tamara Harvey Master of Clothing: Luca Costigliolo Master of Properties and Hangings: Paul Burgess Master of Historical Music/Musical Arrangements and Research: William Lyons Master of Theatre Music: Claire van Kampen Master of Dance: Siân Williams Master of the Words: Giles Block Master of Movement: Glynn MacDonald Master of Voice: Stewart Pearce This production was staged as part of the Globe’s “Season of Star-Crossed Lovers,” and played in repertory with Romeo and Juliet and Measure For Measure, both of which were performed by mixed-gender casts.

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NOTES

1 Introduction: Wearing the Codpiece 1. William Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 2.7.49–61. I use the Norton Shakespeare to quote from Shakespeare’s plays, and hereafter all references are cited in the text. 2. Under artistic director Mark Rylance, the Globe Theatre mounted all-male productions of Henry V (1997), Julius Caesar (1999), Antony and Cleopatra (1999, in which Rylance controversially played Cleopatra), Twelfth Night (2002, in which Rylance played Olivia), Richard II (2003), and Edward II (2003). Edward Hall’s all-male Propeller Theatre Company has performed well-reviewed productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2003), The Winter’s Tale (2005), and The Taming of the Shrew (2006). 3. William Shakespeare, King Lear (conflated text), 3.4.98. In this scene, Lear is prompted to his realizations about the nature of humanity by a naked man’s body, which demonstrates that the male is the standard of experience by which the idea of the “universal” is formed. 4. Interestingly, Bloom admits to the absence of a “definitive Shakespeare” in the acknowledgments to Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human; yet he does not consider the impact this has on his view of the plays as authoritative and universal. 5. He fails to mention, for instance, Kathryn Hunter, Marianne Hoppe, Maria Casares, and Olympia Dukakis, all actresses who played the role between 1985 and 1998, possibly because he had not seen their performances, but also presumably because they did not offer suitable models for his own. 6. Shakespeare beat out fellow finalists William Churchill, Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, William Caxton, and Oliver Cromwell to claim the title. See “Bard is Millennium Man,” BBC News, January 1, 1999, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/245752.stm. 7. This piece responds to TV personality Carol Vorderman’s gaffe on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, in which she was unable to correctly identify Sir Toby Belch as a character from Twelfth Night and subsequently pronounced Shakespeare “dull as ditchwater.” The incident sparked a furor in the press, which included lengthy evaluations of Shakespeare’s place within the culture. This article concludes with

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Notes the writer chiding, “Miss Vorderman really ought to have known better.” 8. Although Mullenix’s book is about the American stage, she suggests that the development and decline of women’s cross-gender performance was similar in Britain. 9. There is much more interest in women’s cross-gender performance of Shakespeare on the contemporary American stage, where actresses have had more opportunities to play male roles, ranging from Hamlet to Falstaff to Henry V. There are also theater companies who use all-female casts to produce Shakespeare, such as the New Yorkbased Women’s Shakespeare Company, the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, and the Charlotte, North Carolina-based company Chickspeare. Further, many companies, such as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Georgia Shakespeare Festival, the Judith Shakespeare Company in New York, and the Folger Shakespeare Theater in Washington, D.C., explore nontraditional gender casting. This willingness on the part of American companies to cast women (and often men) against gender bolsters my claim that using such casting in Britain is perceived as a threat to Shakespeare and to national identity.

2 The King’s Many Bodies: Fiona Shaw’s Richard II (1995–96) 1. Fiona Shaw, interview with the author, London, March 17, 2001. 2. The designation of Richard as “effeminate” originates with Coleridge (1960), who wrote: “[He possesses] an intellectual feminineness which feels a necessity of ever leaning on the breast of others, and of reclining on those who are all the while known to be inferiors. To this must be attributed as its consequences all Richard’s vices, his tendency to concealment, and his cunning” (135). 3. I use three main sources to analyze this production: the promptbook, a video recording of the stage production (from the November 18, 1995, matinee performance), and the television film. The major difference between stage and film versions is the cuts. Warner used a full text for the stage production, which ran three hours and fortyfive minutes, and cut a lot for the film, which runs two hours and fifteen minutes. Richard Bremmer also replaced David Threlfall as Bolingbroke in the film version. 4. Their work together includes productions of Brecht’s The Good Person of Sichuan (1989, in which Shaw played both male and female roles), Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1990), Beckett’s Footfalls (1994), a one-woman rendition of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1997), Euripides’s

Notes

5.

6. 7. 8.

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Medea (2001), an adaptation of Jeanette Winterson’s novel The Power Book (2002), Julius Caesar (2005), and Beckett’s Happy Days (2007). I distinguish between Shakespeare’s and Shaw’s Richards through pronouns. When discussing the character within the Shakespearean text, I use “he” and “him.” When analyzing Shaw’s interpretation of this character, I use “she” and “her,” despite the fact that Shaw played Richard as a man. This distinction is preserved in the other production chapters as well. The term “queer” is a deliberately slippery concept, used by Teresa de Lauretis (1991) to “transgress and transcend—or at the very least problematize” the categories of “gay” and “lesbian” (iii). Catherine Silverstone (2007) notes in her essay on the production that this was one of two program covers; the other had no illustration (212). Although the stage direction “to the Lord Marshal” is not always included in editions of the play, it is included in the edition used by Warner and recorded in the production promptbook. It is therefore clear that Warner decided to change the addressee from the Marshal to Richard. This stage direction is also included in the Norton edition, from which I quote here.

3 Playing with Contradictions: Kathryn Hunter’s King Lear (1997) 1. Helena Kaut-Howson, interview with the author, London, March 12, 2001. Quotations attributed to Kaut-Howson throughout this chapter refer to this interview, unless otherwise noted. 2. When Kaut-Howson was artistic director of Theatr Clwyd in North Wales, Hunter played Sister Jeanne in John Whiting’s The Devils (1992) and Serafina in Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo (1995). They have since worked together again on Federico Garcia Lorca’s Yerma at the Arcola Theatre in 2006. 3. Janelle Reinelt (2001) writes of Complicité: “Several of its founders trained with Jacques Lecoq and Phillippe Gaulier, comprising two processual, intensely somatic and extra-textual approaches to performance that link the company to a European tradition of physical theatre work. Through its twenty-seven productions touring fortytwo countries, Complicité has used diverse bodies and multiple languages as fundamental elements of performance” (373). Hunter’s credits with the company include Clara in Dürrenmatt’s The Visit (1991, for which she won an Olivier Best Actress Award), Paulina in The Winter’s Tale (1992), Out of the House Walked a Man (1995), and Susan Barton in Foe (1996).

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4. Hunter played the male Antiochus and Cerimon and the female Bawd in Phyllida Lloyd’s 1994 production of Pericles for the National Theatre. She has also played the androgynous, mutative title character in Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker (1994, National Theatre), a seven-year-old cancer patient in Lee Hall’s Spoonface Steinberg (2000, Ambassador’s Theatre), and Dr. James Barry, a woman who lived most of her life as a man, in Sebastian Barry’s Whistling Psyche (2004, Almeida Theatre). 5. I quote from the Norton’s conflated text throughout this chapter, since this version most closely resembles the text used by KautHowson for her production. 6. Some reviewers criticized Brook for cutting the servants who help the blinded Gloucester in 3.6, and for cutting Edmund’s deathbed repentance and subsequent retraction of his orders to kill Lear and Cordelia. 7. As Martin Esslin notes in his introduction to Kott’s book (1964), Eastern Europe—and “Poland in particular”—is “the vantage point from which Shakespeare can be seen and reinterpreted with the highest degree of relevance, of fresh, revitalized significance.” This is because “Poland could well be regarded as a focal point of the midtwentieth century. Poland has been through the whole gamut of that experience” (xiii), having suffered under both Nazi and Bolshevik occupation and since it was the site of the Nazis’ concentration camps. Because Kaut-Howson, like Kott, comes from this background, she was perhaps particularly well-equipped to understand and illuminate Shakespeare’s play. 8. I use three main sources to analyze this production: notes from my viewing of the February 22 performance in Leicester, the London promptbook, and a video recording of the August 2 matinee performance in London. Unless otherwise noted, I use evidence from the London run. 9. In addition to drawing on her mother’s death to create this frame, Kaut-Howson may have been inspired by Tadashi Suzuki’s adaptation The Tale of Lear. The play featured a similar framing device in which the Fool, dressed as a nurse, read to the aged (male) Lear in a hospital. “ ‘It is his memories and his fantasies which provide a framework within which Shakespeare’s King Lear is performed.’ . . . Suzuki regards the world as a mental hospital where we all, men and women, are patients, and where we have neither doctors or nurses nor hopes for recovery” (Takakuwa 2000, 37). 10. As far as I can tell, only one critic regretted the loss of the frame story in London, and for a telling reason. Nicholas de Jongh, writing in the Evening Standard ( July 3, 1997), described the change as “misguided . . . since a woman can make a believable King Lear only if it’s her fantasy projection of being a male monarch.”

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11. There is ample evidence that Holm’s Lear has joined the ranks of legendary performances. Eyre filmed his production for the BBC in 1998, and it was subsequently televised for Masterpiece Theatre in the United States. Further, a number of books on King Lear in performance include a chapter or section on Holm: Leggatt’s second edition of his Shakespeare in Performance volume, Grace Ioppolo’s sourcebook, and Jay L. Halio’s King Lear: A Guide to the Play. 12. Terence Hawkes (1992) notes, “It is not without significance that Goneril’s husband is called Albany (the old name for Scotland) and that Regan’s husband is called Cornwall (the old name for Wales and the west of England) . . . leaving Cordelia’s ‘third’ . . . appropriately signaled as England” (125). 13. Hopkins (2005) writes, “According to mediaeval and Renaissance authors, the historical King Leir was the founder of the city of Leicester, whose name, indeed, means Leir’s Castle” (116).

4 Gender in Exile: Vanessa Redgrave’s Prospero in The Tempest (2000) 1. I use a number of sources to analyze this production: three live performances (which I attended on June 2, June 8, and June 10, 2000), two video recordings (May 18 and July 7, 2000), and the production promptbook. 2. Christine Dymkowski (2000) notes that although The Tempest was staged at the indoor Blackfriars theater, the play “would also have played at the Globe: there was no distinction in the repertoires of the two theatres nor any need for one, since the indoor theatre did not offer any facilities unavailable at the amphitheatre” (5). 3. Nigel Reynolds wrote in the Daily Telegraph ( January 19, 2000) that the Globe reported an £800,000 profit based on ticket sales of £2.4 million, despite the fact that the theater charges only £5 for groundling tickets and can only perform from May to September. 4. Jaq Bessell, interview with the author, London, March 14, 2001. All quotations attributed to Bessell in this chapter are drawn from this interview, unless otherwise noted. 5. Kiernan (1999) observes that the early seasons at the Globe revealed that these corners “were powerful positions to play, and ‘hot’ spots for interacting with the playgoers,” even when the character is just listening or watching, as Alexander often was (63). 6. Hartley is, however, talking about a 2003 production of The Tempest at the Georgia Shakespeare Festival in which Prospero was “regendered” female. Jan Akers played the character as “Prospera,” which created significant differences from Redgrave’s performance as a male Prospero. This production belongs to a recent tradition of

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Notes playing Prospero as a woman, which includes Valerie Braddell’s 1991 performance for the Oxford Stage Company and Demetra Pittman’s 2001 performance for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. 7. Gielgud performed the role onstage four times, at the Old Vic in 1930 (dir. Harcourt Williams), at the Old Vic in 1940 (dir. George Devine), at Stratford in 1957 (dir. Peter Brook), and at the National in 1974 (dir. Peter Hall). He played the role a final time in Peter Greenaway’s 1991 film Prospero’s Books, in which the magus, engaged in writing the play’s narrative, speaks nearly all of the lines.

5 Staging and Subverting Nostalgia: Dawn French’s Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2001) 1. This description was used in a news item on the online London Theatre Guide; the headline read “Dawn French to play Bottom in feminist Dream.” 2. The sources for this production are fewer than those used in previous chapters; there is no extant promptbook or video recording. I use my notes on the March 17, 2001, performance to analyze the production. 3. Francis’s Theseus and Hippolyta fulfilled Tom Clayton’s vision (1999) of them: “Theseus has a good deal of the country squire about him, and Hippolyta herself is on the horsy side, the two of them dogfanciers together. . . . [They are] Anglo-Athenian-mythical country gentry” (65). 4. Much of the current scholarship on nostalgia characterizes it in a negative light: Susan Bennett (1996) argues that nostalgia is “conservative . . . promot[ing] a false and likely dangerous sense of ‘we’ . . . [displacing] individual pasts . . . into a collective nostalgia which is often highly and powerfully regulatory” (5). Lowenthal’s essay puts a more positive spin on the subject, arguing that nostalgia acts as a kind of necessary safety valve for dealing with the postmodern world. 5. Hewison’s chapter details the National Trust’s efforts to preserve England’s country houses, and analyzes the romanticization of the country house in such television series as Brideshead Revisited. The identification of the country house with a romantic, traditional England can be seen in John Harris’s description for the glossy book British Greats (2000): “The Great House broods over its parkland. . . . The Plantagenet lions of England glint yellow in the ducal flag that tops all. . . . The house is framed in gardens that have been fashioned by generations of gardeners. . . . These are all evidences of continuity of possession” (58).

Notes

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6. Peter Holland (1994), in his introduction to the Oxford edition, takes exception to Kott’s reading, arguing that in Shakespeare’s play “sexuality is diminished rather than intensified” (73). Harold Bloom (1998) agrees, rejecting what he calls “the prevailing notion that sexual violence and bestiality are at the center of this humane and wise drama. . . . Shakespeare, here and elsewhere, is bawdy but not prurient” (148). 7. I say “himself” because although Francis uses “we” and “you,” he also refers to “a man’s life” and uses the masculine pronoun repeatedly. He therefore undercuts his own claims about the play’s universality (not to mention the purportedly “feminist” nature of the production). 8. As Gary Jay Williams (1997) argues, many Victorian productions of the play were explicitly nationalistic, seeking to consolidate British national identity through an invocation of the glories of empire: “[The play] became a medium for the representation of British national identity throughout the nineteenth century” (77). 9. French and Saunders were initially the only women in the group, which included fellow up-and-comers Adrian Edmondson and Rik Mayall. The group wrote and starred in a number of films for Channel Four, including Five Go Mad in Dorset, Five Go Mad on Mescalin (both spoofs of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five children’s books), Slags, Summer School, Wedding, and Strike (which won the Golden Globe Award in Montreux, 1988). 10. Examples are drawn from two video compilations: French and Saunders: The Ingénue Years (BBC Video, 1990) and French and Saunders: Living in a Material World (BBC Video, 1996). 11. Examples are drawn from The Vicar of Dibley, Volume One: The New Girl in Town! (BBC Video, 1994). Anne Hole (2003) takes a different view of the series, arguing that “despite the apparent conservatism of The Vicar of Dibley, ostensibly a very gentle comedy, the representation of the vicar as a fat woman is a direct result of the work of French and Saunders” (326).

6 Vice-Versa: All-Female Shakespeare at the Globe Theatre (2003–04) 1. These lines were printed in the programs for all the productions in 2003. 2. This passage has been oft-quoted in Globe promotional materials. It is no accident that the first fully staged production at the Globe during its opening season in 1997 was Henry V. 3. To analyze these three productions, I use a combination of live performances, video recordings, promptbooks, and interview materials from the Globe’s website.

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Notes

4. In an interview on the GlobeLink website, Sarah Woodward (2004), who played Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, reveals, “There’s no makeup, no greasepaint. We aren’t even allowed a bit of mascara. I think that’ll be quite freeing.” 5. John F. Cox’s work on the play’s production history indicates that it is conventional to delay the kiss between Beatrice and Benedick. Although some couples have kissed in 4.1, as in Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 film version, others have waited until the very last scene, as in this production. 6. Along with the performance I attended on June 20, 2004, I watched four recorded versions of this moment in the Globe archive. There was applause at all of the performances except for the June 1 matinee; instead, there were some shocked gasps at first, followed by a few approving cheers. This indicates that not all audiences responded exactly the same, and that some, at least, were conscious of the fact that they were watching two women. 7. The scene in 4.4 includes one of Richard’s more sexually repugnant moments: he attempts to seduce Queen Elizabeth into wooing her daughter for him. Elizabeth resists, reminding him, “thou didst kill my children,” to which Richard replies, “But in your daughter’s womb I bury them, / Where in that nest of spicery, they will breed / Selves of themselves, to your recomfiture” (4.4.353–356). Hunter kissed Vazquez after saying, “Bear her my true love’s kiss” (361). 8. Sher leaned forward on two crutches and had a large hump on his back, conveying the impression of Richard as a “bottled spider” (1.3.240). 9. Elizabeth Schafer (2002) cites the productions by Charles Marowitz (1973) and Michael Bogdanov (1978) for emphasizing the “sheer brutality” of Petruchio’s taming (47). Often in such productions, Petruchio is physically very violent to both Kate and his servants, both on- and offstage. 10. This production is a rarity in using an actor in the role of Troilus. The dog has made an occasional appearance throughout the play’s performance history, but usually remains offstage. Schafer (2002) notes that past productions have used a real spaniel and a glovepuppet in the role (177).

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INDEX

Aaron, Melissa, 163 Abbitt, Erica Stevens, 11 Absolutely Fabulous (TV series), 127 Acton, David, 69 Adelman, Janet, 73 Akers, Jan, 181–82n6 Alberge, Dalya, 104 Albery Theatre, 3, 115–18, 122–23 Alexander, Geraldine, 88, 94–96, 102–3 Alexander, Helen, 81 alienation, 10, 39, 42–43, 46 Allam, Roger, 164 Alleyn, Edward, 143 Allfree, Claire, 150 Anderson, Benedict, 20 androgyny, 11–13 corporeal form of, and sexy vs. not sexy, 11–12 Hunter’s Lear and, 70–71, 82 Redgrave’s Prospero and, 88–89, 97–99, 104, 107 Shaw’s Richard II and, 34, 37–39, 41–49 Anne, Lady (Richard III), 147, 154–56 Another Day of Life (Kapuscinski), 107 Antipodes, The (Brome), 91 anti-theatricalists, 24–26 Antony and Cleopatra (all-male Globe, 1999) Rylance’s Cleopatra and, 142, 149, 177n2 Appleyard, Bryan, 168 Ariel (The Tempest), 27, 29, 88–89, 93–96, 102–3, 106, 109

Armitstead, Claire, 31, 35–36, 51 Ashcroft, Peggy, 18 As You Like It (Sphinx Theatre Company, 2003), 28 audience, 6 all-female Globe performances and, 139, 145, 149, 184n6 authentic Shakespeare and, 15–16 construction of gender and, 9–11, 13 Dream and theater space and, 117–18, 125–26 expectation and iconicity and, 18–19 French’s Bottom and, 130–35, 137–38 Hunter’s Lear and, 58 Hunter’s Richard III and, 155 Much Ado and, 150, 152 Redgrave’s Prospero and, 88, 92–96 Shaw’s Richard II and, 33–34, 43 Austrian critics, 51–53 Bajic, Brana, 38 Balkans setting, 28, 89, 104–9 Barry, Sebastian, 180n4 Bartolovich, Crystal, 146 Barton, John, 44 Bassett, Kate, 122, 136, 161–62, 165 Bassett, Linda, 154 Bate, Jonathan, 23 Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing), 148–51, 184n5 Beaumont, Francis, 91 Beaumont, Penelope, 150 Bechtler, Hildegard, 36, 37 Beckett, Samuel, 61, 62, 178n4, 179n4

196

Index

Benedick (Much Ado About Nothing), 139, 148–52, 159, 164, 184n5 Bennett, Susan, 182n4 Benton, Howard, 91 Berberi, Besa, 107 Bernhardt, Sarah, 18, 51 Bessell, Jaq, 92, 93, 106–7, 181n4 Bevington, David, 124 Bhabha, Homi, 21–22 Billington, Michael, 51, 68, 108 binary oppositions, 11, 13, 25, 89 Blackwood, Tilly, 118 Blitz, 117–22 Bloom, Harold, 13–14, 177n4, 183n6 body/ies cross-dressed, 2–4 cross-gender, on center stage and layers of, 8–10 England as diseased, 25–26 French and Saunders and, 127–28 French’s Bottom and fat woman’s, 131 Hunter’s Lear and, 71–78, 82 Hunter’s Richard III and, 141 king’s natural, vs. body politic, 41–42 McTeer’s Petruchio and, 141 Redgrave’s Prospero and, 93 Shaw’s Richard II and two, vs. many, 38–39, 41–43, 50 Bogdanov, Michael, 6, 184n9 Bolingbroke (Richard II), 34–35, 40–49, 63, 117 Bottom, French’s, 10, 29, 115–17, 129–37 “rare vision” speech, 135 reviewer’s response to, 136–38 Titania and, 124–25, 132–36, 138 boy actresses, early modern, 10, 25, 147 Braddell, Valerie, 182n6 Bradley, A.C., 59, 61 Braveheart (film), 128 breasts, 39, 132, 159 Brecht, Bertolt, 10, 18, 178n4 Bremmer, Richard, 52, 178n3 Brideshead Revisted, 119, 182n5

Britain conflated with England, 54 defined, vs. England, 21 Lear’s map and, 84–85 Shakespeare and mimetic ideal in, 6 British national identity (Britishness). See also English national identity construction of, and exclusion of Irish and, 56 crisis in, 19–23, 30, 121, 146 Dream set in WW II and, 115, 120–21, 126, 183n8 Britton, Jasper, 88, 94–96, 165 Broadbent, Jonathan, 125 Brome, Richard, 91 Brook, Peter, 59, 61–62, 64, 116, 124, 132, 180n6, 182n7 Brooks, Harold F., 130 Brooks, Richard, 156 Brotherston, Lez, 115–16, 122–23, 125, 132, 137 Brown, Georgina, 51, 55, 90, 111 Brudenell, Jeremy, 69 Bulman, James C., 142 Burbage, Richard, 17 Burchill, Julie, 31 Burgess, Paul, 145 Burton, Richard, 17, 165 Bush, Louise, 155 Butler, Judith, 5, 7–8, 75 Butler, Robert, 122, 137 Buzacott, Martin, 6, 17 Cadell, Selina, 119 Caliban (The Tempest), 29, 88–89, 92–95, 104, 108–9 Campbell, Lucy, 149 Carmichael, Hayley, 65, 69, 77 Casares, Maria, 177n5 Castledine, Annie, 82 Cavaliere, Nick, 69 Chaste Maid in Cheapside, A (Middleton), 91 Chazen, Debbie, 118

Index chiasmic layers, 9 Churchill, Caryl, 180n4 citation. See also simultaneous citation Derrida on, 6–7 spectator interpretation of, 9 Clapp, Susannah, 110–11, 164 Clark, Pete, 116, 119–20 class, 120–21, 128–29 Clayton, Tom, 182n3 codpiece(s). See also women’s cross-gender Shakespeare all-female Globe performances and, 30, 145, 159, 161 impact of women wearing, 1–3, 30 colonial issues, 28, 53, 105–6 comedy, 116, 126, 130–31, 135–38, 150–52, 157, 160–62 Comic Strip group, 127 confusao, 107 Connolly, Billy, 100 Cordelia (King Lear), 65–67, 69–70, 78–79 Costigliolo, Luca, 143, 144 costumes all-female Globe and original practices, 140–41, 143–45, 147 Francis’s Dream and, 118–19, 123, 125 French’s Bottom and, 130, 132–33 Hunter’s Lear and, 63–64, 71–73, 75 McTeer’s Petruchio and, 159 Much Ado and, 144–45, 150–51 Redgrave’s Prospero and, 99–100, 106 Richard III and, 143, 145 Shaw and, 38–39 Shrew and, 143, 145, 159 Cottesloe Theatre, 35–37, 88, 91, 117 Coursen, H.R., 33, 111 Cousin, Geraldine, 39 Coveney, Michael, 55, 77, 82–83, 99, 111, 113, 135–36 Covington, Richard, 33, 49 Cowan, Amber, 115, 126 Cox, Brian, 17, 61 Cox, John F., 184n5

197

Crick, Bernard, 21 critical response, 15, 81–82 actresses dismissed by, 19–20 all-female Globe and, 139–42, 163–64 androgyny and, 11 Dream staging and, 115, 121–23, 137–36 English national identity and, 24–28 French’s Bottom and, 131, 135–38 Hunter’s Lear and, 28, 57, 59, 68, 77, 81–86 Hunter’s Richard III and, 156, 162–63 Much Ado and, 145–46, 149–50, 162–63 Redgrave’s Prospero and, 28, 89, 105–6, 110–14 ridicule and, 110, 163–64, 167–68 Shaw’s Richard II and, 28, 43–44, 49–56 Shrew and, 160–62 cross-gender, defined, 4 cross-gender casting. See also men’s cross-gender performance; women’s cross-gender Shakespeare audience asked to read, and complexity of, 9 Globe and original practices and, 142, 145 Globe space and performativity of gender, 153–54 Crowden, Graham, 38 Cushman, Charlotte, 27 Damon and Pythias (Edwards), 141 Davies, Oliver Ford, 17, 76 Davison, Belinda, 151 Day, Barry, 90 defamiliarization, 30, 39, 141 de Jongh, Nicholas, 38, 50, 60, 81, 105, 111, 121, 135, 162–63, 165–67, 180n10 de la Tour, Frances, 16–17, 28

198

Index

de Lauretis, Teresa, 179n6 denaturalization, 4, 10, 12–13, 75, 155, 159, 160 Derrida, Jacques, 5–7 Devils, The (Whiting), 179n2 Devine, George, 182n7 Diamond, Elin, 7, 10, 18 Dido Queen of Carthage (Marlowe), 91 Dimond, Penelope, 150, 157 disability, 154–55 Dobrzyski, Pawel, 63 Dobson, Michael, 23, 121, 137, 156 Dodd, Philip, 21 Dolan, Jill, 7 Donnellan, Declan, 6 Doran, Gregory, 165 Doré, Katharine, 117 Drakakis, John, 90–91 Dromgoole, Dominic, 91, 168 Drouin, Jennifer, 4 Dukakis, Olympia, 177n5 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 111 Duparc, Christiane, 52 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, 179n3 Duse, Eleonora, 18 dyke, 4, 33 Dymkowski, Christine, 111–12, 181n2 early modern British theater, 14–15, 24–25, 140, 146 Eastern European setting. See Balkans setting, Poland setting Edgar (Poor Tom, King Lear), 64–67, 69–70, 80 Edmondson, Adrian, 128, 183n9 Edwardes, Jane, 119, 134, 156, 162 Edward II (Marlowe), 141, 177n2 Edward IV, King of England, 148 Electra (Sophocles), 35 Eliot, T.S., 178n4 Elizabethan era, 22, 54–55 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 54–55 Ellis, Roger, 21 Emerson, Jean, 119

England anti-theatricalists and, 25–26 defined vs. Britain, 20–21 French’s Vicar of Dibley series and, 128 nostalgia for 16th century, 22 united with Scotland and Wales to form Britain, 84 women’s right to re-tell history of, 156 English national identity all-female Globe performances and, 140, 145–47, 163 anti-theatricalists and, 24–26 Britishness vs., 20 creation of ideal of, 21–23 crisis period in, 22–23, 30, 121 cross-dressing and dismantling of, 3 defined, 20–21 English country estate and, 117–19, 121, 182n5 Francis’s Dream and staging of, 28–29, 117–21, 126 French’s Bottom and, 137 Hunter’s Lear and, 59, 64, 66, 69–70, 84–86 mitigation of challenge to, in Dream, Richard III, Shrew and Much Ado, 28–30 problematized by women’s cross-gender performances, 5, 19–27, 167–68 Redgrave’s Prospero and, 89, 110–13 Shakespeare associated with, 23–24 Shaw’s Richard II and, 28, 34–35, 49–50, 53–56 eroticism, 25, 44–45, 124–26, 131–32, 135–36, 138, 162 Esslin, Martin, 180n7 Esty, Jed, 21–22 Euripides, 178–79n4 Evans, Edith, 18 Every(wo)man, 77, 117, 126, 131 exile, 88–89, 104–9 Eyre, Richard, 83, 165, 181n11

Index fairy kingdom forest setting, 117–19, 122–23, 125–26, 137 fat female body, 129, 131, 136–37 Fay, Stephen, 111 femininity, 5 as deviant Other, 12 French and Saunders and, 127–28 French’s Bottom and, 132, 134 Hunter’s Lear and, 67, 71–73 Hunter’s Richard III and, 155–56 McTeer’s Petruchio and, 141, 159 Redgrave’s Prospero and, 99 Shaw’s Richard II, 38–39, 44 feminism, 24, 32, 51, 57–58, 115–16, 127–29, 160–62, 183n7 feminist psychoanalytic criticism, 73, 75 Ferney, Frédéric, 52 Ferris, Lesley, 9 Finlay, Jonas, 69 Fleetwood, Kate, 108 Fletcher, John, 87, 91 Foakes, R.A., 77, 131 Foe, 179n3 Fool (King Lear), 27, 67–70, 79–80 Footfalls (Beckett), 178n4 Forker, Charles R., 141 Foss, Roger, 136, 137 fourth wall, 117 France, 23 Francis, Matthew, 28–29, 115–17, 119–20, 125–26, 129, 134–35, 137–38, 140, 163, 166–67, 182–83nn freakishness, 75–77, 83, 166 French, Dawn, 3, 10, 28–29, 49–50, 115–17, 124–25, 129–38, 182–83nn Evening Standard piece by, 129 persona of, 116, 126–29 French and Saunders (TV series), 116, 127–28 French critics, 51–53 Gale, Mariah, 144, 149, 150, 152 Gambon, Michael, 76, 139 Garber, Marjorie, 11–12

199

Garcia Lorca, Federico, 179n2 Gardner, Lyn, 60, 163 Garrick, David, 17, 23, 76 Gaulier, Phillippe, 179n3 Gaunt, John of, “This England” speech (Richard II), 38, 53–55, 84 Gay, Penny, 113 Gee, Francis, 58, 86 Gelpi, Barbara, 11 gender identity/ies all-female Globe and challenge to, 140, 142, 145, 163 all-female Globe and downplaying of, 147–53, 163 all-female Shrew and, 157–61 alteration of character’s to match performer’s, 138 construction of, in performance, 114 “cross” and movement across spectrum of, 4 cross-cast male performer and destabilizing of, 25 deconstruction of, and theater, 7 denaturalization of, 4, 10 drag performance and possibility of different, 8 Francis’s Dream and attempt to erase contradictions of, 116 French in Vicar of Dibley and, 128 French’s Bottom and, 131–38 Hunter’s Lear and, 57–59, 70–76, 81–82 Hunter’s Richard III and downplaying of, 29–30, 140–41, 153–54 ideology of, exposed by V-effekt, 10 iterability and, 5 layers of, 8–10 McTeer’s Petruchio and, 29–30, 140–41, 153–54, 162 normative, 5–6, 29–30, 153, 158–59 performativity of, and all-male productions, 142 performativity of, and cross-gender casting, 8, 93

200

Index

gender identity/ies—Continued performativity of, and French and Saunders and, 127–28 Redgrave’s Prospero and performance of, 96–104, 112–14 re-iteration and, 7 sex and, 12–13 Shaw’s Richard II and, 31–35, 38, 41–43, 46, 47, 50–51 as spectrum vs. static binary, 5, 13 traditional mimetic theater and norms of, 5–6 women’s cross-gender performances and threat to, 167 Gender Trouble (Butler), 8 German critics, 51 Gibson, Mel, 128 Gielgud, John, 17 Lear of, 76 Prospero of, 17, 110, 111–12, 182n7 Richard II of, 50 “This England” speech and, 54 Gilbreath, Alexandra, 165 Gillies, John, 84 Glaister, Dan, 57, 81 GlobeLink website, 143–44, 152–53, 184n4 Globe Theatre, 2, 89, 181n5. See also specific productions all-male company at, 139, 142, 177n2 English national identity and, 146–47 Prologue season of 1996, 141 Redgrave’s Prospero and performance space at, 3, 89–96 Globe Theatre (all-female Shakespeare and Women’s Company, 2003–4), 2–3, 28–29, 183–84nn. See also specific productions critical response and gender issues in, 161–68 downplaying gender in, 147–53 highlighting gender in, 153–61 Globe Trust, 90–91

Gloucester (King Lear), 64, 66, 69, 80–81 Goneril (King Lear), 69–70, 73–75, 78, 80 Goodman, Benny, 119 Good person of Sichuan, The (Brecht), 178n4 Gore-Langton, Robert, 136–37 Gosson, Stephen, 25–26 Gounaridou, Kiki, 22 Gray, Frances, 131 Greenaway, Peter, 182n7 Gross, John, 152 Grosz, Elizabeth, 75 Guinness, Alec, 17, 77 Gurr, Andrew, 44 Hadfield, Andrew, 54 Halberstam, Judith, 8, 12 Halio, Jay L., 124, 181n11 Hall, Edward, 167–68, 177n2 Hall, Lee, 180n4 Hall, Peter, 83, 182n7 Hamlet all-female, Sphinx Theatre Group, 28 Bernhardt’s, 18, 51 de la Tour’s, 16, 17, 28 Lear vs., 84–85 nostalgia and male actors and, 17 Siddons’s, 18, 27 Hampshire, Susan, 50 Hapgood, Robert, 97 Happy Days (Beckett), 179n4 Harris, Amanda, 153–55, 157 Harris, John, 182n5 Hartley, Andrew, 15–16, 98, 181n6 Harvey, Tamara, 148–52, 159, 162, 167 Hawkes, Terence, 15, 181n12 Hayden, Liza, 155 Hayes, Nick, 120 Haymarket Theatre (Leicester), 59–60, 68–69, 85 Healy, Anna, 147–48, 157 Hedda Gabler (Ibsen), 178n4

Index Heilbrun, Carolyn, 11 Helgerson, Richard, 22, 84 Hemming, Sarah, 161 Henderson, Diana E., 91 Henry, Lenny, 128 Henry IV (parts I and II), 53 Henry V, 53, 89, 144, 144, 177n2, 183n2 Henry VI (part III), 154 Henry VIII, 87 Hepple, Peter, 163 heterosexuality, 134–35, 138, 156 Hewison, Robert, 58, 77, 121, 182n5 Highley, Christopher, 54–55 Hirschhorn, Clive, 50 Hodgson, Michael, 69 Hoggard, Liz, 161, 162 Holderness, Graham, 22 Hole, Anne, 127, 131, 183n11 Holland, Peter, 34, 37, 130, 183n6 Holm, Ian, 76, 83, 165, 181n11 homoerotic meanings, 147–49 homosexual male, 4, 33–34, 43–49 Hopkins, Lisa, 84–85, 181n13 Hornby, Richard, 50 Howard, Alan, 83 Howard, Tony, 27 Hunter, Kathryn, 177n5 background of, 60 Kate of, 157–58 Lear of, 3, 9, 18–19, 28–29, 39, 57–86, 70–71, 81–84, 87, 100, 102, 110, 136, 152, 154, 159–60, 165, 166, 179–81nn Richard III of, 49, 29–30, 139–41, 149, 153–57, 159, 162–67, 184n7 Ibsen, Henrik, 178n4 iconicity, 13, 17–19, 39, 83–84 Ingleby, Lee, 123, 125 Ioppolo, Grace, 181n11 Iraq War, second, 22 Irish and Ireland, 28, 31, 34–35, 49–50, 53–56 Irving, Henry, 17

201

Isaacs, Alan, 118 iterability, 5–7 Jackson, Tina, 115, 127 Jacobi, Derek, 17, 164 Jacobs, Sally, 124 James, D.G., 87 James I, King of England, 84 Japan, 85–86 Jarvet, Yuri, 77 Johnson, Samuel, 13 Jorgens, Jack, 61 Jubilee celebration of 1769, 23 Julius Caesar, 177n2, 179n4 Jung, Carl, 11 Kahn, Coppélia, 73, 75 Kantorowicz, Ernst H., 39, 41 Kapuscinski, Ryszard, 107 Katherine (Taming of the Shrew), 157–60 Kaut-Howson, Helena, 28, 29, 57–65, 70, 74–76, 83, 85–86, 115, 117, 137, 140, 147, 163, 165–67, 179nn, 180nn background of, 60, 62–63, 70 cutting of Lear by, 64–67, 68 erasure of gender issue in Lear and, 81–82 frame story for Lear and, 67–70 Kean, Charles, 123, 125 Kean, Edmund, 17–18, 50 Kearney, Gillian, 118 Keen, Will, 102, 118 Kellaway, Kate, 149–50 Kempson, Rachel, 88 Kennedy, Dennis, 6, 90 Kettle, Liz, 157 Kiernan, Pauline, 93, 144, 181n5 King, Robert L., 33, 37 King John, 84 King Lear, 17, 27, 177n3 Britain and kingdom of, 84 Brook’s, with Scofield, 18–19, 62, 180n6 Eyre’s, with Holm, 83, 165, 181n11

202

Index

King Lear—Continued Hall’s, with Howard, 83 Kozintsev film (1970), 77 nihilism vs. redemption in, 59, 61–62, 66–68 universal humanism and, 16 King Lear (Kaut-Howson/Hunter, 1997), 3, 9, 18–19, 28, 57–86, 110, 179–81nn critical response to, and gender and national identity and, 81–86 frame story and, 67–70 hunter and hunted theme, and setting of Poland, 59–67 king vs. man and performance of Lear, 76–81 Lear as mother and father and reading of gender in, 67–76, 86 production details, 170–71 King Lear: A Guide to the Play (Halio), 181n11 “King Lear or Endgame” (Kott), 61–62 kingship Lear and, 59, 76–81 Richard II and, 39–43 Kingston, Jeremy, 58, 77, 82 King’s Two Bodies, The (Kantorowicz), 41 Kirimi, Kananu, 88, 94–96 Koenig, Rhoda, 33, 161 Kott, Jan, 59, 61–62, 64, 116, 124, 180n7, 183n6 Kozintsev, Grigori, 59, 77 Kumar, Krishan, 19–21, 30 Kyle, Barry, 148–49, 163, 166 Lambarde, William, 55 Laughton, Charles, 17, 76 Lawrence, Josie Benedick of, 139–40, 150–52, 159, 164–65 Lecoq, Jacques, 179n3 legendary performances, and male actors, 17–19, 50, 82–83, 85, 87, 110–12, 163–65, 168

Leggatt, Alexander, 76, 83, 181n12 legitimacy, 15, 19, 26–27, 111, 162–64 Lennox, Annie, 12 lesbian encounter, 131, 133, 135–36, 148 Lipman, Maureen, 50–51 Lister, David, 104, 109–10 Lloyd, Phyllida, 2, 139, 157, 161–63, 165–66, 180n4 Looking for Richard (film), 14 Lowenthal, David, 121 Lyon, David, 42 Lyons, William, 144–45 Macbeth, 27 macho, 157–58 Mack, Maynard, 59, 61 Mackintosh, Iain, 36 MacNeill, Meredith, 147, 154, 160 Macready, William Charles, 76 Madonna, 128 Magni, Marcello, 68, 79 Maid’s Tragedy, The (Beaumont and Fletcher), 91 Making of English National Identity, The (Kumar), 21 male drag, 8, 12 male gaze, 131 male power and privileges, 2–3. See also masculinity Maley, Willy, 20, 21, 84 Marlowe, Christopher, 91 Marlowe, Sam, 112 Marmion, Patrick, 150, 164 Marowitz, Charles, 184n9 Marxists, 24 masculinity, 3, 5, 9, 12, 19 action genre, 128 all-female Globe and clothing and, 145 codpiece and power and, 1–2 dismantling of, 3 French and Saunders parody of, 127–28 French’s Bottom and, 132, 134–35, 138 Hunter’s Lear and, 67, 71–72

Index Hunter’s Richard III and, 141, 153–56 instability of, 12–13 McTeer’s Petruchio and, 30, 141, 157–59, 160–61 Redgrave’s Prospero and, 99–101 Shaw’s Richard II and, 35, 39, 42, 44 Shrew and satirization of, 157, 160–61 threat to, 29, 167 Maxwell, Glyn, 91 Mayall, Rik, 183n9 McBain, Robert, 108 McCormack, Colin, 69, 79 McGinity, Terry, 108 McIntosh, Alex, 125 McKellen, Ian, 139, 164 McTeer, Janet Petruchio of, 9, 29–30, 39, 49, 73, 75, 139, 140–41, 153–54, 156–62, 165 “mechanicals,” gender changed, 115, 118–19, 122, 129–30, 132 Medea (Euripides), 179n4 Medea (Ovid), 98 Mendelssohn, Felix, 123–24 men’s cross-gender performance of Shakespeare, 2 all-male companies and, 139, 141–42, 145, 168, 177n2 Dream, 167, 177n2 Richard II, 141, 177n2 Rylance’s Cleopatra, 142, 149, 177n2 as source of anxiety, and anti-theatricalists, 25–26 Twelfth Night, 142, 177n2 Merchant of Venice, The, 27 Middleton, Thomas, 91 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 10, 27 all-male, 167, 177n2 Brook’s RSC staging of 1970, 124 Kean staging of 1856, 123 Open Air Theatre stagings of, 123–24 Tree’s staging of 1900, 123 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Francis/ French, 2001), 3, 28–29, 115–38, 182–83nn

203

critical response and, 163, 166–67 dark vs. light in, and undercurrent of sexual violence, 124–25, 129–30 nostalgia and production design of, and Blitz/Victorian forest settings, 117–26 production details, 172 subverting nostalgia, and French’s Bottom and, 126–38 Millennium Man, Shakespeare as, 177n6 Miller, Carl, 34, 50, 131 mimetic theater tradition, 4–7, 36, 60–61, 88, 92–93, 116–18, 167 Miranda (The Tempest), 29, 88–89, 94–95, 101–2, 106 misogyny, 151–52, 157, 160–62, 184nn Moore, Stephen Campbell, 118 Morley, Sheridan, 146 Moss, Kate, 127 mother, 67–76, 97–99, 100, 113 Much Ado About Nothing (Harvey/ Lawrence, all-female Globe 2004), 3, 29, 139, 184nn critical response and, 162–65, 167 downplaying of gender in, 148–53 original practices and, 141, 144–45 production details, 174–75 Mullenix, Elizabeth Reitz, 178n8 Mulryne, Ronnie, 36, 37 Murder Most Horrid (TV series), 127 Murphy, Andrew, 53, 54 music Dream and, 118–19, 123 original practices and, 140–41, 143–45 Redgrave’s Prospero and, 106–7 Nathan, David, 112 Neeson, Liam, 128 Neill, Heather, 58, 70, 158 new British history movement, 20–21 Nightingale, Benedict, 32, 33, 50, 99, 113, 131, 139, 162–67 Nine Years’ War (1594–1603), 54

204

Index

Noakes, Lucy, 120 Northbrooke, John, 26 nostalgia, 182n4 defined, 121 Dream settings and, 116–26, 129, 167 Dream and subversion of, by French’s Bottom, 117, 126–38 Gielgud’s Prospero and, 112 Globe’s original practices and, 140, 146 Oakley-Brown, Liz, 21 Oddey, Alison, 85 Ogbomo, Ann, 145, 149–50, 152 Old Vic Theatre, 83 Olivier, Laurence, 17, 76 Lear of, 77 Richard III of, 164 O’Neill, Hugh, 54 Open Air Theatre, 123–24 Orgel, Stephen, 15, 97, 112 original practices, 113, 140–47, 167 Osborne, Nigel, 106 Oswald, Peter, 91 Othello, 27 Other, 21–22, 60 Out of the House Walked a Man, 179n3 Ovid, 98 Pacino, Al, 14 Paige, Deborah, 33 Parker, Mike, 162 Parks, Sam, 109 Pasco, Richard, 44 Paul, Elizabeth, 145 performance tradition, 5 Francis’s Dream and, 118, 123–24 French’s Bottom and, 130–32 Hunter’s Lear and, 59, 62, 67, 76–78 Shaw’s Richard II and, 43–44, 50 Pericles, 180n4 Peter, John, 100, 110, 135, 136, 166–67 Petruchio (Taming of the Shrew) Britton’s, 165

McTeer’s, 9, 139, 141, 157–61, 165 violence of, 184n9 phallus, 3, 39, 124, 131–34, 136, 159 Pickavance, Robert, 69 Piggford, George, 12 Pittman, Demetra, 182n6 Poland setting, 28, 59–67, 85, 180n7 postcolonial theory, 21–22 Potter, Lois, 97, 105 Power Book, The (Winterson), 179n4 Prescott, Paul, 146–47 Pritchard, Glyn, 69 Propeller Theatre Company, 2, 168, 177n2 props, 42–43, 60, 78, 92–93, 140–41, 143–45 proscenium-arch theater, 117–18, 123 Prospero (The Tempest) conflicted nature of, 3, 17, 87–88, 94, 96–105, 113–14 father and mother in, 97–98 Gielgud’s, 111–12 Redgrave’s, 3, 17–18, 29, 73, 75, 87–114, 136, 141, 152, 166, 167, 181–82nn Prospero’s Books (film), 182n7 prosthetic construction of gender, 10–11 Prynne, William, 25–26 psychoanalytic criticism, 73, 75, 97–98 Puck (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), 27, 29, 123, 125, 129 Pyramus and Thisbe, 119, 129–30 queer perspectives all-male Globe productions and, 142 French’s Bottom and Titania and, 49, 117, 126, 131–36, 138 Hunter’s Richard III and, 49 McTeer’s Petruchio and, 49 Richard II and Bolingbroke and, 34, 43–49 term defined, 179n6

Index Redgrave, Corin, 88 Redgrave, Jemma, 88, 118, 122–23, 131, 133–36, 138 Redgrave, Lynn, 88 Redgrave, Michael, 88 Prospero of, 88, 112 Redgrave, Vanessa all-female Damon and Pythias and, 141 Prospero of, 3, 17–18, 29, 73, 75, 87–114, 136, 141, 152, 166–67, 181–82nn Reid, Beryl, 50 Reidy, Gabrielle, 69 Reinelt, Janelle, 179n3 re-iteration, defined, 7 Restoration theater, 27 Reynolds, Nigel, 181n3 Rhind-Tutt, Julian, 37 Richard II, 84 all-male, at Globe, 2003, 141, 177n2 Barton’s, with Richardson and Pasco, 44 English national identity and, 53–54 Essex’s command performance of, 1601, 55 Ireland and Elizabethan history and, 54–56 Kantorowicz’s “King’s two bodies” and, 39, 41, 50 Richard II (Warner/Shaw 1995), 3, 6, 28, 31–56, 110, 136, 178–79nn critical response to, with Irish woman playing English king and national identity, 49–56 cross-gender claims of universal humanism and, 16 king vs. man, vs. many bodies of king, 37–43 production details, 169–70 queering of Richard/Bolingbroke relationship and, 29, 34, 43–49 reviews of Shaw’s, 166 theatrical space re-configured by, 35–37 TV film of, 3, 33–34, 41, 48–49, 178n3

205

Richard III (Kyle/Hunter, all-female Globe 2003), 3, 27, 29, 139 critics and, 162–64, 166 downplaying of gender in, 147–49, 153 highlighting gender in, 153–54, 156 Hunter’s performance in, 29–30, 49, 141 original practices, 141, 143, 144, 145 production details, 172–73, 184nn Richard III Society, 156 Richardson, Ian, 44 Richardson, Joely, 88 Richardson, Natasha, 88 Richmond, Hugh, 76, 148 Riding, Alan, 52–53 Roberts, Peter, 50, 112 Roberts, Simon, 69 Rodger, Struan, 42 Rogers, Laura, 147, 157 Romeo and Juliet, 27 Rosenberg, Marvin, 57, 77 Rose Tattoo, The (Williams), 179n2 Royal Shakespeare Company, 35, 44 Brook’s Dream, 124 Brook’s Lear, with Scofield, 62 Doran’s Shrew, 165 Gambon’s Lear, 76 Michael Redgrave’s Prospero, 88 Sher’s Richard III, 154 Russell, Anne, 28 Rutter, Carol, 33, 47 Rylance, Mark, 91, 93, 100, 104, 139, 142, 149, 168, 177n2 Sanders, Rachel, 144, 145, 157, 158 Saunders, Jennifer, 127–28, 183n9 Scanlan, Joanna, 118 Schafer, Elizabeth, 57, 62, 184nn Scofield, Paul, 17–18 Lear of, 18, 62, 76 Scotland, 22, 53, 84 Seaward, Kate, 69 Senelick, Laurence, 13

206

Index

Sewell, Elizabeth, 108 sexism, 141, 161–62 sexlessness, 4 sexuality all-female at Globe and, 142, 145 French’s Bottom and, 116–17, 133–36 gender and, 12–13 Kott’s interpretation of Dream, 124–25 Much Ado and, 148–49 Richard III and, 147–48 Shakespeare, William. See also specific plays and roles all-female productions and, 30, 163 American all-female casting of, 178n8 critics and policing of boundaries of “legitimate”, 26–27 deconstruction of, in Europe, 6 defamiliarized by all-female casts disrupted by McTeer’s Petruchio and Hunter’s Richard III, 29–30 English national identity and, 19–27, 53–54, 118, 146–47 English performance of, and two Stratfords, 6 Francis’s Dream and faithfulness to, 118, 137 great male actors associated with, 18 ideological position of, in Britain, 5 impact of women’s cross-gender performance of, 3, 7 language of, and Redgrave’s Prospero, 110–12 language of, and Shaw’s Richard II, 50 “man of the Millennium”, 23 new Globe, and essence of, 90 omniscient inventor of human subject, 5 Prospero associated with, 87, 114 status of, 15, 23–24, 168 traditional mimetic theater and, 5–6 universality of, 13–16

Shakespearean authenticity, 15–17, 112–13, 142, 145–46, 162–65, 167 Shakespearean authority, 3, 13–19, 29, 35, 59, 89–90, 110, 112–13, 122, 137, 140–41, 168, 177n4 “Shakespearean nation-scapes”, 84 Shakespeare Our Contemporary (Kott), 124 Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (Bloom), 13–14, 177n4 Shand, G.B., 160–62 Shaw, Fiona background of, 35–36 Richard II of, 3–4, 27–29, 31–58, 60, 73, 75, 81–82, 85, 87, 100, 110, 117, 136, 152, 159, 166, 178–79nn Shepherd, Jack, 91 Sher, Antony, 17–18, 154, 164, 184n8 Richard III of, 164, 184n8 Shewring, Margaret, 36, 37 Shore, Jane (Richard III), 147–48 Shuttleworth, Ian, 110 Shylock (The Merchant of Venice), 27 Siberry, Michael, 118, 123 Siddons, Sarah, 17, 27 “Signature Event Context” (Derrida), 5 Silverstone, Catherine, 4, 34, 42, 142, 146, 149, 179n7 simultaneous citation, 10, 47 French’s Bottom and, 10, 132 Hunter’s Lear and, 67, 80 Hunter’s Richard III and, 155 McTeer’s Petruchio and, 159–60 Redgrave’s Prospero and, 99 Shaw’s Richard II and, 47 Sinden, Donald, 164 Skriker, The (Churchill), 180n4 Skura, Meredith, 105 Smallwood, Robert, 83–84 Smith, Maggie, 50 Soames, Nicolas, 18 Solomon, Alisa, 12 Sophocles, 35 Southwark Borough Council, 90–91 Spence, Martin, 33

Index Spencer, Charles, 50, 68, 81, 90, 100, 136–37, 161, 163–64, 166–67 Sphinx Theatre Company, 28 Spiering, M., 20, 22, 121 Spies, Hansjörg, 52 Spoonface Steinberg (Hall), 180n4 Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe (Kiernan), 144 Stallybrass, Peter, 10, 11 Stephens, Robert, 17, 82–83 Stone, Phil, 156 Stratford-upon-Avon, 23 Sundelson, David, 98 Suzuki, Tadashi, 180n9 Tale of Lear, The (Suzuki), 180n9 Taming of the Shrew all-male, 177n2 Doran’s of 2003, 165 Taming of the Shrew (Lloyd/McTeer, all-female Globe 2003), 2–3, 9, 29–30, 139 critical response and, 161–63, 165–67 downplaying of gender in, 147, 153 highlighting of gender in, 153–54, 156–61 original practices and, 141, 143–45, 145 production details, 173–74, 184nn Tate, Nicholas, 22 Taylor, Paul, 60, 75, 82, 122, 163, 165–66, 167 Teeman, Tim, 35 Tempest (Udovicki/Redgrave, 2000), 3, 17–18, 27–28, 87–114, 141, 181–82nn critical response to, and Redgrave’s underplaying of, 109–14 dialectic of sentimental vs. cynical reading of Prospero, and performance of gender, 96–104 exile and community, in Balkan setting of, 104–9 Globe Theatre as performance space and, 89–96 production details, 171–72

207

Temple, Andrew, 27, 31, 50, 51 Terry, Ellen, 18 theater drag performance in, vs. everyday life, 8 as laboratory, 4–7, 24–26, 37 as transgressive, 24–27 Theater of the Absurd, 61–62 Theatre de Complicité, 60, 179n3 This Wooden “O” (Day), 90 Thorncroft, Antony, 121, 122, 136 Thorndike, Sybil, 18 Threlfall, David, 42–46, 49, 52, 117, 178n3 Tiffany, Grace, 32–33, 43 Tinker, Jack, 31, 50 Tiramani, Jenny, 143 Titania (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), 116, 117, 123–24, 126, 131–36, 138 Tomlinson, Jemimah, 143, 144 Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm, 123, 124, 125 Troilus and Cressida, 124 Turner, Martin, 109, 134 Turpin, Adrian, 60, 63 Twelfth Night (Globe all-male, 2002), 142, 177n2 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The, 1–2, 30, 177n1 Two Noble Kinsmen, The, 87 Tyler, Christian, 32 Udovicki, Lenka, 28, 88–90, 99, 100, 105–7, 110, 115, 117, 137, 140–41, 147, 163, 167 universality, 13–15, 19, 24, 177n4 Francis’s Dream and, 126, 183n7 Hamlet and, 16 Hunter’s Lear and, 58–59, 81, 82 Kott on Lear and, 61–62 Redgrave’s Prospero and, 87 Ursulov, Bjanka, 106 Usher, Shaun, 82

208

Index

Vaughan, Alden, 87, 97 Vaughan, Virginia, 87, 97 Vazquez, Yolanda, 148–52, 157 Verfremdungseffekt (V-effekt), 10 Vicar of Dibley, The (TV series), 116, 127, 128–29, 183n11 Victorian fairy forest setting, 117–18, 122–25, 126, 183n8 violence, 150, 184nn Visit, The (Dürrenmatt), 179n3 voice, 9, 50, 71–73, 75, 84, 111, 159 Vorderman, Carol, 177–78n7 Waldhorn, Gary, 128 Wales, 53, 84 Walker, Ché, 91 Walker, Robert, 16 Wanamaker, Sam, 90–91, 146 Wardle, Irving, 44 Warner, Deborah, 6, 28–29, 31–37, 39, 43–44, 46, 49, 51–53, 55, 57, 60–61, 115, 117, 137, 140, 147, 163, 167, 178n3 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 178n4 Werner, Sarah, 13, 16–17 Western canon, 23–24, 35 Western Canon (Bloom), 13 Whistling Psyche (Barry), 180n4 Whiting, John, 179 Whitley, John, 34, 38, 58, 71, 83, 85 Wilkinson, Tom, 17 Williams, Gary Jan, 183n8 Williams, Harcourt, 182n7 Williams, Tennessee, 179n2 Williamson, Nicol, 17, 50 Wilson, Laura, 125 Wimsatt, W.K., 13 Winterson, Jeanette, 179n4 Winter’s Tale, The, 177n2, 179n3 Woddis, Carole, 31, 33, 111, 137, 154, 165 Wolfit, Donald, 17, 83 Wolsey, Cardinal (Henry VIII), 27

Women’s Company, at Globe, 139, 144, 156, 157 women’s cross-gender Shakespeare. See also specific actresses, plays, and roles affirmative action and, 139–40 agency within iterability and, 6–7 American, 178n9 body onstage, and layers of gender and, 8–10, 12 conventional, and femininity, 33 critical response to, 2, 4, 19, 26–27, 165–68 disruptions caused by, 4–5 English national identity and, 19–27 history of 18th and 19th century, 27–28 iconic male performances and, 17–19 ideological progression of, 1995–2004, 27–30 lack of common language for, and terms for, 3–4 lessons for, from Francis’s Dream, 137–38 meaning and riskiness of, 1–4 reading gender and, 8–13 Shakespearean authority and, 13–19 theater as laboratory and, 5–13 wane of, 168 Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS), 115, 118, 119 Wood, John, 17, 82 Woodward, Sarah, 144, 152, 184n4 World War II, 22, 63, 115–22, 126 Worthen, W.B., 7, 16, 90, 141–42 Yerma (Garcia Lorca), 179n2 Young, Hannah, 125 Young Vic Theatre, 3, 59–60, 68–69, 83, 88, 91, 117 Zarrilli, Phillip, 9, 43