"Redescribing aWorld:"Towards aTheory of ShakespeareanAdaptation in CanadaA lively look at four dramatic adaptations of Shakespeare .

by LINDA BURNETT

You're floundering in the waters of a flood; the Mona Lisaand a babe float by. Which one of these two treasures doyou save? I've saved the baby, and let the Mona drown -Or did the Author know that I'd be coming here, and leavea part for me to play?

-Ann-Marie MacDonald, Goodnight Desdemona(Good Morning Juliet)

In "Saving Desdemona and/or Ourselves,"Marianne Novy wonders why Ann-Marie MacDonald'sGoodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), which touredCanada, won a Governor General's Award, and wentinto multiple printings almost immediately, was so muchmore successful than Paula Vogel's Desdemona: A PlayAbout a Handkerchief, which closed after very short runsat two theatres in New York . At first, Novy attributes thedifference in their popularity to "a greater interest inShakespearean intertextuality in Canada," citing LindaHutcheon, who

has speculated that 'writers in places like Irelandand Canada, working as they do from both insideand outside a culturally different and dominantcontext,' are especially drawn to parody .

Later Novy decides that the "difference in tone"between MacDonald's and Vogel's plays is "moreresponsible" for this difference than "the national con-trast . Both plays are parodies, but MacDonald's is muchmore affectionate" (67-85) .

The tone of MacDonald's play is "much more affec-tionate" than that of Vogel's play. MacDonald clearlyadmires Shakespeare. In a CBC Radio interview in 1992,MacDonald declared that when she decided to master themeasure of her teacher, the iambic pentameter, she felt likeshe was "apprenticing [her]self to someone [she] couldreally trust" (Rogers) . In another interview MacDonaldsays that she likes to take "something people identify withor revere, like Shakespeare," and "turn this upside down."She insists, however, that she "would never lampoonsomething that [she] hated," but only something that "fas-

SUMMER 2002

Ann-Marie MacDonald, shown here as Constance Ledbelly with herFool's Cap in the Canadian Stage's 2001 revival of the play, directs ourattention in Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) to the waywomen's academic work has too often been slighted by the male-dom-inated academy.PHOTO BY MICHAEL COOPER

cinates" her, and that if she is "fascinated by it then itmeans there is a deep attraction to it" (Much 136) .

The same can be said about the tone of the otherCanadian dramatic re-visions of Shakespeare that I haveencountered : Margaret Clarke's Gertrude & Ophelia, KenGass's Claudius and Djanet Sears's Harlem Duet. Whilesuch "creative vandalism," to borrow JonathanDollimore's term (Bennett 1), cannot help but entail acts ofappropriation and subversion, in these plays it is alsorespectful, functioning both to pay tribute to and to sabo-tage Shakespeare . And this double voice marks its resem-blance to parody, which also asks searching questions ofeven as it pays homage to earlier works, or, as LindaHutcheon puts it, is characterized by a "combination ofrespectful homage and ironically thumbed nose" (Parody33) .

5

In fact, if parody is defined as "a form of 'metaliter-ary' criticism" which presents "an argument within theconfines of fictional reference" (Rose 19), then such adap-tation of Shakespeare could be understood as the post-modern manifestation of the parodic strategy. Such anunderstanding is supported by the comments of a numberof contemporary theorists who recognize, as DavidRoberts does, that the "affinity of parody and postmod-ernism lies in their common strategy of revision, a reread-ing of the authorised texts which turns all texts into pre-texts" (183) .

These Canadian adaptations certainly do useShakespeare's plays as "pretexts" for what Brian Vickersrefers to as "'applied politics,' an attempt to change notonly the academy . . . but society itself" (329) . In GoodnightDesdemona, for example, MacDonald directs our attentionto the way women's academic work too often has beenslighted by the male-dominated academy. For years,Constance has been writing articles for Professor ClaudeNight, her colleague, to publish under his own name, arti-cles that have enhanced Night's reputation greatly .Despite this, Night patronizes Constance with remarksabout her "interesting little mind" (24), and her peersrefuse to take her own scholarship seriously.

Harlem Duet Djanet Sears's imaginative prequel to Othello, exploresresponses to racism by a latter day Othello and his first wife, Billie,played here by Alison Sealy Smith (r) . Aman, comforting Billie, is playedhere by Dawn Roach .PHOTO BY CYLLA VON TIEDEMANN

6

In Claudius, Gass raises some questions about the"wonderful concept" (24) that is war . As Polonius explainsto Claudius, a king can invent "always a reason for war."To cover up the scandal created by his murder of the oldKing, all Claudius has to do is "wage a goddamn war" (22)for any reason but the real reason : "The English . . . fishingin [Denmark's] waters again" will do just fine . It does noteven matter if they "lose the war, as long as people are dis-tracted," and Claudius goes "down in history as the mostbeloved king this nation ever had" (50). Wars are notalways fought in the best interests of the people .

In Harlem Duet, Sears explores two extreme respons-es to the racism faced by Blacks in North American socie-ty - integration and separation - and finds each lacking .Othello chooses to "enter the Whiteness" (91) . "My cultureis Wordsworth, Shaw, Leave it to Beaver, Dirty Harry," hetells Billie, "what does Africa have to do with me" (73) . Inhis search for "white respect" (55), however, Othello loseshis own cultural identity. Billie's response is equallyflawed. She moves from intense pride in her culturethrough anger and suspicion to a full-blown racism thatnearly consumes her. During the course of their relation-ship, Othello and Billie shift from a middle ground ofshared cultural pride and sense of the wrongness of dis-crimination to a place where one repudiates Black culture,the other White culture .

And in Gertrude & Ophelia, the politics of staging isaired. Clarke's male Actor keeps pushing her femalePlaywright to include Hamlet on her stage . "No play canstand on its feet just on the strength of two women talk-ing," he advises her . "In the end you know you'll have tomake changes if you want this play to draw an audience . Ithink it will either have to be the shadow scenes or a realHamlet" (S10) . Later, the Actor suggests that thePlaywright's play will never get "onto a mainstage with-out a Prince Hamlet," but will "wear itself out on littlestages." Clarke's Playwright, who is well aware of "theways one gets on the mainstage," remains firm . She willnot have Hamlet in her play (S14) .

Unquestionably, then, these Canadian adaptations ofShakespeare offer social and political commentary.Moreover, if this was all they did or the bigger part of whatthey did, it would make sense to refer to such re-vision asthe "postmodern" manifestation of parody. But theseadaptations do something more, something best under-stood in terms of the differences between a deconstructivepostmodernism and constructive postcolonialism, themost significant of which is that postcolonialism - becauseof the way it views the subject and history - has a "distinctpolitical agenda," as Hutcheon argues, while postmod-ernism is "politically ambivalent ." Whereas postmod-ernism uses irony simply to tear down, postcolonialismuses it both to disassemble and to reassemble ("Circling"168) . It goes beyond the deconstruction of the texts thatmake up our cultural history to create new texts in whichthe old stories are re-imagined and reinterpreted from for-merly excluded perspectives .

Further, it is postcolonialism's constructive projectthat interests me. For although postcolonialism is criticalof the "homogenizing tendency" (Mishra and Hodge 282)

CTR 111

of imperial discourse and its master narratives, its ultimategoal is not to defeat and replace these narratives (of colo-nialism, nationalism, patriarchy, etc .) with its own masternarrative. Its goal is not to vanquish the stories that havebeen told, even those that have been told from the per-spective of the colonizer. Rather, it is to advance narrativesto stand beside (in addition to) earlier narratives . Itsattempt is not so much to offer "counter-narrative[s] to thelong tradition of European imperial narratives" (Hart andGoldie 155) - as it is to offer narratives that act to counter-balance those earlier univocal narratives .

Put differently, if reality is a never-to-be-completedpatchwork quilt of multiple perspectives, the postcolonialenterprise is to stitch to this quilt new patches, squares torepresent the perspectives that have been suppressed bytotalizing colonial practices . It is not to rip out and replaceold patches with new or to start the quilt from scratch, butto add to an ongoing work. Salman Rushdie uses a similaranalogy when he describes

the Humsa Nama, a Mughal miniature stylewherein seven to eight painters from differentparts of India worked on one picture . . . . Accordingto Rushdie, the form represents the very basis ofIndian art which is pluralistic . It has got to do withthe combining of many different ways of looking .And if you select one of those ways of looking youmake a false picture. (Kirpal xv)

What the postcolonial writer must deal with, there-fore, is the "false picture" of the colonizer, who possessedthe power to distort reality by allowing only one way oflooking .

By now it must be clear that I agree with both ofNovy's observations . I do think that Canadian writers "areespecially drawn to parody." I also think that all theCanadian adaptations of Shakespeare I have experiencedare "more affectionate" parodies than Vogel's . And boththeir affinity for parody and the affectionate tone of theiradaptations makes sense when it is acknowledged that as"writers of the postcolonial condition," these Canadianplaywrights "are not so much removers as introducers ofthings not there before" (White 4) . Their goal is not to paintover what Shakespeare contributed to the cultural canvas.It is, to borrow a phrase Rushdie borrows from SaulBellow's The Dean's December, to "open the universe a littlemore" by adding to the canvas those six or seven "differ-ent ways of looking" (Kirpal xv) that were excluded by theimperial power - and, in so doing, bring about a change inthe nature of reality .

The affectionate tone of their adaptations makes evenmore sense given that Shakespeare, in his plays, lays thefoundation for their constructive postcolonial project of re-presenting the past . Sears points out, in "Notes of aColoured Girl," her introduction to Harlem Duet, thatShakespeare's "Othello is the first African portrayed in theannals of western dramatic literature" (14) . As for women,Shakespeare may well do only a sketchy job when it comesto the "ways of looking" of Gertrude and Ophelia .However, when these women "do appear on stage, they'refascinating women," who are so "truly" written(Gabereau) that in Gertrude & Ophelia Clarke "does not

SUMMER 2002

change [Shakespeare's] plot, but honours his honestyabout the typical fates of women in his world" (Clarke) .

Clarke's suggestion that in Hamlet we do hear thevoice of the marginalized second sex, however softly, andSears' observation that in Othello the Other appears for thefirst time on the Western stage suggest that they are drawnto Shakespeare's plays because it is possible to uncover inthem a tacit questioning of authority, or what StephenSlemon and Helen Tiffin refer to as "resistance . . . alreadypresent within the domain of power" (xv) . StephenGreenblatt makes a similar suggestion with respect to TheTempest . Greenblatt does not believe that the "salvage anddeformed slave" Caliban triumphs with his claim "thisisland's mine, by Sycorax my mother ." For this to happen,writes Greenblatt, "it would take different artists from dif-ferent cultures . . . to rewrite Shakespeare's play." What issignificant about The Tempest, though, is that

even within the powerful constraints ofShakespeare's Jacobean culture, the artist's imagi-native mobility enables him to . . . record a voice,the voice of the displaced and oppressed, that isheard scarcely anywhere else in his own time .(Greenblatt 231-32)

In short, Shakespeare does inscribe, albeit faintly, onthe cultural canvas those perspectives generally excludedby his society.

In their adaptations of Shakespeare, Canadian play-wrights pay close attention to the marginalized charactersin Shakespeare's plays . Once this is done, it is impossiblenot to notice that even though Shakespeare has left muchout, many of these characters do have a voice, albeit amuted one, which can be amplified. In Gertrude & Ophelia,for instance, Clarke intensifies Ophelia's voice so that wecannot fail to miss her critique of both Hamlet's tragedyand tragedy generally. These playwrights also introducenew viewpoints, and sometimes, as in the case of Sears inHarlem Duet, add a perspective that Shakespeare hasmissed entirely, such as that of the black woman in Othello;at other times, they retell Shakespeare's story from anoth-er point of view. Clarke, for example, tells us that shewanted to explore Hamlet's story from "a woman's pointof view." She wanted to know "what it's like to be themother of that kind of son," and "what it must have beenlike to be the girlfriend of such a man" (Gabereau) .

In addition to perspectives not found in Shakespeare,these playwrights introduce "different ways of looking" atShakespeare . Their quarrel, their plays suggest, is less withShakespeare, whom they enlist in the service of their coun-terbalancing project, than with traditional interpretation,which has limited what Shakespeare can mean by granti-ng only the patriarchal point of view. "We, men, womenand Ph.D.s have always read," to quote Carolyn Heilbrun,Shakespeare "as men" (Robinson and Vogel 286) . It is alsowith tragedy itself, which since the founding of the polis inancient Greece has been employed in the service ofEuropean patriarchy to promote the values of an aristo-cratic, white and masculine elite .

One of the different ways of looking that theseCanadian playwrights introduce to the picture is the per-

7

spective of the feminist or postcolonial critic who readsShakespeare in opposition to traditional criticism and/orfrom the viewpoint of Shakespeare's women or marginal-ized characters. In Harlem Duet, for instance, Sears sug-gests that Othello desires Desdemona, not because heloves her, but because he views her as his way of gaining"access to the White man's world" (55) and the power thatpatriarchal world bestows on men . And MacDonald, inGoodnight Desdemona, emphasizes sides of Desdemonaand Juliet that have often been ignored by critics to showthat these women are not "real wimps who just getsnuffed out" (Rogers), but forceful women . "Academe"may believe that the "gentle Desdemona" (I .ii.25) is "adoomed and helpless victim," but Constance finds her tobe "magnificent!" (41, 42) .

Both Clarke in Gertrude & Ophelia and Gass inClaudius suggest that it is not lust that motivates Gertrude .Clarke challenges those critics who, in the words ofClarke's Playwright, identifying "like crazy with Hamletand his pals" (1 .1), explain Gertrude's marriage toClaudius by portraying Gertrude as a lecherous monsterwho deserves our contempt . Instead of giving us Gertrudethrough the eyes of Hamlet, Clarke lets Gertrude speak forherself. The result is an intelligent and pragmatic woman,one who marries Claudius in haste because she knows"what a Queen does to survive" (2 .7) in a society wherewomen's choices are limited. For his part, Gass suggeststhat the reason Gertrude could marry Claudius so soonafter old King Hamlet's death, is that these two brothersare so much alike . In the words of Gass's Gertrude, theyare "oranges and pears" (96) . In those of Rene Girard, whoproposes a similar interpretation, they are "brothers inmurder and revenge," and Gertrude "moves in a worldwhere prestige and power count more than passion" (274,276) .

Another of the "different ways of looking" that theseplaywrights introduce to the picture is the perspective ofthe critic who is mindful of the subtexts in Shakespeare'splays that raise questions about patriarchy and its spokes-genre, tragedy. Directing their anger, as Carol ThomasNeely remarks of feminist critics generally, "against themale culture which has misread [Shakespeare] . . . onbehalf of its own values" (243-44), these Canadian play-wrights defend the bard in their adaptations with the sug-gestion that just because tragic theory, from Aristotle on(together with those who have told us how to readShakespeare), reflects the political attitudes of the patriar-chal powers that be, it does not follow that Shakespearedoes. If on one level Shakespeare's tragic drama reflectsthe ideology of patriarchy, at another, this same dramaoffers an argument against tragedy and what tragedyspeaks for in Shakespeare's culture .

In his discussion of the way that Shakespeare under-mines revenge tragedy in Hamlet, Rene Girard contendsthat Shakespeare transforms the silence "at the heart ofHamlet" into a subtext, which allows him to provide "thecrowd with the spectacle they demand while simultane-ously writing between the lines, for all those who can read,a devastating critique of that same spectacle" (283, 287) .MacDonald makes use of similar subtexts in Romeo and

8

Juliet and Othello to undermine tragedy. In GoodnightDesdemona, she foregrounds sides of Desdemona andJuliet that have often been ignored to show that eventhough they have been "really watered . . . down" (49) byShakespeare to suit a genre that cannot accommodateindependent women, these women are sisters of theattractive, strong, unconventional women ofShakespeare's comedies, who as Evelyn Gajowski has alsonoted, "interpenetrate the tragic genre and even destabi-lize it" (22) . MacDonald also foregrounds places inShakespeare's plays where Shakespeare appears to chal-lenge what her play's protagonist, Constance Ledbelly,refers to as the "tragic tunnel vision" (ref) of a genre whichequates romantic love and death, and a code of male hon-our and destruction .

Clarke, Gass, and Sears also make use of subtexts inShakespeare's plays . The goal of Clarke's Playwright inGertrude & Ophelia is to subvert patriarchy, the "eternalmale script" (2 .1) . To this end, Clarke sees her play as a col-laboration with Shakespeare, one in which, her "scenesbecame interchapters of his" in her attempt to amplifywhat is muted in Shakespeare, to write, "a reality thatShakespeare could only suggest by the absences in hisplay" (Burnett) . Picking up on Hamlet's contemplation ofthe "delicate and tender prince," Fortinbras, his "spiritwith ambition puffed," who risks his own life and the livesof "twenty thousand men" for what amounts to "aneggshell" (4 .4 .937-50), Claudius suggests that war usuallyhas nothing to do with honour and everything to do withpower politics and the male ego. And Harlem Duet, for itspart, points to places in Shakespeare's play intimating thatOthello, who according to the Duke is "far more fair thanblack" (1 .3 .289) has completely embraced the ideology ofpatriarchy, including its desire to control women's sexual-ity: "0 curse of marriage,/ That we can call these delicatecreatures ours/ And not their appetites" (3 .3.272-4) .Othello's vulnerability, her play asserts, is a direct result of

"As for the women . . :' Sears fleshes out the female cast. Shown here (I-r) are BarbaraBarnes Hopkins as Maji and Dawn Roach as Amah .PHOTO BY CYLLA VON TIEDEMANN

CTR 111

his determination not to "change the recipe," but to claima "piece" of the sexist and racist "pie" that is white patri-archy (Sears 73) .

In summary, in their adaptations, these Canadianplaywrights certainly do use Shakespeare's plays forapplied politics: to raise questions about the male-domi-nated academy, the politics of war, the racism faced byblacks in North American society, "the ways one gets onthe mainstage" (Clarke xx), and other social and politicalissues. But what is really significant about these play-

wrights' endeavour is their refusal to start a new picturefrom scratch . Instead of painting over Shakespeare's work,they touch it up some places and in others add their ownrepresentations to stand beside his. In so doing, they areengaged in the constructive postcolonial project thatRushdie calls "redescribing a world ." And by adding tothe cultural canvas those perspectives previously left outof the picture, they are, again in Rushdie's words, takingthe "necessary first step towards changing" a world (14),towards transforming the nature of reality. After all, "it is

not the literal past," as Brian Friel writes in Translations, or"the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the pastembodied in language" (445) . CTR

Works Cited

Bennett, Susan . Performing Nostalgia : Shifting Shakespeare and theContemporary Past. London: Routledge, 1996.

Clarke, Margaret. "Gertrude and Ophelia ." Theatrum (April/May1993) : S1-S15 .

-. Personal Interview. 4 May, 1998 .

Case, Sue-Ellen . Feminism and Theatre . New York: Methuen, 1988 .

Friel, Brian. "Introduction ." Translations. London: Faber, 1996 .377-451 .

Gabereau, Vicky. "Interview with Margaret Clarke ." Gabereau .CBC Radio, 5 February, 1992 .

Gajowski, Evelyn. The Art of Loving : Female Subjectivity and MaleDiscursive Traditions in Shakespeare's Tragedies . Newark: U ofDelaware P, 1992.

Gass, Ken. Claudius . Toronto : Playwrights Canada Press, 1995 .

Girard, Rene. "Hamlet's Dull Revenge : Vengeance in Hamlet ." ATheater of Envy : William Shakespeare . New York and Oxford :Oxford UP, 1991 . 271-289 .

Greenblatt, Stephen. "Culture ." Critical Terms for Literary Study.Ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin . Chicago: U ofChicago P, 1990. 225-232 .

Hart, Jonathan and Terry Goldie . "Post-Colonial Theory ."Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory : ApproachesScholars, Terms . Ed. Irena R . Makaryk. Toronto: U of Toronto P,1993.155-58.

Hutcheon, Linda . "Circling the Downspout of Empire ." Past theLast Post : Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism . Ed .Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin . Calgary : U of Calgary P, 1990 .167-189 .

-. A Theory of Parody : The Teachings of Twentieth-Century ArtForms. New York and London: Methuen, 1985 .

SUMMER 2002

Kirpal, Viney, ed . The New Indian Novel in English : A Study of the1980s . Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1990 .

Much, Rita . "Ann-Marie MacDonald: Interview." Fair Play, 12Women Speak: Conversations with Canadian Playwrights . JudithRudakoff and Rita Much. Toronto : Simon & Pierre, 1990 .127-143 .

MacDonald, Ann-Marie . Goodnight Desdemona (Good MorningJuliet) . Toronto : Coach House Press, 1990 .

Mishra, Vijay and Bob Hodge . "What is Post(-)colonialism?"Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory : A Reader . Ed .Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: ColumbiaUP, 1994. 276-290 .

Neely, Carol Thomas . "Epilogue : Remembering Shakespeare,Revising Ourselves ." Women's Re-Visions of Shakespeare: OnResponses of Dickinson, Woolf, Rich, H.D., Eliot, and Others . Ed .Marianne Novy. Urbana and Chicago : U of Illinois P, 1990 .242-52 .

Novy, Marianne . "Saving Desdemona and/or Ourselves: Playsby Ann-Marie MacDonald and Paula Vogel." TransformingShakespeare : Contemporary Women's Re-Visions in Literature andPerformance . Ed. Marianne Novy. NY: St . Martin's Press, 1999 .

Roberts, David . Comic Relations : Studies in the Comic, Satire andParody . Ed. Pavel Petr, David Roberts, Philip Thomson .Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1985 .

Robinson, Lillian S. and Lise Vogel. "Modernism and History."Images of Women in Fiction : Feminist Perspectives. Ed. SusanKoppelman Cornillon. Bowling Green, OH : Bowling GreenState UP, 1972. 278-307 .

Rogers, Sheila . "Interview with Ann-Marie MacDonald ." TheArts Tonight . CBC Radio, 24 February, 1992 .

Rose, Margaret. "Defining Parody." Southern Review XIII .1(1980) : 5-20 .

Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism .London: Granta Books, 1991 .

Sears, Djanet. Harlem Duet . Toronto: Scirocco Drama, 1997 .

Shakespeare, William . The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. StephenGreenblatt, et al . New York : W.W. Norton, 1997 .

Slemon, Stephen and Helen Tiffin, ed . After Europe: CriticalTheory and Post-Colonial Writing . Sydney: Dangaroo P, 1989 .

Vickers, Brian . Appropriating Shakespeare : Contemporary CriticalQuarrels . New Haven and London : Yale UP, 1993 .

White, Jonathan, ed . Recasting the World : Writing AfterColonialism . Baltimore : Johns Hopkins UP, 1992 .

Linda Burnett teaches Shakespeare at Tennessee StateUniversity, Nashville . She is working on a book entitledWomen's Lament and Shakespeare's Self-Subverting Tragedy .

9