Review of Periodicals 71.2

“Comrade Rutland”: Early Soviet Anti-Stratfordians

Mining Russian publications of the 1920s and 30s, including journals and newspapers, Natalia Khomenko provides a compelling account of the winding path Anti-Statfordianism took in the early Soviet Union, as it functioned to serve the state’s communist ideology. Led by a scholar named Shipulinskii, Russian scholars seized on the idea that “Shakespeare” was actually the Earl of Rutland, a participant in the Essex Rebellion of 1601. Shipulinskii promoted the notion that Rutland wrote subversive plays and concealed his identity for political reasons. His argument was popular because Soviets wanted to preserve and make political use of Shakespeare’s brilliant works, but despised Shakespeare of Stratford “for his middle-class interest in personal enrichment and social advancement.” A more congenial candidate for authorship, at least as Spulinskii presented him, was Rutland: a humanist aristocrat who, foreseeing the demise of his class, and even of the (nascent!) bourgeoisie that would replace it, embraced the decline of both, and, with Essex, rebelled against Elizabeth’s autocratic rule. Khomenko doesn’t bother to discuss the logical holes in this argument – presumably they are too obvious – but simply notes that Spulinskii’s temporarily popular view was a triumph of the “ethical imperative” (Make Shakespeare Safe for Communism) over “historical evidence.” Nonetheless, as she records, anti-Stratfordianism had morphed by the 1930s into a variety of Soviet responses to the actual Shakespeare, from those that frankly repudiated the “bourgeois” sentiments of the plays, to those which saw Hamlet as written by a lackey of the upper classes and documenting “the melancholy of aristocratic humanists witnessing their own decline,” to others which found in the protagonist of Hamlet (apparently the favored play) “a global insurgent who is bursting the bars of his imperialist prison.” Soviet Anti-Stratfordianism was finally dropped not because Soviet intellectuals grew more historically scrupulous, but because by the 1930s they, along with theater practitioners, had embraced social realism, a movement which was ideologically better supported by the argument that Anti-Stratfordianism itself was a Western phenomenon produced by embarrassment that a non-aristocrat could achieve artistic heights.

[“Comrade Rutland: Anti-Stratfordian Conversations in Early Soviet Russia,” Shakespeare Quarterly 72:1-2 (Summer, 2022): 104-25]

Romeo and Juliet in Gaza

Shakespeare adaptation’s all the rage (when wasn’t it?). Yousef Abu Amrieh discusses Palestinian-American novelist Susan Abulhawa’s use of the Romeo and Juliet story in her novel The Blue Between Sky and Water, which is set mostly in Gaza and features Palestinian characters. Abulhawa’s novel differs from many adaptations of Shakespeare’s play in that it applies the theme of thwarted love to several generations of a Palestinian family, who are riven not only by class and intra-ethnic conflict but by the large-scale hostilities of war between nations. While the plot of the novel varies significantly from Shakespeare’s plot, Amrieh shows that Abulhawa borrowed from it certain specific elements, including the counseling of a young woman by a bawdy older one, the use of drugs to alleviate difficulties, and even one character’s lapse into a comatose state (leaving some of the story to be told through that character’s dreams). Amrieh uses the word “rhizomatic” – meaning erupting independently, without reference to a hierarchical structure – to describe the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and adaptations like Abulhawa’s, which do not supersede or serve the meanings of, but participate in dialogue with, the original work. His discussion includes some interesting references to other instances of such “dialogue”: to conversations in Palestinian classrooms about how the play might be adapted, and to productions of Romeo and Juliet which have used the universality of this play to construct a bridge between Western ideas and Middle Eastern conflicts, such as that of the 2012 Royal Shakespeare Company season, wherein the Montagues and Capulets were presented, respectively, as Shia and Sunni families.

[“Susan Abulhawa’s Appropriation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet,” Critical Survey 9/1/22, 39-55]

Blackness and Whiteness in Titus Andronicus

Urvashi Chakravarty borrows a term from sociologists Fields and Fields, “racecraft,” to describe a “mental terrain and pervasive belief” that other peoples are inferior: in other words, racism. In general, her discussion of how this allegedly new concept applies to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’ Aaron the Moor is also not new, though it is interesting to read her comments on Aaron’s idea of substituting a white-looking child of partly black parentage for his own illicitly born but blacker biracial child, to save the Empress Tamora from the shame of having borne his son. This part of the play is less frequently discussed than Aaron’s proud defense of his child’s blackness, and of blackness’ superiority as a “hue” to pale, weak whiteness. So it’s good to be reminded that Aaron’s prideful announcement that black is beautiful culminates in his implicit acknowledgment that his son’s color is a social and political hindrance. Less helpful is Chakravarty’s argument that Aaron’s views and behavior proceed from his “enslaved” status, since Aaron is the only one in the play who uses the word “slave” to refer to himself or his own, and since he exhibits more freedom of movement than anyone else in the play, bar none. But Chakravarty provides a good review of the various tropes of negative “blackness” and positive “whiteness” in the tragedy, arguing that Titus does not so much as promote such views as demonstrate how they are constructed.

[“Fictions of Race: Racecraft, Reproduction, and Whiteness in Titus Andronicus,” English Literary Renaissance 52:3 (Autumn 2022): 330-42]

 

Being With Hamlet in a VR Universe

 Jihay Park investigates three VR (virtual reality) products offering Shakespeare “experiences”: the eight-minute To Be With Hamlet and the significantly-longer-but-still-shorter-than-the-actual-plays Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit and The Under Presents: Tempest. These VR creations offer what Park calls “social performances,” whereby the audience member enters virtually into a scene’s setting and even assumes the role of a character, occasionally interacting with live actors. The word “live” is frequently misused in contemporary references to streamed and other digital dramatic artifacts, often signifying only that actors were alive when they recorded the production, not that they are there in real time when the viewer/audience member experiences it. Therefore it’s difficult to discern from Park’s discussion which or whether any of these VR products offers a real interactive experience with paid human actors, though it appears that this is or was the case with Hamlet 360, which required a paid-for ticket for access during a particular time slot. In at least one of the other “worlds,” the actors (apart from the participant) were digitally generated. Despite that layer of unreality, given Park’s description, the virtual experience offers an eerily “real” experience of being right there in Elsinore or on the magic island – if one is playing (say) Marcellus, one can actually run with Hamlet along the battlements – and also an experience of interacting in real time with other audience members, who in one program collectively voice Hamlet’s father’s ghost. Thus the eerie sense of becoming not only the “ghost in the machine” but part of the Borg is achieved. This is apparently good. In any case, it’s the future.

[“Shakespeare in Cyborg Theater: Immersive VR Theater and the Cyborg Subject,” Contemporary Theatre Review 32:2, 177-90]