Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-qxsvm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-13T04:26:11.652Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Stage over Study: Charles Marowitz, Edward Bond, and Recent Materialist Approaches to Shakespeare

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Sonia Massai
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The flurry of Shakespearean adaptations in the 1960s and 1970s represents a significant yet largely neglected chapter of recent cultural history. This article assesses two of the more enduring adaptations – Edward Bond's Lear (Royal Court Theatre, 1971) and Charles Marowitz's Measure for Measure (Open Space Theatre, 1975) – in order to show how these controversial texts anticipated later mainstream critical approaches which still affect our reception of Shakespeare in the late 1990s. Several parallels between Marowitz and Bond's adaptations and recent materialist readings of their Shakespearean sources suggest that the adaptors anticipated the critics, and that both sought meaning from their Shakespearean originals by focusing on certain aspects of the text and by disregarding others. By demonstrating that whilst Marowitz and Bond's adaptations should best be regarded as a form of stage-centred criticism, Sonia Massai suggests that literary critical approaches inevitably reflect an arbitrary and historically determined appropriation of the Shakespearean original. Sonia Massai is a Lecturer in English Studies at St. Mary's, Strawberry Hill, a College of the University of Surrey. She has published articles on Shakespearean adaptations in Studies in English Literature, Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, and in a special issue of Textus: English Studies in Italy. She is currently collaborating with Jacques Berthoud on the New Penguin edition of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , August 1999 , pp. 247 - 255
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes and References

1. For further discussion of the establishment of the myth, see Dobson, Michael, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and Bate, Jonathan, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, and Criticism, 1730–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

2. Hudson, H. N., Lectures on Shakespeare, II, quoted in Spencer, C., Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), p. 8Google Scholar.

3. In Image-Music-Text, trans. Heath, S. (London: Fontana, 1977)Google Scholar.

4. In Rabinow, Paul, ed., The Foucault Reader: an Introduction to Foucault's Thought, (London: Penguin, 1991)Google Scholar.

5. Cohn, Ruby, Modern Shakespearean Offshoots (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 221Google Scholar.

6. Bulman, James C., ‘Bond, Shakespeare, and the Absurd’, Modern Drama, XXIX (1986), p. 60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Bond, Edward, Plays: Two (London: Methuen, 1978), p. xGoogle Scholar.

8. Marowitz, Charles, The Marowitz Shakespeare (London: Marion Boyars, 1978), p. 10Google Scholar.

9. Garson, Barbara, Macbird! (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 9Google Scholar.

10. Edgar, David, Dick Deterred (New York; London: Monthly Review Press, 1974), p. 14Google Scholar.

11. Ibid., p. 61.

12. Bond, Edward, ‘Drama and the Dialectics of Violence’, Theatre Quarterly, II, No. 5 (1972), p. 8Google Scholar.

13. 'For more details, see, for example, Almansi, Guido, ‘The Thumb-Screwers and the Tongue-Twisters: on Shakespearean Avatars’, Poetics Today, III (1982), p. 96Google Scholar.

14. Rabkin, Norman, ‘Tragic Meanings: the Redactor as Critic’, in Rabkin, Norman, ed., Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 63–119Google Scholar; Dessen, Alan C., ‘Modern Productions and the Elizabethan Scholar’, Renaissance Drama, XVIII (1987), p. 205–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dodd, William Nigel, ‘Richard II, i Critici, Nahum Tate e la Resistenza del Testo’, in L'Altro Shakespeare, ed. Marzala, A. (Milano: Guerini Studio, 1992), p. 81–113Google Scholar.

15. Fortier, Mark, ‘Mortality and Mercy in Vienna: Measure for Measure, Foucault, and Marowitz’, English Studies in Canada, XXI (1995), p. 385Google Scholar.

16. Cohn, p. 37.

17. See, for example, , Marowitz's dedication in his Recycling Shakespeare (London: Macmillan, 1991): ‘For Peter Brook who first made me aware of the buried treasure, and Jan Kott who drew the map that led me to it’Google Scholar.

18. Bond, ‘Dialectics of Violence’, p. 13.

19. Bond, Plays, p. xi.

20. Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, p. 176–7.

21. Bond, Plays, p. 5.

22. Ibid., p. 6.

23. Zapf, H., ‘Two Concepts of Society in Drama: Bertolt Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan and Edward Bond's Lear’, Modern Drama, XXXI (1988), p. 356Google Scholar.

24. The Marowitz Shakespeare, p. 21.

25. All quotations from , Shakespeare'sMeasure for Measure are followed by line references to Wells, S., Taylor, G., eds., William Shakespeare: the Complete Works, Compact Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

26. The Marowitz Shakespeare, p. 223.

27. Ibid., p. 224–5.

28. Only the Duke's first line belongs to Escalus in Shakespeare (III, i, 479).

29. Angelo's first speech belongs to Pompey in Shakespeare (IV, ii, 14–17). The rest of Angelo's lines in this scene belongs to Shakespeare's Lucio (V, i, 503–5, and V, i, 521–2).

30. Sinfield, Alan, ‘Making Space’, in Holderness, Graham, ed., The Shakespeare Myth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 136Google Scholar.

31. Dollimore, Jonathan, ‘Transgression and Surveillance in Measure for Measure’, in Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. , Dollimore and Sinfield, Alan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

32. Ibid., p. 85–6.

33. Ibid., p. 86.

34. Ibid., p. 73.

35. Hammond, Brean S., ‘The Intertext of an Adaptation: Bond's Lear and King Lear’, in Études Anglaises, XL (1987), p. 281Google Scholar.

36. Bulman, James C., ‘Bond, Shakespeare, and the Absurd’, in Modern Drama, XXIX (1986), p. 61Google Scholar.

37. Bond, Plays, p. 94.

38. Ibid., p. 97.

39. Sinfield, ‘Making Space’, p. 140.

40. Dollimore, Jonathan, Radical Tragedy (Brighton: Harvester, 1984), p. 201Google Scholar.