Appropriation anxieties

In 1981 at the Théâtre du Soleil in Paris, Ariane Mnouchkine directed a production of Richard II using her own French translation. Inspired partly by Antonin Artaud's dictum that 'the theatre is oriental', she told an interviewer: 'When we decided to perform Shakespeare, a recourse to Asia became a necessity.' She spoke of trying to find an antidote to the 'psychological venom' which infects western acting; wanting to break from the realistic tradition, she relied on a combination of Shakespeare's text and Asian form. Accordingly, she ignored the play's specifically English, national, resonance, instead importing movement, costumes and a hieratic style borrowed from Japanese Kabuki and Noh, interlaced with Balinese and Kathakali influences plus various styles of Asian music. The result was a blend designed to reveal the play's 'sacred and ritualistic aspects' and the chief means were the disciplined bodies of the actors and the words. Colette Godard describes the effect: the actors face the audience, 'knees flexed . . . hands ceremoniously spread. With their heads held erect, almost never looking at each other . . . they project their lines directly at the audience’. The words ‘come across with incredible clarity . . . It’s as if these weren’t characters, but bodies traversed by a single voice’. But the temperature is not uniformly cool: at the end, Bolingbroke ‘dares [to] kiss the lips of the murdered king, before laying himself out . . . tiny and fragile at the centre of an enormous bare carpet’.

Beyond the sphere of Wollstonecraft studies, Mary, A Fiction (1788) and The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798) typically receive scant attention. As if her novels had little intrinsic interest, most histories of the novel do not mention Wollstonecraft's contributions to the genre, and until relatively recently Wollstonecraft scholars in a way have seemed to concur, largely ignoring the first and reading the last either as an extension of her biography or as a fictionalization of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. At first glance, some skepticism about Wollstonecraft's contributions to the English novel seems only too reasonable. Although she became a woman of letters – “moralist” would probably have been the eighteenth-century term for her – Wollstonecraft's career did not develop around a single genre. All of her works are of a piece in their very diversity, blending overlapping discourses of education, political commentary, travel literature, autobiography, moral philosophy, and fiction by turns, and while this makes for challenging and often bracing reading, it is also probably a little dizzying to audiences whose generic expectations are more straightforward, who expect novels to execute a well-managed plot or to unfold incrementally developing character. Moreover, like most women writers of the time, Wollstonecraft had little in the way of formal education and is not a remarkably deft writer, lacking the ease and fluency of novelists like Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, the dramatic flair of Elizabeth Inchbald, let alone the comprehensive mastery of narration, dialogue, and pacing of someone like Jane Austen. She mostly wrote topically and in haste, rarely polishing what she had done, and she did not even finish such major works as Rights of Woman, Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, and, of course, Wrongs of Woman.

The Elizabethan and Jacobean stage

Cleopatra, Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Rosalind, Viola and Olivia, and all the rest of the approximately 140 named female roles in Shakespeare, were written as roles for boys or young men. We do not know what the considerable number of women in the audience felt about their exclusion from the stage, either as actors or as writers. On the one hand, they were 'represented' by a male writer's concept and a male performer's body; on the other hand, the many speeches throughout Shakespeare's plays that refer to this fact create a unique bond of sophisticated complicity between actor and audience. It would, after all, have been a 'squeaking boy' who first uttered these words on the stage of the Globe, as his performance moved towards the climax of Cleopatra's great threnody. Shakespeare seems to have written in the confidence that the young actor would perform the role with far greater expertise than his character's derogatory comment suggests.

The age of puberty for males in the early seventeenth century was probably later than it is today; and the adolescent boy can often seem androgynous, his voice not fully broken, his body slim and childish.

Shakespeare's work reached Africa no later than it reached the most distant parts of his own country. In 1607 there are reports of performances of Hamlet and Richard II by British sailors off the coast of Sierra Leone. This hardly raised the floodgates of performance, but in 1800 the African Theatre – an amateur theatre set up in Cape Town, South Africa, by the soldiers of the British garrison – opened with a performance of I Henry IV, and since then the amateur entertainments of colonial officers, the educational priorities of missionary and colonial government schools, plus tours of professional actors from Britain to South Africa from the early nineteenth century and throughout Africa from the mid-twentieth century onwards, ensured that the plays of Shakespeare – played in English (and in the nineteenth century often adapted, in the tradition of the times, to make them more acceptable to contemporary tastes) – had a significant presence. But Shakespeare – perhaps more pertinently for our interests in this chapter – has also been performed and explored through the medium of translation and adaptation in a range of African languages and performance cultures. Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest and Julius Caesar have all been translated into Kiswahili – a language spoken extensively throughout East Africa – perhaps most interestingly by the distinguished statesman Julius Nyerere, who was the first president of independent Tanzania. Nyerere, a Shakespeare enthusiast, seems to have undertaken his translations in the 1960s, initially as a celebration of the richness and beauty of the Kiswahili language, showing – with a clear ideological purpose – that the major indigenous language of the new nations of East Africa was every bit as sophisticated as the language of the world’s greatest poet.

All spectators at the theatre are tourists, taken from their everyday world into the strange other country they visit for the duration of the theatre performance, a mixture of a fictive world where the events of the drama unfold and a fantastical space where actors and crew collaborate to create the fiction through the physical skills of their performance techniques. But theatre companies too are often tourists, displaced from their home-base, taking their work to places that may be like their origins or completely alien, playing to audiences that may not understand a single word spoken on-stage or to people who know the text as well as the actors themselves. They may act in a local theatre or bring their theatre with them. Their visit may be part of a regular tour, an expected arrival for the local theatre-goers, or it may be an unprecedented event, something that transforms irrevocably the local culture into which the particular otherness of the plays or production techniques has intruded.

Touring Shakespeare’s plays in England and abroad has been a substantial factor in the economy of the theatre and in the culture of performance since the 1590s, and yet it passes, for students of theatre, largely unnoticed. There is almost too much of it to account for: almost every country has its own examples of touring theatre companies and almost all of them include companies touring with Shakespeare in their repertory.

When the fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 signaled to the world that something extraordinary was taking place in France, Mary Wollstonecraft was already in a position, intellectually and socially, to respond with enthusiasm. From 1784 to 1785 she had lived in Newington Green, where she came under the influence of the Dissenting preacher Dr. Richard Price, then in his sixties, who was one of the leading radical intellectuals of the day. In 1787 she began working as a writer and translator for Joseph Johnson, a Dissenter and radical publisher whose home and bookshop at St. Paul's Churchyard was a focal point for London Dissenters and radicals. As a kind of surrogate daughter to Johnson, Wollstonecraft became part of one of the most forward-looking intellectual circles in Britain. Members of Johnson's circle hurried to Paris in the summer of 1789 and returned with enthusiastic accounts, hoping that a similar revolution might take place in Britain. The joy occasioned by the French Revolution's early phase bound this circle together, as Claire Tomalin puts it, “in the certainty that they knew the truth and that it was bound to prevail.”

The French Revolution was a drawn-out process rather than a single event. But the dramatic events of the Revolution’s early phase provoked one of the most important political debates in British history. The “Revolution Controversy” of 1789–95 was as much about the implications of the Revolution for Britain as it was about the Revolution itself.

A keen and vital concern with education, especially the education of girls and women, runs throughout Mary Wollstonecraft's writing and remains a dominant theme to the abrupt end of her career. The title of her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, speaks for itself; her single most important work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, begins as a plea for the equal education of women and includes an ambitious and farsighted proposal for a national schools system. Both of her novels, Mary and the unfinished Maria, centrally address the self-education of their heroines while seeking to fill a pedagogical role in relation to their female readers. More directly, Wollstonecraft produced a book for children (Original Stories) in the innovative, progressive mode of the day, edited an innovative reader specifically designed for the use of girls, and frequently commented on children's books and educational treatises for the Analytical Review. Among the projects left unfinished at her death were a treatise on the “Management of Infants,” barely begun, and a primer, provisionally entitled “Lessons,” that, if completed, might have changed the early history of the British children's book.

Education was critically important to Wollstonecraft both as a liberal reformer and as a radical theorist and proponent of women’s rights. A broad spectrum of reformist writers and activists – from conservatives wishing to shore up the status quo to “Jacobins” wishing to overturn it – saw education as a, if not the, key locus for promoting social stability or engineering social revolution.

Wollstonecraft reading

A remarkable strategy of Wollstonecraft's cultural criticism, especially on the state of women, is her method of reading society as a text, a “prevailing opinion,” so she calls it in the title of chapter V of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. To regard the regulating forms of social existence as “opinion,” and not a dictate of divine law or natural order, is to identify a human construction – a set of ideas and practices – that may be subject to critical reading, to revision, to rewriting. Wollstonecraft's method of cultural criticism is at once assisted and logically enabled by her actual literary criticism, applied to such prestigious texts as John Milton's Paradise Lost (and its biblical bases), Alexander Pope's epistle To a Lady, Of the Characters of Women, Samuel Richardson's epic novel Clarissa, J.-J. Rousseau's influential “education” novels, Emile and Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, and such works of patriarchal advice as Dr. James Fordyce's Sermons to Young Women and Dr. John Gregory's A Father's Legacy to His Daughters. Reading the social text and its literary instances,Wollstonecraft sets her sights, and trains ours, on a lexicon (cherished by poets) by which women are flattered into subjection – innocent, delicate, beautiful, feminine – to expose a specious syntax of faint praise for “fair defects” of character and a suspect reverence for “angels” and “girls” rather than respect as capable, intelligent adults. She is particularly sharp on how notions of natural are summoned to rationalize a social text: worn into “the effect of habit,” a social system is “insisted upon as an undoubted indication of nature” (VRW 5:150). “Such is the order of nature,” Rousseau intones of man's claims to women's obedience (except in matters of pleasure, where she “naturally” directs him). Taking the form of factual statement about “the order of nature,” such assertions conceal a structure of values and power relations, what modern cultural critique would call “ideology.”

Biographies

Three texts which offer detailed biographical information on Shepard are Don Shewey's Sam Shepard, Martin Tucker's Sam Shepard, and Ellen Oumano's Sam Shepard: The Life and Work of an American Dreamer. All cover Shepard's life from childhood through to their publication dates, and consider both his playwriting and film work. They offer numerous and often illuminating anecdotes about Shepard culled from interviews and reports.

Shewey’s Sam Shepard was originally written in 1985 when Shewey saw Shepard as being at the peak of his career. The book was updated in 1997 with two additional chapters, but is clearly not as enamored with Shepard’s more recent work in film or theatre. Although hard to shake the impression that Shewey is more concerned with Shepard the “beefcake” movie star than the serious playwright, he does use this double life to point out a duality which is the cause of both tension and creativity throughout much of Shepard’s work. Shewey’s picture of Shepard as a rebellious innovator, inspired by popular culture to create a new kind of theatre, may, at times, seem overglamorized, but is intrinsically sound. There is no deep analysis of the plays, beyond pointing out autobiographical elements, but as biography the book offers insight, and its chatty style makes it an accessible introduction to Shepard the man. Shewey gives the facts – who did what, where, and when – allowing us to glimpse the process by (and conditions under) which Shepard writes.

At the beginning of Vera Cruz, Gary Cooper appears riding slowly from the distance, a speck against the vast Mexican desert landscape. When Wim Wenders's film from Sam Shepard's screenplay of Paris, Texas begins, we see Harry Dean Stanton dressed in an old business suit with a baseball cap on his head trudging aimlessly through the eerily white Mojave Desert. The landscape looks as if it is covered in post-apocalyptic ash. Much of the resonance of this moment of anomie comes from the echo of the classic opening of the Western - the lone hero riding out of the wilderness for a brief foray into society to perform a saving act. Shepard's Travis will also perform such an act but, like the world in which it takes place, now more a spiritual than physical wilderness, the act will be morally ambiguous.

While much has been written about the Western hero and Shepard’s own persona as actor and public figure and about the role of the cowboy in his early works, I want to focus here on echoes of the classic Westerns Shepard grew up with in the family sagas he wrote in the 1970s and 1980s. It is in the echoes of the Western hero in Shepard’s work that we see most vividly what the contemporary American male has lost, a loss connected again and again to the terrifying or ineffectual patriarchal wanderer always associated with the desert.

The performer's voice is shallow, unable to save the energy needed to qualify sentences after they have been spoken. Each utterance sounds ultimate, even when the words themselves are tempered by his humor or reasonableness, or by his obvious exhaustion after finishing a line. An egotistical actor would indicate triumph over his condition; a maudlin one, shame. Here, the man's voice may reach the limits of his language and then withdraw, but his face continues speaking - of the desire to speak with more precision, and of the knowledge that even if he succeeds, he won't shake his compulsion for making sentences.

There are in fact few sentences in his text, The War in Heaven, an enthralling collaboration between Sam Shepard and its performer, Joseph Chaikin, begun in February 1984 but not completed until after a stroke in May left Chaikin aphasic. By the time they resumed work, Chaikin had recovered some of his ability to speak; but as a writer he was limited by a severely depleted vocabulary, and as an actor by his inability to memorize. His character, an angel who “died/the day [he] was born,” crashing to earth and “here/by mistake,” testifies about his condition in abrupt phrases, many of which shatter in performance as Chaikin works to sustain his interpretation. The shivered words mark the turns in a second, shadow narrative that transforms the angel’s story of his exile from heaven into a parable of memory and language – Chaikin’s own exile from the Eden where everything has its name and speech grants life. Chaikin and Shepard dramatize two interdependent losses of faith – one in what the angel calls “a lawful order . . . that was clear to me” (139); the other – more painful – in the survival of a language strong enough to depict and then protest such a loss.

Shepard's plays have little to say about women outside of their role within the drama of male individuation. Yet, it is precisely in his focus on masculinity and its problems that Shepard's plays provide acute critiques of the destructiveness of patriarchy for both men and women. Shepard's early plays establish his interest in male individuation, especially in regard to the father/son conflict where the son's identity is at stake. In The Rock Garden (1964), for instance, the son's final monologue about his sexuality ends up “killing” the father who falls over, supposedly dead, at the end of the play. Again, in the 1970 play The Holy Ghostly, the son must “kill” the father, or at least the father's spirit, in order to assert his own identity, which he has been struggling to do after changing his name and running away from the “Old West” to New York City. But sons in Shepard's plays never escape the father's legacy, even after the father's death, because they inherit patriarchal ideas of violent masculinity from their fathers and have learned from them to stake their claim to manhood upon the body of a woman.

This last belief leads Shepard’s men to search for completion of themselves in the body of a woman, reflecting how in many of Shepard’s plays and films a man’s sense of his control over his world and of his own identity is usually tied to his ideas of women. In the early play Chicago (1965), we witness Stu, whose self-image has been shattered by the imminent departure of his girlfriend (aptly named Joy), retreat into a childish land of make-believe as he refuses to leave his bathtub. In Fool for Love (1983), Eddie’s inability to let Mae go – his perpetual seeking of her to return to old fantasies in contrast to her continued attempts to forge a new life for herself – demonstrates the differences between men and women’s needs for each other in Shepard’s world.

The career of American dramatist Sam Shepard merits acclaim for many reasons, not the least of which may be his remarkable endurance. Dating back to the tumultuous days of the early Off-Off-Broadway movement, Shepard's work first fascinated counter-culture audiences with its frenetic, lyrical outbursts and unrelenting energy. However, unlike the legion of Off- Off-Broadway playwrights whose notoriety was followed by an all too sudden eclipse, Shepard's renown continued to ascend as the coffee-house theatre scene declined. Always prolific and inventive, the playwright found persistent success despite the changing economics, production approaches, and audience tastes of the American theatre. In the three decades (and counting) since his debut at Theatre Genesis, Shepard has emerged as a phenomenon of cultural fascination, a playwright now widely produced and taught as a canonical author, an iconic figure often praised in hyperbolic terms (one critic has extolled Shepard as “after all the most original and vital playwright of our age.”) If one were to invoke metaphors drawn from Shepard's obsession with the racetrack, the playwright over the years has proven sure of stride, game and tireless, endowed with a dramatic gift comprising equal parts imagination, drive, and stamina.

In a 1988 interview, Sam Shepard commented on the centrality of the notion of family and heredity to his thought: “What doesn't have to do with family? There isn't anything, you know what I mean? Even a love story has to do with family. Crime has to do with family. We all come out of each other - everyone is born out of a mother and a father, and you go on to be a father. It's an endless cycle.” Whether critics consider Curse of the Starving Class (1977) and Buried Child (1978) the first two parts of a “family trilogy” completed by True West (1980), or the first two movements in a quintet - those three works plus Fool for Love (1983) and A Lie of the Mind (1985) - they all agree that these two plays mark a turning point to a more realistic, perhaps somewhat O'Neillian dramaturgy. Yet, as Charles R. Lyons insists, it is a realism to which Shepard attaches his own original signature by ironically undercutting it: “Shepard took up another highly conventionalized aesthetic form - dramatic realism - and reconfigured its typical structure to accommodate the more open, fluid conventions of his writing . . . this shift forms another 'appropriation': Shepard's borrowing of the conventions of dramatic realism, theatrical schemes which, by this point, were also 'popular' although decidedly not ideologically radical.”

Sam Shepard conferred upon the American stage its postmodernity in the 1960s. Of course he was not the only one to do so, but he interjected a youthful, exuberant, and experimental voice that extended our appreciation of a postmodern aesthetic. In the 2000s, Shepard continues experimenting with dramatic form and structure. He traverses the borders of faith, logic, and social coherence to reconnoiter a mythic and cultural terrain filled with uncertainty and the near-absence of love. His is a Zolaesque world, a malevolent universe in which a sense of bafflement and loss prevail. As Baylor says in A Lie of the Mind (1985), “We're all gonna get clobbered when we least expect it.” Contextualized within a narrative history of the American theatre, seeing characters “clobbered” on stage is hardly unique. From Susan Glaspell and Eugene O'Neill to Edward Albee and Adrienne Kennedy, American playwrights have presented a rich, if disturbing, series of physical, psychological, and moral assaults. Still, within the works of many twentieth-century American playwrights - Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1953), O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night (1956), Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Marsha Norman's Getting Out (1977), Tony Kushner's companion plays, Angels in America (parts One and Two, 1991, 1992), and Margaret Edson's Wit (1999) - there is more often than not an implied sense of recovery, or some epiphanic coming to terms with one's self and culture. Or if it is too late for a John Proctor or Mary Tyrone, perhaps the spark of recognition transpires within the audience. For many American dramatists, confrontation triggers catharsis, catharsis insight, and that insight becomes a still point whose defining moment, itself, is the mechanism for a transcendent awareness, signaling the first step toward a spiritual recovery of the self.

I met Sam Shepard at dinner in 1964 when he was around 19 years old. There were three of us: Sam, me and the director John Stix, who thought the two of us ought to meet? Then Sam and I walked from the Upper West Side all the way down to the East Village. For eighty blocks we walked and talked. This was one year after the beginning of the Open Theatre. We both felt right away that we would be friends and colleagues and he sometimes visited the rehearsals of the Open Theatre where his friend Joyce Aaron was a member.

During the period of the Open Theatre he also co-authored the screenplay of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, which featured a number of Open Theatre actors. And earlier he helped with the screenplay of Robert Frank’s film of Me and My Brother, in which I played a leading role.

I asked him if he would write a small scene for the piece called Nightwalk, the last production of the Open Theatre. He sent material to us which became part of Nightwalk in 1973.

Then Sam and I corresponded in order to work together on a new play but we didn’t know what to work on. Then we found a subject – reincarnation. We thought about the Sufis, Buddha, and others who thought about being reborn. It was a good idea and it became the play Tongues. Then later, we worked on Savage/Love, a play on the themes of romantic love.

Because he uses theatrical techniques that have been identified with postmodern theatre, Sam Shepard is often written of as a postmodern playwright. Certainly his theatrical techniques have much in common with those of the postmodern theatre. His stage reality is layered and fragmented, his characters sometimes intersubjective and transformational. He juxtaposes borrowings from and allusions to popular culture with those of history and high culture in an often free-form, playful way. He often uses sets that call attention to the theatre's existence as theatre, and invites acting techniques that call attention to the actor as performer and the play as performance. All of this Shepard shares with his postmodern contemporaries. His conception of the playwright's art, however, is far from the distant, ironic stance of the postmodern artist. In fact, as Michael Early has pointed out, Shepard has a great affinity with the American Romanticism of nineteenth-century Transcendentalists like Emerson and Whitman. Unlike theirs, however, Shepard's is a dark Romanticism, closer to the Gothic imagination of Poe or the cosmic despair of Melville than to the Transcendental optimism of Emerson or Whitman. What he chiefly has in common with the Romantics is his sense of the artistic imagination, his awe for his own gift and his compulsion to understand it.