I had the extreme honor of talking with Professor Douglas
Lanier--- Shakespeare scholar and author of
Shakespeare And Modern Popular Culture. It was an awesome chat and gave me so much to think about that I
wanted to share it here with you all, too! Read a bit of our exchange below…pretty
interesting stuff, huh?
I feel so lucky
to be a part of such a dynamic dialogue...one that allowing me the opportunity to come in contact with such brilliant folks.
You wrote a book called Shakespeare
And Modern Popular Culture. Can you tell us what draws you to the topic?
And why you think Shakespeare is still so relevant all these years later?
The
genesis for the project was my experience as a college teacher of
Shakespeare. From the start, it was clear that I was encountering far
more information and assumptions about Shakespeare than I typically encountered
in my other literature classes. What's more, students tended to be highly
invested in those assumptions, far more than with the assumptions they have for
other authors, even when I could relatively easily demonstrate that they might
be problematic or incomplete or just plain wrong. I began to wonder where
those assumptions came from, why they had such power, whether they formed some
kind of ideological belief system, whether those assumptions had a history, and
other related questions. From there I began to look to popular culture as
one particularly powerful source (though certainly not the only one) of ideas
about and images of Shakespeare, his life, his works and his cultural
significance. Popular culture is one place where bardophilia is forged,
where Shakespeare is aligned with all kinds of ideas and values (the range of
specific alignments is staggering!), but also where bardolatry, the impulse to
resist worshiping Shakespeare, is equally at work.
Myself, I don't believe that in and of himself, Shakespeare has relevance to
us. His works spring from a world and a worldview that is quite different
from our own, and so I think it's marvelous in a way we often don't appreciate
that his works survive at all (and some, we know, didn't). Shakespeare is
relevant to us because we are willing to do the interpretive and adaptational
work to make him relevant. Of course, this only pushes back the question
a notch: Is there something in the works themselves--a vision of humankind, a
timelessness or universality, a capacity to capture human nature in his
characters, a level of artistic excellence, a particular kind of metaphorical
suggestiveness or adaptational malleability--that makes Shakespeare reward our
updating in a way that we aren't so rewarded by others playwrights?
However one thinks about the problem, it's also important to acknowledge that
our attachment to Shakespeare comes with a history of prior cultural
attachments to Shakespeare - we love him because prior generations loved him.
You raised a very interesting question: When does a work
stop being Shakespeare? I find this particularly interesting on the subject of
re-tellings. Can you speak a little bit about what your answer would be?
Almost
every adaptation of Shakespeare implicitly poses the question, "is this
Shakespeare?" and I think most adaptations offer an implicit answer.
Some adaptations stress that what is essentially Shakespearean is the language,
and so they pay homage--through imitation or parody (and parody is a form of
imitation)--to the Shakespearean texts we've inherited from the past.
That Shakespeare's language is the essence of Shakespeare is an article of
faith among most modern scholars and many theater practitioners, but in reality
there are other ways of thinking about where we might locate the essentially
Shakespearean in Shakespeare.
One might
locate Shakespeare in particular character types, who need not speak using the
word Shakespeare assigned them; Shakespeare himself was adapting character
types he inherited from the theatrical and classical past.
One might
locate the essential Shakespeare in the particular narratives he tells, though
this is tricky because Shakespeare himself inherited many of those plots from
earlier writers.
One might
locate the essential Shakespeare in his characteristic themes and concerns--the
possibility for cross-gender experience through cross-dressing, for example, or
the personal interior lives of kings or playacting as a metaphor for
life.
Each
adaptation, because of what it chooses to value from its Shakespearean source
texts, poses an implicit answer to the question of when a work stops being
Shakespeare. And it has to be said that different ages have answered that
question in different ways.
With Shakespeare, it's important to remember that he was
not a particularly original writer in the modern sense of
"originality." Shakespeare rarely wrote a story or created
characters from scratch; rather, he was a brilliant adaptor of other
writers' works, pulling them together into new wholes, reshaping them for
theatrical presentation, using them as a catalyst for linguistic, metaphorical
and thematic invention.
Themes like fate and destiny were not invented by
Shakespeare, but there does seem to be something inherently Shakespearean in
them…why do you think that is?
Shakespeare
didn't invent the concept of destiny or fate, it's true. This was a
venerable theme from the classical period, and it was supplemented and
complicated by Christian understandings of God's plan for the world
("providence") which medieval thinkers wrestled with. In
Shakespeare's own day, that issue was complicated even further by Protestant
reconceptualizatioons of providence. I think the theme was particularly
potent for Shakespeare because in his day the notion that one's destiny was
pre-established and inescapable (whether by God or some impersonal force) ran
up against the very palpable new social mobility that he experienced in London,
and also up against new ideas about man's capacity for
self-determination.
For a boy
from a small village where everyone knew each other and where the possibilities
for one's life must have seemed quite fixed, London must have seemed an
incredible experience, a place where one might encounter peoples from all kinds
of lands, classes, and creeds, and therefore a place where one encountered all
kinds of possibilities for human lives.
The
tensions between ideas about fatedness and the human capacity for
self-determination are, it seems to me, central to Shakespeare's outlook.
Romeo and Juliet is all about that tension - on the one hand, Romeo and
Juliet's "star-cross'd" romance is doomed from the start by their
social situation, and on the other, Romeo and Juliet refuse to allow their love
to be determined or destroyed by their situation, even at the point of
death.
Finally, tell us: What’s your favorite play?
This is
clearly a trick question. :) My favorites change over time as I
encounter new productions of them and see unforetold riches in them, but I have
returned to three most often - A Midsummer Night's Dream , the first play I
ever acted in; Hamlet, the Richard Burton recording of which was the
first to enthrall me; and King Lear, a play one grows into understanding
as one gets older.
Thank you so much, Douglas!
XO,
R
