PRESENTISM AS A CONTEMPORARY HERMENEUTICAL ...

UNIVERSITY IN BELGRADE

FACULTY OF PHILOLOGY

ZORICA LJ. JELIĆ

PRESENTISM AS A CONTEMPORARY

HERMENEUTICAL APPROACH AND PRESENTIST

INTERPRETATIONS OF

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S TRAGEDIES

Doctoral Thesis

Belgrade, 2016

UNIVERZITET U BEOGRADU

FILOLOSKI FAKULTET

ZORICA LJ. JELIĆ

PREZENTIZAM KAO SAVREMENI

HERMENEUTIČKI PRISTUP I PREZENTISTIČKA

TUMAČENJA TRAGEDIJA VILIJAMA

ŠEKSPIRA

Doktorska Disertacija

Beograd, 2016

БЕЛГРАДСКИИ УНИВЕРСИТЕТ

ФИЛОЛОГИЧЕСКИИ ФАКУЛЬТЕТ

Зорица Љ. Јелић

Презентизм как современный герменевтический

подход и презентистское толкование трагедий

Уильяма Шекспира

докторская диссертация

Белград, 2016

Podaci o mentoru i članovima komisije

Mentor: dr Zorica Bečanović-Nikolić, vanredni profesor, Univerzitet u Beogradu, Filološki

fakultet

Članovi komisije:

1. ____________________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________________

2.

______________________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________________

3.

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Datum odbrane:

Beograd, __________________________________________

Neizmernu zahvalnost dugujem svojoj mentorki, profesorici dr Zorici Bečanović-Nikolić, na

savetima u vezi sa načinom pripreme za ovaj rad, pomoći oko realizacije rada i istraživanja u

oblasti književne teorije kao i na neprocenjivom iskustvu koje sam dobila u toku naše saradnje.

Ovaj rad ne bi bio to što jeste bez njene nesebične pomoći.

Z.J.

Beograd, septembar 2016

Сажетак

Ова докторска дисертација представља приказ и анализу презентизма као

савремене интерпретативне перспективе која се профилише у области проучавања

Шекспирових трагедија. На почетку је дат сажет преглед историје херменеутике,

као и сумирајућа панорама књижевнотеоријских и књижевнокритичких

перспектива које су обележиле двадесети век, у оквирима епоха модернизма и

постмодернизма. Потом је испитан настанак и развој презентизма, у односу према

другим постмодерним приступима Шекспиру: културном материјализму,

марксистичкој критици и новом историзму, у односу на који се презентизам

поставља антитетички. Будући да је презентизам настао као својеврстан изазов

новом историзму, и као одговор на изостанак новоисторичарске аналитичке пажње

за Шекспиру несавремене рецептивне позиције читалаца и гледалаца,

одговарајућа пажња је посвећена новом историзму. Теоријски постулати и

интерпретативна начела презентизма приказана су посредством приказа и

критичких коментара радова и истраживања Хјуа Грејдија (Hugh Grady) , Теренса

Хокса (Terence Hawkes), Јуана Фернија (Ewan Fernie) и Евелин Гађовски (Evelyn

Gajowski). У оквиру ове дисертације разматрана су и питања у вези са теоријама

темпоралности и њиховом повезаношћу с теоријом презентизма, како их је

представио Расел Вест-Павлов (Russell West-Pavlov), као и проблематика

адаптације и апропријације, према класификацији Џули Сандерс (Julie Sanders).

Последњи део рада приказује интердисциплинарну спону између презентистичких

тумачења изабраних Шекспирових трагедија и савремених филмских адаптација

Хамлета, Магбета, Кориолана и Ромеа и Јулије. Закључак окупља аргументе у

прилог презентизму, који су изнети, развијени и диференцирани током претходне

расправе. Презентизам као интерпретативни приступ Шекспировим делима указује

се као убедљив, комуникативан, вишеструк у својем повезивању удаљеног времена

настанка текста и тренутка разумевања његовог смисла. Чини се да у савременој

култури постоји потреба за критичком артикулацијом презентизма као неопходног

и убедљивог савременог приступа Шекспировим делима, који пажљиво, иако не

увек успешно, настоји да одржи критичарску свест о темпоралној дистанци и

културним разликама између времена настанка Шекспировог текста и времена

рецепције у двадесет и првом веку.

Кључне речи: Шекспир, презентизам, нови историзам, херменеутика, Грејди

(Grady), Хокс (Hawkes), Ферни (Fernie), Гађовски (Gajowski), темпоралност,

адаптација, апропријација, Шекспир на филму

Научна област: Друштвено-хуманистичке науке

Ужа научна област: Књижевна теорија

УДК број:

Abstract

The intention of this doctoral thesis is to present, analyze and discuss presentism as a

contemporary hermeneutical approach in the field of Shakespeare studies. This research

offers a concise survey of the history of hermeneutics, a summarizing panorama of the

twentieth century literary criticism − modernist and postmodernist, and, finally, it shows

the beginnings and development of presentism and its relation to other postmodern

methods of interpreting Shakespeare such as cultural materialism, Marxist literary theory,

and new historicism, which is its antithesis. Given that presentism began as a challenging

response to new historicism, special attention is paid to this particular approach. The

theoretical postulates and principles of interpretation on which presentism is based are

shown through commentaries of the works and research of Hugh Grady, Terence

Hawkes, Ewan Fernie, and Evelyn Gajowski. This thesis also discusses the theory of

temporality, based on the work of Russell West-Pavlov, and its close relation to

presentism, as well as the theory of adaptation and appropriation, based on the work of

Julie Sanders. The last chapter offers an interdisciplinary approach to presentist

interpretations of a selection of Shakespeare’s tragedies and to contemporary film

adaptations of Hamlet, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and Romeo and Juliet. The conclusion of

the thesis brings together the arguments in favor of presentism as proposed, developed

and differentiated along the text: such an approach is convincing, communicable,

manifold in its alert correlation of distant times and the present moment of interpretation.

There seems to exist a cultural need for the critical articulation of presentism as necessary

and plausible contemporary way of approaching Shakespeare, which tends to remain

(although not always entirely) aware of the temporal and cultural distances between

Shakespeare’s texts and the twenty-first century readership, theatre, film and cyber

audiences.

Key words: Shakespeare, presentism, new historicism, hermeneutics, Grady, Hawkes,

Fernie, Gajowsky, temporality, adaptation, appropriation, Shakespeare on film

Filed of study: Literary theory

UDK number:

1

Contents

1. Introduction............................................................................................................ 2

2. The Importance of Hermeneutics in Realtion to the Presentist Approac....... 10

2.1 Theory Before the XX Century……………………………………………… 10

2.2 Marxism and Cultural Studies……………………………………………….. 26

2.3 New Historicism……………………………………………………………... 35

3. Presentism as a Hermeneutical Approach…………………………………….. 42

3.1 Hugh Grady and the Urgency of Now……………………………………….. 44

3.2 Terence Hawkes: Culture, Education, and Presentism………………………. 61

3.3 Ewan Fernie and the Moving Now…………………………………………... 75

3.4 Evelyn Gajowski and Other Presentisms………………………..…………… 82

4. The Theories of Temporality and Their Relation to Presentism.………..…... 90

5. Adaptation and Appropriation…………………….…………………………... 97

6. Relevant Presentist Adaptations of a Selection of Shakespeare’s Tragedies 109

6.1 Hamlet …………………………………………………………………..…. 109

6.2 Coriolanus…………………………………………………………………..…..123

6.3 Macbeth…………………………………………………………………..… 129

6.4 Romeo and Juliet………………………………………………………..….. 136

7. Conclusion(s)………………………………………………………………….. 144

8. Bibliography…………………………………………………………………... 159

9. Biografija Autor………………………………………………………………..175

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Introduction

The past is rewritten by the present, which itself is built on

the past, creating a recursive loop in how we read the past.

Again, our recourse lies in our charge: literature and literary

theory are deeply interwoven, and in recognizing this, we

also recognize our relevance as readers able to move across

time.

William Kuskin

The subject of this doctoral thesis is to address the hermeneutical situation that led to the

emergence of a new approach to interpreting Shakespeare at the beginning of the XXI century –

presentism. This research will demonstrate that even though presentism was established as a new

approach during the first decade of the current century, the history of hermeneutics shows that it

has been applied as a way of interpreting literature, without being formulated as a hermeneutical

approach or theory. Presentism emerged mainly as a reaction and answer to the new historicism,

which in turn was a reaction to the new criticism and other formalist approaches of the 1960s and

1970s. In the above given epigraph, William Kuskin addresses two important aspects of the

interpretation process. First, he acknowledges that literature and literary theory are recursive

processes, and, second, he recognizes that the reader is relevant in this process. The notion of

theory repeating itself and certain elements reoccurring again and again is a thread that will be

reappearing through the following pages. Yet, it is not only the reader who is relevant. Since the

ancient days, literature has been performed and adapted, and so the viewer is of equal

importance. This is particularly true in today’s age of various film and theater adaptations. Film

invariably brings the text to an audience that perhaps would not have read it. The relationship

between the essential elements: the text, the author, and the interpreter, is an intricate one.

Twentieth-century literary theory has, at times, disputed the role of the reader, the text, or even

the author who was, at one point, even proclaimed irrelevant in the interpretation process.

Furthermore, despite the prolific history that literary theory has had, someone has exclaimed

recently: “Enough with the labels and theory!” The mentioned ‘labels’ is a reference to the

various theories and approaches that have been advocated especially during the second half of

the XX century. It is a cumbersome task explaining why literary theory is important in the

interpretation process, and why it is needed. The turbulent and rich past of the literary theory

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shows that as long as literature is interpreted there is always a different way of doing it. So, what

is theory? The Greek word theorein means to speculate, to look, or to view, which in a literary

context is inseparable from the text. Every text that is written is done so with the intention of

being read or performed, or, as the definition states, looked at. That is the purpose of literature.

On the other hand, literary theory or literary criticism is a set of principles used to interpret

literature by giving the literary text a possible meaning. Yet, the intention of this work and the

following pages is not to defend, define, or give an extensive history of literary theory. In fact, it

is to show the various instances in the history of interpretation that were based on personal

education, society, cultural, political and geographical circumstances, which is something that

Hugh Grady will later argue under the approach called presentism; to show literary approaches

and theories of the XX century that influenced the establishing of presentism; to give an

overview of presentism; to show the connection between Shakespeare studies and presentism; to

connect the theory of temporality and the presentist approach; and to show the presentist nature

of a selection of adaptations and appropriations of Hamlet, Coriolanus, Macbeth, and Romeo and

Juliet.

In the first chapter, “The Importance of Hermeneutics in Relation to the Presentist

Approach,” the focus is on the interpretation process and its recursive nature of examining the

role of the reader, the author, and the text. The Hermetica, a mostly forgotten ancient Egyptian

text, pointed out the importance of interpretation not only of literature but of life as well. It is a

text that itself has been interpreted various times in various ways, but most importantly it stated

that every reader needed to give it his/her own meaning. During its long history, hermeneutics

went from the exegesis of religious texts to the interpretation of secular ones. The main question

that concerned interpreters was: should the translation rely heavily on the author’s life, should it

be based on the experiences and knowledge of the reader, or is the text scriptura sacra as Luther

suggested? The answer to these questions and beliefs varied and changed over time. Aristotle

believed that the text had all the answers that were needed, which is something that Matthew

Arnold will advocate again in the XIX century. Johann Georg Haman thought that the reader and

the text were intertwined, which is similar to Martin Buber’s view that there is an inevitable

dialogue going on between the reader and the text; for Edmund Husserl the conscious experience

was crucial for understanding the text, while for Benedetto Croce the reader needs to “become

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one” with the author, in order to understand the text.1 The XX century began with formalist

approaches and the emphasis on the importance of the text. Marxism also occurred as a political

and economic movement and philosophy, and it left a significant and lasting mark on literary

criticism. As the decades went by, school after school of criticism came and left. Most are still

around, while some work under different names and theories and approaches. Besides new

criticism, structuralism and literary phenomenology, the XX century offered the reader-response

theory, Marxist theory, deconstruction, cultural materialism, and the new historicism, to name

the most prominent and highly influential ones. The reader-response theory was divided within

its theoretical approach according to what its advocates thought had primacy: the reader, the text,

or the meaning. The works of Claude Levi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Roman Ingarden,

Wolfgang Iser, Roland Barthes, Norman Holland are crucial in this field. Marxist literary theory

and cultural materialism recognized that the individual is not disconnected from the culture

he/she lives in, so culture became a ‘new’ factor in this equation. Culture influenced the

author/artist and the reader respectfully. Feminist theory, especially the works of Julia Kristeva,

found its place within both of these theories before it began to flourish on its own. As

Christopher Butler noticed, the text had become liberated and democratized. The readership base

grew, and all were welcome to read and interpret literature, and the rigid boundaries once set by

elite culture were overcome by popular culture. However, these theories were not only about the

reader; they also examined the impact that literature had on society. Some, like Georg Lukacs,

and later Bertolt Brecht, advocated that literature was not a passive element in the interpretative

process, and that it was supposed to aid the proletariat in their struggle. Cultural theorists, such

as Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, were important because they recognized that there is

not only culture but that there are also subcultures, and that there is an alternative discourse on

the fringes of society existing simultaneously with the prevalent ‘mainstream’ one. The recursive

nature of interpretation led to new historicism, an approach that not only brought back the

importance of the role that the author has, but also introduced ‘different’ histories, which stood

as alternatives to the mainstream version. The focus is on the author and how he/she is

influenced by the social conditions of his/her time. Stephen Greenblatt introduced new

historicism but argued that it was only his approach to literature, which meant that he did not

1 Benedeto Kroče, Estetika, Beograd 1934, 200. Quoted in: Александријски светионик, 97.

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want to advocate it for the sake of making it a discipline. New historicism rests on the works of

Michel Foucault and Clifford Geertz. For Greenblatt, the text does not have the power that is

advocated by cultural materialists because the subversion within it is always contained. This

chapter will address some of the ideas that these theories share or the influence they have had on

the immergence of presentism as a late twentieth-century approach to analyzing literature.

Chapter two, “Presentism as a Hermeneutical Approach,” builds on the previous chapter

and gives an overview of presentism and its main theorists. Jan Kott wrote that Shakespeare’s

writing had unavoidable ‘presentist’ aspects, which, in fact, can be argued for any writing. The

writer and the reader are both influenced by circumstances and other social, economic,

geographical, and political events. These alterations are constantly happening, and, thus, the

reception of a work will vary from one period to another. These are the basic tenets that

presentists advocate. However, presentism itself has more than one way of viewing literature,

since it has many other approaches and theories working within it, so we acknowledge that there

are many presentisms. Hugh Grady worked with the concept of presentism before it was

recognized as a critical and hermeneutical approach. He said that the inescapable present

influences the work and one’s reception of it. He also believed that new historicism had taken

over the hermeneutical scene and that it was time to address the importance of the present

moment. Grady does not negate that the past is linked to the present moment, but he does

embrace the domineering influence of the present, since the reader reshapes the past. By no

means did Grady invent the concept of presentism, since the concept of it was considered at

various points throughout the history of literary theory. As he points out, just because presentism

was not formulated as such, it doesn’t mean that it did not exist in the past. He insists that there is

an urgency of looking into the influence of the present moment on the understanding of old texts,

because the present moment is constantly changing. Grady worked with Terence Hawkes on

introducing presentism as a possible and yet necessary approach to interpreting literature.

Hawkes believed that education presented old texts, especially Shakespeare, in a politically

charged manner; as a consequence, culture and education had essential influence on class

hierarchy. He wrote extensively about the politicizing of Shakespeare in the XX century and how

governments use literature in the never-ending power struggle between the politically dominant

and subversive elements in society. Hawkes wrote how there was an ‘urge’ in academia to read

texts historically, and that presentism came as a natural alternative to new historicism. For him,

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the past could only be seen through the eyes of the present moment. According to Hawkes,

“repetition invariably fails to produce sameness”, which in itself is a paradox, since it is believed

that the more a text is repeated the more it will not change. He argued that texts have only facts

and that it is the reader who gives them meaning and context just as every reading or staging is a

version of the original text. Hawkes wrote about the influence of institutionalized education and

the role it had in promoting ‘Englishness,’ and in the article “Bardbiz” about the lucrative

exploitation of Shakespeare in popular culture. Ewan Fernie is also concerned with the exclusion

of presentism by historicism, which could lead contemporary criticism to using history as the

“sole explanatory hypothesis.” For him, texts are not fixed in time, instead, they transcend time;

hence, he does not exclude new historicism from his perspective. He prefers not to ‘label’ his

perspective since the lines between new historicism and presentism are blurred and unclear. For

Fernie, the text is in the past (historical time) and in the present (reception) at the same time.

Also, he accepts the concept of subversion in the text, unlike Greenblatt, and he writes that

subversion is always in the present. However, unlike other presentist he includes the future as

well, since any reception in the present foreshadows a possible reception in the future. Another

distinctive element of his presentism is that he writes about the performative aspect of the plays

in relation to the moment of reception. Unlike Grady, Hawkes, and Fernie, Evelyn Gajowski is

first and foremost a feminist critic and then a presentist. She is mostly interested in politics and

literature, and she posits that feminist and queer theories are presentist in nature; just as she

argues that these theories have always been suppressed by patriarchal tendencies within

historicism and new historicism. As Hawkes, she believes that time cannot be drained out of

anybody’s experience and as Fernie she wonders how texts, and feminist theory and gender

studies, will be received in the future. As other presentist, she argues that the present cannot

contaminate or change the past, in fact, the only thing that changes is the view of the text, and as

other presentist she supports the argument that in the end it is reader/viewer who gives meaning

to the text. Grady, Hawkes, Fernie, and Gajowski are all Shakespeare scholars, and, here, their

perspectives on presentism are given dominantly in relation to Shakespeare.

Chapter three, “The Theories of Temporality and Their Relation to Presentism,”

examines the interweaving of the past, present, and future. For people in Western society, time

has mostly been perceived as linear, which means that when recollected it has a certain

chronological order. Yet, today scholars do not necessarily view it as such. For some, the present

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and past are happening simultaneously, or the present remodels the past, or they both influence

the future. Hence, it is best to say that theory of temporality deals with the perception of time.

Mikhail Bakhtin wrote how the present moment is not “a pregiven pattern;” and he viewed

temporality primarily within the genre of the novel. Julia Kristeva wrote about intertextuality and

how it creates “a fluid notion of temporal dynamism into structuralism,” while Mieke Bal

discussed the different temporal strands that exist, which clash and overlap so that the linear

perception of time is distorted and disrupted. There are plenty of examples of anachronous

moments in Shakespeare’s plays. Hamlet is perhaps most famous for its “time is out of joint”

perception, which lingers throughout the whole play, but it is not the only one. Taming of the

Shrew, Titus Andronicus, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream also have examples of time being

out of place and not in the ‘order’ that we are used to. Presentism is perhaps closest to

considering the complex nature of temporality, more than any of the other approaches in

Shakespeare criticism, because it acknowledges the existence of the past in the texts we interpret

today, and the influence of the reader’s/interpreter’s present to the meaning of the text which was

written at some other moment in time.

Chapter four, “Adaptation and Appropriation,” asks and answers the question: What are

adaptations and appropriations? The division is adopted from Julie Sander’s division of the two

terms. Most of the time the two terms are used interchangeably, although, there is a stark

difference between them. Adaptation is a re-casting of one work in one media to fit another

media such as recasting of plays for television scripts. Appropriation, on the other hand, is the re-

working of a source text and adding more material to it. The film Shakespeare in Love is a good

example of that. Both are connected, and are interpreted in relation, to Bakhtin’s theory of

dialogism, Homi Bhabha’s hybridity, Gerard Genette’s hypertextuality, and Julia Kristeva’s

intertextuality. There are many reasons for adapting and appropriating texts: sometimes it is to

bring an old text closer to a contemporary audience, sometimes it is to refer to a reputable

source, and sometimes it is just to make money. Shakespeare, as a global phenomenon, has been

adapted for all these reasons. His texts have reached all continents and have proven to be a

lucrative enterprise simply because there is always an audience ready to discover him. Another

way of appropriating his texts is by creating what Christy Desmet calls Mashups. These are

Youtube clips that are comprised out of many other images and/or film clips put together to

create a new narrative. It goes without saying, we can agree with Katherine Rowe when she says,

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“No longer an epiphenomenon, adaptation is now understood as an essential condition of

transmission for Shakespearean texts.”2

Chapter five, “Relevant Presentist Adaptations of a Selection of Shakespeare’s Tragedies:

Hamlet, Coriolanus, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet” analyzes, as the title of the chapter

suggests, some of the relevant adaptations that are presentist in nature. First, it is important to

state that there are plenty of adaptations, which are just too numerous to fit into this work. So, a

selection had to be made of the ones that would present the spirit of presentism in the best way.

Second, adaptations have been done of many other Shakespeare plays, but these were chosen for

the same reason as their adaptations were. This chapter just scratches the surface of the

importance of adaptations and appropriations in the global discussion that is taking place

concerning Shakespeare and his influence on today’s society; as well as what today’s society

finds interesting and relatable to him. The chapter begins with Hamlet, since it is a play that

Grady, Hawkes, and Fernie wrote about. Their views and interpretations are presented and are a

perfect segue from critical theory to the actual receptions of the texts. Hawkes prefers to view it

“against the grain” as a play about Claudius and not Hamlet; hence, the title Telmah, which is

Hamlet spelled backwards. Fernie chooses to look at the performances of Hamlet, especially The

Al-Hamlet Summit, which he believes might help us with the present crisis we all face and that is

terrorism. Grady stays true to his main field of interest and that is aesthetics. He gives an

overview of Hamlet’s aesthetic reception over the centuries, which always turns out to be a

response to current problems and events. The chapter looks into the adaptations of Laurence

Olivier, Grigori Kozintzev, Akira Kurosawa, Franco Zeffirelli, Vishal Bhardwaj, Michael

Almereyda, and the Hamlet Live team global streaming.

Coriolanus did not have such a prolific career as some other Shakespeare plays, but it

was politicized throughout the XX century. As Hawkes mentioned, the play was hijacked by the

right-winged parties more than once. There is a peculiar and undeniable connection between this

play and fascist and communist regimes. Unfortunately, such a history has plagued the play in

such a way that it left it ‘untouchable’ to other regimes in the sense that it ‘would not be wise’ to

2 Rowe, Katherine. “Medium-Specificity and Other Critical Scripts for Screen Shakespeare.” In Henderson 35.

9

perform it, since it gives off a rather anti-democratic sentiment. There is an overview of the

adaptations of Bertold Brecht, Ralph Fiennes, and Zhouhua Lin.

Macbeth is a play that has been presentist in nature since its inception. It was written in

honor of James I who was Scottish and a scholar of witchcraft and witches. The chapter looks

into the Orson Welles’ all-black staging as well as the dark and criminal ‘underworld’

adaptations of Geoffrey Wright, Vishal Bhardwaj, and Leonardo Henriquez. There is also a short

discussion of the African adaptations of Norman Maake and Alexander Abela as well as Tom

Magill’s interesting and controversial staging in a high security prison in Northern Ireland. The

play has turned out to have numerous adaptations in African and Asian cultures, which still

embrace the concepts of magic and witchcraft.

Romeo and Juliet is perhaps the most adapted of all of Shakespeare’s plays. The story of

forbidden young love resonates deeply across cultures, which means that it has been adapted

everywhere from schools to theater and film. Yet, this chapter shows the play from a different

perspective. Margery Garber demonstrated how the concept of that love has permeated into

politics and law, which gives a completely new form of appropriation. There is also a

comparison between John Bell’s and Baz Luhrmann’s choices of the actors for the role of

Romeo as well as the rather subversive sub-cultural adaptations of Don Roy King, Eve

Annenberg, and Aleta Chappelle. The chapter ends with W. B. Worthen’s commentary of the

rather strange and ultra modern scenic écriture staging done by The Nature Theater of

Oklahoma.

These five chapters should provide insight into presentism as a literary approach and a

possible way of interpreting literature, and show why now is important and crucial for the global

discussion of Shakespeare’s works. This doctoral thesis should also shed some light on the

origins of the basic elements of presentism, and how and why it is important to include it as a

valid literary approach not only because it has been excluded and dismissed, but also because

many other approaches and theories have found their own place under the presentist ‘tent’.

10

2. The Importance of Hermeneutics in relation to the Presentist Approach

A good many people, I imagine, harbour a similar desire to be

freed from the obligation to begin, a similar desire to find

themselves, right from the outside, on the other side of

discourse, without having to stand outside it, pondering its

particular, fearsome, and even devilish features.

Michel Foucault “The Discourse on Language”

2.1 Theory before the XX century

Interpretation is as ineludible as reading is. Once a reader embarks on the journey to read

a text he/she also engages in one of the oldest processes - interpretation. One can undeniably

argue that as long as there has been a text, whether it is religious or secular, interpretation has

been an essential part of it. T.S. Eliot wrote, “We might remind ourselves that criticism is as

inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our

minds when we read a book and feel and emotion about it for criticizing our own minds in their

work of criticism.”3 According to him, it is as natural as breathing that we are thinking about

what we read. However, he also addresses the question of individuality, which according to him

is what is valued. Yet it is not only the individuality of the author that matters, and what he

writes, but also of the interpretation. Centuries before him, Erasmus of Rotterdam, who was

perhaps the first to advocate the ‘theory of reception,’ even though it would flourish later in the

XX century, said that interpretation of the text happens within the individual and changes with

time and place. Arguably both of them realized that there is an unbreakable bond between the

reader and the text. Even more so, they are acknowledging that personal education, society, and

geographical circumstances highly influence the interpretation and reception of the text, which is

something that Hugh Grady will later argue under the approach called presentism. Nevertheless,

throughout the history of literature questions like: What did the author want to say? What is the

message? Who is the author writing for? And what is the purpose of the text? have provoked

readers and critics alike. Readers have long discovered layers upon layers of meaning in the text

3 Eliot, Thomas Stearns. "Tradition and the individual talent." The Egoist (Nov-Dec) 1919, 1201.

11

and the need to respond to the meaning of the text has been just as important as writing itself.

While trying to discover the beginnings of literature, philosophers and writers have also

discovered that ancient Greeks, and Egyptians long before them, have bound their culture and

literary analysis to the text. Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote that the emergence of the hermeneutical

problem was in ancient Greece and that it was then that a bridge was built between then and

now.4 In those times, schools were formed to interpret and give meaning to what was written.

The Hermetica5, a text forgotten by most, which only exists in fragments, was devoted to the

mythological ancient Egyptian sage Toth. Toth, later known to the Greeks as Thrice-Great

Hermes, was credited with the invention of the hieroglyphs, and later in the afterlife he became

the judge of human souls who could estimate whether they gained purity, spirituality and

knowledge in life, which would gain them entrance into the underworld; thus, making him the

first interpreter of one’s values. It is no surprise that the remains of this great text were found in

different cultures under different names6 and became the cornerstone of Western culture and

influenced such artists and scientists as Leonardo De Vinci, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Raphael,

Giordano Bruno, Sir Isaac Newton, and even William Shakespeare. So, why is The Hermetica an

important text? The significance of it lies in the numerous translations and interpretations that it

endured over the centuries. Each new person who took on the task of interpreting this text found

meaning in it and prophesies relating to the time it was translated in. Even Timothy Freke and

Peter Gandy comment that Hermes wrote the text in such a way that the wisdom was hidden, and

that future generations needed to discover it, since the ancient mysteries of life are always the

4 Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1976, 2.

5 Freke, Timothy, and Peter Gandy. The Hermetica: The Lost Wisdom of the Pharaohs. London: Judy Piatkus

Publishers, 1997.

6 The origins of The Hermetica are not known; although, it is a descendent of ancient Egyptian philosophy. The

surviving writings are not in hieroglyphs but in Greek, Latin, and Coptic. History shows that wherever it was studied

civilizations flourished. It was studied in the Islamic territories before the Middle Ages, and during this period the

first university was open. The Hermetica made its way to Europe (Florence) in the fifteenth century and once again

it inspired a cultural flowering, which signaled the end of the Dark Ages. Students of this ‘New Learning’ were sent

throughout Europe, while Copernicus and Giordano Bruno, were among the many followers. In England, Sir Philip

Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Donne, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, George Chapman, John

Milton, Sir Isaac Newton, and Francis Bacon were highly influenced by this work. Even […] Elizabeth’s personal

astrologer, whom she referred to as ‘her philosopher,’ was the enigmatic Hermeticist John Dee […]. Unfortunately,

James I hired the scholar Casaubon to disprove the validity and authenticity of this work. James I wanted to purge

the court of any Elizabethan remnants, and after a vigorous and politicized campaign the work slowly faded into

oblivion (xvi-xxvii). Freke, Timothy, and Peter Gandy. The Hermetica: The Lost Wisdom of the Pharaohs. London:

Judy Piatkus Publishers, 1997.

12

same.7 This could lead to the presumption that the text has only one meaning, and that the reader

will undoubtedly find that meaning. Yet, is it so? Can a text have only one true meaning

disengaged from time and culture it is written in and time and culture it is read in? Is, in

Luther’s words, scriptura sacra? Slobodan Grubačić8 writes that translation is always a fickle

tool, and that even when it is arduously done there is the danger of threading the needle of the

time past with a thread from the present. This danger will lead to the main dilemma of every

interpreter: should the text be interpreted only for what it is without adding anything to it, should

the translation and understanding of it rely heavily on the author’s life and his experiences, or

does it change with every new age that comes, and, ultimately, does it depend on the one who is

interpreting? All the schools, theories, and approaches from ancient times until today are based

on one of these apriorisms. These three questions will be revisited over and over again

throughout the ages in search of the true meaning of the text. Luther was right: the text is sacred,

but not in the way that it should always be seen the same, rather it is sacred per se and it will

always be haunted by these three presumptions. It will always have value and thus it must always

be rediscovered and reevaluated. Grubačić somewhat poetically explains this phenomenon and

says that Immortality (Athanasia) ordered the learned maiden Philology that she must break the

seals of many books. Philology, then, goes to reside in the heavens where she marries Mercury

and gains the highest knowledge and immortality. In concordance with astral mysticism, she

ventures through the many regions of the universe, while her litter was carried by two young

men (Labor and Love) and two young women (Attention and Vigilance). These are all symbols

of the interpreter who spends restless nights figuring out the meaning of Greco-roman books and

celestial signs.9 Metaphorically speaking, Mercury

10 may as well be the Thrice-Great Hermes

himself bestowing the interpreter, in the end, with the gifts of perseverance and knowledge to

untangle the words and find meaning that is hidden in the text. The ultimate knowledge is not

one that can be learned; it is one that is based in ways of unraveling the text. These ways or

7 Ibid, 8.

8 Грубачић, Слободан. Александријски светионик: тумачења књижевности од Александријске школе до

постмодерне. Нови Сад: Издавачка књижарница Зорана Стојановића, 2005, 7.



10 Hermes is identified with the Roman God Mercury.

13

methods have marked the numerous epochs throughout the centuries and once again have found

their roots in the three questions mentioned above. Northrop Frye11

wrote that a method of

interpretation is a view, and that a critic’s view is no more than a suggestion on how to

understand a text. For Martin Buber12

the exegesis was a dialogue between the reader and the

text, and for Max Weber the text changes with the times; therefore, the importance of the text

lies with the reader and his ability to understand it. Johann Georg Haman (XVII century)

believed that the reader, the interpreter/critic13

, and the text are intertwined and that the reader

mirrors himself onto the text and vice versa, and in doing so there is a discussion that is taking

place. Perhaps, one can take this mirroring of the present (the reader) on to the past (the text) as

a possible presentist approach to viewing and understanding literature that occurred long before

hermeneutics was officially established.

The history of exegesis is a turbulent one. Throughout the centuries the importance has

shifted back and forth – from the text to the author and back to the text. Aristotle believed that

the text had all the answers, and that if you could not find the answer in it, there was no use

asking the author or critics. Hence the text can exist without the interpretation, but there can be

no exegesis without the text. So interpretation became a skill that was based on vast historical

knowledge; it became a way, a key, to read all in order to better understand life and all that is

profane and sacred. Thus, hermeneutics could be both hermeneutica profana et sacra14

, secular

interpretation of literary texts and religious interpretation of sacred texts. People needed this key

to unlock and reconstruct the text in order to understand their disquieted lives and find meaning

in a hard and meaningless world. Like so, the Bible, which provided guidance, solace, and hope,

became the most explicated text. In Medieval times, the lives of the saints became highly

11 Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957, 4.



13 Haman introduces the concept of the critic. He writes A Rhapsody in Cabbalistic Prose (1759) and openly attacks

Kant and argues that he is not just “any listener;” he is rather the prosecutor and challenger of what Kant writes.

Грубачић, Слободан. Александријски светионик: тумачења књижевности од Александријске школе до




14

allegorized and showed the way to salvation and relief from suffering. Hence, the number of

interpreters grew and the text became more and more dismantled. Therefore, from a text that had

maybe one meaning, interpreters gave a multitude of meanings and exegeses. What Luther later

called a sacred text became a vessel for manipulation and various propagandas. He was, perhaps,

the first to, while making the text sacred, in essence make the reader more important than the

text. He no longer gave primacy to what was written but to who was reading the text. Eventually,

hermeneutics was established as a specific method and scholarly discipline on its own by

Friedrich Schleiermacher at the beginning of the XIX century. It was later in the XIX century

that Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology, openly addressed hermeneutics and said that

it could not exist without phenomenology, the conscious experience. For him, experience was

intentional and interpretation was subjective and reflected the experience of the interpreter. This

claim is rather presentist in nature. Martin Heidegger was highly influenced by Husserl, but he

added a social component and found that interpretation could not be separate from ontology, that

every act of interpreting is at the same time an act of understanding being. Hans- Georg Gadamer

explicated the universality of hermeneutics. Gadamer calls his point of view, with which he

observes the world, hermeneutical – a term developed by Heidegger, which stemmed originally

from Protestant theology. Gadamer explored the use of hermeneutics in all disciplines and not

only in literature. He deemed that the present mirrored the past, and, therefore, the past was in

the present,15

which is a stance that the reader response theory will adopt and a position Ewan

Fernie will advocate, toward the end of the XX century, in his variant of presentism. For

Gadamer, not only are the present and past fused together, but also the text and the interpreter are

fused as well. Yet, he himself is following Haman, and again this view of hermeneutics coincides

with the postulates of presentism, although the presentist critics do not develop their views from

Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics.16

General readers expect interpreters to give them answers to their questions and those

answers to stay permanent. However, even though the text stays the same, the interpretations and

15 Klemm, David E. Hermeneutical Inquiry: Volume 1, The Interpretation of Texts. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986.

16

Зорица Бечановић-Николић, “Тумачење Шекспира из перпективе презентизма. Однос времена настанка и времена

рецепције дела као херменеутички проблем“, у: Аспекти времена у књижевности, зборник радова,

приредила др Лидија Делић, Београд: Институт за књижевност и уметност, 2012, 181-199.

15

the questions change with time, but with readers as well. This is why methods of interpretation

(theories, approaches) were needed. Grubačić writes that there is no Faustus without the

pentagram, so there is no interpreter without the secret formula.17

The formula being the

methodology with which one would gain insight into the text. However, the methodology does

not have to be the same for all. A person who engages the text and uses a certain method can still

reach a different conclusion from his colleague. This conclusion conducted to two completely

divergent paths: one that led to the belief that methods of understanding the text were futile and

nonsensical, and the other that methodology was essential, whether people gathered in groups

and commented on the text in order to understand it, or a critic analyzed it. There is an

abundance of theories, and there is a constant dispute among them. This is beneficial, because a

text is ‘alive’ as long as it spikes interest and is debated on, which was the sole purpose of its

creation – to be read and interpreted. Henry James concurred with this claim, and he wrote, “[a]rt

lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the

exchange of views, and the comparison of standpoints […].”18

Discussion is crucial to

interpretation, and during the vast deliberations that took place over time a plethora of theories

and approaches arose. Assuredly, same theories or approaches resonate with the audience

differently in different times and cultures. One Marxist theory will be accepted and used

differently in modern-day China then in modern-day United States of America. This particular

view has been disputed over and over again throughout the past two centuries. Benedetto Croce,

one of Hegel’s more fervent followers, argued that only when the reader becomes one with the

author can he truly understand the work.19

So, does one need to completely understand the life

and time of the author in order to understand the work, or does the reader project his own views

onto the text? This will become the cornerstone of the dispute between new historicists and

presentists later toward the end of the XX century and at the beginning of the XXI. One cannot

deny that the reader projects onto the text what is his and what he knows. For example, someone

reading William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” in today’s United States America

will have a completely different understanding and appreciation of it than someone reading the


постмодерне. Нови Сад: Издавачка књижарница Зорана Стојановића, 2005,14. 18 James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” Longman’s Magazine 4 (September 1884), 1.



16

same poem in the same place at the end of World War II. No matter how much one reads about

Williams’ life or the period the poem was written in, one cannot completely understand the

poem. Presentism shows that interpretation depends on the reader and the time, location, and

background of the reader. As James argued the author does not have to write from experience,

but the reader does interpret from it.20

Hence, different people, from different cultures and

political systems will interpret theories and approaches differently. The same methodology will

be used distinctively and uniquely. So, is presentism an approach that has existed since the

ancient times or is it a new one? How long has it been around? Where are its beginnings and

roots? To find the answers to these questions one must look into the theories and approaches that

became prominent at the beginning of the XX century. This is mainly due to the fact that until

the nineteenth century only Greek and Latin literature was taught at the universities. Once

Western literature entered the universities and became part of the curriculum, it became

subjected to criticism. Until this time, the focus was on hermeneutics and how to define it.

However, in the XX century different hermeneutical theories and approaches replace one another

and are used to interpret not only ‘other than religious literature’ but also different genres.

Traditional approaches that were used until the XX century focused on historical-

biographical and the moral-philosophical aspects.21

According to Matthew Arnold (1822-1888),

literature was art that needed to be evaluated methodologically and aesthetically.22

He argued

that literature, i.e. poetry, provided all the guidelines, truths, and values that society needed;

above all, it interpreted life for humankind.23

Arnold’s importance is twofold. First, he is an

advocate of XIX century criticism in which literature was compared to classic literature, and the

Aristotelian terms, which set the rules for which text is valuable and which one is not. On the

other hand, he urges critics not to fall under the influence of politics or any other activity, since it

will make them biased. He is a proponent of the traditional humanist approach to literature, but

he is also opening the door to XX century criticism. For, in his argument that critics should be

20 James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” Longman’s Magazine 4 (September 1884), 5.

21 Guerin, Wilfred L., et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 4th

ed. New York: Oxford UP,

1999, 21.

22 Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: an Introduction to Theory and Practice. 5th

ed. New York: Pearson,

2011, 7. 23 Ibid, 40.

17

objective, they actually become more subjective in their criticism, and they are not only

interpreters but also authorities on values, cultures, and tastes.24

According to classical tradition

of the Aristotelian lines, stemming from Horace, the lines of the great masters should always be

followed. Yet, who determines who the great masters are? For some the scholar has this role, for

some it is the critic, and for some it is society in general. For presentists, in the end, it is ‘the

reader.’ In itself, Arnold’s premise becomes rather subjective than objective. It is because of this

stance that he stands on the precipice of a new hermeneutical age while unknowingly opening

the gates for the diverse and text (and reader)-oriented XX century literary criticism.25

Charles E.

Bressler wrote,

Opposed by some modern critics whose analyses stop short of considering literary

criticism of the previous two centuries, Arnold’s criticism serves as either a

rallying point or a standard of opposition by which theorists can now measure

their own critical statements.26

Arnold’s criticism implied that the focus shifts from the author and his life to the text. It is in the

XX century that the text, and with it the reader, gains importance. Toward the end of the XIX

century literature was considered to be a product of social and political events, and that lead to a

surprising rise of a group of Russian scholars who formed an interpretative approach called

Russian formalism. They argued that all one needs to have in order to understand the text is in

the text itself. One needs not to know of the author, his life, or his political or social

circumstances in order to comprehend the meaning of the text and what it is trying to convey to

the reader. Some years later, during the 1920s, British and American scholars developed an

interpretative methodology called new criticism. This movement supported close reading, which

required: ”[…] detailed textual analysis of poetry rather than an interest in the mind and

personality of the poet, sources, the history of ideas and political and social implications.”27

Furthermore, there is a close analysis of individual words, possible allusions, symbols, tone,

view, other poetical devices, and after determining how all these elements make a whole the

24 Ibid 41. 25 Ibid

26 Ibid, 42. 27 Cuddon, J. A. Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London, UK: Penguin Books, 1999, 544.

18

reader understands the poem.28

Such interpretation was an innovation that invited all who were

‘skilled’ to interpret poetry (and prose, while skilled referred to educated people). One of the

pioneers of new criticism was T.S. Eliot. In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” he

discussed the role of the artist and how: “[t]he progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a

continual extinction of personality,” and, “[…] the more perfect the artist, the more completely

separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will

the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.”29

According to Eliot, the

better the artist is, the more he is detached from the text. It is here that he divorces the author

from the text and sets the tenets of the new criticism. The text is the medium through which the

artist works and his life and personality are not important. The poem or any other literary work

no longer had to be a personal statement. Roland Barthes and Northrop Frye, two great literary

critics of the XX century, at the time were old enough to hear about new criticism, but still were

young enough not to participate in scholarly disputes. It is later in the 1950s and 1960s that they

took criticism to a different level. Both of them built on new criticism and on structuralism, but

they, each one in his own way, insisted on the importance of the reader. Overall, the importance

of new criticism for hermeneutics was enormous. Even though today these theoretical ideas do

not get enough credit, it is evident that they opened up a new way of viewing the text.

A mixture of traditional hermeneutics, old positivist consideration of the historical and

cultural context surrounding a literary text and the new critical ‘close reading’ was pervasive in

both Anglo-American and world academia until the last quarter of the XX century.

However, some clenched to the traditional ways and others developed new approaches

and theories. Many schools even to this day use the traditional approach in the classroom. On the

other hand, numerous postmodernist approaches are explored and applied in the literary studies

today. One should also note that various approaches don’t receive equal attention. Bressler, for

example, published his book in 2003, yet he never included any of Hugh Grady’s works, which

were presentist and published as early as the 1990s, nor did he find any connections with it and

other theories or approaches. He mentions new historicism, which rose to prominence in the

1980’s, nevertheless fails to mention Hugh Grady or Terence Hawkes, whose works were a

28 Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: an Introduction to Theory and Practice. 5

th ed. New York: Pearson,

2011, 52. 29 Eliot, Thomas Stearns. "Tradition and the individual talent." (1919), 1201-08.

19

direct response to Stephen Greenblatt’s approach. In 1983, X.J. Kennedy published and

extensive third edition of Literature: Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama30

and followed

the methodology of new criticism to the word. Among other elements, the book presents various

narrators that can be presented in a text. Yet, the question begs to be asked: to whom is the

narrator speaking? If it is so important to develop the role of the narrator, why isn’t it important

to address the reader (the one whom the narrator is speaking to)? This question will be answered

some decades later.

Another faction that appeared in the 1940’s as a reaction to new criticism was the

Chicago School.31

They were a group of colleagues at the University of Chicago, and they

professed that they were concerned with the lack of the humane aspect of new criticism, which

was interested only in the text, while discarding the role of the author or reader (the humane

elements). They also advocated the use of other perspectives including Aristotle’s principles,

which they wanted to take to another level. Their impact on theory in the decades to come was

not great, although, they did bring to the table genre criticism, which was later developed by

Northrop Frye and Kenneth Burke.32

However, Frye was not only interested in genre theory. In his book Anatomy of Criticism,

Frye commented that traditional theory never disappeared.33

Certain parts of academia have kept

using the traditional ways of interpreting literature; however, it did not prevent other

hermeneutical approaches and theories from developing. Frye also opened up the discussion on

external influences on the critic:

30 Kennedy, X. J. Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. 3

rd ed. Boston, MA: Little, Brown,

and Company, 1983.

31 Ronald S. Crane introduced the school in the introduction to “Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern.” In that

book, he and his colleagues, W.R. Keast, Richard McKeon, Norman Maclean, Elder Olson, and Bernard Weinberg,

gathered papers that they published as early as 1936. Not all the essays were Aristotelian, but they considered the

modern use of his poetic methods. This is why they were also called the neo-Aristotelians (305). Guerin, Wilfred

L., et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 4th

ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

32 Guerin, Wilfred L., et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 4

th ed. New York: Oxford UP,

1999, 305.


20

The critic has a subjective background of experience formed by his temperament

and by every contact with words he has made, including newspapers,

advertisements, conversations, movies, and whatever he read at the age of nine.

He has a specific skill in responding to literature which is no more like the

subjective background, with all its private memories, associations, and arbitrary

prejudices, than reading a thermometer is like shivering.34

He discussed literary critics and public critics. Public critics were: “[…] The Lamb or Hazlitt or

Arnold or Sainte-Beuve who represents the reading public at its most expert and judicious.”35

The importance lies not only in the attention that interpretation has, but it also lies in the fact that

critics, or as far as presentists are concerned, all readers are influenced by their background.

Therefore, for presentist purposes, the criticism of Arnold, who influenced a great many

scholars, and the later development of new criticism brought back the importance of the text and

the point of view. Its methodology does not give importance to the author or the reader; however,

it does acknowledge the importance of the point of view, which is essential to presentism. Even

though the methodology does not accept the influence of the reader on a written work, it is

inevitable that the reader is a quintessential element in the process of understanding literature.

Unlike others who were formalists, I. A. Richards, the other of the two pioneers of new criticism,

became interested in the reading process. He was also curious about the reader’s personal

feelings when interpreting a text. He conducted an experiment, which he published in 1924 as

Principles of Literary Criticism, with his students at Cambridge University by giving them to

read a variety of poems of different literary value. Richards was surprised with the contradictory

responses. He attributed his findings to the overall psychological health of his students and

labeled the responses as pseudo-statements.36

It is interesting that in his experimentation he never

took into consideration the difference in the worldview, previous education, ethnicity or

background of his students. The value of his findings for hermeneutics is that they will be the

cornerstone of the reader-response theory, and later for presentists is that the experiment proved

34 Ibid.




2011, 71.

21

that the interpretation of the poems depended on the readers. Nevertheless, in 1929, he

acknowledged,

That a reader brings to the text a vast array of ideas amassed though life’s

experiences, including previous literary experiences, and applies such information

to the text to develop interpretation. These life experiences provide a kind of

reality check for the reader, either validating or negating the authenticity of the

experiences as represented in the text. In so doing, the reader becomes an active

participant in the creation of the text’s meaning.37

Richards began his scholarly career as a formalist, and his work was of tremendous influence for

the formalists; however, his belief in the importance of the reader made him an important part of

reader-oriented criticism, which developed later in the XX century and gained proponents such

as Stanley Fish. In the 1930s, Louise M. Rosenblatt concurred with Richards and developed his

theory even further. She argued that the text and the reader are partners in the interpretative

process. Furthermore, she found that there are as many interpretations as there are readers.38

Her

assertions are important because they shifted the emphasis away from the text and focused it

toward the reader.

Another theory that arose in the middle of the XX century, and that was a direct response

to new criticism, is the reader-response theory or the reader-oriented theory. It is a rather

complicated theory that splintered into many factions that depended on the focus of the critics;

some believed that the text had primacy, some that the reader had, and the rest believed that the

meaning that was created by the interaction of the text and the reader was most important.

Nevertheless, this criticism rose to prominence in America in the 1970s, but it has its roots in the

1920s and 1930s in the works of Richards and Rosenblatt. Bressler comments how even Plato

and Aristotle were interested in the reader, and how the audience responded to the play.39

37 Ibid, 71. 38 Ibid, 73. 39 “Plato, for example, asserts that watching a play could so inflame the passions of the audience that the attendees

would forget that they were rational beings and allow passion, not reason, to rule their actions. Similarly, in Poetics,

Aristotle voices concern about the effects a play will have on the audience’s emotions. Will it arouse the spectators?

Will they cleanse a spectator of all emotions by the end of the play’s end? “ (69). Bressler, Charles E. Literary

Criticism: an Introduction to Theory and Practice. 5th

ed. New York: Pearson, 2011. Print.

22

Nevertheless, it is important to state that when it comes to Aristotle and Plato the readers were

considered passive. In the reader-response theory the reader is an active participant in the reading

process.40

Reader-response critics feel: “ [t]hat readers have been ignored in discussions of the

reading process when they should have been the central concern. […] A text does not even exist,

in a sense, until it is read by some reader.”41

The contribution of this theory to hermeneutics is

immense. First, the reader is finally acknowledged as an important element in the reading

process, and, second, the accent is on ‘some’ reader. It is no more expected that the reader have

skills or a specific education to be able to comprehend the text and comment on it. Now, anyone

can be a reader and interpret the text before them. Jane Tompkins wrote that now: “[critics are]

willing to share their critical authority with less tutored readers and at the same time go into

partnership with psychologists, linguists, philosophers, and other students of mental

functioning.”42

Here, reader-response critics are building on the arguments not only of the former

new criticism followers (mainly Richards and Rosenblatt), but they are also embracing the

postulates of the Chicago School. Tompkins’ words are inviting everyone to participate in the

reading process in order to cultivate an eclectic audience. At this point it is important to mention

Wolfgang Iser and Roman Ingarden. Iser was a German phenomenologist who maintained that

the reader could live in the world of the novel. For him, the mind, i.e. consciousness, gives

meaning to the text; therefore, the reader gives meaning to the text and becomes inseparable

from it. He explained that the critic’s job is not to explain the text; rather his job is to examine

and explain the text’s effect on the reader.43

His work is important because he differentiated two

types of readers. The first is the ‘implied’ reader who “embodies all those predispositions

necessary for literary work to exercise its effects – predispositions laid down, not by an empirical

outside reality, but by the text itself.”44

This is the reader that is implied ‘by’ the text. The other

reader is the ‘actual’ reader, and it is the person who picks up the book and reads it. The concept



2011, 69-70.



1999, 356.

42 Ibid, 356.



2011, 78. 44 Ibid, 79.

23

of the implied reader suggests that the text is important, while the concept of the actual reader

acknowledges the value of the reader. This is why the text and the reader are inseparable.

Edward Quinn explains this relationship by noting that the implied reader is actually the ideal

hypothetical reader who will enter into a partnership with the author in order to complete the

work. The final aim is for the actual reader to become the implied reader. He also suggests that

some times the real reader does not want to accept the role of the implied reader, and this he calls

the “resisting reader.”45

For example, a feminist reading a misogynistic text would have a hard

time making the connection with the implied reader. Iser is by no means a formalist nor does he

advocate that the text has primacy. In fact, he indicates that there are certain gaps in the text that

the reader fills in, which makes them coauthors in a way.46

The reader also develops a certain

expectation of how the plot will go or what the characters will do, which is a logical conclusion

of such a reader/author relationship. Therefore, it can be stated that Iser poses a relationship

between the reader and the author through the text, which is the reason why he cannot be

considered a formalist. Additionally, the reader is the one who ultimately assigns meaning to the

text.47

Also worthy of mentioning is Iser’s predecessor, the Polish theorist Roman Ingarden who

directed the attention to the experience of the reader and argued that the reader concretized the

text.48

His ideas and theory were the foundation of Iser’s work. It seems that literary theory is no

more a segregated land with strictly set borders, and toward the middle of the XX century it was

becoming a medley of various viewpoints and criticisms. Hence, the once avant-garde theorists

became discussants in one of the most influential movements in the history of hermeneutics;

simultaneously clearing the way for the prominent approaches and theories that will appear

toward the end of the XX century. The only, and crucial, divisive argument within the reader-

response group stems from the question: what has primacy - the text, the reader, or the meaning?

All agreed that the reader was important, but not all accepted that the reader came first and

foremost.

45 Quinn, Edward. A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms. New York: Checkmark Books, 1999, 160. 46 Guerin, Wilfred L., et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 4

th ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1999,

360. 47 For further reading see, Robert Magliola, Phenomenology and Literature: An Introduction. Lafayette, IN: Purdue

UP, 1977; Jules Brody, “The Resurrection of the Body: A New Reading of Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress.’” ELH

56, no. 1 1986, 53-80; Hans Robert Jauss, Toward and Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis:

U of Minnesota P, 1982; Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978; Wolfgang Iser,

Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989; Wolfgang Iser,

The Range of Interpretation. NY: Columbia UP, 2000. 48 Quinn, Edward. A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms. New York: Checkmark Books, 1999, 244.

24

One group believed that the reader’s role was imperative. For them, the text could be

interpreted differently by different readers. Also, the context could change from one period of

time to another. This perception is of particular interest to presentists, and this is where

presentism is the closest to any hermeneutical theory or approach. Norman Holland and David

Bleich advocated this theory. They differ in their interpretation of the role of the reader. Holland

argues that every individual reader transforms a text according his personal views.

Interpretations are subjective according to him. For Holland, the reader is a part of the collective.

His interpretations depend on the reader’s cooperation with other readers. He argues, “[t]he key

to developing a text’s meaning is the working out of one’s responses to a text so these responses

will be challenged and amended and accepted by one’s social group. […] Finally, the group will

decide what is the acceptable interpretation of the text.”49

On the other hand, for Holland,

interpretation is subjective and subordinated to each and every reader. The other group believed

that the role of the text is the most significant. Proponents of this theory were close in nature to

formalists, because for them the meaning is determined by the text; however, they did not negate

the importance of the reader. For them the text’s meaning can be synonymous with the author’s

intention. It is no chance that some of the most quoted names not only in literary theory but also

in linguistics advocated this theory, which is better known as structuralism: Claude Levi-

Strausse, Roman Jakobson, Gerard Genette, Roland Barthes,50

Gerald Prince, and Jonathan

Culler.

According to structuralist critics, a reader brings to the text a predetermined

system of ascertaining meaning (a complex system of signs or codes like the

sirens and the red light) and applies this sign system directly to the text. The text



2011, 80.

50 Roland Barthes wrote the essay “The Death of the Author” in which he argued that the author enters into his own

death the moment he starts writing. He claimed, ”The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up

writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” This

essay ends with the famous line: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author. (255-257)

Richter, David H. Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s,

2000.

25

becomes important because it contains the signs or signals to the reader that have

preestablished and acceptable interpretations.51

So, to them, it is more about the overall meaning that a society has developed. This view will

bring them closer to cultural theory and to presentists because presentism is about the reception

of literature now, and ‘now’ is undeniably connected to culture and society. For Prince, it was

important to emphasize that the text produced the narratee, or the reader. However, other fellow

critics distanced themselves from this point of view. The third group gave relevance to the

meaning. They will bring back a term from the XIX century that includes the reader’s

consciousness – phenomenology. According to them, an object exists only if it exists in the

consciousness of the reader. The method is somewhat a continuation of Rosenblatt’s work.

Basically, when the reader and the text interact the consciousness of the reader will form the

meaning. “Reading and textual analysis now become an aesthetic experience,”52

which means

that the reader needs to implore imagination in order to fill in the gaps of the text. Apart from

Wolfgang Iser who advocated this theoretical assumption, for presentism, and XX century

hermeneutics, Hans Robert Jauss was paramount because he espoused a particular kind of

criticism known as ‘reception theory.’ He argued that: “readers from any given historical period

devise for themselves the criteria whereby they will judge a text.”53

Most of the second half of

the XX century was about reception of literature, so his interpretation led the way to viewing the

text differently and acknowledging that the text gains different value with each new generation.



2011, 76.

52 Ibid, 76.

53 Ibid, 78.

26

2.2 Marxism and Cultural Studies

In traditional literary studies, or antiquarian, as Terry Eagleton would call them, culture

was considered as the background to literature, and it was not as important as the text itself,

while in cultural studies the aim is to establish the relationship between text and context, which

are indivisible. Actually, cultural studies investigate the status of culture within the socio-

historical context. These studies originated in Great Britain during the 1960s; be that as it may

they became influential much later, in the 1980s, in the United States. In certain aspects cultural

studies are connected to Marxist studies, since they argue that the difference between high and

low culture is at heart political in nature.54

Cultural studies are hard to define and they are

composed of elements of Marxism, feminism, new historicism, gender studies, anthropology,

studies of race and ethnicity, film theory, sociology, urban studies, popular culture studies, and

postcolonial studies. Any field that focuses on social and cultural forces is a part of these

studies.55

Along these lines, and to give a better understanding of numerable hermeneutical

alternatives, Eagleton wrote,

For any body of theory concerned with human meaning, value, language, feeling

and experience will inevitably engage with broader, deeper beliefs about the

nature of human individuals and societies, problems of power and sexuality,

interpretations of past history, versions of the present and hopes for the future.56

However, it is pivotal to point out that the existence of such a plethora of literary theories and

approaches does not make them less valuable, and it does not mean that critics are in

disagreement. It simply means that hermeneutics has come to the point that it is no longer strict

and exclusive; rather, it has become inclusive. As far as the text is concerned, all texts are

welcome to the pantheon of literature. Literature is no longer a club for the selected few

privileged members of the ironclad canon. Readers are no longer just the learned scholars, and

the crystal prism that is made of the abundance of theories and approaches has made it possible

54 Quinn, Edward. A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms. New York: Checkmark Books, 1999. Print.



1999, 240-1.

56 Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996, 170.

27

for one text to be looked at again and again from different points of view. The alternatives have

become the maxim of interpretation, and the once sacred and now antiquated XIX century

approach has become just one of the many specters of light that exist within that prism. Perhaps

one can claim that the more imagination in interpretation one had, the more ways one found how

to interpret the text. As Christopher Butler wrote, the text has become liberated and

democratized.57

Texts were connected with other texts with the purpose to find a mutual thread.

The word ‘intertextuality’ was coined in the 1960s by Julia Kristeva, but the concept exists as

long as writing and interpretation. John Milton’s use of the Bible in his works is an example of it.

However, the cultural complexity of the last decades of the twentieth century needed a term to

encompass not only the interpretation that flourished but also the literature that was written.

Postmodernism became a term used equally for texts and criticism alike. Literature also became

different in as much so that every work had multitudes of references to other works

(intertextuality). Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose became a symbol of postmodern

writing, and it showed that no text is ever finally analyzed. Perhaps Derrida’s term ‘disseminate’

is quite appropriate because every text disperses variations upon variations of previously set

ideas.

Ways of interpretation of literary texts have been rapidly changing since the XIX century;

in relation to different methodologies. Nevertheless, two aspects are undeniable for the

postmodern perspective: society is important as a whole, and there is no elite and low culture,

which means that culture includes every form of subculture and popular culture. According to

Guerin et al., there are three ways to study culture: through British cultural materialism, new

historicism, and American multiculturalism, which is further divided according to the

subcultures in American society -- Latinos, African-Americans, American Indians, and Asian

Americans.58

According to Michael Meyer, cultural criticism places works in the context of their times,

and they try to make the connection between the work and how it is received in that period, and,

57 Butler, Christopher. Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002, 24.



1999, 253-269.

28

more importantly, how the work can influence this culture. Yet, Meyer keeps the distinction

between high and low culture – something that cultural studies have tried to stay away from. He

also acknowledges that cultural studies use historical materials to bring the text closer to the

reader.59

Therefore, cultural studies are always evaluating the text based on the culture that was

at the moment it was made in, which is a view close to the one of new historicists, and on the

current culture. Unfortunately, these approaches that appeared so quickly dissipated just as fast.

Now they exist more within other approaches than on their own. Literature is interpreted

according to what society as a whole is ‘feeling’ or ‘thinking’ at the precise moment. By the

same token, Butler explains, that it is the institution of the Tate Gallery that made Carl Andre’s

pile of bricks a work of art.60

His claim is that by itself the work would not be valuable, but it is

the institution that ‘proclaimed’ it worthy. One can argue that in the same way it is society and

its cultural institutions that do what once individuals, literary critics, did. Even the author is not

an individual anymore; since one writes under the pressure and impressions that one feels as a

part of society. It is also important to state the importance of psychology in all these approaches

and methods. Experiences are embedded in one’s subconscious and it taints one’s interpretation

of life, culture, and even literature. It seems that whether it be the psychology of the individual

or of the group, one has to remember Friedrich Schleiermacher’s warning that grammatical

interpretation cannot be more worthy than the psychological one and vice versa.61

He believed

that both have equal importance and must be analyzed at the same time. Thus far, first formalists

gave priority to the text, and then cultural critics gave priority to the reader, to the context, and to

the reader’s context. Furthermore, with all the various literary theories and approaches, one has

to wonder have the once exulted interpreters become obsolete. Under cultural studies everyone

was able to interpret the text. Boundaries that once elite culture could not (or did not want to)

overcome - popular culture was able to.

59 Meyer, Mihael. The Compact bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing. 6th ed. New York:

Bedford St. Martin's, 2003, 399.

60 Butler, Christopher. Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002, 1.



29

It appears that during most of the XX century historical criticism has been shadowed by

new criticism, and, yet, during the 1970s and 1980s historicism experienced a revival in the form

of Marxist criticism, new historicism, and even cultural materialism.62

Perhaps it is most obvious

in new historicism, although, it exists slightly in the other two as well. Cultural critics see

themselves as the opposition to power structures in society. They also look into not only the art

that is produced, but also the means of production. To them it is important who publishes the

books, how books are distributed, and who is buying them.63

These issues are of particular

interest to Marxist critics. During Marx’s lifetime the dominant critical approach was the

historical one, and he did not have a problem with accepting this. Regardless, Marx added one

more factor to literary analysis and that was the economic means of production.64

For this reason,

Marxist criticism is based on the historical approach, as it requires the reader’s understanding of

the social and economic conditions of the time the work was written in. Although, it has to be

pointed out that the founders of Marxism had in mind the commercial and not political use of

literature. Engels, for example, wrote, “that overt political commitment in fiction is unnecessary

(not of course unacceptable) because truly realist writing itself dramatizes the significant forces

of social life, breaking beyond both the photographically observable and the imposed rhetoric of

a ‘political solution.’65

Georg Lukacs, one of the eminent Marxist literary theoreticians and

critics, concurred with this view and believed that Realism was supposed to aid the proletariat in

its battle against capitalism.66

Then it is no surprise that he authored the reflection theory

according to which the text directly reflects the consciousness of society. Therefore, literature

mirrors the economic base, and it is the critic’s task to show that the characters in the text are

typical of the historical and socioeconomic setting and the author’s worldview.67

Yet, once again

the question arises, how do we interpret texts from the past with such accuracy? Can we really

‘speak with the dead’ as Stephen Greenblatt urged? The answer is simple: we cannot. The

62 Quinn, Edward. A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms. New York: Checkmark Books, 1999, 150-51.

63 Quinn, Edward. A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms. New York: Checkmark Books, 1999, 241. 64 Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: an Introduction to Theory and Practice. 5


2011, 169. 65 Eagleton, Terry. Marxism and Literary Criticism. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1976, 46.

66 Lukač, Đerđ. Prolegomena za marksističku estetiku. Beograd [Belgrade]: Nolit, 1975, 31.



2011, 171.

30

present, or as Hugh Grady argues ‘now,’ always influences our worldview. The vast majority of

contemporary adaptations attest to this claim. In post World War II East Germany, Bertold

Brecht68

will continue with Lukacs’ concept of the alienation, which is important for

understanding the literature, and art in general, of Social Realism.69

Social Realism is important

for the study of Marxist literary criticism. Literature was interpreted in relation to forces in

society such as history, economics, class, and ideology. In the beginning, one of the functions of

this criticism was to serve the interests of the Marxist revolution, however, contemporary

Marxist critics do not argue this point. Initial Marxist criticism had a huge effect on structuralist

Louis Althusser70

and on contemporary Marxist theorists Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton.

Marxist theory will turn out to be important for the development of new historicism, which in

turn will be important for the inception of presentism, since presentism is a sort of antithesis to

new historicism. Still, presentism is not alienated from certain Marxists theorists. Jameson’s

theory of dialectical self-awareness is interesting to presentist interpretation. He argues that

critics must be aware of their own ideology when interpreting a text. He does not exclude the

importance of the present moment when discussing textual analysis. Marxism also has ties to the

feminist movement and feminist literary theory. Eagleton explains that Marxists have learned a

lot from the feminists.71

Even though, Marx’s work was gender blind, new age Marxists are

connected to the feminist and post-colonial movements. The overall picture is that by 1980 it was

68 Brecht was a poet, playwright, and theater director with modernist views. He agreed with Lukacs; however, he

believed that the market dictated which texts will be published and which not, hence excluding the aesthetic

element. He advocated the abandonment of Aristotelian premises as he hoped to achieve the alienation effect with

the audience. Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: an Introduction to Theory and Practice. 5th

ed. New York:

Pearson, 2011. Print. (171-72) There will be more word about this later in the text with the analysis of Shakespeare’s

play Coriolanus.

69 Social realism, not to be confused with Joseph Stalin’s Socialist Realism, is a term first introduced by Maksim

Gorky and used by Lukacs and Brecht (among many others). This type of literature usually showed the alienation,

despair, and everyday life of the working class and the poor. Stalin’s Socialist Realism portrayed reality and its

revolutionary development. Its purpose was to educate and indoctrinate the masses with the new socialist ideology.

Popović, Tanja. Rečnik književnih termina. Београд [Belgrade]: Logos Art, 2007. Print. (680-81)

70 He was a French Marxist and structuralist, most prominent during the 1960s and 1970s. His anti-humanist

ideology was a huge influence for Cultural Materialists in the 1980s. Parvini, Neema. Shakespeare and

Contemporary Theory: New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012, (xv). Althusser

rejected Lukacs’s reflection theory. He advocated that society did have the power to give individuals identity, which

he called hailing the subject. If this failed, then revolution occurred. Raymond Williams, who developed the theory

of cultural studies, was his follower. Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: an Introduction to Theory and

Practice. 5th

ed. New York: Pearson, 2011, 173-74.

71 Eagleton, Terry. Why Marx Was Right. New Haven: Yale UP, 2011, 213.

31

thought that Marxism, as a political movement and as a literary theory, was dead. However, it is

not the case. As Eagleton argues in his book Why Marx Was Right (2011), the world still needs

Marxist philosophy. One can also argue that in the years when Marxism was overshadowed by

other critical approaches, it found refuge among the many alternatives of other theories, so there

were Marxists among feminists critics, Marxists among cultural critics, Marxists among post-

colonial critics, and Marxists within new historicism and cultural materialism. These alternatives

also made it possible for approaches and theories to co-exist, so it was no longer thought that

when analyzing a work one approach or theory would suffice. There were endless possibilities to

practicing interpretation.

Nonetheless, when it comes to the text and the reader, Marxist theory argues that the

reader cannot have freedom to analyze the text in isolation, and the text is part of the social

construct. Marxist theory is about ideology, and the relation between the individual and ideology

since: “religion is devoid of God, for it is thoroughly atheistic. The god of this religion is found

in the mirror and in humankind’s imagination.”72

However, the first argument does not support

the second. In fact, one can argue that the second argument does not only negate the first, since

humankind opposes individuality, but it is also presentist in nature. If god is in the mirror, then

any reader is god, and that is very subjective. So, the reader interprets the text according to his or

her own knowledge, experience, social and other influences. If this is so, then the interpretation

is based on the present. The same argument follows for psychoanalytic, post-colonial, and

feminist criticism.

Another approach that is based on the historical approach is cultural poetics, which is

another name for new historicism, and its British version cultural materialism.73

Among other

things, cultural critics believe that literature can cause social change. It can even be argued that it

was established as a political reaction to the events in Britain in 1991 or even sooner.74

The



2011, 180. 73 Jonathan Dollimore wrote that he borrowed the term “Cultural materialism” from Raymond Williams, who was a

British Marxist critic. He, too, devoted his life to studying culture and societal relationships; although, he was more

interested in the new forming class and culture than the existing one. Lešić. Zdenko. Novi Istoricizam i kulturni

materijalizam. Београд [Belgrade]: Alfa-Narodna knjiga, 2003, 50. 74 Michael Taylor wrote,” the new urgency in the historical criticism of Shakespeare in the 1980s, the new need to

resuscitate old scapegoats, was as much in response to the critics’ own political situation as was Tillyard’s to the

political situation of 1943 and 1944 or that of Jan Kott to the political situation in Poland of the late 1950s. The

32

British Conservative Party was in the process of reforming education in the way that they wanted

literature to be taught traditionally and not by discussing race, gender, and class. Cultural

materialists believed that the government was trying to exclude any form of English that was not

“standard English” and by standard they meant the English of middle-class white men.75

Therefore, cultural materialists were actively participating in current politics and culture instead

of writing about the past. They believed language and literature could bring a change to the

present. Kiernan Ryan wrote,

Cultural materialism seeks actively and explicitly the use of literature of yesterday

to change the world today. It is a brazenly engaged political stance, committed to

activating the dissident potential of past texts in order to challenge the present

conservative consensus inside the educational institutions where it is forged.76

This is exactly what Jonathan Dollimore, one of the founders of cultural materialism, had in

mind when he opposed the status quo that has been around for almost four hundred years in

Britain. Alan Sinfield, the other founder, also had a major role in this debate, and as it was

expected many others followed. For example, Catherine Belsey wrote about the role women had

in Renaissance drama, so that she could discuss the role women had in contemporary society,

while for Patricia Parker subversion was not only about the verbal, but it was also about the

visual. Cultural materialists were ready to discuss the present unlike new historicists. Perchance

it is best to explain where cultural materialism is situated in literary theory. Cultural materialists

deem themselves close to new historicists, while they also argue that some time ago a few of

their critics broke off and created a new movement called presentism. Finally, they contend that

cultural materialism stems from Marxism, which is based on the historical approach from the

XIX century, because both believe that culture is about the struggle between the dominant

discourse and the dissidents (the opposition, which is usually a marginalized group, i.e. a

1980s ushered in a historical criticism that by and large was left-wing (not to say Marxist), radical, and intensely

committed—in England anyway—to an instrumental view of literary criticism, particularly Shakespeare criticism,

that urged its readers to man the intellectual barricades in the fight against corporate capitalism and Thatcherism

generally.” Taylor, Michael. Shakespeare: Criticism in the Twentieth Century. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2001, 183.

75 Lešić. Zdenko. Novi Istoricizam i kulturni materijalizam. Београд [Belgrade]: Alfa-Narodna knjiga, 2003, 43.

76 Parvini, Neema. Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory: New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. New

York: Bloomsbury, 2012, 127.

33

subversive element). On the other hand, cultural materialism shares issues of subversion and

dissidence with new historicists. Sinfield wrote the following in his book Faultlines (1992):

“[contradictions] in ideology produce many dissident subjects, and control of them depends upon

convincing enough of the rest that such control is desirable and proper,” while for Dollimore

“subversion can arise from the cumulative impact of specific differences within a culture.”77

For

both critics, culture is living and it changes constantly, and with that change all relationships in

society are susceptible to it as well. However, these two groups disagree in the mere fact that

new historicists do not believe that change can occur while cultural materialists do. This is why

cultural materialists are the opposition to the conservative way of thinking according to which

Marxism, feminism, post-colonialism, queer studies, and other approaches and theories need to

be excluded from mainstream education, and possibly discussion. Besides, they differ from new

historicists because they are unified and represent a whole, while Stephen Greenblatt prefers to

speak only for himself and does not like systemizing new historicism.

In order to shed some light on these complex relationships, one must mention that

Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy (1984) is possibly the most important work for cultural

materialists. He wrote that all traditional interpretations insisted on idealistic categories that

supported the established political system. He even accused former critics, such as A.C. Bradley

(character criticism) and T.S. Eliot (formalism), of analyzing literature only according to

classical general and atemporal categories78

while excluding the dissident ones.79

Together with

Alan Sinfield,80

Dollimore proclaimed the tenets of this approach. According to Neema Parvini:

“Dollimore […] refuses to privilege ‘literature’ in the way that literary criticism has done

hitherto; it ‘eliminates the old divisions between text and context.’”81

However, the context he is

referring to is not connected to the present interpretation of the text. There should be no

objections to hermeneutics having a traditional approach to analyzing literature. However, the

77 Ibid, 124-5.

78 Traditional analysis included, among other features, analysis of characters, tone, emotional appeal, moral

criticism, and so on. 79 Lešić. Zdenko. Novi Istoricizam i kulturni materijalizam. Београд [Belgrade]: Alfa-Narodna knjiga, 2003, Print. 80 Sinfield published Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (1992) and Political

Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism (1994). Both works are important for cultural materialism. His later

works have also contributed to queer theory and gay/lesbian criticism; something that he is very passionate about. 81 Parvini, Neema. Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory: New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. New


34

possibility of having alternative interpretations should not be belittled or challenged. Every

society has a culture and various subcultures that exist within it. All these subcultures existing on

the fringe of the prevalent culture have variations upon variations of interpretation of written and

spoken language, and each and every variation is an alternative discourse. Furthermore, literature

that is written by someone who is a part of any subculture, or dissident group, will inevitably

have a different context than the one written by a proponent of the dominant discourse. It follows

that this becomes the interrelated point between cultural materialism and presentism.

Cultural materialism has its roots in Marxism, and its connection to Marxism is not only

based on shared terminology, but also the fact that both believe that culture can cause political

change. Cultural materialism is close to other theories and approaches such as formalism, since

one of the methods that it utilizes is close reading. Yet, they also incorporate other methods of

interpretation. Cultural materialists believed that for centuries there had been only one way of

interpreting the text, and that it was the dominant way of viewing literature. Consequently, they

argued that there are many alternative ways of reading and interpreting the text. Basically, they

have taken the labor and legacy of hermeneutical approaches of the second half of the XX

century, and entwined it within one theory. Finally, cultural materialism is connected to

presentism because it, too, has a strong commitment to the present.82

While pointing out the

difference between the two Ewan Fernie argues, “[that] ‘Presentism’ marks ‘a major

methodological departure’ from both new historicism and cultural materialism in that it

recognizes that Shakespeare is ‘more embedded in our modern world than he ever was in the

renaissance.’”83

Cultural materialists are also interested in Shakespeare, but they want to know

how he influences the present culture and how it can change, while presentists are interested how

the present influences the text. Fernie’s words are perhaps more of a comment intended for new

historicists than cultural materialists. Needless to say, more will be said about Fernie’s work

during the discussion of presentism. What he is conveying is that presentism wants to change

how people read Shakespeare today. Nevertheless, what Fernie posits about Shakespearean



83 Ibid, 139.

35

studies is also true for all literature; the context that a text gets today will, more or less, be

alternative and influenced by the ‘now.’

2.3 New Historicism

The truth is that presentism originated as an antithesis to new historicism, which began as

an attempt to go back into the past and re-consider the cultural mechanisms that interfered with

writing and interpreting literary works. For new historicists the text was no longer autonomous,

and other elements were necessary in order to interpret it. Peter U. Hohendahl concurs with this

relatively new hermeneutical approach and says,

Texts literary and nonliterary are always part of a network; they cannot be

isolated without reducing their meaning. In this respect the New Historicism is

especially opposed to the formalist interest in isolation and textual fetishism; but

also to any notion of artistic creation as it was present in the formalist credo.

According to Greenblatt, ‘there is no originary moment, no pure act of

untrammeled creation’.84

It appears that the text was not ‘sacred’ anymore, and that the period in hermeneutics in which

the text could exist independently from the reader was over. Now, the text was viewed as an

integral part of society, which it emulates. Presentists would agree that the text could not be

isolated from society. However, they would disagree regarding the role society had in the

exchange. As a matter of fact, the text could not exist isolated from the society of the reader.

Nowadays, when reading Shakespeare one would be heavily influenced by one’s own society.

Would Stephen Greenblatt’s view mean that someone who had no, or limited, knowledge of

Shakespeare’s life, and the history of Elizabethan England, could not understand and enjoy his

plays? On the contrary: hundreds of thousands of people who have read, commented, and

enjoyed his works would beg to differ.

84 Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. “A Return to History? The new Historicism and Its Agenda.” New German Critique 55

(winter 1992): 94.

36

After almost a full century of dominantly ahistorical approaches and methods, new

historicism offered a new way of understanding literature based on its historical context. They

argued that the history and text had an unbreakable bond. Furthermore, a text could be

interpreted in relation to the historical documents and non-literary texts, such as letters, diaries,

treatises, wills, bills, contracts, local chronicles of the period. New historicists could even

uncover facts about the author and his life that even he did not know at the time. So, the

questions are: how are they new (historicists), and what role does history play in their

interpretations? Historians had only marginal interest in new historicism, because new

historicism dealt with intertextualization and contextualization. Furthermore, they distanced

themselves from traditional historicism and Marxism, although, the British version was closer to

Marxist theory than the Berkeley one85

(Berkeley being the place where Greenblatt worked

before he moved to Harvard)86

. Carolyn Porter makes the distinction between the two by

commenting, “To periodize [history] by reference to world views magisterially unfolding as a

series of tableaux in a film called Progress. […] New historicism rejects these tableaux in favor

of ordering history only through the interplay of forms of Power.”87

Along those lines, and in an

attempt to explain an approach that seemed to have a few fractions, Parvini wrote how

Greenblatt and Gallagher had their own counter-histories which stand as alternatives to

mainstream history. Additionally, he also commented on the differences between old and new

historicism:

Greenblatt’s new historicism is ‘new’ on two accounts: first, because it is a return

to a historically contextualized (and therefore politicized) reading of literature

after the dominance of new criticism and its formalist cousins and, second,

because it is distinct from the old, monological historicist practices of the 1930s

and 1940s.88

85 Ibid, 87-104.

86 The shift from Berkeley to Harvard is often mentioned in critical commentary not only because of Greenblatt’s

move, but also because some see it as a political move from the left toward the right, while in Britain new

historicism is still predominantly leftist. 87 Porter, Carolyn. “Are We Being Historical Yet?” South Atlantic Quarterly 87 (fall 1988): 765.



37

Greenblatt is considered the founder of this ‘new’ approach, and he became famous for his

extensive research and work in this field. He also became well known for arguing that he wanted

‘to speak to the dead;’ meaning that he believed that much of what we needed to know about a

text comes from the past. A text could be understood by looking into the biography of the author

and the time it was written in (social, economic, political, and other circumstances that occurred).

He also argued how: “Contemporary theory must situate itself …not outside interpretation but in

the hidden places of negotiation and exchange.”89

It’s interesting that he uses clearly Marxist

vocabulary (words such as: exchange, circulation, negotiation, and moment of exchange), which

supports the tie between Marxists theory and new historicism, even though, he somewhat

distanced himself from it. This is also interesting because Marxism found a way to exist with

new theories, and what is even more fascinating is the fact that it is happening in the United

States – the one place where traditional Marxism was not welcome. Despite the similarity to the

traditional approach new historicism was different:

Where traditional historical criticism sees a text against a backdrop of historical

events, new historicism views the text as a participant in a historical or political

process that it “reconceives.” In the words of the new historicist Louis Montrose,

this approach is interested in “the historicity of the text and the textuality of

history.90

Obviously, there was significance in the influence history had on the text, and how the text

accurately portrayed the time it was written in. There seemed to be no concern with the creative

ability of imagination and the category of aesthetics, which the formalists valued. Even though it

had a dominantly historical view of the text some perceived new historicism as a cultural

approach. H. Aram Vesser and Catherine Gallagher agreed that even though it was an attack on

formalism it was as much a reaction against Marxism as it was a confirmation of it.91

Guerin et

al., argue that it is one of the three ways of studying culture, and they state that it: “[concerns]

itself with extraliterary matters, including letters, diaries, films, paintings, medical treaties, et. It

89 Greenblatt, Stephen. “Towards a Poetics of Culture.” In The New Historicism. Ed. H. Aram Vesser. New York:

Routledge, 1989, 13.

90 Quinn, Edward. A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms. New York: Checkmark Books, 1999, 217. 91 Vesser, H. Aram, ed. The New Historicism. New York: Routledge, 1989, xi.

38

looks for opposing tension in a text, then for an opposing tension in history.”92

Still there is no

one and definite definition that they adhered to, which can be viewed as a possible downfall of

this approach. As history and culture change, new historicists must be flexible and always on the

look out for doubleness and subversion.93

Conceivably, Greenblatt was thinking of Michel

Foucault while setting the direction of the approach, since Foucault argued that defining a

discipline was a way of controlling the discourse at hand; hence, disciplines limited and confined

discourse. 94

With this in mind, Greenblatt decided that he did not want to commit to defining

what new historicism was, and whether he would rather prefer the term cultural poetics to it. This

is why there are more than a few fractions within the approach. Others see a reflection of

Lukacs’ theory in Greenblatt’s question: “How did so much life get into the textual traces?

Shakespeare’s plays, it seemed, had precipitated out of a sublime confrontation between a total

artist and a totalizing society.”95

Greenblatt is looking for elements on power within plays that

can be connected to the Elizabethan society. He argues that in the plays one could find direct

references to the historical events of the time. After reading Clifford Geertz and Michel Foucault,

Greenblatt could not accept new criticism and other hermeneutical approaches and theories that

were dominant in academia until then; by the same token, he could not follow E. M. W.

Tillyard’s96

old historicism. The American scholar and novelist Frank Lentricchia even called

new historicism “Foucault’s legacy.” Thereby, the writings of Geertz and Foucault became

foundational for the development of new historicism. Foucault was a XX century French social

theorist, historian, and philosopher. He redefined history and declared that history was not linear

and not teleological (there was no purposeful going toward some known end. For him history

was a complex interrelationship of a variety of discourses (artistic, political, social), which form

92 Guerin, Wilfred L., et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 4

th ed. New York: Oxford UP,

1999, 248.

93 Ibid, 248.

94 Фуко, Мишел. Поредак дискурса. Лозница: Карпос, 2007. Print. (28-30)

95 Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. “A Return to History? The new Historicism and Its Agenda.” New German Critique 55

(winter 1992): 92.

96 Tillyard was one of the foremost “old historicists” from the 1940s. He advocated monological approach of

historical scholarship, which meant that he was concerned with discovering a single political vision of a certain

period, which meant, according to new historicists, that he was prone to generalizations. Parvini, Neema.

Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory: New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. New York: Bloomsbury,

2012. Print. (99-100)

39

an episteme or a discourse formation. These alternative discourses depended on language and

thought, which differed in each period in history, and each: “[established] its own criteria for

judging what it [deemed] good or bad; and certifies what group of people develop, articulate,

protect, and defend the yardstick whereby all established truths, values, and actions will be

deemed acceptable.”97

Hence, the focus of critics and historians switched to discourse. They

found that there are many discourses in society, and one way of quickly and surely imposing a

certain discourse is education. Foucault believed that those who are in power could, politically,

enforce the desired and favorable discourse (written and spoken) in many ways, and one of them

is through the educational system. Yet, if society supports one discourse, then, likewise, there are

certain types of discourses that have to be excluded and/or prohibited. This is why the discussion

on how literature was taught, and what literature taught, in schools was crucial. The power of the

discourse was what Greenblatt was intrigued with. Greenblatt takes from Foucault the term

‘power,’ which had two meanings: the temporal outside powers, and the power that an individual

has to make changes in society.98

Greenblatt views power as the ideological struggle between

containment and subversion. He wrote about this cultural phenomenon in “Invisible Bullets,” and

argued that: “[…] subversive insights are generated in the midst of apparently orthodox texts and

simultaneously contained by those texts, contained so efficiently that the society’s licensing and

policing apparatus is not directly engaged.”99

His point is that subversive elements can even be

found in rather “innocent” texts, and he believes that even individuals who pluck words out of

context can find something subversive in them. He continued by explaining that after researching

texts from the Renaissance he concurred with the historian Carlo Ginzburg that authors used

literature as vessels for subversion. One can argue that literature (and other forms of art) by the

means of its mere ability to vocalize and comment, sometimes even directly, is frequently used

for criticizing authority. The presentists do not contend this claim, however, how would one

know what exactly Shakespeare and Marlowe criticized? Today scholars know some facts about

their lives, but many aspects and facts have fallen into the temporal abyss. Therefore, presentists

argue subversion in a different manner. Hence, the queries: how are literary works used in a



2011, 185.

98 Lešić. Zdenko. Novi Istoricizam i kulturni materijalizam. Београд [Belgrade]: Alfa-Narodna knjiga, 2003, 76.

99 Greenblatt, Stephen. "Invisible bullets: Renaissance authority and its subversion." Glyph 8 (1981): 41.

40

subversive way in today’s society? How is Shakespeare’s Coriolanus read in China, and how is

it read in the UK? Why does the tragedy Romeo and Juliet have so many adaptations in the

United States? Why was the release of “O,” Tim Blake Nelson’s adaptation of Othello, shelved

for two years because its release date coincided with the Columbine School Massacre? It is

because these texts have the subversive elements that could, as Foucault would agree if present,

comment on today’s society; and not only comment, but also they would be powerful enough to

influence the audience or even disturb the established order. Yet, Greenblatt prefers to look back

into the past. In the formerly mentioned article, he continued with examples of the writings of

Thomas Harriot,100

who wrote about the first days of the colonists among the natives. Greenblatt

argues that among the texts written by the authority there were subversive elements. Simply said,

the establishment or any authority can use the text to exercise their power to elicit reactions from

the audience in order to contain them, and this is how authority stays in power. New historicists’

references to Foucault also implied that the status of the author changed as well. Zorica

Bečanović-Nikolić comments that the author no longer has the role of the transcendental subject,

someone who thinks, has insight, and speaks independently. He is someone who is susceptible to

the disseminated, anonymous, and albeit repressive discourse.101

The once proclaimed ‘dead’

author is being assessed in the writing process. However, with new historicism it is not only the

author as creator who is evaluated, but it is also the role he has in historical terms. They ask: how

is Shakespeare shedding light on events from his time? How much was he affirmative of power

or subversive within his own time? New historicists believe that the author can teach the

contemporary reader some kind of alternative form of history.

New historicism was also influenced by Foucault when it came to antihumanism – the

belief that there is no universal human nature. Both cultural materialists and new historicists

agree that people are ‘individuals’ with their own characteristics, which are conditioned by their

social environment. Geertz wrote in his The Interpretation of Cultures that if men were

independent of culture, they would be “unworkable monstrosities with very few useful

instincts.”102

The argument is that men are not isolated from culture and everything that man

100 Greenblatt, Stephen. "Invisible bullets: Renaissance authority and its subversion." Glyph 8 (1981): 40-61.

101 Bečanović Nikolić, Zorica. Šekspir iza ogledala. Beograd [Belgrade]: Geopoetika, 2007, 276.

102 Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Sketched Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973, 48.

41

produces is influenced by it, and by analyzing a text one can know something about the culture

that produced it. To state the obvious, once again, one has to wonder why the consideration of

the reader and the culture in which the reader produces the interpretation is not sufficiently

explored within the context of new historicism. If the culture that produces the text is important,

then it must follow that the culture that produces the interpretation is of equal importance. It

supersedes that if one wants to define the relationship between art and society, then it is

inevitable that one must define the relationship between art, interpretation, and society. This

relationship is two-way. One cannot argue, as new historicists do, that culture influences the text

and the author without considering that culture influences the reader as well. One can state that

any work of art would not have any purpose or value if there were not an audience.

New historicism argues that all analyses stem from one’s history and society, and, during

that process, new historicists want to keep all interpretation authentic and completely accurate.

Its popularity is most definitely related to the extensive research of the past, which has shed light

on many texts regarding historical events (and culture in general) of the time the text was written

in. Its founders and followers teach at the most eminent institutions where they practice and

advocate this approach. Nevertheless, it is certain that this approach cannot be applied to every

text; some texts will be more historically accessible, while with others such analyses would be

highly unlikely – perhaps even impossible. Still, new historicism has great hermeneutical value.

It challenges the assumption that one approach or method suffices, it opens up the possibility for

numerous alternative interpretations, and it brings back the importance and role of the author as

well as the concept of the subversive in society, even though new historicists argue that it is

contained. Most of all, for this work, new historicism is important because it challenged scholars

like Hugh Grady, Terence Hawkes and Ewan Fernie to discuss the alternative view, which is

presentism.

42

3. Presentism as a Hermeneutical Approach

For all the recent emphasis on re-creating the vanished space of

Shakespeare’s plays’ first reception, we continue to know very little

about how the original audience reacted to the play.

Hugh Grady

Jan Kott’s book Shakespeare Our Contemporary is still a relatively important piece of

criticism in Shakespeare studies. One of the still appreciated aspects of this book lies in the fact

that Kott had developed his version of presentism a half a century before it was conceptualized

and promoted by several postmodern critics. Kott was a highly eloquent and widely educated

Polish intellectual, with liminal and controversial war and postwar personal and political

experiences, who found an original way of demystifying and interpreting Shakespeare for the

twentieth-century readers. Along with persuasively showing how King Lear can be understood in

the light of Beckett’s theater of the absurd, or how Lady Ann’s acceptance of Richard of

Gloucester’s cynical wooing can be read from the perspective of the existential philosophy of his

day, for example, Kott had also pointed out to the fact that Shakespeare’s writing had

unavoidable ‘presentist’ aspects (avant-la-lettre). He showed that Shakespeare enriched his

Roman plays and histories with elements from his own time. For example, Kott writes,

“Shakespeare did not know philosophy, had no knowledge of warfare, confused customs of

different periods. In Julius Caesar a clock strikes the hour. A serving maid takes off Cleopatra’s

corset. In King John gunpowder is used in cannons.”103

The fact of the matter is that it is not

about Shakespeare’s knowledge, or the lack of it that Kott points out to - it is about the inevitable

protrusion of the present moment into any writing; hence, a corset and a clock made their way

into a time in history when they did not exist. Shakespeare wrote about things and events that

were known to him. He also used his texts as commentaries of social and political events that

were of immense importance: “For, King Lear, like Hamlet, is also a tragedy of man

contemporary with Shakespeare; a political tragedy of Renaissance humanism. A tragedy of the

103 Kott, Jan. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Trans. Boleslaw Taborski. New York: Anchor Books, 1966, 26.

43

world stripped of illusions.”104

When he wrote about Richard III he was not only presenting a

play − he was saying that despite the ‘Grand Mechanism’ that existed there was also the

individual who was human, full of faults, and with a diabolical desire to annihilate all in his way.

Yet, Kott did not primarily look into the influence of Shakespeare’s present on his works, he

mainly wrote about the interpretation of Shakespeare in his own twentieth century time. He

comments on the perturbing scene of Lady Ann and Richard, and how it “should be interpreted

through our own experiences. One must find it in the night of Nazi occupation, concentration

camps, mass murderers. One must see it in the cruel time when all moral standards are broken,

when the victim becomes the executioner, and vice-versa.”105

He saw the embodiment of Lady

Ann’s unfortunate circumstance in the lives of all of those who suffered during World War II.

Furthermore, for example, he interpreted Hamlet, as a text, which “unless produced in a stylized

or antiquarian fashion, […] immediately absorbs all the problems of our time. […] Every age has

its own Poloniuses, Fortinbrases, Hamlets, and Ophelias.”106

He argues that before Hamlet goes

on stage, he first goes to the dressing room and prepares. The actors themselves bring a lot to the

stage with their own perception of the play and the characters. Both directors and actors

inevitably leave a mark of their own time and their own understanding of human relations and

the surrounding world. A theater production of Shakespeare is always a hermeneutical dialogue

with the text. When not ‘deliberately’ antiquarian,’ theater is, by its very nature – dialogical and

‘presentist.’

Fifty-years later, Kott’s way of interpreting literature will be seen as a modernist

precursor of a postmodernist approach known by the name of presentism. Among the advocates

of presentism are Hugh Grady, Terence Hawkes, Ewan Fernie, and Evelyn Gajowski. Many

others joined the discussion and contributed to this approach and literary criticism in general.

Their books, articles and dialogues have also shown that there is not only one presentism at

stake. Presentism is as diverse as the many other approaches and theories working within it;

hence, despite the historical interpretation there is no one Shakespeare to discover and read, but,

instead, a multitude of Shakespeares. Perhaps it is best to begin the discussion about presentism

with the writings of Hugh Grady.

104 Kott, Jan. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Trans. Boleslaw Taborski. New York: Anchor Books, 1966, 40. 105 Ibid, 44. 106 Ibid, 64-65.

44

3.1 Hugh Grady and the Urgency of Discussing Presentism

Hugh Grady is a preeminent Renaissance scholar who taught at Arcadia University,

Pennsylvania. His publications include: The Modernist Shakespeare (1991), Shakespeare’s

Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification (1996), Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and

Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet (2002), Presentist Shakespeares

(co-edited with Hawkes, 2007), Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics (2009), Empson, Wilson,

Knight, Bamber, Kott: Great Shakespeareans (2012), Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now:

Criticism and Theory in the 21st Century (co-edited with Cary DiPietro, 2013). His research does

not only focus on the Renaissance and Shakespeare, but it also includes literary theory and

aesthetics.

In 1991, before presentism was recognized as a critical and hermeneutical approach,

Grady wrote The Modernist Shakespeare, an analytical critical study of modernist interpretations

of Shakespeare and their major, paradigmatic representatives: G. Wilson Knight and his ‘spatial

hermeneutics’, the American new critics, with T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and William Empson

as their sources of authority and inspiration, F. R. Leavis and the critics of Scrutiny, E. M. W.

Tillyard and his positivist historicism. Although the postmodernist approaches are not visible in

the title, the final chapter of the book “Toward the Postmodern Shakespeare” contains

genealogical explanations of the emergence of deconstructive, new historicist, feminist, and

other postmodern readings of Shakespeare, which came out of postmodern philosophy,

aesthetics, literary and social theories. Even though he did not introduce the term presentism in

that book, he was already working with that concept. He began with the statement that “all

interpretation bears within it the imprint of the moment of history in which is was undertaken but

equally, the past only takes on meaning through the inescapable present. There is nothing

absolutely startling in this idea.”107

He makes an interesting analysis of the Zeitgeist dominating

cultural production versus the Zeitgeist dominating interpretation. He believes that it is important

to take into consideration both aspects in order to have the complete meaning of Shakespeare’s

texts. He doesn’t fully embrace new historicism, since he argues, “it is to object to the naïve

107 Grady, Hugh. The Modernist Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991, 2.

45

antiquarianism of so much contemporary Shakespeare scholarship – even sophisticated and

radical criticism -- that finds its professional justification in a misguided attempt to recover past

meanings as if they existed without a relation to the present moment of the critic’s own social

and historical situation.”108

Yet, he does not abandon it as a possibility. Closer to the future

presentist stance, he emphasizes that the here and now is never completely homogenous with the

past, no matter how complex its wide anthropological, historical, and hermeneutic approach may

be. In essence, he acknowledges that new historicism is one-sided in its attempt to understand

literature solely by looking into the past. For Grady, there is no “authentic Shakespeare.” The

true authentic Shakespeare of his time is long gone, and today’s critics and readers can never be

able to understand that Shakespeare. Here Grady turns to the concept of alternatives109

, which

will dominate Shakespeare criticism of the late XX and early XXI century. He identifies the

legacy of Marx in the background of a ‘panoply’ of Marxisms that existed in the various

competing intellectual and critical discourses of the XX century.110

Yet, Grady remarks that

Shakespearean studies have resisted more than any other studies when it comes to alternatives. It

is no surprise that the beginning of the nineties brings a slow “dismantling of the existing

Modernist critical paradigms”111

and the emergence of the alternative ones. This was also the

period when scholars wondered whether new historicism would last as an approach, or will it,

like Jean Howard posited − produce more “new readings.”112

Perhaps the question of how long

new historicism would last was connected to the concepts of subversion and containment. On

one hand, Greenblatt argued that subversion will always be contained, and on the other, feminists

and Marxists argued that it cannot be. This was a huge problem for feminists, who in the end

never found refuge or acceptance within new historicism. The importance of Grady’s discussion

of new historicism lies in the way new historicists view the present, which will tread the way for

the emergence of presentism almost a decade later. New historicists believe that the present helps

change the lenses how the past is viewed, but, according to Grady, they tend to ‘bracket’ the

108 Grady, Hugh. The Modernist Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991, 3.

109 Back in 1985, John Drakakis edited the book Alternative Shakespeares (New York: Methuen, 1985).

110 Grady, Hugh. The Modernist Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991, 6. 111 Ibid, 191. 112 Ibid, 226.

46

present in order to reach the past, as much as the ‘old,’ positivist historicist did.113

This is how

Grady credits and criticizes Greenblatt: “His attempt […] is certainly powerfully original and a

welcome opening of the windows in the closed space of previous academic criticism. But it is

still unclear whether the new historicism can fully escape the positivist practices of the old. My

suspicion is that the rules of professionalism are at work in producing the quietistic relation to

the present that is evident in the most of the American new historicists’ works […[.”114

On the

other hand, Grady also examined the British cultural materialists, especially Barker and

Dollimore, who is credited with re-writing the Renaissance, which caused the past to appear

differently.115

However, Grady tends to see both new historicism, and its more radical British

version, cultural materialism, as easily ‘contained’ practices, whereas he seems to expect

Shakespeare criticism potentially capable of being an eye-opening activity for the readers eager

to understand their ‘human condition’ in the current historical and political circumstances of

their own present. Certain revisions of new historicism could be seen as precursors of

presentism. Another work that influenced Grady and that contributed to his analysis of the

relationship between the present and the past was Peter Erickson’s essay “Rewriting the

Renaissance, Rewriting Ourselves.”116

Grady discusses it in the last chapter of The Modernist

Shakespeare, where the prospect of Shakespearean feminist criticism is taken into consideration.

Grady states, “shrewdly, I believe, Erickson goes on to identify the most enabling ‘blind spot’ of

the new historicism in its refusal to address its own political situation in the present.”117

In the

particular paragraph, fully quoted by Grady, Erickson posits that the problem between new

historicists and feminists is not only in the disagreement regarding gender, but also in the

conflicting attitude toward the present. Erickson wrote how feminists were interested in the

politics of the present while new historicists avoided this topic.118

The same author continues by

explaining that for new historicists the critic’s present is an enemy to the historical accuracy,

while feminists, such as Adrienne Rich, believe that the past can help us change the present.119

Of course, this is not presentism, but it opened the door to alternative interpretations of the

113 Ibid, 230. 114 Ibid, 230. 115 Ibid, 234. 116 Erickson, Peter. “Rewriting the Renaissance, Rewriting Ourselves.” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 327-37.

117 Grady, Hugh. The Modernist Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991, 242. 118 Erickson, Peter. “Rewriting the Renaissance, Rewriting Ourselves.” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 331. 119 Ibid, 336.

47

present, which opens itself in the dialogue with old texts, since the present is active in relation to

the past. He also agreed with Harry Berger120

, who said that one cannot just change thinking caps

when reading a text from the past, with Jean E. Howard121

, who wrote that our view is always

informed by our present view, and with Margaret Ferguson122

, who claimed that what is seen

depended on how it is seen. Yet, the most compelling case for the importance of the present

Erickson makes when he quotes Stephen Orgel:

To take the psychoanalytic paradigm seriously, however, and treat the plays as

case histories, is surely to treat them not as objective events but as collaborative

fantasies and acknowledge thereby that we, as analysts, are implicated in the

fantasy…. But if we accept this as our paradigm and think ourselves as Freud’s or

Shakespeare’s collaborators, we must also acknowledge that our reading of the

case will be, again, chiefly about ourselves. This is why every generation, and

perhaps every reading, produces a different analysis of its Shakespearean text.123

For Erickson and Orgel, the key is in the importance of the critic/reader. In the end, it is the

reader who creates the fantasy and the meaning with his/her imagination, intellect, education,

and political perspective. Even Shakespeare relied on his playgoers to use their imagination and

bring his plays to life, as, for example, in the Prologue of Henry V:

And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,

On your imaginary forces work.

Suppose within the girdle of these walls

Are now confined two mighty monarchies,

Whose high upreared and abutting fronts

The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;

Into a thousand parts divide on man,

120 Berger, Harry, Jr. Spenser: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968, 1-12. 121 Howard, Jean E. “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies.” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 13-43. 122 Ferguson, Margaret W., Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers, eds. Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses

of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1986, xxii. 123 Orgel, Stephen. “Prospero’s Wife.” Representations 8 (1984): 1-13. This article also appeared in Margaret W.

Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers, eds. Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual

Difference in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1986, 50-64.

48

And make imaginary puissance;

Think when we talk of horses, that you see them

Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;

For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,

Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times […]. (Act I Prologue)

It is easy to understand how this article made an impact on Grady and why he addressed it in his

book. The fact is that these ideas support Grady’s future work and may have contributed to the

formation of what will later be called presentism. By no means did any of these critics invent a

new stance. Others before them discussed the role of the reader and the present moment. Let us

remember the mechanisms of the formation of meaning in Gadamer’s hermeneutics, for

example, and his notion of the ‘hermeneutic situation’ of the recipient. However, what

Shakespearean critics did realize and advocate is that no discourse or interpretation could exist

without considering the influence of the present situation on the reader/critic/viewer. For them,

the present represents an inseparable, indispensible, and perhaps even domineering part of the

interpretation process.

In Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification (1994), Grady

discusses Postmodernism and Modernism from the present point of view. He says that the book

is about Shakespeare in our time, and he goes on to examine and determine Postmodernism,

which according to him began to manifest itself in Shakespeare studies in the 1980s. However, in

order to do that, he had to define Modernism, which preceded it. He argues that Postmodernism

presented a breaking away from the modernist assumptions and premises in the above-mentioned

approaches to Shakespeare. This significant paradigm shift undoubtedly greatly influenced “the

perception of the past.”124

Furthermore, he evokes Walter Benjamin who, says Grady, “insisted

that the past is always already constructed by us, as an enterprise of the present moment, the

Jetztzeit which is our unique historical moment.”125

Once again, like in his previous writings, he

comes to the conclusion that the present moment defines how one interprets the past; hence, his

effort to encompass the major traits of Modernist and Postmodernist interpretations of

124 Grady, Hugh. Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Post modernist Studies in Early Modern Reification. Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1996, 3.

125 Ibid, 4.

49

Shakespeare, and to position his own hermeneutic point of view. For him, it is important to keep

in mind that, when interpreting Shakespeare, one is dealing with the early Modern culture

productions, and that both the purely aesthetic and formalist readings typical of the American

new criticism, and the political readings of the alternative Postmodern strategies, are being

anachronistic in insisting on the aesthetic or on the political interpretations.126

Grady’s

contention, regarding the optimal hermeneutic stance is the following:

The only way out of this, in my view, is a straightforward ‘presentist’ self-

situation in the Postmodernist era on the grounds that there is no other choice,

except that of disguising the set of concepts which one inevitably uses to

approach and ‘read’ an alien culture. It is necessary not to give up ‘historicism,’

however, but to contextualize it. Indeed, at the present juncture in renaissance and

Shakespeare studies, it seems no longer viable to be simply ‘presentist’ or to be

simply ‘historicist,’ we are forced to define an adequate dialectic between the two,

as the best of the new work, including that of Dollimore and Sinfield (often

explicitly) and of Greenblatt (more often implicitly), has attempted. In particular,

I want to adopt and amplify the important insight of these and other critics that

our own Postmodernist distance from the Enlightenment creates for us new

revealing perspectives on the Pre-Enlightenment Renaissance – if ones that can

never dissolve the difference between early modern and Postmodernist.127

Nevertheless, while being aware of the crucial impact of the present on how we perceive the

past, Grady shows his intellectual responsibility by resisting the temptation to reduce the past on

the blank screen with the projected shadows of the present. He uses a philosophical term

‘presentism’, which has a somewhat negative connotation in so much as it designates that only

the present objects exist,128

although, later, Grady will explain that the term ‘presentism’ is used

positively to describe the influence of the present on interpretation. Still, it must be noted that the

term was only introduced at the time and no theoretically conceptualized approach was

advocated.

126 Grady, Hugh. Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Post modernist Studies in Early Modern Reification. Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1996, 6-7. 127 Ibid, 7. 128 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/#PreEteGroUniThe

50

Some years later, in 1999, Grady published an article in which he quoted John Dryden

and Thomas Rymer who wrote that Shakespeare “belonged to a former age rather than the

present. [Since] Restoration and early-eighteenth-century critics using the lenses of

neoclassicism and new canons of correctness in speech saw Shakespeare as barbarous and

Gothic in many ways.”129

Here Grady already had a clear concept of what presentism represents

and how it works, although, he is still not defining it as such. The whole article is based on the

view of different literary periods had of Shakespeare. The point is that every period saw him

through the lenses of their time and not of his (Shakespeare’s). Once again, in this article, Grady

returns to the Postmodern Shakespeare criticism and to the alternatives offered by feminist

criticism, or by Foucault, who inspired new historicism and who saw each discursive formation

as a coinciding and even conflicting multitude of discourses, and Judith Butler who argued that

both identity and self are continuously “performed” within socially given discourses or

ideologies.130

Even though his essay was about modernity, it is undeniable that he was already

developing and arguing a presentist approach. Nevertheless, presentism does not have to exclude

history, which is something that Ewan Fernie will argue later on. The need for including the

present moment in interpretation did not dissipate over the next few years. In 2002, Grady wrote

Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet and in the

introduction he explained how new historicism had taken over the hermeneutical scene and how

its connections to the cultural present were unexamined or suppressed. Eventually, a new

approach was on the rise, in Shakespeare studies, which was called, for lack of a better word,

presentism.131

Grady clarifies that he took that word from the field of history and philosophy of

history.132

The term is rather pejorative in those fields, “designating a naïve view of the past as

homogenous with the present,”133

but he believes that such a term could be considered positive in

literature and would represent a worthy alternative to new historicism, which was so dominant

that certain approaches (even theories) that existed in the 1980s, such as feminism and the

129 Grady, Hugh. “Renewing Modernity: Changing Contexts and Contents of a Nearly Invisible Concept.”

Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 3 (1999): 269. 130 Ibid, 277. 131 Grady, Hugh. Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet.

Oxford: UP, 2002, 1.

132 Ibid, 1, n.1.

133 Ibid, 1.

51

psychoanalytic theory, were overshadowed and eclipsed by new historicism. He elaborates on

this new approach and says that presentism shares many of the postulates with new historicism,

but at the same time it represents “an important challenge to historicists premises because they

underline the salient point that all our knowledge of works from the past is conditioned by and

dependent upon the culture, language, and ideologies of the present, and this means that

historicism itself necessarily produces an implicit allegory of the present in its configuration of

the past.”134

His argument is that every story from the past has a message for the present; hence,

every past is linked to the present in an inseparable way. So he points out that “[i]n studying the

configuration and reconfiguration of the themes of power and subjectivity in central

Shakespearean plays, [he has] come to the conclusion that these plays, in effect, constitute

interventions within our own theoretical discourses on these topics with late modernity.”135

He

continues that when he looks into the works of Machiavelli and Montaigne it is not to analyze

them within their own time; rather, it is to see how their works resonate and exist within our own

time. He wants to know how Machiavellian terms of power are used today, or how Montaigne’s

“potential subversive skepticism and, interestingly in the modern context, an account to

subjectivity which emphasizes its potential for resistance to power and ideology as these terms

have come to be defined in the late twentieth century.” 136

He makes the connection between

Montaigne’s, Machiavelli’s, and Shakespeare’s writings to modern-day events and debates.

Furthermore, Grady explains that he had already used a presentist approach in the past

while writing his Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf. In that book, he “used the theory from our

cultural present to help understand and reinterpret works from the past,”137

however; he also used

a historicist dimension while looking into the Jacobean mentality, in order to better understand

the works. He posits that he still needs a historicist view, in order “to compliment the opposite

procedure of [his] previous book.”138

The concept that plays an important part in both Grady’s

134 Ibid, 2.

135 Ibid, 3.

136 Ibid, 5.

137 Ibid, 2.

138 Ibid, 20.

52

studies considered here, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification and

Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet,

comes from Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment, which seems to have a

central position in his own intellectual horizon. As a matter of fact, Grady noticed, “important

aspects of the dialectic of enlightenment defined by Adorno and Horkheimer were in operation

already in the sixteenth century.”139

He does not argue the point that Shakespeare used

Machiavelli’s works, but that “many of the plays written in this period take Machiavelli’s most

famous ideas on value-free realpolitik and use them as the starting point for multidimensional

probings and conflicting interpretations of the cultural and political crises these ideas

produce.”140

Therefore, Grady explains that he still needs historicism in order to examine the

influence of Shakespeare’s present day philosophy on his works, which in its own way can be

interpreted as a presentist stance, since in his day his works were highly influenced by the

politics and philosophy of his age. Perhaps this is why presentism, as Fernie will argue later,

does not have to exclude historicism. Historicism, on the other hand, is not concerned with the

present moment nor does it take into account the influence of the present on the process of

interpretations. They also share Foucault’s understanding of history and culture as common and

overlapping theoretical framework, since presentism acknowledges the existence and function of

many discourses within the present mindset.

In 2008, Grady wrote “Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics: The Case of A Midsummer

Night’s Dream.”141

He discusses presentism through aesthetic theory, which is to say that

aestheticism shares the fate of literary theory. Basically, aestheticism went through a few

decades of being redundant, but after the 1980s it came back because “nonaesthetic criticism has

largely exhausted itself or led to disconcerting dead ends.”142

During the past thirty years many

changes have happened in literary theory. Despite David Scott Kastan’s claim that “the great age

of theory is over,” one can see that, in fact, there has been a revival of certain theories such as

139 Ibid, 20. 140 Ibid, 20.

141 Grady, Hugh. “Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics: The Case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Shakespeare

Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 3 (2008): 274-302.

142 Ibid, 277.

53

historicism. Also, some new theories have come into existence—like presentism. By the same

token, aestheticism, which was appreciated in the XIX century, became rather obsolete during

the politicization of literary theories and approaches. Grady posits that it is with the banishment

of the political from theory that has enabled aestheticism to return. Furthermore, once again he

argues, “all our perceptions of the past are presentist, in the sense that we are always immersed

in our own ideologies and aesthetics as we work to reconstruct the past; the past reveals new

facets to us as our own understanding of it changes and develops.”143

He makes a case both for

presentism and aesthetics that just because they were not known as such in the Renaissance it

does not mean they did not exist. Moreover, he argues in his paper that the aesthetic in A

Midsummer Night’s Dream is both presentist and historicist.

Hawkes and Grady worked together on introducing presentism as a possible, and, yet,

necessary manner of interpreting literature, and in 2007 they could see that there were three

major contemporary movements: new historicism, cultural materialism, and presentism.144

They

argue that presentism is more than just an obstacle in viewing the past, and that it is impossible

to completely recapture the past, as it is impossible to step out of one’s own time. Grady wrote

an article for that edition titled “Hamlet and the Present Notes on the Moving Aesthetic ‘Now.’”

The article is a survey of selected interpretations of Hamlet from the earliest to the latest critics,

since plays/texts “must be reinterpreted from generation to generation, as culture, language,

values, and assumptions evolve and change over time.”145

Grady relies on Adorno’s

‘enigmaticalness’ of a work of art, implying “a concept-resisting ‘truth-value.’”146

The article

follows the reactions to Hamlet from the Renaissance, through Neo-classicism and Romanticism

to Modernism and Postmodernism. He examined the different views playgoers and critics had

toward it. Apparently, when the play came out, it was accepted, because ghosts and madness

were appealing at the time. Later, Shakespeare’s famous disregard for Aristotle’s ‘three unities’

made him unpopular with the Neo-classicists, which caused his plays to be seen as barbarous and

143 Grady, Hugh. “Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics: The Case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Shakespeare

Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 3 (2008): 279.

144 Grady, Hugh and Terence Hawkes, eds. Presentist Shakespeares. New York: Routledge, 2007, 1-3.

145 Grady, Hugh. “Hamlet and the Present Notes on the Moving Aesthetics.” Grady and Hawkes 142.

146 Ibid, 141-42.

54

not fit for the cultured. However, Shakespeare’s fame and status remained through this period

because of the respect for his natural poetic talent. During the German Romanticism,

Shakespeare was considered as one of the greatest poets in world literature because Romanticism

valued aesthetics and subjectivity. For the German Romanticism Hamlet was an exceptional

work. This appreciation continued well into the XIX century. Unfortunately, in the XX century

there was a decline in status of this play. Grady views Eliot’s essay “Hamlet and His Problems”

as one of the reasons. Eliot did not approve of the “misleading interpretations”147

of the

Romantic interpreters. His contention was that the enigma of Hamlet’s motivation was due to the

play’s aesthetically insufficient composition, lacking the famous ‘objective correlative’, and not

due to the subtleties of characterization. The Postmodernist Shakespeare critics found theoretical

incentive in major postmodern theorists. Thus, Hawkes played with Derrida’s deconstruction in

his essay “Telmah,” known as an attempt of showing the radical indeterminacy in Shakespeare’s

text. Marjorie Garber relied on Freud, Nietzsche, Lacan, and Derrida in her interpretation of

Hamlet as a drama about memory and forgetting. Stephen Greenblatt’s later work Hamlet in

Purgatory (2001) is a study, says Grady, more “rooted in the historicist than the presentist side of

Greenblatt’s methodology.148

However, Grady notices both sides in Greenblatt’s book: the

prologue presents the entire book as stemming from the death of Greenblatt’s father, and, on the

other hand, the complex approach to pre-modern emotions of mourning as transformed into

dreams, by way of cultural negotiation, bears the historicist traits. Here is Grady on Greenblatt:

The work of art that is produced in this transaction is one that defies – has defied

for four centuries – a crystallizing focus on its energies behind some clear

concept, but by that very quality makes its lost context available to subsequent

ages, in constantly regenerated and re-organized forms as history develops.

Greenblatt’s embrace of an essentially poststructuralist, Postmodernist idea of the

play’s textuality, its openness to a multiple, unending series of interpretations and

re-interpretations, makes his reading of the play simultaneously a work of

147 Ibid, 152.

148 Ibid, 160.

55

(incomplete) cultural restoration an a contribution to the culture of

Postmodernism.149

Therefore, “[t]here can be no historicism without a latent presentism.”150

By commenting a long

series of interpretations of Hamlet across centuries, and by analyzing both historicist and

presentist aspects of the contemporary Postmodernist criticism, Grady arrives to the conclusion

that “a work of art always exists in the present to the extent that it remains a work of art, and it is

precisely for this reason that presentists criticism is inevitable, if it is sometimes disguised (as

late it has been) as historicists criticism.”151

The content of the above-mentioned essay shows

that interpretations and acceptance of Shakespeare’s works, and even Shakespeare himself,

varied from period to period and depended on the present moment of those times. This is why he

claims that any historicism will always have a latent presentism within it.

Cary DiPietro and Hugh Grady co-edited Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now:

Criticism and Theory in the 21st Century (2013), and in it they explain that the book was the

result of many years of presentist research and the strong presence of Shakespeare in our

multicultural time. They wanted to engage in the re-shaping and re-thinking of “Shakespeare

across time and space” and “the creative encounter between a 400-year-old text and active,

creative readers and audiences in the present.”152

DiPietro and Grady take the words “urgency of

now” from the Martin Luther King, Jr. speech given during the 1960s American civil rights

movement.153

The urgency, as they explain, lies in the fact that now is always changing, and that

it “implies some necessity of agency,” since the world is changing at such a rate, and since the

interpretation of Shakespeare’s works changes at proportionally same rate. The influences of

economy, culture, politics, and ecology are constantly altering one’s worldview just as

Shakespeare is infusing “performance, film, popular culture, and academic criticism.”154

Now

149 Grady, Hugh. “Hamlet and the Present Notes on the Moving Aesthetics.” Grady and Hawkes 161.

150 Grady, Hugh. “Shakespeare Studies, 2005: A Situated View.” Shakespeare: A Journal 1.1: 115. 151 Grady, Hugh and Terence Hawkes, eds. Presentist Shakespeares. New York: Routledge, 2007, 161. 152 DiPietro, Cary and Hugh Grady, eds. Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now: Criticism and Theory in the 21

st

Century. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 1.

153 Carson, Clayborne, and Kris Shepard, eds. A call to conscience: the landmark speeches of Dr. Martin Luther

King, Jr. Atlanta, GA: IPM, 2001, 82,162. 154 DiPietro, Cary and Hugh Grady, eds. Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now: Criticism and Theory in the 21

st


56

more than ever, Shakespeare is ever so popular. Perhaps the main interest is in the research of

what is lost and gained between today’s audience and old texts.

The emergence of presentism and its theoretical awareness and development show that it

is not connected to the old and naïve approach to the past, and it was intended to be more than

just another approach. Regarding this stand, Grady and Hawkes wrote, “It was meant […] to be a

‘big tent’ under which a number of different contemporary critical tendencies could be

grouped—tendencies with the shared view that a wholly historicist approach to literary criticism

is reductive of the complexities of reading in the present.”155

Despite certain rumors among

scholars that presentism is already dead and a perspective of the past, Grady commented at the

2015 Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) conference that presentism is alive and well,

that he still believes that it is a “big tent,” and that it exists now with these various approaches

that are within it. Evelyn Gajowski’s presentism, which is at the same time feminist in nature, is

an example of this theoretical amalgamation that Grady is describing. For him, such

interweaving is a logical outcome in literary criticism. On the one hand, many approaches and

theories have developed since Shakespeare’s works were written, and, on the other hand, the

present is innate in any given time period. It is then reasonable to expect such fusion. Grady also

comments on how there were similar tendencies in new historicism. Marxist critical theory is a

good example of a theory working well within new historicism and within presentism. At the

aforementioned SAA, Grady was the co-leader (with Christian Smith) of the seminar on Marxist

Shakespeares / Shakespearean Marx, which attests to the importance and demand for such

alliances. Conferences and panels are calling for more and more re-readings and re-

interpretations of old texts, which proves that presentism is not on the horizon, but that it is very

much present in recent research. Grady concluded the introduction to his new book by writing

that the purpose of it was created by the urgency that is felt in the academia. He continues,

We [contributors to this edition] hope that by forging analogies between the felt

immediacies of our world now and the historically situated texts of Shakespeare’s

plays, the essays presented here will help to forestall a deradicalized historicism

by emphasizing, rather than the facts of the past, the ever-shifting nature of

155 Ibid, 3-4.

57

historical context and, rather than the inevitable inescapability of our presentness,

its necessity.156

One of the reasons for such urgency is because there is a global and international crisis in the

debates, and it appears that the academic world is one of the last places for a reasonable debate.

Therefore, there is urgency for scholars to participate and provide a critical and valuable view on

present-day issues.

Grady and DiPietro wrote a co-authored article “Presentism, Anachronism, and Titus

Andronicus,” which is their contribution to the co-edited collection of essays. In it, they discuss a

particular type of presentism as one of many possible approaches. Therefore this presentism is

One that acknowledges the importance of scholarly attempts to understand the

contexts of the texts that come down to us − while also acknowledging that such

historicist efforts nevertheless are always already implicated in the assumptions

and values of the “now” within which they are created. The “timelessness” of

literature, we have learned is a façade for our reconstructions of the past at our

specific historical moment − all too often a façade concealing unspoken

assumptions from our own time.157

The argument is that these works are made in a certain historical moment, and that moment is

imprinted in the works. Presentists are aware of that. However, what they claim is that those

works, and historical moments, are interpreted outside their point of origin, which challenges the

reader. They also point out that there is no “timelessness,” since “there is a complex negotiation

between then and now, and one that has to be continually renegotiated as our “now changes in

the wake of developing history.”158

The interaction between the present moment and any past

moment is constantly changing because the “now” is always influenced by current events and

there is always a different point of view from which one is interpreting the past. Grady and

DiPietro are advocating an “allegorical” approach, which is based on Walter Benjamin’s theory

156 Ibid, 6.

157 Ibid, 9.

158 Ibid, 10.

58

of allegory and Richard Halpern’s application of it to literary analysis.159

Benjamin’s theory is

based on two premises: the first one is that every text is open, unfinished, with only an illusion of

totality, without organic wholeness, which means that further interpretation is possible, and the

second one is that every text is layered, and with multiple intended significations, which means

that all texts can be interpreted in more than one way. The general essence is that history is re-

made and reborn in the reader’s mind. He was particularly interested in plays in which history

always presented a different era than the one it was written in − texts that were anachronous. The

unfinished and allegorical text is compared to archeological “ruins,” around which the whole

construction has to be imagined. According to Benjamin, “allegories are, in the realm of

thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.”160

In order to examine both the historical

difference and critical practice in the context of presentism, the authors analyze Titus Andronicus

and the use of anachronisms in the play.161

In this play, the classical past and the Elizabethan

present meet. This is why Benjamin’s allegorical theory. The present day audience adds another

layer to the interpretation process. The play is based on many classical sources, so it is

impossible to use a strictly historical approach to analyzing it. Also, an argument can be made

that the politics of the play can be mirrored varyingly in different societies. It could have had one

meaning in Elizabethan England opposed to another meaning it could have today. Grady and

DiPietro argue that the play, thus, represents Shakespeare’s own presentism, since it is his own

“creative amalgamation of neoclassical humanism and Latin sources that brings the past into

view through a historical context particular to the play’s renaissance audience.”162

They claim

that the historical shifting in the play is as impressive as the shifting of importance of the play in

recent decades. The play has come into focus recently, whereas, once it was considered one of

his disappointments due to its extreme violence. The play is also a good example of

159 Richard Halpern, Shakespeare Among the Moderns. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1997, 1-14; Walter Benjamin, The

Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedmann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap,

1999, 331. DiPietro, Cary and Hugh Grady, eds. Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now: Criticism and Theory in the

21st Century. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 10.

160 Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London: New Left Books, 1977,

178. Quoted in DiPietro and Grady, 10.

161 DiPietro, Cary and Hugh Grady, eds. Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now: Criticism and Theory in the 21st


162 Ibid, 13.

59

anachronism—when in one play the audience has to keep in mind multiple histories/times and

constantly shift between the past and the present.

The 1595 sketch of Henry Peacham is also the object of Grady and DiPietro’s attention. It

is famous for its many anachronisms in the representation: Queen Tamora is dressed in a

medieval costume, while Titus is dressed in a roman tunic, and the Roman soldiers behind him

look like Elizabethan infantry. Aaron is portrayed as a starkly black sword-waving young man

dressed in a tunic. As Grady and DiPietro observe, the dark skin and the Oriental implications

are threatening to the Elizabethan audience, since there is “equation between villainy and skin

color.”163

There are other examples from the text itself such as the reference to Lily’s grammar

from 1540, and it is because of the displacements of time that many critics in the XIX century

considered these historical inaccuracies as ridiculous, an as Grady mentions, even disputed

Shakespeare as the author. The assumption is, according to these two authors, that these textual

anachronisms are deliberate, and that “Shakespeare’s creative presentism is the vehicle by which

the past becomes meaningful for Elizabethan audiences.”164

Shakespeare’s temporal

misplacement, which is considered by historicists and new historicists as temporal solecism,

worked for the Elizabethan audience just as it would work for today’s audience. The post-9/11

Western world has the same fear and equalizes the dark-skinned oriental individual with

terrorism just as it once did with barbarism.

Having thus recognized and analyzed Shakespeare’s ‘presentism,’ Grady and DiPietro

concentrate upon the meanings that could be drawn from Titus Andronicus today. One of their

theoretical impulses comes, as it could be expected, from postcolonial studies, and one of its

major thinkers – Edward Said. Although, Said’s term Orientalism refers to the colonial discourse

originating from the XVIII and XIX centuries and disseminating its meanings further on along

the entire XX century, the basic binary construct of the Orient as inferior and alien, dangerous

and barbaric other/otherness opposed to the positively denoted West, formed part of the early

modern perceptions of the East as well. Aware of the critical arguments according to which Said

had not taken into account the changing temporal dimension of the constructs which make up

Orientalism, Grady and DiPietro remind their readers that Said understood the impossibility of

163 Ibid, 17. 164 Ibid, 19.

60

stabilizing or objectifying constructs like Orient, or – Shakespeare. Very much like a presentist,

Said wrote in his article “Orientalism Constructed,”

Similar problems are commonplace in the interpretation of literary texts. Each

age, for instance, re-interprets Shakespeare, not because Shakespeare changes, but

because despite the existence of numerous and reliable editions of Shakespeare,

there is no such fixed and non-trivial object as Shakespeare independent of his

editors, the actors who played his roles, the translators who put him in other

languages […] readers who have read him and watched performances […]. On

the other hand, it is too much to say that Shakespeare has no independent

existence at all, and that he is completely reconstructed every time someone reads,

acts or writes about him.165

This point also disputes timelessness, because it is not about a play being such that it will always

be interpreted the same way—that it will resist the passage of time. Each performance carries

elements of the time it is created in, which is why certain plays are more popular in certain

periods. Perhaps, the turbulent and violent past few decades have brought back to popularity

certain Renaissance (and other) plays, which were considered barbaric or brutal before that. One

of them is Titus, and as the authors say, the play resonates more with our own culture than some

other plays do.166

By the same token, certain texts have disappeared from school curriculums.

One of these texts is William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily.”167

Unfortunately, the

text has many words that offend the African-American community, and it is not a good idea to

teach it now when the situation between the African-American subculture and the white

population is strained.

It has been mentioned, at the beginning of this section, that Hugh Grady and Terence

Hawkes co-edited notable collection of essays Presentist Shakespeares (2007). They

165 Said, Edward. ''Orientalism Reconsidered.'' Cultural Critique 1 (Autumn 1985): 92.

166 DiPietro, Cary and Hugh Grady, eds. Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now: Criticism and Theory in the 21st

Century. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 31. 167 I taught this text as part of the curriculum for an English 68 course at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut,

California (2007-2009). However, the African-American students did not like the text and felt uncomfortable

because of the frequent use of the N-word in the text. This is why I deleted the text from the syllabus and substituted

it with Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use.”

61

collaborated on other projects as well, but Terence Hawkes also had his own prolific career and

contributed immensely to championing presentism.

3.2 Terence Hawkes: Culture, Education, and Presentism

Terence Hawkes (1932-2014) taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and

later at the University of Cardiff, Wales. He changed literary studies in England, and made an

astounding contribution to the study of literary criticism and the development of presentism; he

made a great impact on literary criticism in Great Britain, as a sharp and audacious critic and a

cutting-edge editor of the famous Routledge series Accents on Shakespeare (1977-2013). Among

other innovative editorial moves, he championed presentism and introduced it in the wide range

of the postmodern approaches to Shakespeare. His scholarly journey spanned from writing about

structuralism to poststructuralism and in the end to introducing, conceptualizing, and developing

presentism. John Hartley, first a student of Hawkes’ and then a long-time friend of his, wrote an

in memoriam article168

about the three great cultural critics who died in 2014 − Stuart Hall,

Richard Hoggart, and Terence Hawkes. Hartley presents Hawkes primarily as a cultural

materialist and then as a presentist, which reflects the respective impact of the two critical

positions Hawkes has contributed to. This illustrates the discussion about cultural materialism

and presentism and the elements that they share. As mentioned before, Parvini also believes that

presentists have been a rogue branch within cultural materialism, preferring to “satisfy their

desire of talking to the living.”169

In the formerly mentioned article, Hartley explains how he met

Hawkes, and how he had the luck of having him as a mentor in Cardiff. Hawkes believed that

education presented Shakespeare in certain, politically charged, light; as a consequence, culture

and education had influence on class hierarchy, which he, as no proponent of scholarly

convention, openly criticized. Hawkes wrote about high culture and popular culture, and he

believed that popular culture had an immense impact on Shakespeare studies. He was also a jazz

aficionado, and he argued that jazz could contribute to the “democratization of culture and

168 Hartley, John. “Building Cultural Studies: New Brutalism, Hoggartsborough and All That Jazz.” Fusion Journal

005 (August 2014). Web. 2 September 2015.



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emancipation from authoritarian control.” For a while, he generated discontent with many critics

for writing about the parallels between jazz and Shakespeare. This particular view he voiced in

the book That Shakespeherian Rag (1986). Some of his most influential works are: Metaphor

(1972), Structuralism and Semiotics (1977), Meaning by Shakespeare (1992), Shakespeare In the

Present (2002), was the editor of Alternative Shakespeares, Vol 2 (2002), and as general editor,

many books within the already mentioned New Accents, which changed the course of English

studies in Britain, and with Hugh Grady he was also the co-editor of Presentist Shakespeares

(2007).

Long before Hawkes became a presentist he realized that “reality lies not in things

themselves, but in the relationships which we construct, and then perceive, between them.”170

He

continued to explain that he viewed the world in which the nature of every element was

determined by its relationship to other elements and not by its own characteristics. During his

stay in America in the 1950s, he was writing about structuralism, and these comments reflected

his thoughts on language. However, some years later he would engage in presentism, and much

of what he said about language could be reflected on his view of hermeneutics. Interpretation,

the text, the reader, culture, politics, language, etc. were indivisible elements of the reading

process, and one of them could not be considered dominant while the others were neglected and

excluded.

In Shakespeare in the Present171

, Hawkes said that at the time (i.e. during the last decades

of the XX century and at the beginning of the XXI) there was an urge in Shakespeare studies to

read the plays historically.172

It appears that presentism came as an alternative to this dominant

tendency in academia, and it was just as much an alternative to new historicism as all other

approaches were to new criticism. Hawkes believes that it is impossible to repeat the past, and as

he says, “[restoration] may aim to be the thief of time, but it’s a notoriously unsuccessful one.

170 Hawkes, Terence. Structuralism and Semiotics. New York: Routledge, 2003, 135.

171 Hawkes, Terence. Shakespeare in the Present. New York: Routledge, 2002, 1.

172 Ibid

63

For none of us can step beyond time. It can’t be drained out of our experience.”173

Evidently, he

argues that we can see the past only through the eyes of the present, which means that one’s

perceptions and understandings are tainted by what people know and what surrounds them. Also,

one has to take into consideration the alternative histories that exist. That means that one’s

understanding of history is different from another’s. There is also the problem of facts. As

Hawkes says, they are not isolated, and they mean nothing until the reader gives them meaning.

Furthermore, he says, “We choose the facts. We choose the texts. We do the inserting. We do the

perceiving. Facts and texts, this is to say, don’t simply speak, don’t merely mean. We speak, we

mean, by them.”174

Yes. The reader is the sum of all of his/her experiences and knowledge, and

various teachings, which lead to unique and present interpretations. The reader chooses

deliberately or unconsciously what will be read, and it will be read. Once again, one is reminded

of Croce’s words that all history is contemporary history. Hawkes knew this entirely too well and

advocated it openly. According to Hawkes, there are two areas in which presentism aims to make

ample contribution to Shakespearean studies: the first appertains to the development, or as he

calls it “devolution,” in British politics, which is based on the constitutional changes regarding

Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland since 1997. The second relates to “ [Presentism’s] crucial

investment in the reversal of apparently immutable conceptual hierarchies such as

primary/secondary, past/present […]. After all a fully paid-up presentist will always feel entitled

to ask how the influence of Shakespeare on Marx or Freud matches up to the influence of Marx

or Freud on Shakespeare.”175

Presentists, like Hawkes and Fernie, do not negate the past and the

influence it has on the present. In fact, they are very much interested in the reciprocal

relationship that they share.

Every screenplay that was written and every theater performance that was staged is

presentist in nature. Each director wishes to make his adaptation unique and memorable, so they

present their own version of the original text. This is what presentism is about. Another question

173 Ibid, 3.

174 Ibid, 3.

175 Ibid, 4.

64

that deserves an answer is: can the reader be sure of what the author thought? When one reads a

text one is not only interested in what the author wanted to say; the reader is absorbed into the

plot because he wants to re-live that story. Every high-school girl reading Romeo and Juliet

wants to have that heart-breaking romance with her own Romeo. Many readers are not thinking

about why Shakespeare wrote the play; they are reading it because they want to have that

experience. So Greenblatt’s wish ‘to speak to the dead’ does not resonate much with the majority

of readers. People read for their own experience of the story. There can even be more

understanding for the claim that Othello mirrors more the racial problem in modern day United

States than it did in Shakespeare’s England. It is certainly a most heated issue considering many

recent events in the United States. Can anyone, except the highly devoted scholars, read

Shakespeare as new historicists propose? The answer is – not many can. Hawkes points out how

after the fall of Berlin, at the end of the Second World War, in the American sector, the Office of

Military Government of the United States appointed a number of Theater Officers, and the sole

duty of these officers was to approve or ban plays by placing them on the “white” list or the

“black” list (white being the approved one and black being the banned one). The purpose of the

lists was to, “[benefit] the defeated and traumatized populace in need of radical political re-

education.”176

The two Shakespeare plays that made the white list were Macbeth and Hamlet,

since: “[the] former held brusquely to affirm that ‘Crime Does Not Pay’, the latter’s inclusion

more curiously justified on the basis of its alleged treatment of ‘corruption and justice,’” and the

two that made the black list were Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, because they glorified

dictatorship.177

The “policing” of the United States Government and the allied forces was

necessary in order to prevent art from influencing the masses, or, in other words, from art

working as a subversive element. At that moment in history, certain art, or in this case plays, was

used to coerce the audience into a required set of mind. It is clear that this is a presentist

approach to art. “In other words, what confronts us here is a ‘presentist’ reading of Hamlet, made

in and for the new ‘present’, which began in 1945 […].”178

Since the text of Coriolanus could in

no way be “changed” and “transformed” for that specific task the play was considered

undesirable. Undoubtedly, any work of art is always viewed from the present moment, and so it

176 Ibid, 66.

177 Ibid, 66.

178 Ibid, 76.

65

will always be viewed based on the current social, economic, and political events; just as the

Elizabethan audience was presentist at the time. Hawkes borrows Clifford Geertz’ phrase to

explain the presentist approach:

“[Thick] description”: a focus on the symbolic dimension of social actions which

aims to place them in the context of the cultures in which they occur and to

construe them as events whose raw content (available in ‘thin” description) is

ultimately overridden by a larger semantic function. Such activities do not “mean”

in themselves. It is we who mean, by them.179

Accordingly, the German audience of Berlin in 1945 allotted the meaning to the plays. They

were the ones who viewed the plays and assigned the adequate, and in essence presentist,

interpretation. Literature has always been used, misused, and abused for political purposes.

Hawkes was interested in the connection between the British culture in the past and the one in

the present. He was also worried about the changes that were happening in Britain and how

Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland were always ill favored. Everything was always English

even though it was in Britain. Such claims are reminiscent of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of

hegemony in which one social class dominates over another.180

He also asserted that this

“power” was never supposed to be complete. If it crossed certain lines there was the danger of

rebellion. Perhaps, Hawkes feared that Britain would reach this tipping point if institutions

continued with the dominance of Englishness.

At this point, it has to be noted that Ewan Fernie, a fellow presentist, distinguishes

Hawkes’ presentism from Grady’s since “Hawkes’ presentism is more performative: an assertion

and demonstration of the immediate freedom and energy of the critical act.”181

Hawkes believed

that in shaping the current political climate literature had a pivotal role. Amazingly enough, it

just happened that the Bard became an official spokesperson of the Monarchy. Correspondingly,

at the beginning of World War II (in 1940), G. Wilson Knight wrote an essay titled “This

179 Ibid, 89.

180 Gramsci, Antonio. Il Risorgimentio. Turin: Einaudi, 1979, 70.

181 Fernie, Ewan. “Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism.” Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005): 171.

66

Sceptred Isle: Shakespeare’s Message for England at War,”182

to influence the nation and

awaken the sense of pride and patriotism, and to achieve his goal Knight used the following

quote from Queen Elizabeth I’s prayer: “O! Let thine enemies know that thou hast received

England, which they most of all for thy Gospel’s sake do malign, into thine own protection. Set a

wall about it, O Lord, and evermore mightily defend it.”183

The heightened political situation in

1940 required looking back into the past and following in the footsteps of one of the toughest

and most inspiring British monarchs, or turning to the words of the most famous British poet and

playwright. The past was being re-read in the image of the present. The fact of the matter is that

people were understanding and accepting the text in the way that was needed at the time.

Hawkes wrote about the difficulties of contemporary adaptations/re-creations. He based

this inability to stay accurate, to the time they were written in, on two conflicting principles.

Thus, he comments, “Repetition invariably fails to produce sameness” (140). He found that

presentism existed long before he wrote about it. Commenting on Jorge Luis Borges’ famous

experiment “Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote”, Hawkes concluded: “In theory, repetition,

simulation, copying may be the midwives of sameness. In practice, they tend the subtle womb of

difference.” 184

In the same text, Hawkes quotes Kierkegaard: “The dialectic of repetition is easy,

for that which is repeated has been – otherwise it could not have been repeated – but the very

fact that it has been makes the repetition into something new.”185

In his discussion he also

included Gilles Deleuze: “Since there can be no immaculate ‘sameness’, there can be no absolute

repetition. Whatever returns affirms and confirms, by returning, its difference.”186

The paradox

lies in the assumption that if lines are repeated many times, they should be the same; however,

Hawkes states that repetition leads to new ways of viewing, interpreting, and understanding

those same lines. For this reason presentism and new historicism are juxtaposed. Oddly enough,

they have many common points, and yet they define each other by their contrariety. Adaptations

are always different in some way from the original text, and this is why there is no absolute

repetition or exact reenactment. Nevertheless, richness, beauty, and aesthetic value lie in the

differences or as Eliot would claim – in their originality. Undeniably, the more a culture allows

182 Hawkes, Terence. Shakespeare in the Present. New York: Routledge, 2002, 130. 183 Ibid, 130. 184 Hawkes, Terence. Shakespeare in the Present. New York: Routledge, 2002, 132 185 Ibid. 186 Ibid, 133.

67

variety and difference, the more it is bounteous. The main point is that who is to really know

what an authentic Shakespearean text is and what a reconstruction of it may be.

Hawkes mentions another important element because of which this “sameness” is

unachievable. It follows that even if one could recreate the setting, the costumes, and the place,

there is one crucial element that can never be repeated, and that is – the audience. No matter

where a play is filmed or performed, it can never be the same. The audience has changed from

Shakespeare’s time, and it also changes today from one culture to another. The audience of his

time understood the play in their own presentist way as does the audience of today. As Hawkes

notes, “Like it or not, modern playgoers will almost certainly be literate, multinational, and

steeled for an encounter with Great Art.”187

Modern playgoers have their own understanding of

the play, and thus, he concludes, over the centuries the same lines have been viewed differently

and always anew. Perhaps it would not be reasonable to expect to understand Shakespeare’s

plays as his rather homogenous and somewhat illiterate audience did. This brings the discussion

to the aspect of anti-humanism, which presentism shares with new historicism and cultural

materialism, as with a number of other theories and approaches. There is, according to all of

them, no universality of the human condition. When scholars discuss his universality, they

mostly think of Dr. Johnson’s preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765), in which the

Bard is praised for having the gift to faithfully present reality and human nature in his works.

Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare. The Invention of the Human (1988) is a widely familiar late

twentieth century disseminator of this attitude. Thus, Shakespeare is universally regarded as

universal. On the other hand, he is universal as much as it means that he is universally adaptable

to different cultures. Even when his lines are unacceptable or politically subversive he is still

adaptable to the concepts of unacceptable and subversive within that particular culture.

In the “Introduction” to Alternative Shakespeares 2, Hawkes asks the question:

Alternative to what?188

It is not an easy or gratifying task to state what the authentic and true text

meant. Hence, the various alternatives exist not only from one century to another or from one age

to another, but they also exist within this particular century, or one time, or one culture. He

attests that Shakespeare exists in today’s (for argument’s sake let’s say Western) culture on a

187 Ibid, 140. 188 Hawkes, Terence, ed. Alternative Shakespeares 2. New York: Routledge, 1996, 1.

68

number of levels. Shakespeare is an important figure in the curricula and criticism regardless of

the hermeneutical theory or approach. There is a Shakespearean immersed in every type of

interpretation. Shakespeare is also an indispensible part of popular culture. He is everywhere:

from T-shirts to coffee mugs and refrigerator magnets. He is not only a name, to allude to

Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” but he is also a commodity that has become a rather lucrative business.

Hawkes even wrote an article “Bardbiz”189

in the London Review of Books, and spiked an

unbelievable discussion in the form of post-responses to his article between James Wood, Alan

Sinfield, Graham Martin, John Drakakis,190

and a few other university professors. The article

mainly focused on the rebuilding of the Globe and the problem of the terms ‘reconstruction’ and

‘original.’ Hawkes wondered if one should be content with the premise that origins create

authenticity, and that history and change should be forgotten. He explicitly voiced his discontent

with the public’s interest in re-creating something that would be more an attraction than the real

original theater. He claims that the original Globe was torn down and the one that was build after

it was in fact a reconstruction, which would mean that the present one would be a reconstruction

of a reconstruction, which does not seem so authentic (somehow one cannot but think how

similar this view is to Plato’s interpretation of art). Whether the new Globe building is original or

not − to the public it does not matter. Nowadays, Shakespeare has become a business, and

everything that is connected to him has become a matter of profit. In the article, Hawkes did not

seem to be concerned with this matter much; he only wished to continue the discussion on what

is it that is being sold: the original or the copy? Hawkes was interested in adaptations and the

power they had over the audience. He wrote that when Samuel T. Coleridge analyzed The

189 Hawkes, Terence. “Bardbiz”. London Review of Books. 22 February 2002. Web. 9 October 2015.

190 The heated discussion began with Wood’s response in which he claimed he did not agree with Hawkes treating

of Shakespeare’s texts as sponges that soak up various historical, ideological, and social discourses. He argued that

in that case nothing could have its value since it always changes. According to Hawkes, Wood claimed that the text

had no power to resist history. Alan Sinfield replied that he was annoyed with Wood’s accusations and that he

(Wood) did not understand what Hawkes was saying. He also called Wood dismissive and not willing to participate

in the discussion. Wood, who insisted on the aesthetic values of the texts, argued that the text was there to affect the

reader, and that the cultural materialist reading gave odor of energetic statements of a dying enterprise. Sinfield

replied again and said that Shakespeare is a cultural token and that what is important is – the discussion. The whole

debate went back and forth for months until Wood ended the conversation by saying that “These moments are like

symptoms; they appear without regard to a writer’s intention or will. The humanist is interested in good intentions,

the materialist in bad symptoms. But the humanist is the real radical.” At the time, presentism wasn’t yet perceived

as a specific approach, and none of the participants treated Hawkes as a presentist; rather, they considered him a

cultural materialist. Hawkes, Terence. “Bardbiz”. London Review of Books. 22 February 2002. Web. 9 October

2015.

69

Tempest he did it in such a way that the play seemed very much Romantic just as A.C. Bradley

turned Shakespeare’s plays into Victorian novels.191

Although, Gary Taylor defended Bradley,

since he believed that it only looked like that, because his critiques resembled a novel; they were

elaborate and serious.192

Therefore, in every time he will be analyzed and presented within the

culture and the Zeitgeist. A fine example would be the 1963 Hollywood blockbuster “Antony

and Cleopatra,” which was directed during the golden years of Hollywood. The movie became

infamous for its cost of production of 44 million dollars instead of the estimated 2 million and

the lavish costume and scene designs. This particular version is not considered an adaptation of

Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, but it is a faithful representation of the time it was filmed

in.193

The same case can be made for the 1936 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in

which Leslie Howard (age 43) played Romeo, while Norma Shearer (age 34) played Juliet. At

the time, the two actors were so popular that the director cast them to play the teenage lovers.

Even though the production and acting were a success it is unlikely that the Bard had that kind of

casting in mind. Both adaptations would seem rather uninteresting or even grotesque to today’s

audience, which proves that the reception of texts/adaptations changes with the times. Hawkes

also writes about the process of shaping works to fit specific purposes. He mentions the use of

Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens in two separate, yet related occasions. Apparently, according to

191 Hawkes, Terence, ed. Alternative Shakespeares. 2 vols. New York: Routledge, 1996, 4. 192 Bečanović-Nikolić, Zorica. Šekspir iza ogledala. Beograd [Belgrade]: Geopoetika, 2007, 90.

193 The filming of “Cleopatra” began in 1960 in London, and it premiered in 1963. The movie needed to be an eye-

filler for various reasons. Namely, the US was going through a conflicting and uncertain political period. After

World War II America entered the Cold War with the Soviet Union and as a result got engaged in the Korean War

1950-1953 in order to contain the red tide of communism. Since the war did not end as anticipated, America had to

engage in the Vietnam War 1955-1975 in order to prevent further communist expansion. As early as 1950 America

sent some 20 000 military advisors to Indochina; however, the war escaladed and America joined it in 1962. The

agenda was to prevent the domino theory, propagated by Dwight D. Eisenhower, which deemed that if communism

did not stop in Vietnam it would spread to the whole region and one after the other countries would become

communist. At the same time, John F. Kennedy was fighting the war against racism and racial rioting at home and

the Cubans in the Golf area. It seemed that he was losing on all fronts, so America needed to look strong. He needed

to establish America as a super power that can balance out the Soviet influence in the world. Hence, the Vietnam

War had to be won, and at home America had to look like the Promised Land. Hollywood also reflected the current

political situation. In 1962, The West Side Story, an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet with the two families presented

as the Latinos and the Whites, was nominated for eleven Oscars and won ten. It was then no surprise that Cleopatra

would turn out to be such an attraction. America needed to show that it could make such extravagant movies, which

would have no equal. Yet, Cleopatra was a financial disaster, and it represented the remnants of the old filmmakers

of Hollywood who filmed musicals and historical epics, which were uninteresting compared to the European

movies. The New Wave of Hollywood began in the 1960s and was a successful response to European filmmaking.

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Hawkes’ research,194

Allardyce Nicoll was able to stage this play twice in his career, and both

times it was a presentist production. The first time he staged it at Yale in 1940, before the United

States joined World War II. During this time, the public opinion in the United States was against

the US joining the war. These were blurred times as Hawkes liked to say. Britain needed an ally,

and America could not commit to being one. Be that as it may, the production: “[…] took place

in modern dress, with modern scenery, energetic dance routines and ‘original songs.’ The text

was cut and occasionally re-arranged. […] It focused on the issue of Timon’s capacity for

blurring boundaries, particularly those between past and present.”195

The play addressed the

audience of 1940 with a specific purpose just as it had a purpose back in the1600’s. There was

no doubt that the carefully chosen text, arranged in the proper way, could send a powerful

message.

Nicoll would appear in England after the war and was responsible for two important

Shakespeare-related events. One was the forming the International Shakespeare Conference

(1946), and the other was an indirect influence on Sir Barry Jackson’s staging of Timon of

Athens during the 1946-47 season. Jackson was Nicoll’s close friend and, according to Hawkes,

Jackson admitted to adopting Nicoll’s version of the play. Once again, the costumes and setting

were modern, and at that time the play’s arranged text focused on: “[the] themes of betrayal, self-

interest, and greed, its presentation of the human condition at its most basic, were also more

compelling, and you can feel these tugging at any purely local moorings.”196

Later in 1947,

Nicoll persuaded Jackson to stage that same play at the 1947 Shakespeare Conference. As

Hawkes conveys, the critics loved the play and the staging “shook the play free of period.”197

194 In his essay “Band of Brothers,” Hawkes discusses the role of Allardyce Nicoll, a Scottish scholar, who was first

a professor at King’s College and later the chair of the drama department at Yale University. According to Hawkes,

Nicoll seemed to be connected to the intelligence service. However, there was only conjectural evidence of that,

during the war years, he was attached to the British embassy in the United States. To this day the British government

negates his role in their operations. Nevertheless, his influence was undisputed. Grady, Hugh and Terence Hawkes,

eds. Presentist Shakespeares. New York: Routledge, 2007.


196 Grady, Hugh and Terence Hawkes, eds. Presentist Shakespeares. New York: Routledge, 2007, 17.

197 Ibid

71

The post-war period198

was perfect for staging presentist plays in which a message could be sent

to the public while elegantly transcending time and place. Needless to say, this play has been

used twice in those few years to fit the purposes of current politics and historical events just as

Coriolanus was not suitable for those same purposes. Presentist interpretations and staging is

powerful at any moment in history, which cannot be said for historicist ones. As Christy Desmet

writes, Hawkes was drawn to the durable project of establishing English national identity by way

of English letters. There was the idea that Shakespeare spoke for the English nation and its

values.199

However, one has to disagree with Desmet. It is true that Hawkes wrote on how

Shakespeare was influencing the identity of his nation, but he was a believer of the British unity

of different parts and not Englishness, which dominates other parts of the Commonwealth. He

was a witness to how the establishment used Shakespeare to ascertain Englishness throughout

Britain, yet he did not seem to agree with that colossal endeavor. Undoubtedly, Hawkes argued

that Shakespeare gives meaning as much as the present gives him meaning and uses him. Robert

Shaughnessy discusses Hawkes’ words and explains how meaning can be found and interpreted

differently. Even silence has meaning in Shakespeare:

We can recognize that this (partial and selective) reading of the text in order to

cultivate an angst-ridden subtext is an appropriative, perhaps manipulative,

procedure, manufacturing a silence—to be inhabited how one will – that,

objectively speaking, simply is not there, a classic micro-managed instance of the

process that Terence Hawkes (1992) calls “meaning by Shakespeare.”200

In “A Sea Shell,”201

Hawkes takes on A.C. Bradley’s interpretation of Hamlet, and shows that

there is no perfect meaning as there is more to the text than just the words on paper. Bradley

offers three different explanations as to why Hamlet does not mention Ophelia in any of the

198 Hawkes was thinking about the role that Britain had to choose after the war – to be America’s ally or to side

with Europe, which was becoming divided. The Empire was losing colonies and was in no position to choose a

weaker ally. Grady, Hugh and Terence Hawkes, eds. Presentist Shakespeares. New York: Routledge, 2007, 23.

199 Desmet, Christy. “Shakespeare the Historian.” Holland, 7

200 Shaughnessy, Robert. “’ I do, I will’ Hal, Falstaff and the Performative.” Henderson ,14-33.

201 Hawkes, Terence. “A Sea Shell.” That Shakespeherian Rag, 27-50.

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crucial moments of the play (crucial to Bradley); however, he stumbles in his own words and

interpretation, because he realizes that he cannot explain the silence in the text. As Hawkes

phrases it,

[…] by noting the text’s silences as part of the text, Bradley uncovers a

vertiginous vista at its centre, a complex self-engendered paradox, in the face of

which any readings can only and must always register bafflement. […] Bradley’s

disquiet can be imagined. He has encountered a Ghost on the battlements: it

brings the alarming news that a text’s ‘meaning’ cannot be limited to the words it

uses.202

Hawkes argues that the silence can be determined in two ways: first it shows that the text cannot

be limited to what is on paper and second, that the silence that exists in every text, since this is

what Hawkes claims in this article, can be interpreted differently by its readers. As he says,

“[S]ilence, like all silences, speaks […].”203

He believes that the former example is excellent

proof of the interaction between author, text, and reader. This is why no text is perfect. It cannot

and must not be understood only in one way. The silence in the text can be interpreted differently

depending on the person reading the text. Silence can be connected to the pauses between words,

but it can also be the complete silence of certain characters in the play. In Much Ado about

Nothing, Hero’s mother, Innogen, appears in the first act but has no lines; she is not only silent,

but oddly enough, she is non-existent in the play. The same can be said for all the missing

mothers that are not named, but are mentioned (or not!) in any of the many motherless plays.

Understanding a text is undoubtedly dependent on one’s cultural, religious, political, sexual,

biological, and other differences. To dispute this argument is as futile as to endorse the one

according to which the author writes solely for himself and not for the audience. The meaning

can be adjusted according to the situation, which is something that presentists have been saying

all along. Shakespeare could not have intended to give one meaning to his lines. Hawkes’

argument is that meaning should be given to Shakespeare instead of the other way around. For

Hamlet he says,

202 Hawkes, Terence. That Shakespeherian Rag. New York: Routledge, 1986, 39-40.

203 Hawkes, Terence. Meaning by Shakespeare. New York: Routledge, 1992, 12.

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At one time, this must obviously have been an interesting play written by a

promising Elizabethan playwright. However, equally obviously, that is no longer

the case. Over the years, Hamlet has taken on a huge and complex symbolizing

function and, as a part of the institution called “English Literature”, it has become

far more than a mere play by a mere playwright.204

Once again Hawkes returns to the problem of institutionalized education and how the

government dictated it, and to the fact that the meaning that Shakespeare’s plays have once has

transcended their original meaning. Undeniably, Barthes’ words linger between these lines and

remind the present reader that “what gets taught does not appear on the curriculum by some kind

of magical process but as a result of complicated, sometimes obscure, cultural movements.”205

Governments use literature in the never-ending power struggle between the politically dominant

and the subversive elements in society. The lines from Shakespeare’s plays have permeated

everyday life to the point that many do not even know that those lines are his but use them on a

regular basis. Shakespeare and his plays have become much more than just texts to be added to

the curriculum. According to Hawkes, the meaning of the text has changed dramatically in the

post-structuralist days.

In consequence, the notion of the text as the direct expression of that subject’s

innermost thoughts and feelings has also been undermined. And amongst the first

casualties of that development is the supposed “authenticity” of the text as a

document whose “final” meaning includes unmediated access to its author’s

intimate being.206

However, this does not mean that the text has its own meaning independent of the author or

readers. In his famous book That Shakespeherian Rag, Hawkes contended that ambiguities in the

text show that a text “has no claim to be autotelic, prescribing its own boundaries, determining

the limits of its own meaning.” This particular statement led to the presupposition that the


205 Taylor, Michael. Shakespeare: Criticism in the Twentieth Century. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2001, 194. 206 Hawkes, Terence. Meaning by Shakespeare. New York: Routledge, 1992, 5-6.

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historical moment could not confine the text.207

Hawkes preferred to believe that “meaning is

made rather than found.”208

Still, it has to be emphasized that Hawkes was not a proponent of

any wild interpretation that the audience can come up with. Similarly, Michael Taylor notes that

[the] eagerness of present-day audiences to take in, or close with, any bizarre bit

of contingent circumstance thrown up by a play’s production and render it part of

an overall interpretation—even pimples on the noses of actors. Even “no

performance at all, with a statement that the entire company had been brought low

by a sudden sickness, might rank as an interpretation.209

History of interpretation has shown throughout the centuries that there is no fixed meaning.

Adaptations are always done in such a way that they give some kind of cultural, social, or

political commentary that the current audience can relate to. Understanding the text depends on

many factors and is different for each individual.

When it came to history, Hawkes was expressive about how much was known about the

Bard, and to what length historicists (and new historicists) went to “create” history for his plays;

whereas, Hawkes would have preferred to think that history “created” Shakespeare. Hawkes

critiqued G. Wilson Knight, L.C. Knights,210

and Bradley since “[Bradley’s] dogged pursuit of

quasi-‘real world’ issues, his infamous inquiries into ‘Events before the opening of the action in

Hamlet,’ the Prince’s age, his location at the time of his father’s death, or the number of

Macbeth’s children211

, began to seem flat-footed” (5).212

It is true that such material is highly

entertaining to many. It is still popular, since for many there is also a fascination with the

207 Hawkes, Terence. That Shakespeherian Rag. New York: Routledge, 1986, 11.

208 Hawkes, Terence. Meaning by Shakespeare. New York: Routledge, 1992. 7.

209 Taylor, Michael. Shakespeare: Criticism in the Twentieth Century. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2001, 113-14.

210 Zorica Bečanović-Nikolić writes how Knights' article presented an example of close reading, which was ppular

at the time. Knights examined the structure of the text, phrases, clauses, etc.He was interested only in the text itself

and what it represented aestethically, while the context was not of primary importance. Although, Drakakis posits

that when it came to context Knights did not completely exclude it. Bečanović-Nikolić, Zorica. Šekspir iza

ogledala. Beograd [Belgrade]: Geopoetika, 2007, 56.

211 L. C. Knights wrote an essay on how many children Lady Macbeth had. Knights, L. C. Knights, and Lionel

Charles. ''How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?'' An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespearean

Criticism. Gordon Fraser, the Minority Press, 1933. 212 Hawkes, Terence, ed. Alternative Shakespeares. 2 vols. New York: Routledge, 1996. Print.

75

“behind the scenes” story. There are many novels about Shakespeare’s family members, his

secret life, his secret works, and his influence on others. All could be sorted into some kind of

“authentic” and “legitimate” fan fiction. Hawkes understood this, but his concern was with the

possibility that such works influenced people to think that what they presented was real, and that

this particular genre was justifiable. By the same token, Hawkes was against the traditional

reading of Shakespeare because many alternative readings (feminist, queer theory, etc.) had been

excluded, ignored, or forbidden. This is why his collection of essays is called Alternative

Shakespeares 2, just like the previous Alternative Shakespeares (edited by John Drakakis in

1985). There is more than one way of looking into these texts and interpreting them. All in all,

he intended readers to realize that his collection of essays (and his view) was not about getting

Shakespeare right, whatever that might be, but rather it was about understanding how people

today understand Shakespeare, and he argued that “Shakespeare doesn’t mean: we mean by

Shakespeare.” 213

One of the scholars who contributed to the collection, agreed with Hawkes and

Grady on many aspects, and stimulated the presentist discussion in a new direction is –

Ewan Fernie.

3.3 Ewan Fernie and the Moving Now

Fernie teaches at the University of Birmingham, and he is Chair of Shakespeare studies at

the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. He authored and edited many influential

works in current Shakespeare studies and some of them are: Shame in Shakespeare (2002),

“Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism” (2005), Spiritual Shakespeares (editor, 2005),

“Terrible Action: Recent Criticism and Questions of Agency” (2006), Reconceiving the

Renaissance: A Critical Reader (editor, 2006), “Action! Henry V” (2007), “Dollimore’s

Challenge” (2007), The Demonic: Literature and Experience (2012), Thomas Mann and

Shakespeare: Something Rich and Strange (co-editor with Tobias Döring, 2016), Macbeth,


76

Macbeth (co-author with Simon Palfrey, 2016), and he is the general co-editor, with Simon

Palfrey, of the series Shakespeare Now! As these two editors wrote in the Preface to Eric. S.

Mallin’s Godless Shakespeare,214

this series was meant to bridge the gap between scholars and

the public in two ways: the first was to bring academic writing to a level so that everyone can

read it, and, second, to engage the audience (playgoers and actors) in literature they otherwise

thought was too sophisticated and specialized. The series was also a (worthwhile) attempt to

make scholarly work more “communicable” while preserving “a commitment to publishing

powerful cutting-edge scholarship,” which will not be in the traditional monograph length, but

they will rather be “minigraphs” liberated from “obscure jargon and complacent self-regard.”

Fernie is right about the unapproachable aspect of scholarly work that seems to be more

prevalent than work that is written in a more accessible way. Over the years, it has become the

norm to write in such a convoluted and incomprehensible way that even the best of scholars need

to take a break in reading the material. This commentary on contemporary literary criticism, and

the disappointment with it, seems to echo Fernie’s article “Shakespeare and the Prospect of

Presentism,”215

from 2005, in which he concurs with Hugh Grady and articulates his discontent

with “the increasing exclusion of presentism by historicism in contemporary Shakespeare and

Renaissance studies.”216

Even as early as 1986, Grady believed that other non-historicist

approaches were in danger of eclipse.217

Actually, it is quite manifest that presentism is

excluded from various up-to-date and recent studies, dictionaries, literary guides, and books on

literary terms and literary theory. Moreover, if it is not excluded from critical conversation, then

it is (dis)placed under cultural materialism or culture studies. Like Grady, Fernie brings the past

into the present, which changes how one perceives the future; therefore, connecting his

conception of presentism to historicism and cultural materialism:

After new historicism and cultural materialism, history is now the far horizon and

sole explanatory hypothesis in contemporary criticism to the extent that

conceiving of and accounting for resistance to history has become a familiar

214 Mallin, Eric S. Godless Shakespeare. New York: Continuum, 2007, ix-x.

215 Fernie, Ewan. “Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism.” Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005): 169-184. 216 Ibid, 174. 217 Grady, Hugh. Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now: Criticism and Theory in the 21

st Century. Houndmills, UK:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 39.

77

problem. […] Cultural materialists have managed to evade this hopeless position

by emphasizing that history is always fractured and divided. Alan Sinfield, for

instance, finds a way of combining a commitment to historical determinism with

the possibility of resistance to the dominant culture in the notion of subcultures.218

It does not seem that Fernie spends a lot of time analyzing subcultures, although, he is interested

in the relation between new historicism, cultural materialism,219

and the present. Because of his

view of reading texts from the past in the present he cannot ignore new historicism, since the text

brings into the present something from the past. For Fernie, texts are not fixed in time and do not

belong only to a certain period in time, they transcend time. Even though his view, which will

be mentioned shortly, is different from the view of other presentists, he builds on their work and

collaborates with them successfully. Evelyn Gajowski seems to concur with Fernie that there is a

lot in common between new historicism and presentism. She quotes Fernie’s shrewd observation

from “Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism” that “the present may be considered the

unconscious of the new historicism”220

The whole premise lies on Croce’s words that “practical

requirements which underlie every historical judgment give to all history the character of

‘contemporary history’ because, however remote in time events there recounted may seem to be,

the history in reality refers to present needs and present situations wherein those events

vibrate.”221

Plainly, Fernie builds on the work of presentists and new historicists to connect the

text from the past with the present time. This stance most definitely questions new historicism;

for this reason, he claims that his presentism is different than Hawkes’ and Grady’s, which is

why for him the lines between presentism and new historicism are rather blurred than clear and

obvious.

Fernie argues that there is an urgency to write about the now, which is something that he

shares with Grady, and, what is even more important, scholars need to write about Shakespeare

218 Fernie, Ewan, ed. Spiritual Shakespeares. New York: Routledge, 2005, 10.

219 Fernie collaborated more with cultural materialists, especially Dollimore, who even wrote the Afterword for his

Spiritual Shakespeare’s and the Foreword for The Demonic. Literature and Experience. 220 Gajowski, Evelyn, ed. Presentism, Gender, and Sexuality in Shakespeare. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2009, 7.

221 Croce, Benedetto. History as the Story of Liberty, translated by Sylvia Sprigge, New York: Norton, 1941, 19.

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now. Furthermore, he writes, “[t]he repression of the present here is intellectually unsustainable –

all the more so since the spectacle of a prominent critic looking so fixedly backwards in an effort

to ignore the present must itself be a compelling feature of the present.”222

In essence, Fernie

discusses the intriguing relationship between presentism and historicism, and how new

historicism relies on certain presentist standpoints, like the one that “the repression of the present

[…] is intellectually unsustainable”223

which coincides with Greenblatt’s general awareness that

critic’s temporal distance from the investigated cultural period should not be ignored. Fernie’s

aim is to define presentism by comparing it to new historicism and finding their mutual ground,

which is something why his presentist approach is different than the approaches of Hawkes and

Grady. Greenblatt believes that Shakespeare’s text primarily belongs to the past, Hawkes reads

Shakespeare in relation to the present, while Grady reads him in relation to the early modern past

and the postmodern present. Yet, for Fernie the text is in the past and in the present at the same

time. He suggests that the text is in the present, but that the presence provides a

phenomenological comprehension of the present, past, and future.224

This draws the discussion to

what Hawkes wrote extensively about - meaning. Fernie believes that the meaning of the text

cannot be easily explained, since it is very much rooted in the present and the now, but it also

incorporates history into itself, so he acknowledges the concept of historical time. Hence, “to be

in the audience of a performance of Hamlet is automatically to entertain, all at once, a sense of

the past from which it originates, the present in which it is now being played, and the future to

which it is already on its way.”225

He posits that people from a post-industrial society would find

it hard to comprehend life from a preindustrial age, so strictly viewing literature historically is

impossible, and, therefore, it is imperative that presentism is acknowledged and credited by

literary criticism.

Another point that Fernie shares with new historicism and cultural materialism is the

consideration of subversion. Unfortunately, it is obvious that the only way new historicists deal

with subversion is based on the subversive that “no longer retains any power to subvert.”226

Unlike Greenblatt, Fernie believes that subversion is active and it interacts with the present. For

222 Fernie, Ewan. “Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism.” Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005): 174. 223 Ibid. 224 Ibid, 189. 225 Ibid, 181. 226 Ibid, 179.

79

him, subversion is “thoroughly temporal,”227

and it is unequivocal that it can sustain its

properties only in the time it is read in – subversion is always in the present.228

Fernie argues that

subversion is temporal, and that the text is subversive only as long it “threatens the dominant

culture. […] For presentism is more able than new historicism to profit from the subversive

potential of historical difference which new historicism has impressively emphasized.”229

In the

other line of approach to Shakespeare, called the ‘spiritual turn,’ which Fernie is also

championing, he contends that spirituality is a credible alternative, and he bases this on the work

of Ken Jackson and other scholars who claim, “[…] spirituality is an existential, ethical or

epistemological experience pertinent, in several ways, to the present.”230

However, to him it is

not only about the subversive properties of the text. The issue at hand is the relation between the

text and the present/past/future. As Gajowski comments, for Fernie “Encountering the otherness

of an early modern text has the potential of engendering an awareness in us that the future will be

different yet again.”231

Fernie includes the future because any reception in the present can

foreshadow a possible reception in the future. He explains that implications are “stored” in the

text and they wait to be “unpacked’ by critics, actors, and directors at some point in the future.232

The only potential problem anyone can have with his view is that he always considers the reader

to be an intrinsic part of the theater, which excludes the “ordinary” reader. While Hawkes

considered the entire educational system as readership, Fernie seems to keep it within the sphere

of the performing arts.

In consequence, Fernie writes about the effect of Shakespeare’s plays on modern-day

issues, which could be defined as a form of performative presentism. His presentism is connected

227 Ibid. 228 Fernie utilizes the words of Fredric Jameson who wrote, “the past will itself become an active agent…and will

begin to come before us as a radically different form of life which rises up to call our own form of life into question

and to pass judgment on us and though us on the social formation in which we exist. At that point the very dynamics

of the historical tribunal are unexpectedly and dialectically reversed: it is not we who sit in judgment on the past, but

rather the past…which judges us, imposing the painful knowledge of what we are not, what we are no longer, what

we are not yet.” Fernie, Ewan. “Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism.” Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005): 179. 229 Fernie, Ewan. “Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism.” Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005): 179. 230 Fernie, Ewan, ed. Spiritual Shakespeares. New York: Routledge, 2005, 24, n2.

231 Gajowski, Evelyn, ed. Presentism, Gender, and Sexuality in Shakespeare. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2009, 15.


80

to creativity and art, although, he does take a more or less approach that is developed from

Derrida,233

which, according to Grady, is what Hawkes did as well. Hawkes and Fernie seem to

favor that difference rather than presence determines identity. Grady noticed that Fernie, like

Derrida, preferred to view the present as the “moving now,”234

which inevitably leads to the

following argument that presentism “mustn’t merely cater to confirm present values. But any

really responsive engagement with Shakespeare’s inimitable and even alien presence in the

present will in fact creatively confront, unsettle and transcend routine modes of thinking.”235

Finding a way to distinguish his approach from the writings of Grady, Hawkes, et al., Fernie is

offering a different kind of presentism. Shakespeare’s plays had a role in his time: they presented

an action that engaged the audience, while the actors awakened and revived the otherwise

inanimate words. Fernie asks whether it does the same today. He views presentism as being

manifested through the performative aspect of the plays. The theater then becomes “the very

substance of his [Shakespeare’s] presence,”236

and Fernie concludes, “Shakespeare makes his

own way into the present only inasmuch as his characters come alive here.”237

He asserts that

even though the playwright is no longer present, his words are, and it is the speeches, which the

actors carry out that deliver the action and make the difference; therefore, pursuant to Fernie, the

characters are brought back to life only with their speeches, which bring the action to life.

Furthermore, he insists that speeches and actions should be prevalent presentist topics. Another

distinction of his presentism is “[t]he presence of the historical text in the present never simply

mirrors and affirms the present. This is partly because the historical text brings into

contemporary life its own alien history.”238

So how does presentism manifest itself within

performative art? Fernie discusses the role of the play Henry V in recent history. The 1944 film

with Lawrence Olivier was a movie made to “inspire and encourage extreme action”239

at the end

of the war, so Armed Forces Editions of Shakespeare were printed by the US, and Henry V was

233 Fernie explains, “Remember Derrida’s assertion that ‘a masterpiece’ moves through successive presents,

throwing them productively out of joint, like Shakespeare’s ghost.” 233 Fernie, Ewan. “Shakespeare and the Prospect

of Presentism.” Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005): 181. 234 Grady, Hugh. Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now: Criticism and Theory in the 21

st Century. Houndmills, UK:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 17.

235 “Action! Henry V.” In Grady and Hawkes, eds., Presentist Shakespeares, Routledge, New York, 2007, 97.

236 “Action! Henry V.” In Grady and Hawkes, eds., Presentist Shakespeares, Routledge, New York, 2007, 97. 237 Fernie, Ewan. “Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism.” Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005): 177. 238 Ibid, 179. 239 “Action! Henry V.” In Grady and Hawkes, eds., Presentist Shakespeares, Routledge, New York, 2007, 99.

81

one of the included plays. A half of a century later the same play was used by the Bush

administration to promote the “War on Terror,” while parts of the play have been quoted by

David Gergen, when hostilities against Afghanistan began, and Mackubin Owens240

during the

Iraqi war. Fernie gives all these examples to show that during crucial political moments

Shakespeare’s words were utilized to instill the belief in America’s and Britain’s intention to act

and their will power. They are also used as an ominous warning on what can happen if “enemy

forces” used “fierce agency”241

like Henry. These are the messages that such speeches and

performances are sending in order to achieve some kind of governmental agenda. Hawkes and

Fernie both concur with the influence of the government on education, and this is where their

researches converge. Yet, it must be mentioned that Fernie did not only write about the

performative arts and presentism. In his book Shame in Shakespeare, he clearly addresses how

the “spiritual bankruptcy”242

of capitalism has caused decadence and shamelessness in the

Western world. He continues that shame has not been eradicated and needs to be addressed.

Furthermore, he writes, “shame in Shakespeare works as an ethical wake-up call, the dissolution

of the anxious subject’s phantasmal self automatically revealing the world beyond it. This

notion, I contend, fills the gap in contemporary ethics.”243

It is interesting that he posits that

shame in Shakespeare is the beginning of the spiritual journey. His interest is in the aspect of

shame/shamelessness and how it is perceived and manifested not only from a political but also

from a religious point of view. He touches on the importance of shame when it comes to

minorities and women, which is a stance that he shares with Gajowski.

240 David Gergen worked at Kansas State University (2001), and Mackubin Owens was the professor of Strategy

and Force Planning at the American Naval War College (2002). “Action! Henry V.” In Grady and Hawkes, eds.,

Presentist Shakespeares, Routledge, New York, 2007, 99. 241 “Action! Henry V.” In Grady and Hawkes, eds., Presentist Shakespeares, Routledge, New York, 2007, 117. 242 Fernie, Ewan. Shame in Shakespeare. New York: Routledge, 2002, 2. 243 Fernie, Ewan. Shame in Shakespeare. New York: Routledge, 2002., 7.

82

3.4 Evelyn Gajowski and Other Presentisms

Evelyn Gajowski is a Professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She has

published four books on Shakespeare: Re-Visions of Shakespeare: The Art of Loving: Female

Subjectivity and Male Discursive Traditions in Shakespeare's Tragedies (Delaware, 1992).

Essays in Honor of Robert Ornstein (Delaware, 2004); Presentism, Gender, and Sexuality in

Shakespeare (2009, Palgrave Macmillan); and The Merry Wives of Windsor: New Critical

Essays (Routledge, 2014, co-edited with Phyllis Rackin). She is also the editor of the Arden

Shakespeare and Theory Series by Bloomsbury. Furthermore, Gajowski published the following

presentist articles: “’Mirror[s] of all Christian Kings’: Hank Cinq and George Deux,” and

“Lavinia as ‘Blank Page’ and the Presence of Feminist Critical Practices” (the latter was

published in Grady’s Presentist Shakespeares).

Gajowski’s presentist approach pertains to the relationship between politics and

literature. She has special interest in feminist and queer theory within the presentist discourse,

and she posits that “[…] feminist and queer theory and criticism are discursive practices that are

rooted in and are informed by early twenty-first century political, economic, and social practices,

they are inevitably presentist in nature.”244

She is interested in how these delicate and always-

present issues are discussed within Shakespeare studies, and how today’s politicians and

lawmakers address them. She uses Derrida’s collocation always already to emphasize that

feminist and queer readings were in their attitude ‘presentist’ even before the term was being

used at all. Gajowski adds, “These issues have been, and continue to be, of urgency on the

intellectual, political and social agendas of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and

questions they raise are of genuine, felt significance in our lives.”245

She argues that queer and

gender theories are important issues today that challenge the traditional liberal humanism

established by men who privilege masculinity, heterosexuality, and power over the other.

Besides this point, she also contends that queer and feminist aspects of performances have been


Macmillan, 2009, 2.


Macmillan, 2009, 3.

83

repressed from “Shakespeare’s text and culture” for four centuries. She sides with Juliette

Dusinberre, Carol Thomas, Phyllis Rackin, Dympna Callaghan, Peter Erickson, Jean Howard,

and many other writers and critics who caution that these matters have consistently been present

in literature; yet, the dominant patriarchal establishment has ignored and repressed them.

According to Gajowski, feminist criticism went through a few phases before it converged with

presentism. First, feminist critics, like Juliette Dusinberre, for example, argued that Shakespeare

was a feminist, then, like Linda Bamber, for example, that he was a patriarchal Bard. Within the

historicist position, feminists searched for the connection between the text and context; however,

unfortunately, under its influence feminism lost its voice, forasmuch as new historicism and

cultural materialism stayed more or less indifferent to the nuance of gender issues, or as

Gajowski states, “[i]t became naïve to analyze female agency and unfashionable to analyze

female subversion; it became fashionable, instead, to underscore how any subversion, including

female subversion, was inevitably contained by power structures, including patriarchal

structures.”246

Recent research shows that gender studies and feminism are intertwined and

explored within racial and post-colonial studies. The overall conclusion is that patriarchal

societies have oppressed and degraded both women and gays. For this reason, gender studies and

feminism share the understanding and use of Foucault’s and Derrida’s works. This is why they

were able to accept what they call unhistoricism, or presentism, and they agree with Hawkes that

there is dialogue between the past and the present. Gajowski writes, “Situated in the liminal

present moment, we occupy a position analogous to that of the classical Janus figure at the

doorway – simultaneously looking backward into the past and looking forward into the

future.”247

Here Gajowski resonates Hawkes’ assurance that time cannot be drained out of

anybody’s experience. Her statement also points out that feminism is about the future, among

other things, since feminists wonder how future generations will view this present time; the

answers are unknown, but they can possibly be predicted – they say. She observes that just as

history has repressed the question of women and gay men, so has historicism repressed

presentism. Fernie wrote about this when he concluded that the present is the unconscious of new

historicism. Still, it must be repeated that for feminist criticism and gender studies, which are

246 Ibid, 4.

247 Ibid, 6.

84

rooted in the present, the political aspect is crucial. As Gajowski points out, Rackin

acknowledged that

Our own experience of Shakespeare’s women is conditioned not only by the

accumulated tradition of Shakespeare scholarship and reception but also by the

present history of the world in which we live: both of these histories help to shape

our experience of the plays, whether we study them in an academic setting, see

them on stage or screen, or read them in the privacy of our own rooms. Both of

these histories will need feminist intervention in the twenty-first century.248

It is not hard to understand why feminist and gender studies are closer to presentism than any

other hermeneutical approach or theory. Surely, they share the common political nature, which

does not exist between feminism and gender studies on one side and new historicism on the

other. Peter Erickson wrote about the political and apolitical natures of these approaches in

1987,249

when it was obvious that feminism and gender will not be an urgent issue with new

historicism and cultural materialism. Gajowski sides with Fernie regarding Grady’s

understanding of subjectivity, that supports feminist and queer theorists, and Hawkes’

situatedness in the present, which cannot contaminate the past.250

Gajowski explains that the

present cannot contaminate the past or change it in any way. The present has only the ability to

shape the view of it. In essence she concurs with other presentists that the presentist work is

based on “the understanding that all our knowledge of Shakespeare, including that of his

historical context, is shaped by the ideologies and discourses of our cultural present.”251

Furthermore, she maintains that feminist and queer readings of early modern texts show that the

different treatment of genders is a central and not marginal issue in these texts. However, Taylor

argues that it is somewhat a paradox how the feminist criticism, which has been one of

[…] the most powerful critical movements over the past thirty years in

Shakespeare criticism (and in every other kind), should consider themselves by

248 Ibid, 9.

249 Erickson, Peter. “Rewriting the Renaissance, Rewriting Ourselves.” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 327-37. 250 Gajowski, Evelyn, ed. Presentism, Gender, and Sexuality in Shakespeare. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave


251 Ibid, 12.

85

and large to be on the outside looking in. Yet they feel themselves – no doubt

justifiably--to be the marginal in the lack of power that they as women (not just as

women feminists) have in the academy; and they elect to be marginal in their

disinclination to play the game of criticism by the old rules.252

It is true that feminist approach has been very much alive in literary criticism for decades, and

yet these critics are on the outskirts of literary criticism; always having to operate within a

dominant theory or to be in a coalition with a theory or approach. The same can be said for

gender studies, although, in recent years general gender studies have been quite independent and

popular in comparison to separate women’s studies, men’s studies, queer studies, or LGBT

studies, which are all incontestably presentist in nature.

Like Fernie, Gajowski found Henry V to be an inviting play for a presentist

interpretation.253

She has analyzed the play by comparing Henry V to George W. Bush, because

she found “provocative, striking parallels” between the two. She states,

Both are reformed prodigal sons of national leaders – sons who themselves go on

to inherit the mantles of their fathers. Both conduct imperialistic invasions of

sovereign foreign nations, recruiting soldiers from the working classes to do so.

Both violate war etiquette and international treaties regarding the treatment of

prisoners of war, prompting chargers of war criminal to be lodged against them.

Both believe in absolute power of their respective offices – power that is,

moreover, divinely inspired.254

Her essay looks into the battle of Agincourt and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which represent

“masculinized ventures” of powerful figures represented the political climate of their times. In

her own, feminist and gender-oriented, presentism she envisions the invaders as depicting

masculine traits while the other is representative as “feminized, emasculated, or effeminate

252 Taylor, Michael. Shakespeare: Criticism in the Twentieth Century. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2001, 195.

253 Kay Stanton also writes about the correlation between Henry V and George W. Bush in her essay “A Presentist

Analysis of Joan, la Pucelle.” Which was published in Gajowski, Evelyn, ed. Presentism, Gender, and Sexuality in

Shakespeare. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 103-121. 254 Gajowski, Evelyn, ed. Presentism, Gender, and Sexuality in Shakespeare. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave


86

entities.” The terminology used in the press is equally divided. The intentions and actions of the

President of the U.S. are depicted with masculine terminology and the words of his critics with

feminine. She notices how both reigns, George’s and Henry’s, are tainted with illegitimacy, and

how both men want to continue their father’s conquests and achieve what they could not do;

furthermore, both sons justify their actions as to not be responsible for the crimes of war. It is

fascinating how certain plays open themselves up for specific interpretations. Coriolanus is more

interesting, for lack of a better word, to Marxist interpretation, and Henry V is more for

presentist. Both Fernie and Gajowski dive into the issues of the play from different standpoints

but with the same need to impose presentism on the text. Since Gajowski’s interpretation is

feminist in nature she addresses the issues of rape, which occurs symbolically in Henry V and

literally in Iraq. She concurs with Rackin and Howard that the forceful and rather vile kiss that

Henry takes from Katherine is nothing short of a symbolic rape, which is just another step in the

conquest and capitulation not only of the country but of the country’s finest maiden – the

princess. The fact that she denies to tell him that she loves and accepts him, and that he goes

against the customs and kisses her against her will, is seen as a symbolic rape of the princess.

She makes a symbolic parallel between Henry’s assertion of his right to behave in such a way

with the French princess to the killing and rape that is being done by the troops in Iraq. Along

these lines, Kay Stanton and Kathryn Schwarz also remind of the issue of women in war, i.e.

female soldiers; the latter addressing the unfortunate capture and torture of the female American

soldier Jessica Lynch.

In “Lavinia as ‘Blank Page’ and the Presence of Feminist Critical Practices,” Gajowski

continues to explore and define “the present moment as untheorized and unpoliticized.”255

She is

against approaches that privilege the past at the expense of the present. Her essay is based on the

essay “‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity”256

by Susan Gubar, which draws

upon the work of Derrida and Gayatri Spivak, and is a direct reference to Isak Dinesen’s

exceptional short story “The Blank Page.”257

Gubar sees the writer as male and active, and the

text as female and passive. Hence, there is no place in the writing process for women. It is

interesting that Gubar chooses the text of a woman (Isak Dinesen was actually Karen Von

255 Grady, Hugh and Terence Hawkes, eds. Presentist Shakespeares. New York: Routledge, 2007, 122-23. 256 Gubar, Susan. “‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity.” In Elaine Showalter, Ed., The New

Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory. New York: Pantheon, 1985, 292-313. 257 Dinesen, Isak. “The Blank Page.” In Last Tales. New York: Random House, 1957, 99-105.

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Blixen-Finecke) who takes a male identity in order to write her works. Gubar makes a rather

intriguing comparison between the nuns’ work of art258

to the blood streaming from Lavinia’s

“mouth, stumps, and genitalia.”259

Gajowski writes about the interpretation of both the blank

sheet and Lavinia’s body, whose meanings are not specified by the authors. Dinesen does not

give any explanations for the sheet just as Lavinia “would seem to mean whatever the other

characters in Titus – and we – want her to mean.”260

Lavinia is left mute, and the reader is left to

determine what her thoughts are, how she feels, and what she thinks of her father. Gajowski

relates the patriarchal interpretation of rape in the text to the contemporary US law. She

elaborates on coercion and consent; however, for presentists there is another interesting aspect of

the two stories – both authors leave the interpretation to the reader. The storyteller in Dinesen’s

story cautiously tells her listeners “where the story-teller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly

loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak.”261

It is left to the reader/listener to give

meaning to the text and to finish the story. What does the blank sheet mean? What is Lavinia

thinking? These and other questions the readers ask and answer. Douglas E. Green, another

scholar interested in presentist adaptations, explained it quite well that even if one knows the

text, one never knows what to expect when encountering a contemporary adaptation.262

He also

argued that the 1960’s influenced the interpretation of Shakespeare’s texts in such a way like no

other period before that. Perhaps this is due to the fact that most influential scholars today are,

themselves, inspired and uplifted, or discouraged, by the politics, social events, and

consequences of that decade.

It is imperative to state that the importance of presentism lies not only with

Shakespearean and feminist studies. The urgency of now applies to all literature. Sarah Hogan

258 The story is about an ancient order of nuns who grow flax seeds and make the finest linen from them. The linen

is used to make the sheets for the royal bridal sheets. After the wedding night, the sheets are brought back to the

convent, and the nuns frame and display them. Hence, their white sheets become works of art marked by the female

bodily fluids of the bride. The convent, in turn, is an “art gallery.” However, among the displayed sheets there is one

that is different than the rest. It is a blank sheet with nothing on it with an equally blank nameplate next to it.

Dinesen, Isak. “The Blank Page.” In her Last Tales. New York: Random House, 1957, 99-105. 259 Grady, Hugh and Terence Hawkes, eds. Presentist Shakespeares. New York: Routledge, 2007, 126. 260 Ibid. 261 Dinesen, Isak. “The Blank Page.” In her Last Tales. New York: Random House, 1957, 99-105. 262 Gajowski, Evelyn, ed. Presentism, Gender, and Sexuality in Shakespeare. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave


88

published an online article “What More Means Now: Utopia, Occupy, and the Commons,”263

and in it she argues that even though presentism flourished within Shakespeare studies it also

exists within other studies, and that he is not the only contemporary from the Renaissance. She

posits that Thomas More speaks to contemporary readers just as Shakespeare does, and that

“contemporary readings outside the academy make urgent an alternative, historically-minded

presentism engaged with the meanings of Utopia then and now.” Furthermore, she quotes an

interview that Wired magazine made with Ursula Le Guin:264

“I am proud and happy that a book — and actually a book printed quite a long

time ago now — is still making some waves and being of some use to people

thinking about this stuff” (“Geek’s Guide”). It requires no great stretch of the

imagination to understand the continued relevance of The Dispossessed, the story

of an anarchist-physicist’s disillusionment with an alien world of plenty but gross

inequality, even if Le Guin’s book originally allegorized topical events like

Vietnam and the Cold War. In fact, Le Guin’s novel remains extraordinarily

timely given its eco-socialist criticisms of mass consumption and social

inequality. While she admits in the interview that her book was never a “blueprint

for action,” Le Guin hopes that her ambiguous utopia — like all good novels —

nevertheless offers “moral guidance,” and thus invites a presentist reading that

extends her book’s life into the 21st century.

According to Hogan, More continues to speak to the topic Occupy Wall Street as a utopian social

movement, thus inviting readers and followers to embrace the presentist perspective. For Le

Guin, her books still offer moral advice even though they were written during a different time. If

there are those who still wish to believe that presentism is not alive and vigorous, then they

should be aware of the fact that there are more and more proponents as time goes by. It is

embraced and advocated by many, and it is there for all who wish to acknowledge it. What is

263 Hogan, Sarah. “What More Means Now: Utopia, Occupy, and the Commons.” Upstart: A Journal of English

Renaissance Studies. 2 September 2013. Web. 9 December 2015.

<http://www.clemson.edu/upstart/Essays/occupy/occupy.xhtml>

264 Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. “Ursula K. Le Guin: Still Battling the Powers That Be.” Wired. 25 Jul. 2012. Web.

26 Jul. 2012.

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Cleopatra in a corset, Coriolanus in a contemporary uniform, Hamlet in an expensive posh suit,

and Othello in a high-school basketball jersey −if not a presentist perspective? As Grady

commented, little is known about the Renaissance audience and sometimes even less about the

authors. One cannot interpret a text completely historically without infusing it with the present.

The reader, the translator, the interpreter, and the movie director are all individuals who are

products of their own experiences and time, and they cannot be isolated from the influences that

besiege them every day. Presentism, as we call it today, has travelled a long journey through the

ages. It has been recognized in the past. It is also highly unlikely that it will disappear as a

literary approach considering that it is inevitable that the future will read and interpret literature

from the past from its own perspective, and that now will be different than this now; yet, just as

important and urgent as this one is.

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4. The Theories of Temporality and their Relation to Presentism

Perhaps toward the end of the discussion on presentism as a theory, and before the

examination of presentist adaptations, one should mention the theory(ies) of temporality(ies).

Hugh Grady wrote that there is no postmodernism without modernism; and, by the same token,

there can be no presentism without historicism (or new historicism), which means there is no

present without the past. So, how is presentism, as a hermeneutical approach, connected to the

theories of temporality? In recent decades, literary criticism revived the discussion about the

past; for example, new historicism based interpretation of literature on the fact that it was created

in the past. Its focus was on the moment of the creation, while presentism interprets the literary

work of art from the past in terms of its impact on the present moment. Furthermore,

contemporary criticism researches the interrelations between the Early Modern period and the

contemporary postmodern period. On the other hand, temporality interrogates the defining and

interweaving of the past, present, and future. It is a concept of understanding time and the flow

of it. In the Western world, traditionally, the flow of time has been conceived as linear—the past

happened and the future is yet to be. The XX century philosopher, mathematician, and historian

Bertrand Russell said, “the present contents of my mind have an order, which I believe to be

correlated…with the objective time-order of events to which my recollections refer.”265

Therefore, when replicated, time had a certain chronological order, which it followed. However,

according to contemporary interpretations, time is not perceived as linear (or as historians would

say chronological), rather the past, present, and future are intertwined and happen

simultaneously. This means that the past is already infused into the present and the future is

abundant with possibilities that are influenced by the present. Additionally, the present

constantly remodels the past as the future will remodel the present and past. In short, temporality

deals with the presentation and perception of time. Perhaps it is best to say a few words about

Mikhail Bakhtin, since many contemporary scholars who write about temporality refer to him.

For Bakhtin, as Gary Saul Morson shows, temporality is more than that - “in Bakhtin’s view,

both determinism and pure chance, both absolute certainty and total relativism, destroy human

265 Russell, Bertrand. Human Knowledge: It’s Scope and Limits. New York” Simon and Shuster, 1962, 212.

91

agency because they close down time.”266

Bakhtin is against any “theoretism” (Marxism,

Freudism, structuralism…), because all systems of thought ascertain “that truth can only be the

sort of truth that is put together out of general moments […].”267

What these theories leave out is

the eventness, as he calls it. According to Bakhtin, the author’s creativity is not taken into

account and the present moment is just a “pregiven pattern.” He claims that it is not so. He gives

an example of Tolstoy who did not know how he would finish Anna Karenina or what his

characters would do. Their moral choices and his decisions were based on the very moment

when something was about to happen or the presence. Also, Tolstoy did not like to change the

plot in the previously written chapters. Apparently, he immediately published each chapter in

order to prevent himself from doing so. Bakhtin argues that all great writers know that in real life

“we are always facing ethical choices, and those choices are rarely reducible to rules.”268

While

still researching temporality and genres he wrote three essays on temporality and the chronotope

(the field of possible actions, which is linked to post-Kantian aesthetics). One of the ideas,

according to Morson’s interpretation, is that

The past must always be understood as consisting of the same sort of time as the

present. As modern geology was made possible by uniformitarianism – the

principle that forces governing the physical world have not changed qualitatively

– so the novel reflects the discovery that time has always been a sequence of

present moments. The past consisted only of other presents; it was always open,

always unfinalizable, and the future that was in fact realized did not have to be

realized. Thus we have Bakhtin’s paradox that the novel, which is the genre most

oriented toward contemporaneity, turned out to be the genre best able to represent

the past. The great success of the historical novel lies in its appreciation of the

presentness of each past time.269

266 Morson, Gary Saul. ''Bakhtin, Genres, and Temporality.'' New Literary History Vol. 22, No. 4, Papers for the

Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change (Autumn, 1991): 1073. 267 Ibid. 268 Ibid, 1075. 269 Morson, Gary Saul. ''Bakhtin, Genres, and Temporality.'' New Literary History Vol. 22, No. 4, Papers for the

Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change (Autumn, 1991): 1085.

92

The unfinalizable aspect of the present moment is of interest to the presentist approach, because

it shows that the present influences the past and changes it. 270

Bakhtin’s theory of temporality is

tied to the novel as a genre. He does not discuss temporality outside of it. Nevertheless, his views

of interpreting time and the importance of the present moment influenced modern and

contemporary theorists.

Recently, Russell West-Pavlov has addressed temporality in relation to the story and

discourse, and he revisits Laurence Sterne’s division of the narrative: “These two levels of

narrative have their respective chronologies: that of a sequence of events as they are supposed to

have happened – in real life (‘story-time’) and the sequence in which the events are narrated in

the process of story-telling (‘discourse-time’).271

Obviously, he makes a distinction between

actions that happened and those that are the product of a narrative, which, according to West-

Pavlov, is a theory that originated with the Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky, while the

contemporary Dutch narratologist and cultural theorist Mieke Bal agrees and explains that this is

possible since the narrative is a multilayered construct “which contains a number of different

temporal strands.”272

In a general way, she identifies four temporal strands:

(1) That of the lines of print, which the reader will consume or construct in a

temporal reading process, (2) that of the ‘story’ which is assumed to be mapped,

with more or less acute degrees of ‘anachrony,’ by (3) the linear sequence of the

narrative ‘discourse;’ and (4) the temporality of reading, already referred to, in

which the three previous temporalities are woven together as a putatively coherent

whole.273

Needless to say, these strands clash and overlap, and so the once linear perception of time in the

text gets wrinkles and interruptions, which coexist with the temporality of the reading (i.e.

reader). To this, already complex temporal construction, one can add the aspect of

270 For more on Bakhtin and temporality see MacCannell, Juliet Flower. “The Temporality of Textuality: Bakhtin

and Derrida.” MLN, Vol. 100, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec. 1985): 968-988;.

271 West-Pavlov, Russell. Temporalities. New York: Routledge, 2013, 88.

272 West-Pavlov, Russell. Temporalities. New York: Routledge, 2013. 91.

273 Ibid.

93

intertextuality, which in itself is a collage of various texts and quotations. As Julia Kristeva

commented, intertextuality on its own creates “a fluid notion of temporal dynamism into

structuralism.”274

Elizabeth Freeman also builds on Kristeva’s theory, but for her Kristeva’s

temporality is connected to biopolitics (hence it is called chronobiopolitics):

[…] as Julia Kristeva argues, the gender binary organizes the meaning of this and

other times conceived as outside of – but symbiotic with – linear time. Kristeva

claims that Woman, as a cultural symbol, comes to be correlated with the endless

returns of cyclical time, as well as the stasis of monumental time: the figure of

Woman supplements the historically specific nation-state with appeals to nature

and eternity.275

Obviously Kristeva’s thoughts are oriented more toward feminist and queer theories; however,

time plays an important role not only in the lives of individuals but also for societies

incorporated into a larger temporal scheme, which itself is natural. As Freeman remarks, “Queer

theory and feminist theory have answered to calls for poststructuralist and affective

historiography by foregrounding just this kind of body, that is, one intelligible only through its

encounters with other bodies.”276

Jacques Derrida is an important poststructuralist critic who

addressed the theories on temporality. He believed that “the past and future give the present a

temporal dynamic which makes it notpresent to itself. […] The present becomes differential,

different to itself, with complete meaning always deferred backwards or forwards.”277

The

significance of these theories lies in the acknowledgement of different strata of time that alter the

interpretation of the text in different times and cultures, which is an understanding close to the

presentist approach.

Shakespeare experimented with the notion of time on different occasions in his plays.

Just to name a few, in Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus wants to speed up time in order for

him to consummate his marriage with Hippolyta, while Oberon shortens it when he orders Puck

274 Kristeva, Julia. Au risqué de la pensée. Paris: L’Aube, 2001, 66.

275 Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010, 5.

276 Ibid, 11.

277 West-Pavlov, Russell. Temporalities. New York: Routledge, 2013. 94.

94

to enchant Titania and quicken her desire. In Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio taunts Katherine

that it is not the day but the night, and he refuses to continue the journey until she conforms to

his rather illogical notion of time, which is disjointed. Similarly, in Hamlet, young Hamlet

declares that “time is out of joint.” Freeman comments on this specific notion of time:

[Hamlet] describes time as if its heterogeneity feels like a skeletal, or at least

deeply somatic, dislocation. In this famous phrase, time has, indeed is, a body; the

disruption of present by past and the resulting disunity of the present seem

visceral. […] Here and throughout Hamlet, then, the body is less a metaphor for

time than it is the means for and effect of convoluting time, and consequently the

smooth machinery of political power, or the mode of the state’s reproduction. As

Hamlet recognizes, time as body, and ‘’the times,’’ or the sphere of official

politics and national history, form a joint: the body and the state are, rather than

mere metaphors for one another, mutual constructing.278

It seems that Hamlet is longing for a different, previous, time when things were different and

there was some order. In fact, in this play, everything happens and unfolds at the wrong time:

Gertrude remarries too soon; while Hamlet does not seem to be clear on how long it has been

since his father died. First, he says he has been two months dead, and then he adds that it has

been not so much, not two. Yet, right after that he remarks that his father died within a month.

Finally, when talking to Horatio he says that the funeral baked meats coldly furnish the marriage

table. At this point, time for Hamlet is not only out of joint but it is also blurred. As the play

develops, for him time does not pass quickly enough in order for him to satisfy his vengeance. At

the same time, Ophelia returns with the flowers, which are interpreted by many as solutions to

everyone’s problems,279

too late. In the end, she is abandoned by Hamlet and dies too soon,

while Fortinbras and the Ambassador arrive too late only to find almost everyone dead.

278 Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010, 15. 279 Blackmore, Simon Augustine. The Riddles of Hamlet. Boston: Stratford & company, 1917. Shakespeare Online.

2 Aug. 2011. < http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/hamlet/opheliasend.html >; Grabau, Lydia. “Ophelia’s

Flowers.” < https://hamletdramaturgy.wordpress.com/2013/02/20/ophelias-flowers/>

95

DiPietro and Grady also acknowledge temporality and its close connection to presentism

in their essay “Presentism, Anachronism, and Titus Andronicus.”280

They write that the

timelessness of literature implicates not only that it carries specifics of the historical moment

when it was created, but it also “is a façade for our reconstructions of the past at our historical

moment – and too often a façade concealing unspoken assumptions from our own time.”281

There is an unbreakable bond within the present/past binary, which entails entanglement of

different temporal stances within the same text. They do not discuss this as temporality but rather

as anachronism. They write, “The idea of nonidentical but contiguous histories overlaying one

another in our reading of historically situated texts requires a kind of temporal double-

consciousness, a concurrency between present and past that is, by another name, anachronism,

”282

or as Clifford Ronan has argued, “anachronism transforms ‘the Then’ into ‘a Now that

urgently must be dealt with.’”283

In this play, anachronism is present through the interpretation of

events portraying ancient Roman soldiers while written in the Renaissance and interpreted in the

XXI century. Therefore, the text is viewed in relation to different temporal contexts, i.e. multiple

temporalities.

Since the Enlightenment, time has been segmented, which opened it up for various

interpretations. As West-Pavlov explains, there is no hegemonic absolute model of time; instead,

time is composed of “alternative models of multiple temporalities which are immanent to the

very processes of material being itself in all of its manifestations,”284

or as Alfred North

Whitehead notices, ”time is a continuous stream of occurrences.”285

Literature, in its nature,

embodies time and temporality. Therefore, the discussion on temporality cannot be separated

from any literary discussion be it historicism, new historicism, or presentism. Presentism is

280 DiPietro, Cary and Hugh Grady, eds. Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now: Criticism and Theory in the 21

st


281 Ibid.

282 Ibid, 15.

283 Quoted in Moschovakis, Nicholas. '''Irreligious Piety' and Christian History: Persecution as Pagan Anachronism

in Titus Andronicus.'' Shakespeare Quarterly, 53.4 (Winter 2002): 461.

284 West-Pavlov, Russell. Temporalities. New York: Routledge, 2013. 175-76. 285 Whitehead, Alfred North. The Concept of Nature: Tanner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College November

1919. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1920, 172.

96

perhaps the closest to the theory of temporality, because it acknowledges the existence of the

past in the texts we interpret today, and the influence of the present on the texts written at some

earlier moment.

97

5. Adaptation and Appropriation

The spectator or reader must be able to participate in the play

of similarity and difference perceived between the original,

source, or inspiration to appreciate fully the reshaping or

rewriting undertaken by the adaptive text.

Julie Sanders286

Adaptations of texts have been used in one form or another since the beginning of

literature. Shakespeare was well known for basing his plays on Latin, Italian, French or other

texts. Poetic narratives and historiography were his favorite sources. Additionally, his plays have

been adapted variously since his death. His work has become the source for many operas, novels,

screenplays, podcasts, ballets, YouTube clips, and many other literary and artistic achievements

in all known media. Culture, politics, economics, and time shape and adapt texts. So, what is

adaptation specifically? It is a re-casting of one work in one media to fit another such as the re-

casting of plays for television scripts, to give one example.287

It is also considered close to the

practice contemporary theorists refer to as intertextuality.288

Julia Kristeva, to begin with, saw

intertextuality (a term she coined) as an ever-evolving cultural mosaic289

. The intertextuality

argument is based on Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism290

and the argument that texts are always

used and re-used in other texts; thus, they are adapted to fit a purpose.

Dialogism is the characteristic epistemological mode of a world dominated by

heteroglossia. Everything means, is understood, as a part of a greater whole -

there is a constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential

286 Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. New York: Routledge, 2008, 45. 287 Cuddon, J. A. Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London, UK: Penguin Books, 1999, 8.

288 Quinn, Edward. A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms. New York: Checkmark Books, 1999, 4; Sanders,

Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. New York: Routledge, 2008, 17.

289 For more see Kristeva, Julia. “The Bounded Text.” Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and

Art. Trans. Thomas Gora. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980.

290 Holquist, Michael. Dialogim: Bakhtin and His World. Oxford, UK: Psychology Press, 2002, 426.

98

of conditioning others. Which will affect the other, how it will do so and in what

degree is what is actually settled at the moment of utterance. This dialogic

imperative, mandated by the pre-existence of the language world relative to any

of its current inhabitants, insures that there can be no actual monologue. One may,

like a primitive tribe that knows only its own limits, be deluded into thinking

there is one language, or one may, as grammarians, certain political figures and

normative framers of "literary languages" do, seek in a sophisticated way to

achieve a unitary language. In both cases the unitariness is relative to the

overpowering force of heteroglossia, and thus dialogism.

“Any given text is, instead, an assemblage of prior texts […].”291

In a wider sense, adaptation can

be associated with Homi Bhabha’s term hybridity, as well, which suggested that ideas (and for

this purpose texts) are “repeated, relocated and translated in the name of tradition.”292

Hybridity,

according to him, allowed creativity and innovation. Hybridity is somewhat similar to Gerard

Genette’s hypertextuality, which means writing a text with other texts in mind.293

Both

intertextuality and hybridity can be related to the associative processes in one’s mind and within

the literary text, which Gerard Genette elaborated as the relations of hypo- and hypertextuality.

Therefore, nowadays adaptation can be defined as variation upon variation within the diversity of

postmodernist, and, more and more frequently, postcolonial cultures. Adaptation can also be

used to ‘bring’ texts closer to new audiences. Perhaps, this is why Shakespeare is often adapted.

The richness of his opus makes his plays tempting for this sort of arduous endeavor. Margaret

Kidnie commented how Shakespeare’s texts were not discrete, detached, isolated, and stable; in

fact, their adaptation was “a dynamic process that evolves over time in response to the needs and

sensibilities of its users. […] It was an evolving category closely tied to how the work modifies

over time and from one reception to another.”294

According to Kidnie, his texts have often been

291 Quinn, Edward. A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms. New York: Checkmark Books, 1999, 167.

292 Bhabha, Homi K. “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences.” Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen

Tiffin. Eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 1995, 207.

293 For more see Genette, Gerard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman and

Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: UP Nebraska, 1997.

294 Kidnie, Margaret Jane. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. London and New York: Routledge, 2009,

2-5.

99

re-worked and are considered palimpsests. One cannot but notice how she echoes Clifford Geertz

by connecting historical moments and reception theory. The historical and cultural moment of

the audience determined the adaptation and, thereby, the reception of it. Mark T. Burnett also

emphasizes that Shakespeare’s texts were favorable for adaptation. He writes, “[that filmmakers]

consistently find in Shakespearean narratives indexes of transnationalism, border crossings and

interchange.”295

Furthermore, he explains that other non-western cultures use these adaptations

for “analogizing their relation to Shakespeare, a western cultural phenomenon, [which] enables

them to contemplate the tensions and the energies, the initiatives and the instabilities, that

constitute their own possibility.”296

Hence, Shakespeare has become a global phenomenon and is

adapted in order for other (to use the term in Edward W. Said’s way) audiences to comprehend

and accept global issues such as “deterritorialization, urbanization, demographic shifts,

generational conflict and local realignments of gender and race.”297

There has been an explosion

of adaptations of Shakespeare’s texts in India, Japan, China, Burma, and South Africa in the past

century. It is interesting how the original text and the adaptation complement each other and

touch on issues that are regionally specific. Sarah Hatchuel, Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, and

Victoria Bladen have also written about non-Anglophone and global Shakespeare.298

As an

example, they show how adaptations of Macbeth have reflected on the supernatural, issues of

power, and gender roles in South Africa. Their point was that what had once been considered a

marginalized and non-Anglophone cinematographic outpost had a lot to contribute to the global

conversation on Shakespeare. Additionally, these specifically local adaptations have become not

only acceptable, but they have also proven to be valuable for the international discourse on

Shakespeare.

The palimpsestuous nature of texts makes them not only adaptable, but they are also

“reinterpretations of established texts in new generic contexts or perhaps with relocations of an

‘original’ or sourcetext’s cultural and/or temporal setting, which may or may not involve a

295 Burnett, Mark Thornton. Shakespeare and World Cinema. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2013, 24.

296 Ibid, 154.

297 Ibid, 196.

298 Hatchuel, Sarah, Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, and Victoria Bladen. Eds. Shakespeare on Screen: “Macbeth.” Mont-

Saint-Aigan, France: Publications des Universites de Rouen and du Harve, 2014.

100

generic shift.”299

In recent decades, it has become common practice to relocate and change the

cultural, geographical, and social background of the play in order to reach out to the audience,

which in most cases is not familiar with the original text, and bring the original story closer to

the viewers. Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet300

is such an example. The

North American setting and gang violence is something that the younger contemporary Western

audience can relate to. Such adaptations are easier for the new audience to accept, they offer a

way of gaining new viewers, and are a pleasure (in most cases) for the audience that is familiar

with the original text(s). John Ellis argues, “[that] adaptation into another medium becomes a

means of prolonging the pleasure of the original presentation, and repeating the production of a

memory.”301

In essence, the afterlife of a play extends through adaptations, appropriations, and

literary criticism. Some will argue that the ‘original’ presentation of a play or novel is the best

and only way to engage with literature. However, an argument can be made that every staging,

film, or some other medium, which has been done after the original text has been published, is an

adaptation. For instance, Shakespeare’s plays have been adapted even in the XVII century.

Sandra Clark points out that it has been done as early as the Restoration period 1660,302

while

Gerald E. Bentley contends that it occurred even sooner: “[the] refurbishing of old plays in the

repertory seems to have been universal practice in the London theaters from 1590-1642.”303

Frederick W. Kilbourne wrote about the immense alterations that were done to the authentic

texts, which in the XVII century almost displaced the originals. One such example was the

famous or one could even argue ‘infamous’ version of Tate. Nahum Tate (born Nahum Teate)

was an Irish poet who is famous for adapting King Lear. At the time, in a politically charged

interpretation, he ended the play with a happy end by marrying Cordelia and Edgar. Apart from

the political issue, even Jacobean theatergoers wanted something new. Once the play was

experienced in its original staging, the desire to see something new and different came naturally.

Also, theatergoers of the Restoration had a different taste than those in Elizabethan England.

299 Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. New York: Routledge, 2008, 19.

300 William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet. Dir. Baz Luhrmann. Perf. Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes, Brian

Dennehy, and John Leguizamo. 20th

Century Fox, 1996. Film 301 Ellis, John. ''The Literary Adaptation: An Introduction.'' Screen 23.1 (1996): 3-5. 302 Clark, Sandra. Ed. Shakespeare Made Fit: Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare. London: Everyman, 1997.

303 Bentley, Gerald Eades. The Profession of Dramatists in Shakespeare's Time. 1590-1642. Princeton: Princeton

UP, 1971, 263.

101

They thought that Shakespeare was ignorant of the ‘rules of art;’ meaning he did not follow the

Aristotelian unities of time and place. Simply stated, their opinion of Elizabethan plays, and of

Shakespeare too, was unfavorable, so changes and adjustments needed to be made. Thus Tate, as

Marjorie Garber explains, believed that Shakespeare was a writer “wanting in taste” and “was an

unfortunate by-product of a barbarous age.” Furthermore, she writes that those such as Tate

believed that “his plays, remarkable though they were, could be ‘improved’ by more

sophisticated modern writers.”304

Nevertheless, Tate’s own desire to ‘improve’ Shakespeare’s

work was eclipsed by the same belief that actors had well into the nineteenth century, who also

made corrections and revisions, just as twentieth century editors still defended this practice and

conformed his works to their own tastes and age. Hence, they boldly replaced what was said with

what should have been said. 305

Admittedly, one might wonder whether there is an authentic text

at all. The answer, although not simple, is that there are many texts that are available for further

adaptation and appropriation, and suitably for our discussion one might add, as Garber does as

well, that there are just as many Shakespeares as there are versions of his texts. Perhaps it is

opportune to add that the authentic text was not only re-worked to sound better or to fit the age.

Sometimes, authors felt that they needed to ‘work on’ the texts of one of the most celebrated

authors of the western world and, hereinafter, prove their own merit and writing skills.

Apart from adaptation, there is also appropriation, which is often mixed with the former.

Appropriation differs from adaptation, because it is the re-working of the sourcetext and taking it

a step further by adding more material. It is important to note that appropriation nowadays is

mostly cultural appropriation, which is taking elements from one culture and incorporating them

into a different one. There is dispute about the manner and degree of taking elements from other

cultures, since it often happens that they are used in ways that seem colonial and which are not

sanctioned by the members of the original cultural. The problem is that these elements are taken

and stripped of their original meaning and purpose only because they are ‘exotic’ or interesting.

Sometimes taking parts of Shakespeare’s plays and using them in film and television can be seen

as such.

304 Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare After All. New York: Random, 2004, 12-14. 305 Ibid.

102

An example of adaptation is Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. Apart from dropping a few

lines, the text is Shakespeare’s, while the rest was left to Branagh’s artistic freedom. On the

other hand, Shakespeare in Love,306

Ran,307

and Throne of Blood308

are appropriations.

Shakespeare in Love presents one of many possibilities how the play Romeo and Juliet came to

be, and what Shakespeare was like privately. This backstage drama shows the amorous

relationship between Will and one of his actors, who is a woman dressed as a man. It goes

without saying that there is no factual evidence for such a plot. Yet, such appropriations have

been popular, because they expand on the original story and are more in tune with the present

time than adaptations are. One can argue that appropriations are somewhat closer to presentism

than adaptations. Yet, Sanders warns of the danger of appropriation being treated as plagiarism.

She mentions Graham Swift’s novel Last Orders, which won the Booker Prize in 1996. Swift

wrote the book, as she puts it, as ‘homage’ to the late novelist William Faulkner and his work As

I Lay Dying (1930), but was accused by John Flow of the University of Queensland, Australia, of

plagiarism. Flow considered that the novel was a substandard derivation of the original, which

made the book unworthy of its prize for originality. Julian Barnes defended Swift by saying that

borrowing/appropriation is a standard feature of the artistic process.309

The likeness was based

not as much on the plot but as on the length and style of the monologues and the development of

the characters. Sanders notices,

What is both interesting and troubling in the case of Last Orders and the

‘homage’ to Faulkner is that what in studies of Shakespeare might be termed an

examination of sources or creative borrowings, citing allusions to or

redeployments of Ovid, Plutarch, Thomas Lodge, the Roman comedies and so on,

306 Shakespeare in Love. Dir. John Madden. Perf. Joseph Fiennes, Gwyneth Paltrow, Geoffrey Rush. Universal

Pictures, Miramax, 1998.

307 Ran. Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Perf. Tatsuya Nakadai, Akira Terao, and Jinpachi Nezu. Greenwich Film

Productions, 1985.

308 Throne of Blood. Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Perf. Toshiro Mifune, Minoru Chiaki, and Isuzu Yamada. Kurosawa

Production Company, 1957.


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becomes in the case of a modern novel a reductive discussion of plagiarism and

‘inauthenticity.’310

The apparent issue does not only question whether this author has committed the act of

plagiarism, but it also brings to the discussion the questions of intertextuality, intellectual

property rights, and authorship. This problem begs the question: is there a line that should be

drawn when borrowing sources while writing a text or composing music? Could the problem be

simply solved by giving credit to each reference made in the text? These are some of the

questions that appropriation addresses while attempting to provide objective and acceptable

answers. To those who view appropriation as an undeserving and dishonorable form of aesthetic

and plot recycling, Sanders, unapologetically, rebuts, “[…] we need to view literary adaptation

and appropriation from [a] more positive vantage point, seeing it as creating new cultural and

aesthetic possibilities that stand alongside the texts which have inspired them, enriching rather

than ‘robbing’ them.”311

Adaptation and appropriation are dependent on the literary canon, but

they are also products of their time. Since the XVII century theaters have been adapting

Shakespeare for commercial purposes, and financial (and cultural) gain. In today’s global

market, adaptation and appropriation have become a dominant means of production for the

cultural industries. Furthermore, we are, once again, reminded of Hawkes’ Bardbiz, and the

financial potential that lies in anything that has Shakespeare’s name, face, or verses on it.

Adaptation and appropriation are products of a cultural moment. Politics and society

highly determine how a text will be adapted. Coriolanus would most certainly not be presented

the same way in the communist China, as it will be in the United States. By the same token, the

racial problem in Othello will be interpreted and staged diversely in different cultures. As

mentioned previously, the magic in Macbeth is viewed and adapted differently in South Africa,

Jamaica, or India than it is in Western societies.

Shakespeare’s profound insight into everlasting social problems provides unique, and

exploitable, grounds for (evidently presentist) adaptations and appropriations. However, there is

also the aspiration and need of each generation to ‘find’ themselves in his works. As Jean I.

Marsden explained,

310 Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. New York: Routledge, 2008, 34. 311 Ibid, 41.

104

[…] Ben Johnson’s famous observation that Shakespeare ‘was not of an age but

for all time’ need not be taken to endorse the hoary old claims to his ‘universality’

but rather as an indication that he remain available to subsequent ages to adapt

and adopt as they wish. His cultural value lies in his availability […]. Each new

generation attempts to redefine Shakespeare’s genius in contemporary terms,

projecting its desires and anxieties on to his work.312

Some adapt and appropriate his works to gain acknowledgement by adding their name to

Shakespeare’s. As Pascal Aebischer and Nigel Wheal write, “[…] that his plays and name [are

used] as pretexts for cultural and ideological negotiations that are more often relevant to their

immediate context than to Shakespeare’s plays themselves.”313

Others do it to reinforce his

place in the canon, while there are those who simply just borrow what has proven to work. Since

many adaptations are in a contemporary setting it just so happens that the audience is not even

aware that it is Shakespeare. For example, the movie Ten Things I Hate About You314

is an

adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew; although, most people who have seen it do not know that

it is so. In today’s world, his texts are mainly adjusted to contemporary issues and concerns. As

mentioned before, Henry V has been ‘modified’ to address World War II, Vietnam, and the Gulf

wars, which is exactly what presentism claims that contemporary adaptation does. There is an

undisputed adaptive influence of the present moment on interpreting classics. Most of the time,

such influences are political. However, in Shakespeare’s case it can also be linguistic in nature.

Sometimes, adaptations of his texts are needed to bridge the gap between ‘his’ English and the

one of today’s generations. In America, the series of books titled “No Fear Shakespeare”

translates, or should one say adapts, his English to colloquial language line for line, so that

people (mostly teenagers and students) will understand his plays.

Shakespeare’s name is often associated with the term intermedia. According to Daniel

Fischlin,

312 Marsden, Jean I. Ed. The Appropriation of Shakespeare. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991, 1. 313 Aebischer, Pascale, Nigel Wheal, Edward J. Esche. Eds. Remaking Shakespeare: Performance across Media,

Genres, Cultures. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, 3.

314 Ten Things I Hate About You. Dir. Gil Junger. Perf. Heather Ledger, Julia Stiles, Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Touchstone Pictures, 1999

105

Intermedia references a vast, ongoing set of practices associated with how

narratives travel in and across media, in and through cultures. Intermedia occur

when representation is reconfigured through an array of media and cultural forms

that arise out of specific contexts, diffuse histories, technologies, and creative

practices.315

It is not strange that the crossing over between arts and media is a part of today’s world, since

they have been even in Shakespeare’s age. Stephen Greenblatt wrote, “The dominant media of

our time – television, film, and popular music – depend, as did the Elizabethan theater, upon the

intersection of arts: words, images, music, dance.”316

In essence, culture is a synthesis of views,

beliefs, and various media, which themselves are considered to be new works of art. One

example is a ‘mashup’,317

as Christy Desmet calls it. This mashup is:

A hybrid artifact [stands] midway between curating (filtering, framing, and

replication of others’ material) and what we consider individual creativity

(making an ‘original’ art object) and so tends to reflect self-consciously on its

artistic status. Mashups are prominent in the world of Youtube Shakespeare and,

over time, have developed into a less precise form in which array of clips,

sometimes from many sources and sometimes from just one, are mixed to create a

new narrative. Many early examples fell victim to copyright complaints, but in the

wake of the unsuccessful Viacom copyright suit, Shakespeare mashups are

making a comeback.318

Hence, these mashups, or as their authors consider them ‘works of art,’ are not only a cultural

phenomenon, but they are also, undisputedly, presentist in nature. Again, variation upon

variation of adaptations and appropriations, and with mashups one sees even adaptations of

315 Fischlin, Daniel. Ed. OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation. Toronto: Toronto

UP, 2014, 3.

316 Greenblatt, Stephen. ''The Interart Moment.'' In Interart Poetics: Essays on the Interralations of the Arts and

Media. Eds. Ulla Britta Lagerroth, Hans Lund, and Erik Hedling. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997, 14.

317 A mashup is created from one or more video clips rolled over a soundtrack from a different, usually discordant,

source. […] These moments coalesce into a multimedia narrative in which the soundtrack – both aurally and

conceptually, by virtue of its source – supports an inverted reading of the original film’s ethos. Desmet, Christy.

“YouTube Shakespeare, Appropriation, and Rhetorics of Invention.” Fischlin 62. 318 Desmet, Christy. “YouTube Shakespeare, Appropriation, and Rhetorics of Invention.” Fischlin 63.

106

adaptations or appropriations of appropriations, lead to a new way of viewing of old texts, which

is tinted by the events and concepts of the present moment. It can even be argued that

Shakespeare’s name itself gives validity and importance to a prolific and presentist popular

culture, which dominates high culture. Thus, Shakespeare, as Desmet impartially puts it, is a

global intermedial brand endlessly appropriated and adapted319

to best express the cultural and

political moment of the time. These mashups, video clips, and other intermedial adaptations and

appropriations are important because they are not only representations and products of popular

culture, but they have also entered academia. Samuel Crowl, a professor of English at Ohio

University, teaches Shakespeare on film, and he iterates how there has been a renaissance of

Shakespeare on film since the 1990s. However, professors do not have the time to show them in

class, so Crowl shares that he has learned over the years that few films ever enter the classroom;

consequently, “most film or television productions are likely to find their way into the

Shakespeare survey via the film clip.”320

He, specifically, writes about film clips and scene

selections from film; however, it can be argued that mashups and other visual media are used by

professors and students alike as a replacement for film and a supplement to class discussions.

Usually, this occurs when professors want to show the difference in the interpretation of the

original text. For example, the scene when Romeo and Juliet meet is performed and staged

differently; thus, it is suitable for such endeavors. Nevertheless, for the purpose of this work,

film is chosen as the most popular medium for Shakespeare adaptations, and it will be discussed

on the following pages.

There are various Shakespeare film adaptations, which deserve attention and are often

cited in scholarly papers, articles, and books. One could say that the death of the author,

discussed in the previous chapters, could have brought on the birth of the auteur, which

according to Crowl is the movie director. Conversely, television, film, and other media were not

blithely accepted by influential intellectuals, critics, scholars, philosophers, social scientists, and

consequently, across academia:


UP, 2014, 260. 320 Crowl, Samuel. Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide. New York: Norton, 2008, xiii.

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For Walter Benjamin, the newspaper and novel destroy the “chasteness” and

embedded life of storytelling; for Frederic Jameson, photography challenges the

fullness of novelistic representation. For many years television played the

aesthetically impoverished and dangerous newcomer but web-based electronic

media now regularly inhabit that role.321

There was a fear in academia of the alienating affects of technology and the media. In essence,

skepticism derived from the query could the director and the audiences interpret plays while

preserving the high culture standard? The fact of the matter is that the same reservations that

scholars had toward the role of the reader were transferred to the audience. Rowe and Emma

French discuss this issue and concur that the Frankfurt School understanding that the audience is

passive and can be manipulated by the media has changed. French proposes a neo-Gramscian

approach to reception in which the audience is active and is an important participant for the film

industry.322

The relevance of the reviews that follow the premier of the films shows how

significant film reception is. The second part of the issue, which is often discussed in scholarly

papers, is whether film is low culture. French argues that out of fear of debasing Shakespeare, in

the past, the film industry always chose a conservative approach to his works. However, in the

second half of the XX century with the expansion of Shakespeare to the international film

production, in Asia in particular, there has been a more postmodern approach to filmmaking and

interpretation. As Rowe writes, “No longer an epiphenomenon, adaptation is now understood as

an essential condition of transmission for Shakespeare texts.” In consequence, adaptation in the

form of film has become the international medium for adapting Shakespeare for a contemporary

audience by correlating their world with his. There are various types of film but we will turn to

the following classification, which is most applicable to Shakespeare film adaptations. Crowl

borrows from Jack Jorgens323

the division of these films into the following categories: the

theatrical, the realistic, and the filmic. Jorgens divided the movies according to how the text was

used. Some used Shakespeare’s texts (Olivier, Welles, Zeffirelli), some used a translated version

321 Rowe, Katherine. “Medium-Specificity and Other Critical Scripts for Screen Shakespeare.” Henderson 47.

322 French, Emma. Selling Shakespeare to Hollywood: The Marketing of Filmed Shakespeare Adaptations from

1989 into the new Millenium. Hatfiled, UK: U of Hertfordshire P, 2006, 7.

323 Jorgens, Jack J. Shakespeare on Film. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1979.

108

of it (Kozintsev), and Kurosawa, for example, used the plot of the play but the dialogue was not

directly connected to Shakespeare’s text.324

Crowl adds how most Hollywood films, since they

are overtly popular internationally, are in the second category. The following selection covers

film adaptations of Hamlet, Coriolanus, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet from all three categories

and addresses the cultural, political, and social aspects that influenced their making.

324 Crowl, Samuel. Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide. New York: Norton, 2008, xix.

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6. Relevant Presentist Criticism and Adaptations of a Selection of

Shakespeare’s Tragedies

6.1 Hamlet - Presentist Criticism and Adaptations

When it comes to this play, perhaps, the best way to commence the discussion on Hamlet,

and its adaptations, is to begin with the main presentist critics and their thoughts on the longest

of Shakespeare’s plays. Hamlet is considered a play of multiple viewpoints, and it may be one of

the reasons why many have written extensively about. It also has more film adaptations than any

other Shakespeare play. As established earlier, Terence Hawkes’ presentism is connected to

social criticism and reform. Adequately, his essay on Hamlet will go along those lines.

“Telmah”325

(Hamlet written backwards) is first and foremost an essay that shows the

importance of literature in society, and the power a text (or criticism of it) has to influence

people to create change in society. In this essay, Hawkes considers the case of the scholar and

critic John Dover Wilson who was highly disturbed by an article about Hamlet published in the

Modern Language Review (XII, 4) in 1917. Apparently, it overwhelmed him so much that,

according to Hawkes, it reflected his own change of opinion about a major political reversal at

that time in the world – Bolshevik revolution: from a youthful consideration of the necessity for

social justice in Tsarist Russia (in 1906 when Dover Wilson wrote about the topic as a young

journalist) to a firm conservative position which included subtle ideological instrumentalization

of literature. Later, in 1935 he published a book What Happens in Hamlet, which will be a

classic in Shakespeare criticism. The book was an answer to the 1917 W. W. Greg’s article in the

MLR titled “Hamlet’s Hallucination.” Furthermore, in 1934, he prepared the New Cambridge

edition of Hamlet after years of working in education and being responsible for shaping the

educational system of England between the two world wars. Hawkes goes into detail on the

influence this article had on Dover Wilson, but he also addresses what captured Wilson’s

attention in the first place – Greg chose to read the play in such a way that he put the attention on

Claudius and his failure to respond to The Mousetrap. The core of the problem Hawkes

325 Hawkes, Terence. That Shakespeherian Rag. New York: Routledge, 1986, 92-119.

110

recognizes is W. W. Greg’s disturbing tendency to change the way Hamlet could be interpreted,

whereas Dover Wilson’s position served to enhance the ideological strength of teaching literature

with the aim to make British subjects politically loyal. Developing a personality by

understanding literature was desirable as long as it remained individualistic, and therefore

harmless to the social order, as long as it developed the sense of belonging to a national tradition

(English, British), but it had to be channeled so as not to provoke any thoughts of fundamental

social change, which could be the case if literary works of art could be, so to say, ‘deconstructed’

by critics and readers. Although Hawkes’ re-construction of Dover Wilson’s personal political

and ideological development may seem a bit far-fetched and full of hardly verifiable conjectures,

which, at moments, reach the necessity of psycho-analytic “hermeneutics of suspicion”, the

article Telmah remains a central example of the radical cultural materialist and presentist

consideration of the political aspects of reading Shakespeare.

Hawkes’ own consideration of Hamlet relies on the possibility of reading the play with

the focus on contradictions and reversals of the traditional readings, among which a dominant

one belongs to Dover Wilson. Hugh Grady notices that

Hawkes proceeds to read the play ‘against the grain’ (as Terry Eagleton would

later put it), discerning within the text the potential to be interpreted as the

tragedy, not of the Prince, but of his ‘mighty opposite,’ Claudius. “I propose,”

wrote Hawkes, “the sense of the text as a site, or an area of conflicting and often

contradictory potential interpretations, no one group of which can claim ‘intrinsic’

primacy or ‘inherent’ authority, and which are always ideological in nature and

subject to extrinsic political and economic determinisms” (1986:117). Hawkes’s

manifesto for radically indeterminate readings was a signal that a new paradigm

for interpretation of Hamlet (and of literature generally) was well underway.326

Hawkes argued that it is the reaction to the text that gives it meaning. The power of the text, or

for this purpose we can even claim an adaptation, to ignite an individual is most remarkable.

However, for Hawkes, it also extended onto society as a whole; literature does affect social and

political issues. He indicated, as seen in the quotation above, that literature can be/is interpreted


111

differently around the world and that there is no ‘one point of view.’ Hence, he chose the essay’s

title, which is Hamlet spelled backwards. The true play, according to Hawkes, is Telmah and not

Hamlet.327

He did not write about film adaptations of Hamlet, but he did believe that every

individual reading and staging was an interpretation in itself.

Ewan Fernie perceives performance as a presentist act. He reminds of Derrida’s words

and says, “Hamlet breaches and disrupts successive presents.”328

Hamlet seems to speak to

everyone and adapts easily to any culture. Sulayman Al-Bassam’s The Al-Hamlet Summit,329

played at Riverside Studios, London 2004, is of special interest to Fernie. The plot is

Shakespeare’s but the time is the XXI century, and Hamlet is a Europeanized Arabic playboy. It

is a powerful representation of contemporary political scenarios, and all the characters are

delegates in a conference room.

Visually, we are solidly located in a 21st century political universe, with the live-

feeds and projection screen constantly reminding us of last night’s television

address by George W. Bush, or last week’s summit in Bonn or Washington. This

arrangement allows Shakespeare’s words to take on an uncanny metaphorical

resonance.330

Fernie comments that the performance plunges into the ethical idealism and “demonstrates how a

pledge to the absolute can combine the violence of a specific commitment with the assurance of

doing right.”331

Fong Li Ling of the Flying Inkpot Theater Review wrote (10/06/2005) that the

performance was amazing, and that the director chose to leave out the minor roles so that the

main characters can interact more. The Ghost was presented as fundamentalist leaflets or as the

voice of Allah. Furthermore, Hamlet’s madness was portrayed as religious zealotry. The staging

was able to address the turbulence and strife of the post 9/11 Arab world. The only slight

327 Hawkes, Terence. That Shakespeherian Rag. New York: Routledge, 1986, 116. 328 Fernie, Ewan. “Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism.” Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005): 169. 329 The Al-Hamlet Summit. By William Shakespeare. Dir. Sulayman Al-bassam. Perf. Mariam Ali, Nigel Barrett,

Nicholas Daniel, Monadhil Daood, Bashar Al-Ibrahim, Mohamed Kefah Al-Khous, Amana Wali. Sulayman Al-

bassam Theater. Kuwait.

330 The Al-Hamlet Summit. Web. 7 Mart 2016. http://www.sabab.org/the-al-hamlet-summit/


http://www.sabab.org/the-al-hamlet-summit/

112

drawback was that the play was in Arabic and the subtitles in English; however, Ling applauds

the director for the “commendable job with the English script.”332

Fernie discusses this staging

(and the whole play) in relation to terrorism, so he comments, “[…] a presentist consideration of

the play, that doesn’t baulk at its uncompromising strangeness, might help us think through the

present crisis.” Fernie advocates a presentism that encompasses both the present and the past. He

explains that such texts

[…] mark time in two very different ways. They do so firstly because the complex

processes of the past, present and future can be read off from the dialectical

interplay between their origins and their changing reception. But they also mark

time in that they have altered it as if from outside. Inasmuch as they maintain any

vital force, they continue to do so. They can’t be completely explained by history,

but go on leaving their mark on it.333

Fernie’s rendition of presentism has always been between that of Hawkes and Grady. While

Grady’s is a historical presentism, which is modified by the past, Hawkes’ is an active influence

of works from the past on the events of the present moment. Hawkes argues that these works

change the present moment and the reception of them. For Fernie, on the other hand, the past is

inseparable from the present moment and influences the present just as much as the present

reception influences the meaning of the literary work coming from the past.

According to Grady, Hamlet has always been the source of heated discussions,

disagreement, and even scandals; yet, it has escaped the nets of critics throughout the

centuries.334

He analyzes the reception of Hamlet in the past centuries in relation to the fluid,

and, if one may say, ever-shifting, epochal standards of aesthetics. From the neo-classical

disregard of Shakespeare’s ‘barbarous’ plots, due to his disregard for the classical unities,

‘decorum’, rules of necessity and probability as the structural plot principles to the Romantic

praise of Hamlet and to the development of Kantian and post-Kantian aesthetics – aesthetics has

always been marked and changed by the time it was discussed in. In a time, when an individual

332 Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead. Web. 7 Mart 2016.

http://www.inkpot.com/theatre/05reviews/0610,alhasumm,fl.html


334 Grady, Hugh. “Hamlet and the Present Notes on the Moving Aesthetic ‘Now.’” Grady and Hawkes 142.


113

became the center of art and philosophy (late XIX c.), Hamlet once again rose to prominence:

“Interpreting Hamlet in this period becomes in that sense a simulacrum for solving the age’s

great philosophical problems of knowledge and personhood.”335

Grady reminds of the

importance this work had in Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Johann

Wolfgang Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship is famous for its Romantic reading

of this play. Karl Marx’s friend, the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath, wrote a poem “Germany is

Hamlet”. Not only in Germany, and not only during Romanticism, this play seemed to be “the

defining instance of inter-related categories of the aesthetic and subjectivity.”336

Hamlet turned

out to be exceedingly fruitful for Modernism. At the apogee of the Romantic tradition, A. C.

Bradley wrote his Shakespearean Tragedy (1904). Some years before that, Sigmund Freud wrote

his The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), in which he demonstrated the power of the Oedipal

complex in Hamlet. The discussion of Hamlet in Modernism includes T. S. Eliot’s essay

“Hamlet and His Problems” (1919), for the admirers of this play known as somewhat

disappointing. The important effect of Eliot’s essay was, says Grady, a major shift in Hamlet

criticism: the attention was turned from Hamlet the character toward Hamlet the play and its

structure, “as a source of many ‘problems’ critics had been debating.”337

Each of the

aforementioned works, which are in the center of Grady’s analysis, are works of cultural and

aesthetic transition. Grady views Eliot’s essay as a means to serve “both conservative political

and aesthetic Modernist purpose.”338

Hence, the essay devaluated Shakespeare, the aesthetics and

culture of the previous period in general, and signaled the beginning of a new period. Grady

concurs with Hawkes in his judgment that “Eliot’s verdict on Hamlet is best explained as part of

his political-literary ‘programme’ for a new, more conservative English literary canon – one

based on the denigration of the Romantics in favor of the a seventeenth-century Anglican

tradition […].”339

For Hawkes, and Grady in this instance, literature, or even a single work as

Hamlet, has the power to influence not only the canon, but also it can make an impact on the

educational system of one country.

335 Ibid, 146. 336 Ibid, 147. 337 Ibid, 152. 338 Ibid, 152. 339 Hawkes, Terence. Meaning by Shakespeare. New York: Routledge, 1992, 93-94.

114

Grady writes that as far as adaptations are concerned, “The 1912 production of Hamlet in

the Moscow Art Theater which used Cubist motifs (a collaboration between Edward Gordon

Craig and K. S. Stanislavsky) seemed at first to enlist Hamlet into the cause of Modernism, and

the twentieth century in fact saw a plethora of Modernist-inspired Hamlets.”340

Grady also points

out the 1947 Lawrence Olivier film that delivered a different Hamlet − one who is a hero, rather

than alienated and indecisive, as he was sometimes interpreted in between the two world wars,

which reflected the sentiment of the British who won the war. Scholarly interpretations of this

play also changed during the Modernist period and Grady singles out two of them. One is by G.

Wilson Knight (1930)341

in which Hamlet is a positive, action-taking ambassador of death, as

Death is the central theme of the play. The other is by Maynard Mack (1952),342

and his is

“another Modernist attempt at spatialization of the play and relies less on poetic imagery and

more on trying to conceptualize ‘the imaginative environment that the play asks us to enter when

we read it or go to see it.’”343

It can be argued that Hamlet slowly fell out of favor in the XX

century, and Eliot’s opinion that the play failed artistically lingered over academia and the film

industry in the years following World War II. Nevertheless, Grady points out that a number of

important questions in Lacan’s poststructuralist psychoanalysis and in other areas of postmodern

philosophy were dealt with via interpretations of Hamlet. Lacan’s seminar dedicated to the

theory of subjectivity and published in English as “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in

Hamlet” is a long and intricate analysis of Hamlet’s character as a paradigm of human subject.

Derrida’s Spectres of Marx can be seen as a presentist interpretation of Hamlet focused on the

problems of late capitalism, decadent Western democracy, haunting, disturbing and provocative

admonitions of Marxism in the current Western civilization. In Shakespeare studies sensu

stricto, Grady singles out three postmodern interpretations of Hamlet as representatives of

different critical methodologies: Hawkes’ “Telmah” (1986), Marjorie Garber’s chapter on

Hamlet in Shakespeare Ghost Writers (1987) and Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory (2001).

Psychoanalysis, deconstruction, Marxism, and late new historicism all offered mirrors for

complex reflections of Hamlet at the end of the twentieth and at the beginning of the twenty-first

century. However, in our search for presentist reflections in other media, we will here part with

340 Grady, Hugh. “Hamlet and the Present Notes on the Moving Aesthetic ‘Now.’” Grady and Hawkes 154. 341 Knight, G. Wilson. The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespeare’s Tragedies. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1930.

342 Mack, Maynard. “The World of Hamlet.” Yale Review 41.4 (1952): 502-23. 343 Grady, Hugh. “Hamlet and the Present Notes on the Moving Aesthetic ‘Now.’” Grady and Hawkes 156.

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chosen presentist literary and philosophical criticism of Hamlet and turn to the interpretations

that come in the form of film adaptations.

The most famous film adaptation of Hamlet was done by Laurence Olivier in

1948.344

Besides the fact that he directed himself to getting an Oscar, the film was the first non-

American film to get one. However, this is not the only reason this film is remembered by.

Olivier is one of the most influential directors, along with Welles and Zeffirelli, when it comes to

adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. His version was more about the relationship of the characters

than about the politics in the play; thus, it is no surprise that he cut out the roles of Rosencrantz

and Guildenstern as well as some other characters. In many ways, Olivier’s Hamlet is presentist

in nature when it comes to psychoanalytical movement of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. His

Oedipal depiction of Hamlet is the first of its kind in cinematography. Yet, now when looking

back it seems only logical that there would be a version of Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth or Lear that

would be based on the psychoanalytical approach; for, Freud took many elements from these

plays as examples for his studies and later theories. According to Barbara Creed:

One of the first artistic movements to draw on psychoanalysis was the Surrealist

movement of the 1920s and 1930s. In their quest for new modes of experience that

transgressed the boundaries between dream and reality, the Surrealists extolled the

potential of the cinema. They were deeply influenced by Freud's theory of dreams

and his concept of the unconscious. To them, the cinema, with its special

techniques such as the dissolve, superimposition, and slow motion, correspond to

the nature of dreaming. [...] Many of Freud's theories have been used in film

theory: the unconscious; the re-turn of the repressed; Oedipal drama; narcissism;

castration; and hysteria. Possibly his most important contributions were his

accounts of the unconscious, subjectivity, and sexuality.345

344 Hamlet. Dir. Laurence Olivier. Perf. Laurence Olivier, Jean Simmons, and John Laurie. Pinewood Studios,

1948.

345 Creed, Barbara. “Film and Psychoanalysis.” The Oxford Guide to Film Studios (1998): 1-2.

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Olivier used these elements in his film in order to show the development and changes within the

characters, as well as to hint at, although openly in the scene when Hamlet passionately kisses

his mother, the subconscious incestuous aspect of the relationship between Hamlet and Gertrude.

Yet, even though many directors later on, especially Branagh, would draw on Olivier’s work,

none would focus as much as Olivier on the relationship between the characters in this play;

rather, they would work on Hamlet and the political issues in the text.

The end of the twentieth century is marked by a number of Shakespeare adaptations in

film. A significant part of this approach to Shakespeare is due to the persistence of Kenneth

Branagh.

Branagh’s appropriation of Shakespeare fashioned his career in Hollywood and

consolidated Shakespeare’s position in the American corporate and cultural

marketplace. In effect, the Branagh brand succeeded in more or less demolishing

the either/or high/low cultural barrier in filmed Shakespeare adaptations, born of

Branagh’s desire to break into the Hollywood market and to maximize

Shakespeare’s availability to mass audiences.346

It is interesting that Emma French uses the term ‘appropriation’ instead of adaptation; although,

according to the discussion in the previous chapter, it is an adaptation. Branagh almost does not

digress at all from the original text, while giving it his own approach to directing and

interpretation. Following a rather successful run in Hollywood after making Henry V (1989) and

Much Ado About Nothing (1993), he ventured out to adapt Hamlet (full-text version, 1996)347

.

“The varying degrees to which Branagh’s films have achieved commercial success and

demonstrated the ability to capture the consumer Zeitgeist must be investigated in relation to the

distinctive political and social climate in which they were marketed […].”348

Emma French

believes that the making of the film and the choice of this particular play are representative of


1989 into the new Millenium. Hatfiled, UK: U of Hertfordshire P, 2006, 63. 347 Hamlet. Dir. Kenneth Branagh. Perf. Kenneth Branagh, Derek Jacobi, Julie Kristie, and Kate Winslet. Castle

Rock Entertainment, 1996.



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what was going on in Hollywood at the time. Perhaps Hollywood was ready for another epic

Shakespeare movie – something that was not done since the famous 1963 Cleopatra. Although,

this particular adaptation of Hamlet is not quite presentist in nature, it has to be mentioned since

it opened the door for other Shakespeare adaptations in the period between 1990 and 2000. Its

value is the ability of Branagh to seek and find an audience for even the most challenging of

Shakespeare’s texts. Unfortunately, Hamlet, a four-hour feature, did not enjoy the same success

as the previous two films he made. Nobody disputes the quality of his adaptation but as French

notes, “an appeal to improving high culture is insufficient in itself to ensure box-office success

[…].”349

Apparently, shorter versions and popular action movies or romantic comedies with

famous movie stars did much better in the international market than this specific film. The

problem with the length of the movie was not a surprise to many; therefore, a shorter version was

distributed to non-English speaking countries where moviegoers had to endure less time reading

subtitles. Branagh’s attempt to be as authentic to the text as possible left him with a scarce

audience that had less interest in his Hamlet than they did in some other ones.

Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet350

was a much greater success and had movie stars that the

audience wanted to see. Almereyda shortened the script; although, he did not modernize the

language. This adaptation is presentist and shows Hamlet as a student (both he an Ophelia are,

which appeals to the younger audience), while Claudius is a manipulative and vile CEO of the

Denmark Corporation situated in Manhattan. Not only is there a temporal shift in the film, but

also there is a modernized change in some other parts. The ‘play within a play’ is actually a short

video montage in which Hamlet expresses his anti-establishment sentiment, and which is

supposed to be submitted as an assignment for his college course. Almereyda uses the media and

technology to show the lack of true communication; the characters are not able to connect

directly but only through various media. Hence, there is also a change in the interpretation of the

plot with Ophelia’s flower-giving moment. Instead of flowers, in her madness, she gives

symbolic flowers in the form of photographs. The modern, or shall we say postmodern,

substitutions make sense. As Sanders writes, “The motive behind updating is fairly obvious: the

‘movement of proximation’ brings it closer to the audience’s frame of reference in temporal,

349 Ibid, 89. 350 Hamlet. Dir. Michael Almereyda. Perf. Ethan Hawke, Kyle Maclachlan, Liev Schreiber, and Julia Stiles.

Miramax, 2000.

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geographic, or social terms.”351

Needless to say, this version was more popular with the audience

than the Branagh one, and its commercial success was equally noteworthy. The intellectually

provocative – specifically presentist – dimension of this film is particularly worthy of mention:

while watching the movie, spectators are faced with criticism of the corporate world and led to

consideration of both positive and negative potential of audio-visual and digital media as

implemented in personal communication, from the appearance of the Ghost on a video tape to

the already mentioned “Mousetrap”, Ophelia’s photographs or video club as a setting for the “to

be or not to be” soliloquy. The high/low binary opposition is successfully deconstructed by a

subtle way of approaching the wider young audience, their openness to radical, critical or

subversive thinking of the society and social issues.

However, a film produced a decade before Almereyda’s, Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet352

achieved the most praise both in Hollywood and internationally, while Mel Gibson gave a

surprisingly good performance. The temporal shift in this film took the audience into the past,

and Elsinore was situated in medieval times, with a Gothic ambience. Casting Gibson turned out

to be a great marketing move, since he was highly popular in the 1980s. Although, some critics

thought that

The close up [on the posters] emphasizes Mel Gibson’s iconic action movie

attributes: acting not thinking, good looks, decisiveness and masculinity, rather

than Hamlet’s traditional attributes: thinking not acting, inability to make up his

mind, satire, tragic humour and feigned madness. Gibson’s popular celebrity

status complements Hamlet’s high-culture credentials and characteristics to create

a rich, if potentially contradictory, semiotic image.353

Nevertheless, it is specifically manly image that Gibson had, which enabled the popularity of

Hamlet. It was exactly what was needed to open Shakespeare’s plays up for a different and

postmodern interpretation. As much as he respected and looked up to Kurosawa and Olivier,

Zeffirelli wanted to break away from them and adapt Shakespeare in his own way. In the era of

351 Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. New York: Routledge, 2008, 21. 352 Hamlet. Dir. Franco Zeffirelli. Perf. Mel Gibson, Glenn Close, Alan bates, and Paul Scofield. Canal+ and

Carolco Pictures, 1990.



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domination of popular culture, a pop-cultural, perhaps even populist, approach is essentially

presentist in performing and reflecting a crucial aspect of the current cultural attitude.

There are two other 20th

century adaptations by non-Anglophone filmmakers that should

be considered for their presentist qualities. Both were made in the 1960s, and both reflected the

time they were filmed in. The first to be considered here, although not the first in the

chronological sense, is Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet,354

released in Russia. Since it is in famous

Boris Pasternak’s Russian translation, this adaptation does not retain Shakespeare’s language,

but it follows the plot and is a remarkable interpretation of the original text. Apart from being

credited as one of the six great directors to film Shakespeare (the others are Olivier, Branagh,

Kurosawa, Zeffirelli, Welles),355

Kozintsev also contributed to the international discussion on

Shakespeare and the continuation of adapting his texts in the twentieth century. This was not his

first attempt at adaptation. In 1940, he staged Hamlet in theater. Nevertheless, his film

adaptation is the reason of the worldwide recognition he has achieved in Shakespeare cinema.

Stalin’s death in 1953 enabled the funding of the film, so “Russian filmmakers were no longer

tightly bound by the strictures of social realism, and, thus, this adaptation was both a moving

reaffirmation of Russian Romanticism and a covert critique of Stalinist power politics.”356

The

use of fog, the forest, and rain could be seen as homage to Kurosawa’s filmmaking, since

Kurosawa’s films were known for such elements, while the visual images of imprisonment

represented the deadly world of Elsinore. Ophelia’s iron corset in which she is bound, while

preparing for Polonius’ funeral, shows her own entrapment in a world she cannot escape from –

except through death. Samuel Crowl best describes Kozintsev’s style by writing that “his films

are a unique mixture of Russian tough-mindedness and sentimentality, and in their rough beauty

they never forget that Shakespeare’s tragic narratives are palpable as well as symbolic, realistic

as well as mythic.”357

It can also be added that his films are a reaction to, and commentary of, an

oppressive and terrifying regime in which the Russian people felt just as imprisoned as Hamlet

felt at the court of Elsinore.

354 Hamlet. Dir. Grigori Kozintzev. Writer. Boris Pasternak. Perf. Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy, Mikhail Nazvanov,

and Elza Radzina. Lenfilm Studio, 1964. Russian.

355 Crowl, Samuel. Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide. New York: Norton, 2008, 20. 356 Crowl, Samuel. Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide. New York: Norton, 2008, 49. 357 Ibid, 53.

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Another adaptation, or rather, in this case – appropriation, based on Hamlet, and re-

configured as a film narrative in a major non-Anglophone culture, is Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad

Sleep Well.358

Just as Grigori Kozintsev, Akira Kurosawa contributed to the revival of film after

World War II. He was the first of Japanese filmmakers who became popular with the American

audience and market. He adapted Hamlet, not by using the text but by pursuing the theme and

giving his own variation of it. The story is set in the Japanese corporate world, similar to

Almereyda’s reworking, and the film is his comment on the destructive and powerful world of

corporations that are taking over Japan, while his suicidal Hamlet character tries to destabilize

this world. Kurosawa was also important for bringing Shakespeare to Asia and showed how he

can be appropriated into the Asian culture, customs, and history. Three years before this film, he

filmed a famous version of Macbeth – Throne of Blood (1957), and later in his career, an epic

film appropriation of King Lear by the name of Ran (1985).

However, this is not nearly the end of non-Anglophone adaptations. In recent decades,

there have been quite a few adaptations that are worth mentioning. Haider359

is a successful

adaptation that captures the unfortunate events in Kashmir during 1995. The film is haunting to

say the least, and the present day problems in bellicose region in the far north of India, which

borders China and Pakistan. The ethnical and religious conflicts, which have gone on since the

creation of India and Pakistan in the 1940s, are still prevalent. The film focuses on the

insurgency of the 1990s, and show Haider, a young medical student, returning to Kashmir to find

his abducted father, who was betrayed by his own brother. The elements of the play are skillfully

interpreted into the Hamlet plot with the emphasis on the issues of terrorism and the unresolved

problems in this region. Haider addresses these issues in a similar way as Sulayman Al-

Bassam’s The Al-Hamlet Summit, and both comment on the danger and consequences of

terrorism as a regional and global threat not only to the Christian but to the Muslim population as

well. Hamlet Goes Business,360

is another adaptation that focuses on the issues of corporations

and their influence in societies. This time the story takes place in Finland. This comical film noir

358 The Bad Sleep Well. Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Perf. Toshiro Mifune, Masayuki Mori, and Kyoko Kagawa. Toho

Studios,1960. Japanese. 359 Haider. Dir. Vishal Bhaaradwaj. Perf. Shahid Kapur, Irphan Khan, and Shradda Kapoor. UTV Motion Pictures,

India, 2014.

360 Hamlet Goes Business. Dir. Aki Kaurismaki. Perf. Pirkka-Pekka Petelius, Esko Salminen, and Kati Oulinen.

Villealfa Filmproduction Oy. Finnland, 1987.

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is an existentialistic portrayal of life and the world in which the pursuit of wealth has debased

Man to an emotionless businessman. Hamlet is unable to connect with his feelings because he is

preoccupied with expanding his business. The film comments on the dangers and consequences

of consumerism, and how it will, eventually, prevent people from being happy, experiencing

emotions, and seeing that the real value is in the relationships that people build with others. Yet,

adaptations do not end only with film. In 2012, the Hamlet Live team proposed a live streaming

of the play with a chat room in which the audience could interact as the play was unfolding.

Hence, Hamlet361

streamed around the globe and was widely viewed. The performance was

presentist in nature, because it addressed the present fear of a desolate and cataclysmic future

that awaits Mankind. The story takes place in 2080 on a dangerous Earth mostly destroyed by

wars. Denmark is the only territory in which life is still bearable. Unfortunately, the king is killed

and the famed plot unravels.

Mark Thornton Burnett, author of Shakespeare and World Cinema 362

, has authored

article “Capital, Commodities, Cinema: Shakespeare and the Eastern European ‘Gypsy’

Aesthetic”, published in Shakespeare Jahrbuch in 2014363

, in which he analyzes Hamlet (2007)

directed by Aleksandar Rajković. Like the Hungarian film appropriation of King Lear from 1997

( Romani Kris, directed by Bence Gyongyossy), Rajković’s film is set in the Roma environment.

Burnett’s conclusion is that:

Romani Kris and Hamlet come together in deploying local contexts – such as state

policies towards minorities and the Balkan crisis – to reflect upon the predicament of a

disenfranchised constituency that is apprehended in terms of economic hardship and

limited horizons of opportunity, as the films’ thematic treatment of centers and

peripheries indicates. In so doing, these films move beyond their immediate areas of

consideration, revealing the uses of Shakespeare as a cinematic commodity and his

uneven fortunes in the global media marketplace”. 364

361 Hamlet Live. N.d. “Our Hamlet.” http://www.hamletlive.com/our-hamlet/ Web. 11 March 2016.

362 Burnett, Mark Thornton. Shakespeare and World Cinema. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2013. 363 Burnett, Mark Thornton. Capital, Commodities, Cinema: Shakespeare and the Eastern European 'Gypsy'

Aesthetic. Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 2014, 150. 364 Ibid.147.

http://www.hamletlive.com/our-hamlet/

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Presentist in attitude and treating utterly marginal social groups, those films are far from popular,

let alone populist, immersed in specific aesthetics and destined to art-film festival shows. They

do not reach wider audience, but they merit our special attention in so far as sensitive and

intelligent dialogical arches joining Shakespeare and contemporary subaltern subcultural

phenomena via film medium.

On the other end of the scope of communicability of appropriated Hamlet, the live

streaming made the play available globally in the literal sense. The comments showed that the

diverse audience shared emotions and gave new perspectives. It also showed that there is not one

world view and because everyone could participate in the discussion it enriched the experience

of experiencing literature. Additionally, the number of YouTube clips and mashups regarding

any of the characters from the play, or just the play, is countless. As Fischlin writes,

These new forms of interactivity via social networking and virtual presencing are

profoundly adaptive of (and challenging to) traditional notions of embodied

performance. But at the same time they remind us of the degree to which the work

of imagination takes multiple forms both embodied and virtual.365

Ever since Shakespeare has become a global phenomenon more and more people have become

acquainted with him and his works. Hamlet has always been tempting for adaptations and

criticism alike. However, today the global discussion is turning more toward what does Hamlet

mean to us today than what he meant to Shakespeare. The international interest in adapting this

play in non-Anglophone cultures shows how differently it can be interpreted and how it has

meaning today.


UP, 2014, 17.

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6.2 Coriolanus Adaptations

What Coriolanus shows above all is that, lying at the heart of

social structures and thus politics, meaning is constantly in

dispute, under discussion, and the battle for it is never-ending.

Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare

Unlike Hamlet, Coriolanus did not have a rich history in adaptation. It seems that in the

twentieth century, one thing has become clear: some of Shakespeare’s plays have not found

frequent refuge in theaters as others have. Politically speaking, the ones that are always welcome

and produced are those which do not “stir” the social status quo. Coriolanus is not one of them.

It is Shakespeare’s most neglected play.366

Even the first Nahum Tate adaption from 1681 did

not have the original text but a favorable politically correct one.367

Yet, this was not the last this

play was used for certain parties to make a statement. For example, John Dennis utilized it as an

exaggerated warning against an immanent invasion in 1719. Perhaps, the most audacious staging

occurred in Stratford on April 23rd

1926 in memoriam of Shakespeare’s birthday. Apparently,

Hawkes writes, the vicar’s wife, Mrs. Melville, was one of the people responsible for choosing

this play. The problem occurred when a few days before the birthday, the Soviet Union requested

that it should be permitted to join the group of nations whose flags are flown in honor of

Shakespeare. Mrs. Melville who claimed to be a Fascist and Conservative could not imagine a

Soviet flag flown in the heart of Britain. She vehemently protested in vain. Ultimately, the flag

was flown and the festivities took place; although, the famous General Strike, which was

negotiated that same day in London, took place some days later. The truth of the matter is that

Mrs. Melville’s reaction was shared by many and was based on fear of a potential Bolshevik

revolution that could change a post-World War I Conservative England to a liberal society in

which individuality would be suppressed and altruist notions of socialism would take its place.

There was an overwhelming fear of collectivism, and Mrs. Melville found it her duty to speak up

against it. Her importance to Shakespeare studies at that moment lies in the fact that she was one

of the governors of the Shakespeare Theater, and as such she was “presumably amongst those

responsible for the choice of Coriolanus as the Birthday Play.”368

The opening of the play in

366 Goddard, Harold C. The Meaning of Shakespeare. Vol. 2. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1951, 209.

367 Костић, Веселин. Шекспирова драматургија. II. Београд [Belgrade]: Стубови културе, 2010, 273. 368 Hawkes, Terence. Meaning by Shakespeare. New York: Routledge, 1992, 49.

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which the masses turn to violence was exactly what was needed to show the necessity of a

conservative government in order to prevent civil disobedience and unrest. As Hawkes writes,

this would not be the first time for right-winged parties to hijack this play, since certain

aspect/parts of the play lend themselves to a more conservative interpretation.369

Apparently, the

lone hero going against all society was just how aforementioned lady envisioned herself fighting

against the Soviet possible influence, and the following decades of both Western and Soviet

politics and their cold-war relations would give validity to this statement.

Undeniably, it is one of those plays that was politicized (abused) by various political

regimes or ignored by others. It is quite intriguing how the play was frequently adapted in

Germany between the two wars, and it was even included on the required list of reading material

in schools. Coriolanus was portrayed as a leader who liberated his people but was fooled by false

democratic values.370

In Nazi Germany, Coriolanus was portrayed more as a Hitler type than

Roman general, and so just after World War II the play was banned in American-controlled

Germany. The particularity of this play lies in its uniqueness that both totalitarian ideologies of

twentieth century, fascism and communism, were able to adapt it371

. W. H. Auden once said in

his lecture that this play is quite odd ─ for it is a favorite with the critics and ignored by the

public.372

One has to wonder whether the public is to blame, or is this choice simply made by

political influence and/or popular demand? Even though the focus of this chapter is on film there

are a few notable theater performances that are presentist in nature and worth mentioning. In the

end, Ralf Fiennes’ film Coriolanus will be addressed.

Germany was not the only country that staged Coriolanus in the turbulent years between

the two world wars. In Paris in1933/34, there was, perhaps, the most amusing staging of the play.

It was supposed to promote the anti-Republican forces, which were against an allegedly corrupt

and weak democratic regime. The play caused such an outrage that it had to be stopped due to

rioting. After this, the play was banned until further notice. The next year, there was a leftist

staging in Moscow as an answer to the Paris debacle.373

Don Shewey, a journalist and critic,

369 Ibid, 48-51. 370 Костић, Веселин. Шекспирова драматургија. II. Београд [Belgrade]: Стубови културе, 2010, 274. 371 Ibid, 259.

372 Auden, W. H. Lectures on Shakespeare. Ed. Arthur Kirsch. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000, 243. 373 Костић, Веселин. Шекспирова драматургија. II. Београд [Belgrade]: Стубови културе, 2010, 274.

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writes how in 1935, the Maly theater in Moscow staged a play and called it a “drama of

individualism” portraying Coriolanus as “a superman who had detached himself from the people

and betrayed them."374

He also mentions a Prague production of the same play in 1960, which

followed the same “guidelines” for politically appropriate staging as in other communist

countries. Coriolanus was scarcely produced in communist countries or countries under the

SSSR influence after 1945. So, such rare productions should be mentioned, since they were

staged with a particular purpose. During the times when it was produced in these countries,

Coriolanus was portrayed as a dictator and ruthless villain/politician while the people were wise,

honest, capable and willing of conducting a fair judicial process in order to protect the laws and

rights of ‘the people.’ According to the “list of productions of Coriolanus on stage” of the Arden

edition375

since 1945 there was one production in Eastern Germany (Brecht in 1964), and one in

China (Lin in Beijing, 2007).

Bertolt Brecht worked on a Marxist adaptation of class struggle toward the end of his life;

he tried to keep the original text but changed the tone to accommodate the theory. “Brecht’s

adaptation stressed the historical and economic location of the play, situated between feudalism

and nascent capitalism.”376

Peter Holland cites Kenneth Tynan, a passionate Brechtian, regarding

the elaborate preparations for the play and how Brecht went to the extent to give names to all the

plebeians in the play. They were no longer a mob, but a group of protestors who utilized passive

resistance against the anti-hero, the individual who blackmails society with his indispensability.

It is then no surprise that when the play came to London the Daily Telegraph printed the

following after the premiere:

This is described in the programme as Brecht’s “adaptation” of Shakespeare’s

play; but “contradiction” would have been a more honest word. This is

374 Shewey, Don. “Power Play – On Coriolanus.” American Theater. Web. 13 March 2016.

http://www.donshewey.com/theater_reviews/coriolanus.html

375 Shakespeare, William. Coriolanus. Ed. Peter Holland. London: Bloomsbury, 2013, 465-68.

376 Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare After All. New York: Random, 2004, 777.


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Shakespeare’s play as it might have been if the bard had been a convinced Prole,

which is about the last thing he would ever have wanted to be.377

Similar fate awaited Zhouhua Lin’s 2007 theater production. The play titled: The Tragedy of

Coriolanus was envisioned and produced as a contemporary one. Lin used two heavy metal rock

bands whose performances punctuated the heightened moments in the play. He chose the play

because of the class struggle, and to better depict this he used rock music to show “the conflict

between the ruling classes and the people.”378

Lin, who was 71 years old at the time, was rather

proud of his adaptation since Mao Zedong and the communist party, who restricted any

individual expression, hindered his career at its early stage. According to Lin, heavy metal

music has been defying authority for a while in China, and he wanted to channel that within his

play. It had a successful two-year run in China only to meet a bad reception in the Western

world. Lyn Gardner wrote a review of the play after it premiered at the prestigious Edinburgh

festival in 2013. It was perceived as a mediocre play since the “production remains mysteriously

opaque, offering empty spectacle in the place of nuanced political comment and metaphor.”379

According to the article, more was expected from a Chinese adaptation of Coriolanus. Due to the

country’s long oppression under communism, the Western audience apparently wanted to see a

stronger political statement. The real problem was in the reception of a play that was expected to

have a powerful political message. In essence, for Chinese people the play delivered a political

statement against the communist regime. The artistic individuality with which Lin adapted the

play was no less than an act of defiance, which in a country of no opposition is a bold expression

of nonconformity. Unfortunately, the audience in Edinburgh failed to recognize the political

elements in the play, and, therefore, deemed it unsuccessful. Even though these are just two

examples (from the limited number of examples to comment on), the plays seem to be plagued

with more expectancy and less communist influence. Yet, can such plays, which are produced in

377 Shakespeare, William. Coriolanus. Ed. Peter Holland. London: Bloomsbury, 2013, 122-23.

378 Bakkalapulo, Maria. “Chinese Metal Bands’ Miserable Faith and Suffocated Become Symbols of Rebellion in a

Shakespearean Adaptation, Sponsored by the Ministry of Culture.” MTV Iggy. September 24, 2013. Web.

http://www.mtviggy.com/articles/lin-zhaohuas-coriolanus-heavy-metal-shakespeare-in-china/ 379 Gardner, Lyn. “The Tragedy of Coriolanus – Edinburgh Festival Review.” The Guardian. August 21, 2013.

Web. http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/aug/21/the-tragedy-of-coriolanus-review

http://www.mtviggy.com/articles/lin-zhaohuas-coriolanus-heavy-metal-shakespeare-in-china/

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/aug/21/the-tragedy-of-coriolanus-review

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communist or post-communist countries, rid themselves so easily of decades of communist

influence? Furthermore, should they be expected to be anything other than what they are?

After World War II, Yugoslavia was a communist country, and there have been no noted

productions or adaptations of Coriolanus. Similarly, in Serbia, Coriolanus has not been

performed. Ralf Fiennes chose the Serbian capital of Belgrade as the setting for his film. Given

that Belgrade is rather hard to identify in this film, the viewers could easily imagine any other

country or city as the backdrop. However, while Fiennes filmed in Belgrade, the local media

covered the filming during every step of the way, and the appearance of such A-list movie stars

was a sensation. The similarity of the media hype in the film and around it is quite astonishing.

They filmed on 36 locations in Belgrade and near by locales, while many Serbian actors got

small parts in the movie. The papers were full of interviews with statesmen and politicians who

were hoping to “cash in” and become a part of popular film tourism. Recently it has become

rather fashionable and fun for tourists to visit destinations where famous movies and television

series were made (Harry Potter, Sex and the City, Terminator, Back to the Future, etc.). Yet, are

there fans for Coriolanus?

Fiennes’ production was seen as refreshing and challenging, in a way, for the scholarly

world, since it brought attention to this particular play. Nevertheless, Holland, in his lengthy

introduction to the new edition of the play, fails to mention any parallel between the play and the

country it was filmed in. Even though he goes into length to comment on the ideological

background in Brecht’s version he finds no particular meaning and background in the Fiennes’

adaptation. In one sentence, he comments on the possible future the characters have after the

movie ends and that is that Rome stays unstable just as the Balkans are.380

Slavoj Žižek wrote an

article for the NewStatesman381

with more insight and actually pointed out a plausible connection

to the play: “[…] how about fully exploiting the film having been shot in Serbia by making

Belgrade the "city that called itself Rome", imagining the Volscians as Albanians from Kosovo

and Coriolanus as a Serb general who changes sides to join the Albanians?” Žižek’s

380 Shakespeare, William. Coriolanus. Ed. Peter Holland. London: Bloomsbury, 2013, 135.

381 Zizek, Slavoj. “Sing of the New Invasion.” NewStatesman. Web. 13 March 2016.

http://www.newstatesman.com/film/2011/12/coriolanus-freedom-play


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interpretative construct is rather simplistic and expected, but, it must be admitted: in its

simplistic approach – entirely presentist. His remark does point to one of the possible

connections with the former Yugoslavian constituents that participated in the civil war. Holland

did not see it as important that one more production of Coriolanus was filmed or staged in a

former communist country as Slavoj Žižek thought it could possibly be.382

From a Western point

of view it is maybe not such a huge issue. As Marjorie Garber writes, “What has been especially

striking about productions and citations of this play is the way it has been appropriated,

consistently over the years, as a commentary on a current political situation, and on issues of

morality, ethics, social responsibility, and individual virtue of politics.”383

It presents the same

response to current issues today as it did when Shakespeare wrote it – in a time when James I

was on the throne, and the tension between the common people and aristocrats were heightened.

It was presentist in nature in his time as it is today.

382 During the fifty years under communism the politics of the country went through numerous clashes with the

official politics of the Soviet regime. Tito, the only Yugoslavian president during the communist era, explicitly

sided with Marx’s ideology taking pride in the fact that the country’s heritage stemmed directly from the October

Revolution (Broz). 383 Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare After All. New York: Random, 2004, 778.

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6.3 Macbeth and Adaptations

Thy letters have transported me beyond

This ignorant present, and I feel now

The future in the instant.

Macbeth (1.5.47-49)

Macbeth is Shakespeare’s shortest play, since it is almost half the length of Hamlet.

There is a lot of postulating on the possible sources of the play and the probability that the play

was written for a court performance in honor of James I, since he was Scottish.384

Also, he was

known as a scholar of witches and witchcraft, so he would have liked the plot or even ordered

the play.385

It was always considered an unlucky play and many actors are superstitious about it,

since accidents have known to happen while preparing or performing it. Nevertheless, it has been

performed and filmed on numerous occasions. It appears that Macbeth was a presentist play

when it was written, since it reflected the current political situation in England – at least the one

that influenced the writing of it. Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles created the first successful

adaptations of Shakespeare, and while Olivier was working in England Welles became famous in

America. His first adaptation was Macbeth in 1936386

, which was performed at the Lafayette

Theater in Harlem. The play was staged with the help of The Negro Theater Unit, which was a

workplace for black writers, actors, and other theater workers. The government funded this

federal project for stimulating jobs; especially among the African American community (part of

the Depression’s Federal Theater Project). The text was original, but the setting was made as if it

were a Caribbean island. At the time, there was much discussion about Haiti and its problems

with slavery, so the setting was Welles’ own commentary on that issue. Also, he thought that the

use of voodoo magic instead of medieval witches was something that the audience could relate

to. It is unknown if he removed the references to Scotland from the play; although, it is known

that he made the characters speak in Scottish burr to keep it ‘authentic.’ The play was popular;

albeit, the Harlem communists agitated against it, since they thought that the play would ridicule

384 Костић, Веселин. Шекспирова драматургија. II. Београд [Belgrade]: Стубови културе, 2010, 204. 385 Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare After All. New York: Random, 2004, 697. 386 Jack Carter, Edna Thomas, Canada Lee, and Eric Burroughs starred in the play.

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Shakespeare considering that it was an all-black cast. After this project, Welles came back to

Macbeth one more time. In 1948, he made the film.387

It was not that successful, and it is famous

for Welles adding characters and the strange costumes; even though, one has to note that “as he

demonstrated in Macbeth and Othello, Welles is brilliant at employing physical landscapes that

suggest psychological states of mind.”388

Furthermore, the use of film and all of its possibilities

made it possible for the audience to envision the action, setting, and costumes better. As Jan Kott

wrote, “Film has discovered the Renaissance Shakespeare.”389

In a way, Welles and Olivier

opened the door to film productions of Shakespeare’s plays, which moved from adaptations in

theater (mainly focusing on text and performance) to adaptation on film (mainly focusing on

actors and setting).

A postmodern adaptation that presented the text in contemporary light is Geoffrey

Wright’s Macbeth.390

Wright chose the Australian underworld as the setting for his film. Duncan

is the crime boss in Melbourne, and Macbeth is his friend and loyal underboss. It is interesting

that the prophecy is told by three teenage witches. The film is full of gang fights, and the clan

territories in the play are presented as nightclubs. Wright stays true to the text, although, he does

change some details. For example, Lady M. commits suicide in the bathtub. The film describes

the problem that Melbourne has with gangs and turf wars. Interestingly, this adaptation is rarely

discussed as a contemporary adaptation. As The Sydney Morning Harold writes, “This might

have seemed funny a decade ago, but with bodies piled high from Sunshine to St Kilda in

Melbourne's real gang war, it now seems entirely plausible and fitting.”391

Even though there is

some parallel with the not so famous film Men of Respect: “Mr. Wright’s version is a huge

improvement over that film. The pulsing, club-ready soundtrack, plentiful nudity and frenzied,

sometimes pretentiously edited action sequences are clearly intended as bait to broaden the

387 Macbeth. Dir. Orson Welles. Perf. Orson Welles, Jeanette Nolan, and Dan O’Herlihy. CBS Studio Center, 1948.

388 Crowl, Samuel. Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide. New York: Norton, 2008, 33.

389 Kott, Jan. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Trans. Boleslaw Taborski. New York: Anchor Books, 1966, 347. 390 Macbeth. Dir. Geoffrey Wright. Perf. Sam Worthington, Victoria Hill, and Chloe Armstrong. Film Finance and

Mushroom Pictures, 2006. Australia.

391 Macbeth – film review. The Sydney Morning Harold. Web. 20 March 2016.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/film-reviews/macbeth/2006/09/20/1158431777972.html

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audience beyond Shakespeare buffs, but “Macbeth” is ultimately true to the horror and sadness

of Shakespeare’s vision.”392

Even the reviews show the cultural differences between Australia

and the United States. The Australian paper was not forgiving for corrupting the language, while

the American reviewer only noticed the sensuous language and the thrill of the blood and gore of

the movie. What appeared as only a contemporary adaptation to the American was an eerie film

about the threatening and violent reality of the underworld in Sydney. Per contra, it seems that

feminists are not fond of this particular adaptation if it is to be judged by an article written by

Amanda Rooks: “Wright's current Macbeth offers a disturbing representation of a contemporary

society no less inimical to women. In particular, Wright's film is part of an enduring discourse

linking femininity, sexuality and evil, which exposes our persistent anxieties surrounding the

alleged dangerous sexual power of women.”393

Still, one has to note that this is not the case with

all adaptations. Leonardo Henriquez makes a point to address the treatment of women in the

South American/Latino culture in Sangrador as does Abela in Makibefo.

Leonardo Henriquez had the same idea as Wright when he filmed Sangrador.394

Sangrador means ‘the bleeder,’ and this version is a black and white film. Henriquez

commented, "Although the premise for making this film was to identify the aesthetic aspects of

Macbeth, there were also aims of recuperating, vindicating and learning from Shakespeare’s

perfect dramaturgy and confronting the challenge of translating it to Andean space and time.”395

Similarly, the plot involves thieves and the fight for who will be the leader of the gang. The three

witches are presented as three mysterious women, which is again another version of their

portrayal. This is also a film that is authentic to the original storyline. When asked why he chose

Shakespeare, Henriquez said, “Shakespeare’s works have overcome the flow of time…he is an

392 The Weird Sisters Prophecy Blood From A Dance Floor. The New York Times. Web.20 March 2016.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/06/movies/06macb.html?_r=0 393 Macbeth’s Wicked Women: Sexualized Evil in Geoffrey Writght’s Macbeth. Article in Literature/Film

Quarterly. Web. 20 March 2016.

https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1P3-1698082481/macbeth-s-wicked-women-sexualized-evil-in-geoffrey

394 Sangrador. Dir. Leonardo Henriquez. Perf. Daniel Alvarado, Karina Gomez, and Francisco Alfaro. Centro

Nacional Autonomio de Cinematografia, 2000. Venezuela. Spanish. 395 Sangrador. /Arts Weekly/ Film Venezuela: Macbeth Rides the Andes. Web. 20 March 2016.

http://www.ipsnews.net/2003/05/arts-weekly-film-venezuela-macbeth-rides-the-andes/

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/06/movies/06macb.html?_r=0



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unlimited resource for the cinema…to be translated into every language and to be applied to all

cultures.”396

For him and other non-Anglophone filmmakers Shakespeare is “the stimulus for

creativity and experiment on a worldwide basis.” This adaptation has many intertextual and

intercultural references. For example, in the background Maria Callas is singing, which is

anachronous with the original text and the action in the film. Henriquez as Vishal Bhardwaj uses

music to enhance the storytelling in his films. Unfortunately, this and many other Shakespeare

adaptations have limited success due to the popularity of other film genres in South America, and

because they lack funding, since all films in Venezuela are funded by the government.

Nevertheless, non-Anglophone adaptations are challenging more and more American and

English adaptations ─ especially at film festivals where they are noticed.

Another presentist adaptation is Entabeni.397

The story takes place in present-day

Johannesburg. It was filmed as a six-part drama, and it follows the main character Kumkani who

is a successful young banker, and it shows the human experience of South Africans while using

historical and contemporary contexts. A homeless woman tells him his fate, and he goes on a

path of destruction to reach his goal. There is a parallel between the storyline and South African

politics and the dictatorship of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. The language in the series of

dramas in the Mzansi project is Zulu and Xhosa and not English. Recently, the questions that are

often asked are: Can Shakespeare speak to the South Africans, and can he be translated

successfully? Tinashe Mushakavahnu, editor of Sentinel Quarterly, interviewed the South

African filmmaker Minky Schlesinger in order to get answers to these questions.398

Schlesinger

says that some time ago Sir Peter Hall, the founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, was

asked the same question(s) and he answered that Shakespeare is ‘untranslatable.’ Schlesinger

argues that it is quite the opposite of that. The reception of all of the plays was great, and people

could relate to the stories. “We made no attempt to incorporate Shakespeare’s language. Much of

396 Burnett, Mark Thornton. Shakespeare and World Cinema. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2013,

117.

397 Entabeni. Dir. Norman Maake. Perf. Dumisani Dlamini, Malusi Skenjana, and Zikhona Sodlaka. South African

Broadcasting Corporation, 2008.

398 Sentinel Literary Quarterly. Web. 20 March 2016.

http://www.sentinelpoetry.org.uk/slq/4-1-oct2010/interviews/tinashe-mushakavanhu.html


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the beauty and complexity of Shakespeare’s original lies in his use of language. However, film

language is more visual than verbal, and we tried to find visual equivalents of the poetry where

possible.” Furthermore, Schlesinger says that a skilled translator can translate Shakespeare’s

plays just like any other text. As far as Shakespeare reaching the audience, Schlesinger says that

the series of dramas was popular, and that it addressed the issues that needed immediate attention

in South Africa: “Our series attracted interest, less because it was based on Shakespeare, than

because it spoke to the audience about burning issues in our own country. Shakespeare’s genius

(aside from his extraordinary language) lies in his complex engagement with grand universal

themes, which is probably why his texts prevail.” When adapting Shakespeare it is obvious that

the language is not so much as important as the plot is, which begs the discussion on the

importance of the text and the author, and the role they have in today’s reception of Shakespeare.

Nevertheless, the stories that he tells are adaptable and relatable, and the multicultural audience

accepts that.

Alexander Abela filmed Makibefo in a coastal village Faux Cap on Madagascar for the

same reasons as Maake did.399

The film follows the original story, but it shows the political

ambition and the violence in the small village.400

It shows that the hunger for power exists even

in the smallest of societies. The people of the Antandroy tribe never saw a film or heard of

Shakespeare, but they agreed to act out the story. The film is part their acting and part a voice

over in English, while their dialect can be heard as they speak their lines. Some parts of the plot

were changed so that the film could be as close as possible to their way of life. For example, the

witch doctor tells Makibefo that he will achieve glory before he is turned into a snake. Also,

there is a display of traditional food and costumes in the film. Abela succeeds in showing the

village life and intimacy during the dinner scene. Burnett comments, “Abela’s work with the

Malagasy culture […] unpacks a cinematographic style that consistently finds in Shakespearean

narratives indexes of transnationalism, border crossings, and interchange.”401

Not only does he

399 Makibefo. Dir. Alexander Abela. Perf. Martin Zia, Neoliny Dety, and Gilbert Laumord. Blue Eye Films, 1999.

France/Madagascar.

400 Makibefo-Scoville film.com. Web. 20 March 2016. http://www.scoville-film.com/goto/home/

http://www.scoville-film.com/goto/home/

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acknowledge the role of Shakespeare in international filmmaking, but he also advocates the

importance of the auteur in regional and global cinema.

Mickey B402

is an adaptation that is worth mentioning not only for its contemporary

storyline but also for the circumstances under which it was filmed. The production took place in

a maximum-security prison in Northern Ireland, and the actors were inmates. It took them two

years to finish the film and everyone was involved. The setting is a fictional jail in Burnam, and

the fights are over who will control the prison wings. The film ultimately shows that crime does

not pay, and the filming had a positive impact on the prisoners. In the film, they had to act out

their own crimes, and that helped them understand better why they did it. Initially, the production

was not accepted, while problems occurred even after filming. At first, the victim’s families

complained, and then the reviews were mixed. Some believed that it was a good contemporary

adaptation of Shakespeare, while others thought that inmates should not be given such attention

and spotlight. However, the film was not only about the prisoners. It had a political message as

well. As Magill says, in an interview given to Fischlin and Riley,

[The film] adapts Shakespeare’s Macbeth across media and through the dual

lenses of the collaborators’ localized, personal experiences and the more global,

historical context of the political travails of Northern Ireland in the struggle for

decolonization. The film’s prison setting allegorizes the clash of the regional and

the global as a key aspect of its ethical compass: the modernized language and

local slang, along with the use of prison and gang personalities only accessible

within the film’s specific context, effectively resonate with Northern Irish

experiences of the extended conflict known as The Troubles.403

Furthermore, Magill explains that the movie got mixed reception throughout the world. He says

that cultures that had been colonized understand the film better than others do. The film’s

political context does not disturb the original text, according to Magill. Mark Fortier argues,

401 Burnett, Mark Thornton. Shakespeare and World Cinema. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2013, 117,

24. 402 Mickey B. Dir. Tom Magill. Perf. David Conway and Sam Mcclean. Maghberry Prison. Northern Ireland, 2007.


UP, 2014, 153.

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“Even as the Shakespeare effect becomes an instrument of colonial hegemony, it also facilitates

a form of transcultural exchange that produces a new literary and performative hybrid.”404

Yet,

the film is not only political as far as Northern Ireland is concerned; it is also political in the

sense of the internal politics in Northern Ireland. For example, one of the issues addressed in the

film is the treatment of prisoners. This is portrayed through the death of Lady Macbeth, or should

one say Lady Boy Macbeth. The suicide scene clearly comments on the number of suicides that

happen in prisons yearly, and which is not dealt with by the government.

Apart from adapting Hamlet and Othello, Vishal Bhardwaj also filmed an adaptation of

Macbeth.405

The story line is similar to Wright’s and Henriquez’. It takes place in the dark

underworld of India’s commercial capital. He makes some smaller adjustments and the witches

are two fortune-telling policemen (who are not passive but actively change events), while

Duncan is the head of a crime family (something like the Godfather). His mistress plots with

Maqbool to kill him, so that Maqbool can take over the business. It is interesting that the Birnam

wood is actually the sea. Maqbool was as equally successful as his Haider. Perhaps, it should be

noted that the music in the film is as equally important as the text. In Bhardwaj’s films, the music

has a meta-diegetic effect and it tells the story just as the text does. If this is the Indian version of

Macbeth meets the Godfather, then Men of Respect406

is the American version. Mike Battaglia is

the main character in the film, and he is the hit man for the mafia. He decides that he deserves to

be the Don, so he goes on killing spree. The story follows the original text, but it also has

elements of the 1955 adaptation Joe Macbeth. The question that Sanders asks is whether Men of

Respect is an adaptation or is it the enrichment of the 1955 movie?407

Nevertheless the choice of

adaptation was indicative of the time it was made in and what the audience could relate to.

Macbeth was written as a political play and to this day it adapted to make a statement or

comment on social or political issues. Even though most adaptations stay faithful to the text

404 Ibid, 157.

405 Maqbool. Dir. Vishal Bhardwaj. Perf. Irrphan Khan, Tabu, and Pankaj Kapur. Kaleidoscope Entertainment,

2004. 406 Men of Respect. Dir. William Reilly. Perf. John Tuturro, Katherine Borowitz, Dennis Farina, and Stanley Tucci.

Grandview Avenue Pictures, 1990.


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some aspects change. Sarah Hatchuel, Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, and Victoria Bladen wrote about

postmodern adaptations in the non-Anglophone world, and they have noticed that most of the

time it is the characters of Banquo’s ghost and the witches that change. Apparently, over time the

witches are getting younger and more appealing, which is more interesting to the younger

audience. Also, they argue that the way the filmmaker portrays the ghost provides the answer to

how he/she interprets the world the play is set in. It is also worth mentioning that since Macbeth

has magic it is a play that relates the most to cultures in which magic and sorcery are believed in;

hence, the various adaptations in Africa and Asia.

6.4 Romeo and Juliet and Adaptations

Rarely has a play been filmed or staged as many times as Romeo and Juliet. It is

Shakespeare’s version of the timeless tale of two young lovers being together despite family

disapproval, or in a wider multi-cultural sense despite caste and social differences, political

animosity, and /or religious variance. The same or similar story has been seen across cultures and

continents, but it is Shakespeare’s choice of characters, plot, and text that has captured the true

essence of this type of tragedy. However, the play has not only become synonymous with a

tragic love story of youth – it has also become an established modern-day cliché. Recently, in the

midst of the presidential campaign in the United States, a headline “Republican Romeo”

emerged in the U.S. News newspaper blog section. The writes proceeds to say,

The whole dynamic – Trump and Angry Americans vs. The Political

Establishment – is starting to remind me of a story as old and classic as "Romeo

and Juliet" or "Rebel Without a Cause." A teenage girl (like the Angry

Americans) is passionately drawn to the bad boy on a motorcycle (aka Trump)

who says and does whatever he wants, with no fear or concern about

consequences. Her parents (in this case, The Establishment) are apoplectic. Why,

they wonder, doesn't their daughter see that motorcycle guy is bad, bad news?

She'll just get hurt! Why doesn't she listen?! The more the parents protest, the

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tighter the girl and the motorcycle guy cling to one another, the more they act out

and rebel. Because they're in this thing together, they don't care what anyone

thinks or says, and they won't be broken apart! Understanding how this story

began is important if you want to know how it will end. It began with parents who

were too restrictive. They didn't let their daughter be herself and insisted they

always knew best. They limited her freedom, so she rebelled.408

Apart from it being an interesting comparison, one has to ask: how did two characters in a play

become everyday social and political symbols of forbidden relationships that extend and go

beyond the boy/girl coupling? Due to the fact that this play cannot be tied down to any particular

ancient myth has enabled it to become a modern myth or symbol, and for that matter, ‘any time’

can appropriate it for its own tale. Northrop Frye used to describe their love as a religion of its

own. This is why, perhaps, the story is timeless and without any social or political boundaries.

Yet, it can be more than that. Margery Garber addresses the controversial use of Romeo and

Juliet in the case of the “Romeo and Juliet law:”409

These laws, which have been adopted by several states (Kansas 1999;

Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, and Texas in 2007), are an attempt to mitigate

harsh penalties meted out to teenage lovers who had consensual sex when one of

them was still a minor. Well-publicized cases, including one in Georgia, drew

attention to the situation of individuals, typically young men in their teens, who

have received lengthy jail sentences as “sex offenders” because the parents of

their underage partners pressed charges. As one commentator noted, because of

Juliet’s age, “even Romeo would be labeled a sex offender today.”410

408 “The Republican Romeo.” Jean Card. A blog post in the “U.S. News Newspaper.” Web. March 25.

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/opinion-blog/articles/2016-01-29/donald-trumps-bad-boy-appeal-is-

a-tale-as-old-as-time

409 These laws were preceded by the famous “Romeo and Juliet” effect, which was formulated by psychologists in

the 1970s. The point was to encourage support from parents and relatives in order to achieve stability in romantic

relationships of teenagers.

410 Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare and Modern Culture. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008, 58.

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This discussion has gone even further, and at the present moment there is a need to include

homosexual underage relationships. Homosexuality and queer theory have been discussed within

Shakespeare studies thoroughly. Yet, when it comes to staging it seems a bit odd, or not, and it

appears to have been deliberated on in Romeo and Juliet as early as the 1970s. Adrian

Kiernander writes about the intersection of presentism, the performance of Romeo and Juliet (he

also includes Twelfth Night in his paper), homosexual desire between men, and modern

society.411

Kiernander compares John Bell’s staging of Romeo and Juliet (1979) and Baz

Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1996)412

in order to show the change in

the Australian audience regarding social tolerance to the mutability of sex. In 1979, the Nimrod

Theater Company aimed to produce either new Australian scripts or to adapt European classics,

such as Shakespeare, “in ways that seemed appropriate to present-day Australian conditions.”413

It so happened that Romeo and Juliet was staged just a year after the first Sydney Mardi Gras,

which meant that the audience was still rather homophobic and was not ready to see any

homosexual content or references in theater. To achieve its goal, Bell cast the young but very

masculine Mel Gibson, while for Juliet he chose Angela Punch, who remained overshadowed by

Gibson during the whole play. Even though Gibson just finished filming Mad Max, which was

still not showing in movie theaters, he had the action hero, rugged macho look that clearly

showed that he was a heterosexual man. Despite the fact that Romeo was not supposed to look

like that, Bell said that all of the male characters in the play had to emit homophobic masculinity.

The play was well received and Gibson’s “impetuosity and physical ability” were lauded. Some

years later, in 1996, the Australian film director Baz Luhrmann, who actually began his career in

theater, filmed William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The casting of Leonardo DiCaprio,

with gentle and almost feminine facial features, signaled a change in the reception of the

Australian audience. Nearly two decades of sexual liberation and gay and lesbian rights have

passed, and the Australians were more prone to accepting a boyish Romeo who could even be

411 Kiernander, Adrian. “’You’ll be the man!’: Homophobia and the Present in Performances of Twelfth Night and

Romeo and Juliet.” Gajowski 125-142.

412 William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Dir. Baz Luhrmann. Perf. Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes.

Twentieth Century Fox, 1996.


Romeo and Juliet.” Gajowski 136.

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seen as somewhat androgynous. According to Kiernander, both versions “have in common the

desire to revitalize Shakespeare’s plays by brining them radically into the present day, and

adapting or refocusing them so that they directly reflect current concerns, especially those

dealing with the performance of gender and social changes regarding homophobia.”414

Luhrmann’s gang and drug related film gives a disturbing glimpse into young love within the

present-day drug and violence fueled almost dystopian world in which love is quite possibly

doomed to fail. Shakespeare’s exotic Verona has become Luhrmann’s gun-waving mix of

“Miami Beach, Los Angeles, and Mexico City”.415

Nevertheless, “though Luhrmann is

determined to translate Shakespeare so successfully into the 1990s that the historical gap

separating our age from his is erased, he is also clever enough to repeatedly take his visual

inspiration from elements and images in Shakespeare’s text.”416

In parts of the script where he

omitted the original text he compensated with imagery, which was implied or spoken of in the

text. For example, when Romeo sees Juliet for the first time he sees her through a fish tank, and

later their ‘balcony scene’ is actually in the pool. Throughout the film, Luhrmann ‘translates’

Juliet’s reference to water imagery (in act 2 scene1) into actual water. Be that as it may,

Luhrmann’s film, together with Shakespeare in Love, “paved the way for an increasingly abstract

and postmodern referencing of Shakespeare in marketing material in the new millennium.”417

However, that was not the only adaptation of this play that came out in 1996. The other two films

were Love Is All There Is and Tromeo and Juliet. The first is a romantic comedy with the soon-

to-be famous Angelina Jolie in which the star-crossed lovers come from two rivaling catering

families, while the second is an independent and rather violent transgressive comedy.418

It seems

that there has never been a want of adaptations for this play. In the past few decades, there has

been a notable amount of adaptations and appropriations in film and animated film. The

following films need to be mentioned since they represent the diversity, and the limitless ways,

of adapting the same story. However, they are just a few out of many filmed and staged in the


Romeo and Juliet.” Gajowski 141. 415 Crowl, Samuel. Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide. New York: Norton, 2008, 86.

416 Ibid.


1989 into the new Millenium. Hatfiled, UK: U of Hertfordshire P, 2006, 2. 418 Transgressive comedies are a type of underground New York- based film.

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past fifty years. Romeo and Juliet in Harlem is the first film of its kind. It is set in Harlem and

has “a complete cast of color.” It is the first Shakespeare adaptation done with the martial art

Capoeira used for the fighting scenes, and it is the first major film directed by an African-

American woman. The movie is shot entirely in Harlem in modern-day surroundings, but the text

is Shakespeare’s. The director, Aleta Chappelle is proud that she was able to make a film that

non-Caucasian people can relate to. She also wanted to address the issue of racial and ethnic

intolerance, which, actually, is a problem for many young people who are in love but belong to

different ethnic groups.419

The film is also interesting because it has three men playing Romeo

and three women playing Juliet. The film is not presentist regarding the cast and plot, but it is

presentist regarding directing and editing. Another film Romeo and Juliet420

has an interesting

production path, but it got modest reviews. It began as a Broadway play that later got filmed with

many cameras covering different angles and was shown in movie theaters. The plot is true to

Shakespeare, even though it is placed in modern times, but Romeo is Caucasian and Juliet is

African-American. Hence, their racial background makes their love unacceptable for their

families. The production in more than one genre is an innovative way of reaching out to the

audiences of both theater and film lovers. Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish421

is another provocative

adaptation. It has the use of Yiddish, old Yiddish, and English, in the film, while it addresses the

issues, and often intolerance, between secular, ex-Orthodox, Orthodox, and Ultra Orthodox

Jewish communities in New York City, and all of it is sprinkled with Kabbalah magic. There are

also many adaptations of the play in India (and other Asian countries) and Africa. Places that are

multi-ethnic or have more than one religion can particularly relate to the story of forbidden love.

Nevertheless, forbidden love is not only restricted to these social categories.

Michael Boyd, the Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, in an interview

with Diane E. Henderson, mentioned that he would like to approach this play from a more

alternative perspective by not making it only about two young people. He says,

419 “Romeo and Juliet in Harlem.” Indiegogo Web. 27 March 2016. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/romeo-

and-juliet-in-harlem#/

420 Romeo and Juliet. Dir. Don Roy King. Perf. Orlando Bloom and Condola Rashad. Inception Media Group,

2014.

421 Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish. Dir. Eve Annenberg. Perf. Lazer Weiss, Melissa Weisz, and Mendy Zafir. Vilna

City Films, 2011.

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Another kind of progressive, alternative, theater that relates very closely to

Sulayman’s doing but from completely different motives is the project I am

working on with Romeo and Juliet, a two-hander for two 75-year-olds, using

exclusively Shakespeare’s language. It’s on the evening of their decision to die,

and it’s a celebration of their life. That is more Duchamp, using Shakespeare as

pretext: it is frankly making something new out of the carcass of Romeo and

Juliet.422

Ultimately, we have to come to the inevitable questions: are all these adaptations only a

rehashing of ‘carcasses,’ as Boyd says? Is there anything more to presentist and postmodern

reception other than just adding a contemporary setting to the ‘old’ plot? W. B. Worthen

addresses these questions through commentary of the scenic écriture staging of Romeo and

Juliet.423

There is no grand acting in the play and no celebrities; the actors/speakers speak out

their lines in different way. First, the story is told by eight different people via a phone interview.

They act out their monologue, which they hear through their ear buds on stage. Then the two

main characters speak to each other, informally, about love, acting, and performing Shakespeare

today. Interestingly, the male characters never read Romeo and Juliet. Finally, the balcony scene

is heard over the sound system. The language of the play is as informal as their conversation is.

Each of the eight monologues tells the same story, but the audience, which was interviewed after

the showing, remembers only parts. This de-dramatized performance, which focuses on the

words/text and their meaning, explores the authorial text and the de-dramatizing performance.

The ‘problem,’ if we see it as such, is that the audience does not remember, or get to know,

Shakespeare; instead, they remember parts of the performance itself. This argument can also be

used for film adaptations. The majority of young people remember Romeo and Juliet by

Leonardo DiCaprio or Claire Danes. They remember the film. In film and stage adaptations,

theatricality, scenery, costumes, special effects displace, or even replace, the text. Luhrmann

does that with water imagery just as the series No Fear Shakespeare replaces the original text

with the alternative easy-to-understand one. Could today’s audience get to know Shakespeare’s

real works through adaptations and appropriations? It was mentioned earlier that Nahum Tate

422 Henderson, Diana. E., ed. Alternative Shakespeares 3. New York: Routledge, 2008, 267. 423 Worthen. W. B. “’What light through yonder window speaks?’: The Nature Theater of Oklahoma Romeo and

Juliet and the Cult(ure) of Shakespeare.” DiPietro and Grady 148-171.

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adapted, rather loosely, Shakespeare’s plays and did exactly the same thing that is being done

today. The other side of the argument is that words are not the whole play. As René Weis

comments, the magnetism of Romeo and Juliet does not lie exclusively in its language.424

Plays

were intended to be performed, so action has just as much importance as the text does. The

American Communities program (the Oklahoma Nature Theater which staged the

aforementioned play is a part of it) is trying to bring Shakespeare closer to ordinary people. The

argument is that Shakespeare did not create his works for the rich as much as he did for ordinary

people. Roger Kimball advocates against such an endeavor, which “bring[s] Shakespeare to

communities across America. And by Shakespeare I mean Shakespeare, not some PoMo

rendition that portrays Hamlet in drag or sets Midsummer Night’s Dream in a concentration

camp.”425

The ‘PoMo’ is a derogatory remark about postmodern adaptations. Some critics

believe that adaptations are doing more harm than good, and that they are not bringing the

audience closer to Shakespeare, and by that ‘Shakespeare’ they mean the text. Unfortunately it

also means that with the replacement of the text ─ the author is replaced as well. Nevertheless,

such discussions among scholars and critics do not infringe the film industry, which continues

with adaptations of not only Shakespeare but also other once-considered high-culture authors.

Therefore, commercial success and profit prevent moneymakers from worrying about

authenticity and fidelity to the author. On the other hand, the success of adaptations of

Shakespeare’s plays in the past twenty years has brought Shakespeare to the limelight again and

has sparked a new wave of international discussions and research. In the words of René Weis,

“In popular culture Romeo and Juliet has been brilliantly distilled to its sheer essentials of amor

vincit omnia, that is, love triumphs over everything. What the play’s richly creative afterlife

reveals further is the importance of its storyline, a narrative that Shakespeare did not invent but

one which he shaped, structured and mediated.”426

In general, the newfound popularity of his

plays is bringing Shakespeare closer, one way or another, to the vast audiences that would

probably not experience these works otherwise. One of the reasons Romeo and Juliet, and its

424 Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Ed. René Weis. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012, 2.

425 Worthen. W. B. “’What light through yonder window speaks?’: The Nature Theater of Oklahoma Romeo and

Juliet and the Cult(ure) of Shakespeare.” DiPietro and Grady 158-59.

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characters, have become so popular is because they are ‘available.’ The numerous adaptations in

film, ballet, music, and other media have made it ‘usable’ in sciences, social studies, and politics,

and whether people like it or not, Shakespeare in our current present has turned out to be highly

adaptable and profitable.

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7. Conclusion(s)

The purpose of this research and this doctoral thesis has been to discuss presentism as a

contemporary hermeneutical approach, its relation to other relevant hermeneutical theories and

approaches, its manifestation through a selection of film adaptations of Hamlet, Coriolanus,

Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and the future development of and need for this approach. The

recursive nature of literary theory does not permit this work to be conclusive or finite. The nature

of the presentist approach to interpreting literature is that now should always be examined

because it is constantly reshaped. There is, as Hugh Grady says, an urgency to discuss the

present moment and the present reception of Shakespeare’s works. Hence, since the present

moment constantly changes there is always the need to look into the reception of Shakespeare’s

texts through a fresh and new discourse.

This research began with a concise overview of the hermeneutical situation that led to the

emergence of presentism as a new and, yet, recognizable approach. The history of hermeneutical

theory shows that as long as there were texts to read there was a need to interpret them, and that

interpretation has always been a process that involved the author, the text, and the reader. The

importance of one of the three elements over the other two changed from one period to another

during the long history of hermeneutics. Nonetheless, the bond between the reader and the text is

an undisputed one; readers have always searched for the meaning that a text carries. Hans-Georg

Gadamer (XX century) wrote of the emergence of the hermeneutical problem in ancient Greece,

and in his fundamental work Truth and Method, showed its development throughout the

Western tradition of understanding meaning of texts. The introduction of this thesis briefly

summarized the history of hermeneutics. The questions that kept emerging during the research

that was done for this thesis were: How much does the reader steer the interpretation process?

Should the text be interpreted only for what it is? Is the author the one we should turn to for

understanding the text? These questions have been answered differently in the past centuries. To

become aware of the differences, one can browse through different theories of interpretation. For

Aristotle the text has all the information. Many texts entitled De interpretatione were written in

the Medieval and Renaissance periods; Mathias Flacius developed the notion of hermeneutical

circle: the reader, in his relation to the text, concentrates on the whole and on the details,

connecting the two perspectives into one circle. Schleiermacher distinguished explanation as the

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method suitable for natural sciences, and understanding as the one for human sciences.

Interpretation for Heidegger has ontological importance: to be means to interpret. Wolfgang Iser

plays with that implication by saying: I interpret, therefore I am. For Martin Buber

interpretation was a dialogue between the reader and the text, for Max Weber the text changes

with time and the importance lies with the reader, for Georg Haman and Gadamer the reader and

text are intertwined, for Henry James interpretation depended on the discussions and comparison

of standpoints, for Benedetto Croce the reader and the text had to become one in order for the

text to have meaning, and so on. As the times changed so did the answers to the three questions.

Until the XIX century these approaches to analyzing literature focused mainly on historical-

biographical and the moral-philosophical aspects of Greek and Latin literature, on the one hand,

and on interpretation of Biblical texts, on the other. The XIX century not only brought Western

literature into focus and into the academia but it also opened up literature to various

interpretations. Hence, the beginning of the XX century began with new criticism, which focused

solely on the text, then came the Chicago school, which brought to the table genre criticism later

further developed by Northrop Frye and Kenneth Burke, and after that ensued a plethora of

approaches and theories. The traditional way of interpreting literature was still strong in

academia, but the importance of the reader became more and more prevalent. The reader with

his/her background, experience, education became important in the interpretation process

(Roman Ingarden, Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser were crucial for this theory). Stanley

Fish and Louise M. Rosenblatt were also advocates of the reader-response theory, while

Rosenblatt took this theory a bit further and argued that there are as many interpretations of a

text as there are readers. Norman Holland and David Bleich contributed with their version of the

theory in which the context of the text changed from one period to another. The reading

experience became an aesthetic experience in which the reader implored imagination to fill in the

gaps in the text. Each and every one of these avenues that were taken added to the prolific

discussion that would take place in the second part of the twentieth century, which was most

about the reception of literature, so interpretation led the way to viewing the text differently and

acknowledging that the text gained different value with each new generation.

Marxist theory and cultural studies were exceptionally important for the formulation of

presentism. Marxist literary criticism is based on the historical approach, and it requires the

reader’s understanding of social and economic circumstances of the time the text was written in,

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so the reader is not isolated from society, and, therefore, neither can interpretation be. Louis

Althusser, Fredric Jameson, and Terry Eagleton contributed vastly to this theory that will turn

out to be important for the development of new historicism, which in turn will incite the

inception of presentism. Both shared the exploration and influence of culture on literature and

vice versa. On the other hand, cultural criticism stemmed from Marxist literary criticism.

According to Michael Meyer, cultural criticism places works in their times, and they try to make

the connection between the work and how it is perceived in a certain period. So, the culture of

the period in which the text is made is as equally important as the culture in which the text is

interpreted. Jonathan Dollimore argued that literature of yesterday could change the world of

today. The present moment became a necessary aspect of the hermeneutical process, and

literature had an active role in influencing cultural and social events. Dollimore also wrote that

subversion could arise from differences within a culture. The element of subversion will be of

immense significance for new historicism, which will argue the opposite – that subversion could

be contained. Both approaches to analyzing literature did not oppose to the traditional approach,

but they did invite alternative interpretations. Readers were no longer just learned scholars;

instead, they came from all parts of society. Alternatives have become the maxim of

interpretation and were found within cultures among the various subcultures. By the same token,

these two approaches were also found within other approaches, and so Marxist and cultural

studies criticism functioned within Feminist theory, post-colonial theory, and new historicism.

Presentism originated as an antithesis to new historicism, which presented an attempt to

go back and re-evaluate how literature was written. The moment of creating a text was crucial to

understanding the text. Stephen Greenblatt and his followers argued that one who had no insight

into Shakespeare’s life and Elizabethan England could not fully apprehend Shakespeare’s plays,

which is a view that presentists opposed, since they argue that no text can be separated from the

reader and his/her world view. Greenblatt’s attempt to ‘speak to the dead’ became a recognizable

catchphrase, which explained his relation to textual interpretation, while at the same time

distancing his approach from other forms of formalist and reader-based approaches. Most of the

XX century was ahistorical when it comes to interpreting literature, and returning to the

historical aspect was an important moment in hermeneutical history. New historicists found great

interest in historical documents and were credited with bringing many of them into the spotlight.

Yet, the old historicists, from the 1940s, such as E.M.W. Tillyard and Lily Campbell understood

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the relationship between a literary text and the historical context otherwise. The basic tenets of

new historicism brought something new: the new historicists dealt with intertextualization and

cultural contextualization, following Michel Foucault. Culture for them is polyphonic: there is a

dominant trait of an epoch / episteme, but there are also a number of subordinate, but for literary

art important ones. It could be said that the new historicists preferred to discuss literature

through the interplay of forms of power, as Carolyn Porter argued, which is a standpoint that new

historicism shared with cultural materialism, and because of which it is considered by some as a

cultural approach to analyzing literature. Foucault’s works had a great impact on establishing

new historicism, even though Greenblatt avoided formulating any definitive tenets. According to

some, such as Frank Lentricchia, new historicism is Foucault’s legacy. His view that education is

politicized and has the power to change certain discourses and exclude others is one of the

cornerstones of new historicism as well as one of the main points of Terence Hawkes’ take on

presentism. However, for Greenblatt the term ‘power’ embodies the ideological struggle between

containment and subversion. According to him, subversion exists in the text, but it will always be

contained within the dominant culture, while for presentists, it will not necessarily only remain

contained, but it may, supposedly, influence the world outside the work. Another aspect of

Foucault’s influence on new historicism is the belief that there is no universality in human nature

(antihumanism) and that people are conditioned by their social environment. Yet, Greenblatt

does not insist on the fact that readers are part of the social construct and bring their own mindset

and worldview to the interpretation process. His awareness of this problem is implied, but not

elaborated. The new historicists, focus on the culture which affects the author and the text. They

are not focused on the reader/viewer/audience, and this is where presentists part their way with

new historicism. New historicists want to keep all interpretation authentic and completely

accurate, while presentists argue that the reader will interpret texts based on his/her cultural,

political, and social background.

Presentism, as a hermeneutical approach, came as an answer to new historicism. Terence

Hawkes and Hugh Grady challenged new historicism with an alternative view. Yet, as it is

presented in this research, certain presentist elements existed long before it was formulated. Jan

Kott argued that the protrusion of the present moment is unavoidable when writing. So,

Shakespeare’s use of elements from his own time, in his Roman plays, for example, is proof of

that. Kott also interpreted Shakespeare from his own perspective and time, and he argued that

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any performance on stage depends on the actor’s perception of the character he/she plays. In a

way, Kott was a modernist precursor of a postmodernist approach called presentism. Yet,

presentism is as diverse as the many approaches working within it; hence, the nuances between

Hawkes, Grady, Ewan Fernie, and Evelyn Gajowski, who, in their different ways prove that

there is no one Shakespeare to interpret but a multitude of Shakespeares. For Grady, the moment

and circumstances of the interpretation of a text are just as important as the moment it was

created in. His research of the present moment and time began with modernist and postmodernist

interpretations of literature, which eventually led him to importance of now in the interpretative

process. He did not fully embrace or reject new historicism; he simply acknowledged that new

historicism was one-sided and that the present moment could not be excluded just as the political

aspect of the present moment could not be shunned, and he continued the hermeneutical

discussion on the relationship between the present and the past in literature. This discussion

began in the 1980s with Grady’s work on the postmodernism as a paradigm shift. Along with

other effects, postmodernism undoubtedly influenced the perception of the past. Grady

contended that we couldn’t allow ourselves to simply understand literature only through the past

or strictly through the present moment. For him, the works of Dollimore, Sinfield, and Greenblatt

needed to be taken into consideration just as much as focusing on the now. Grady adopted the

term ‘presentism’ from philosophy; however, he used it in a positive way, and it would take

Grady and Hawkes, almost a decade later, to conceptualize it theoretically as a hermeneutical

approach; one worthy of being an alternative to new historicism. He argued that every story from

the past had a message for the present and influenced the present theoretical discourses. Grady

always believed that the theories from our present helped understand the texts from the past, and

so the present moment could not be excluded from the process of interpretation. By the same

token, Shakespeare, for example, was also influenced by his present moment, thus there is the

need for new historicism and historicism, which shed light on those past moments. By 2007,

there were three major theoretical movements and they were cultural materialism, new

historicism, and presentism. For Hawkes and Grady it was simply impossible to step out of one’s

own time. Grady argued that even Greenblatt could not escape this tendency, since Greenblatt’s

own theory was at times presentist in nature. For example, Greenblatt’s work Hamlet in

Purgatory was highly influenced by his father’s death. By 2013, there were those who believed

that presentism was an ephemeral approach, and that academia lost its interest in it. However, it

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is then that Grady and Cary DiPietro co-edited Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now: Criticism

and Theory in the 21st Century as a result of many years of active presentist research. It was a

presentation of encounters of the present audience with texts (Shakespeare’s) that were 400

hundred years old. The urgency lies in the fact that the present moment is always changing and

that these texts are always interpreted in a new and different way. Once again, they showed that

presentism was always intended to be more than just an approach for itself; it was a ‘tent’ under

which different theoretical tendencies could group together. It is safe to say that presentism did

not dwindle away under the pressure of time and theory; in fact, it was still strong, but not so

much as an approach of its own, but as an amalgamation with other theories and approaches such

as feminist, Marxist, Queer, and postcolonial theories, which is further proof that there is no one

Shakespeare but a multitude of Shakespeares to be understood. This notion is deeply rooted in

the writings of Edward Said and his conceptualization of Orientalism, which reminds of the

impossibility of objectifying terms like Orient and Shakespeare. According to him, each age re-

interprets Shakespeare not because he changes but because he is reconstructed every time a new

reader engages in his texts.

Terence Hawkes had a prolific career in literary criticism and contributed to the inception

of presentism. He was seen first and foremost as a cultural materialist and then as a presentist.

He contended that presentism existed long before anyone wrote about it. He acknowledged that

repetition could never achieve sameness, so as long as plays have been adapted and performed

there has been presentism; therefore, repetition inevitably creates something new. Furthermore,

Hawkes argues; even if one could recreate the perfect historical environment for the play one

could never recreate the audience, which is quintessential, since there is no universality in the

human condition. On the other hand, Shakespeare was presented in education with a political

agenda, which had influence on class hierarchy. Hawkes believed that everything existed in

relation to other elements; hence, Shakespeare could not exist without being seen in relation to

the present moment, i.e. the cultural and political moment of the time the text was read in. He

also, as Grady, believed that presentism came as an alternative and reaction to the ‘urge’ of

academia to read texts solely historically. This reaction was naturally opposed to the unnatural

‘urge’ to repeat the past, which could not be repeated, since the present circumstances of the

reader could not be ‘drained’ out of him/her. According to Hawkes, presentism’s contribution to

Shakespeare studies is twofold: it appertains to the development in British politics and it relates

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to the reversal of conceptual hierarchies such as primary/secondary, present/past and so on.

Hawkes writes extensively on how Shakespeare’s works have been used in the XX century with

a political agenda. After the fall of Berlin, Macbeth and Hamlet were allowed to be played in the

American sector, while other plays were not. By the same token, Julius Caesar and Coriolanus

were blacklisted. Parts of Henry V were used many times by Western governments as

motivational speeches for troops. In other words, plays from the past had the power to coerce

audiences at a given moment; even more so, as Christian Smith contends,427

Shakespeare was

and is used as a means of globalization and political influence of Britain on other parts of the

world. After all, embracing Shakespeare is embracing not only a part of the English culture but

also embracing Englishness. Thus, according to Hawkes, literature has a pivotal role in the

current political climate of any age.

Hawkes also discussed the term ‘alternative’ in his writings. He argued that alternative

interpretations do not only exist within various cultures but they also exist within one culture.

They are a part of academia and of popular culture just as much as of a number of subcultures.

The popularity of Shakespeare has led to a sort of business, or as Hawkes called it Bardbiz. This

term, now widely known, is used to encompass everything that has to do with promoting and

profiting from Shakespeare and his works.

Ewan Fernie agreed with Hawkes and Grady on many aspects but stimulated the

discussion in a new direction. Fernie advocated a ‘communicable’ way of presenting scholarly

work. He believed that academia was clouded with obscure jargon that alienated research from

those who were interested in Shakespeare studies. He wanted to make scholarly work more

approachable. As Grady, he believed that presentism was excluded by historicism, and voiced

that non-historicist approaches were in danger of being slowly sidelined from literary criticism.

He argued that texts were not fixed in time, and as such they exist within the past, present, and

future. He built his version of presentism on the work of Grady and Hawkes, while he

maintained that the text does not only include the present but that it also incorporated history into

itself. He shared the concept of subversion with new historicists and cultural materialists, but he

differed from them in the fact that subversion was active in the present moment. For him,

427 This is part of a conversation that I had with Christian Smith (Marxist scholar) at the World Shakespeare

Congress, London, 2016.

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subversion always operates in the time a text is interpreted in, and because of this, presentism is

more capable of dealing with it than new historicism. Unlike Grady and Hawkes, Fernie includes

the future, because any reception in the present can foreshadow a possible reception in some

future moment. According to him, the text is ‘unpacked’ by the actors, and the actors change

with the times. This is why his presentism is performative in nature. Fernie preferred to view the

present as the ‘moving now,’ since the interpretation of the text depended on how it was

performed at the present moment, which may altogether be different than some other

performance in some other future ‘present’ moment. By the same token, Shakespeare’s texts

were interpreted differently in his ‘present’ moment while they were acted out on stage.

Ultimately, it is the acting out of the speeches and roles that brings them back to life, which

makes his presentism a performative one more than anything else. Yet, Fernie, together with

Evelyn Gajowski, advocates presentism today more than others. The series Shakespeare Now!,

which he edits with Simon Palfrey, keeps presentism viable in the world of literary criticism.

Evelyn Gajowski advocates a different type of presentism and is against approaches and

theories that privilege the past at the expense of the present. However, she is first and foremost a

feminist and then a presentist, and as such she focuses on the relationship between politics and

literature, and how political issues are discussed within Shakespeare studies. She feels that

matters like social practices, minority and gender issues, and political problems require urgent

attention. Gajowski posits that traditional liberal humanism established by white men who

privilege masculinity have and ascertain power over the other. She explains that feminism lost its

voice under new historicism but found refuge within the presentist approach, which is what

Grady hoped it would do. Unfortunately, feminism and gender studies were present in cultural

materialism, but never an urgent issue with new historicism. She argues that there is always a

dialogue between the present and the past and agrees with Hawkes that time cannot be drained

out of anyone’s experience. For her, feminist and queer readings of Shakespeare’s texts only

show that these issues were not entirely absent in Shakespeare’s time, although they might have

been obscured, hidden and only symbolically mediated by means of literary language and

dramatic performance. Gajowski also argues that Shakespeare’s plays are highly politicized and

manipulated by those in power to achieve their agendas, which is a concern she shared with

Hawkes and Fernie.

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Grady wrote that there is no presentism without new historicism (or historicism), which

implies that there is no present without the past. Since temporality interrogates the defining and

interweaving of the past, present, and future it is pertinent to say a few words about it in this

research. According to contemporary interpretations, time is not linear/chronological, rather the

past, present, and future are intertwined and happen simultaneously. Therefore, a section of this

thesis is dedicated to a short panorama of theories of temporality. The significance of these

theories lies in the acknowledgment of different temporal layers that alter the interpretation of

the text in different ages and cultures. Different layers of time influence the reader, which is the

interest of presentist. Grady and DiPietro wrote on the close connection between temporality and

presentism but they discussed it as anachronism. They posit that the timelessness of literature

implicates not only that it carries specifics of the historical moment when it was created, but it

also it is a reconstruction of the past how we in the present moment think it was. As West-

Pavlov, in his book length study Temporalities, concludes, there is no one model of time since

there are multiple alternative temporalities existing at the same time that are influencing our

understanding of the text. Needless to say, Shakespeare experimented with the notion of time in

his works as well as with the adaptation of other texts.

Hence, this research came to the point of addressing adaptations and appropriations. The

distinction between the two is taken from Julie Sanders who argues that adaptations are re-

casting of one work in one media to fit another such as re-casting of plays for television scripts.

On the other hand, appropriation, which is mistakenly mixed with the former, is a re-working of

the sourcetext and taking it a step further by adding more material. Nowadays, appropriation is

mostly cultural appropriation, which is taking elements from one culture and incorporating them

into another. Both are used to bring texts closer to their audiences as a response to their needs.

Shakespeare’s texts have proven to be highly adaptable and sought out for. Mark T. Burnett

believes this is so because his texts perform transnationalism, border crossings, and interchange.

They are also used to connect non-Anglophone cultures with current events and issues such as

terrorism, urbanization, and realignments of gender and race. In recent decades, Shakespeare’s

texts have been adapted and appropriated in Asia (especially in India) and Africa. The reasons

for this phenomenon differ: some say it is because non-Anglophone communities are finding

similarities between what is happening in their surroundings and Shakespeare’s texts, some

accept the challenge of working on a text of one of the greatest playwrights of all time and

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making a name for themselves, others say it is because Shakespeare is an ‘instrument’ that

England is using (and promoting) in order to assimilate the other (which is a view that Hawkes

would probably agree with and then there are those who believe it is all about Bardbiz, i.e. profit.

Presentists argue that adaptations are always presentist in nature. Every time a play has been

adapted it has been done so to fit the time it is performed in and to convey a message in such a

way that the present audience can understand. These alterations have sometimes been small and

sometimes significant as much as to change the ending of the play or add new characters. The

problem with appropriations is that they sometimes change the text to the extent that the

characters and plot are changed or the original ‘meaning’ is simply lost. Emma French argues

that until the second half of the XX century there has been more traditional approach to

adaptations; however, in recent decades, there has been an expansion to the international film,

and as Katherine Rowe posits adaptation has become the international medium for Shakespeare

texts. This can be particularly said for film adaptations, and as Samuel Crowl ascertained, the

‘death of the author’ has brought on the ‘birth of the auteur’. The following adaptations have

been chosen as a selection of presentist adaptations of Shakespeare’s works.

Hamlet is considered a play of multiple viewpoints, and perhaps that is the reason why it

has more film adaptations than any other Shakespeare play. For Hawkes, this play had the power

to bring about change in society. Yet, he chose to discuss the play not as a tragedy of Hamlet but

of Claudius. Still, he wrote that the play itself is one of many contradictory interpretations of the

plot, which opened the door to various new ways of viewing it, since literature is interpreted

differently around the world and there is no one point of view. According to Hawkes, the work

can always influence the present moment, i.e. the audience. Fernie wrote that Hamlet seems to

speak to everyone and is easily adapted to any culture. For him, Shakespeare’s words have an

uncanny metaphorical resonance, and he even connects the play to contemporary political issues

like terrorism. The past is inseparable from the present moment and influences the present just as

much as the present reception influences the meaning of the literary work coming from the past.

Grady deemed that Hamlet was and always will be a source of heated discussions. He analyzes

the play in relation to the ever-shifting standards of aesthetics. He traces the reception of the play

back to the XVII century and shows how reception always follows the current norms of

aesthetics. However, we can make an argument that every adaptation is a product of its time. The

Lawrence Olivier version (1948) was presentist when it comes to the psychoanalytical movement

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of the time. His Oedipal depiction of Hamlet is the first of its kind in cinematography.

Furthermore, Olivier showed the development of the characters rather than focus on the plays

political aspects. Franco Zeffirelli’s (1990) film achieved great praise. It was not temporally

contemporary, but it did have Mel Gibson as Hamlet, which was a savvy commercial move. He

was at the height of his career and immensely popular at the time, so his appearance guaranteed

popularity, which was something that Shakespeare adaptations needed, and it also opened the

doors of Hollywood. It also opened up the play to a different and postmodern interpretation.

Kenneth Branagh’s (1996) adaptation wasn’t quite presentist in nature, but it captured the

consumer Zeitgeist of the moment and was representative of what was going on in Hollywood at

the time. Apparently, Hollywood was ready for an epic movie, and a Shakespeare adaptation was

used not only for commercial purposes but also for attracting a whole new generation of

moviegoers. Michael Almereyda’s (2000) version was presentist in nature and it showed the

affect the media had on our lives. He used the media and technology to show the lack of true

communication and the consequences it has on society.

Non-Anglophone adaptations are also important for Shakespeare studies and presentism.

Grigori Kozintzev’s (1964) version was filmed right after the death of Joseph Stalin, which

enabled Kozintzev to get funding for a film that was not tightly bound by strict constructs of

social realism. The adaptation was in some aspects metaphorically a critique of the oppressive

Stalinist regime. Akira Kurosawa’s adaptation of Hamlet (1960) was set in the Japanese

corporate world, and is a comment on the powerful and destructive world of business, which was

taking over Japan at the time. Kurosawa’s importance lies in the fact that he showed how

Shakespeare could be successfully incorporated into the Asian cultures. Vishal Bhardwaj (2014)

made a successful adaptation and it shows the present day problems in the war-torn region of

Kashmir, while Sulayman Al-Bassam (2002) portrays the dangers and consequences of terrorism

as a regional and global threat not only to the Christian but also to the Muslim population.

Perhaps the most presentist adaptation was the Hamlet Live global streaming of the play. Which

addressed the present fear of a desolate and cataclysmic future that might happen if we continue

to live the way we do. It is evident that in today’s global discussion on Shakespeare we are

turning more toward what does Hamlet mean to us than what the play and the character meant to

Shakespeare.

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Coriolanus did not have such a rich history in adaptation. Yet, it has been used, or

banned, often for political reasons. Even the first Nahum Tate adaptation (1641) had a corrected

version of the text. The XX century was no different. In post-World War I England (1926) it was

chosen as the Birthday Play in memoriam of Shakespeare’s birthday. It was supposed to show

the danger of the Bolshevik revolution and the need for a conservative government that would

suppress any civil disobedience. Some years later in Nazi Germany, Coriolanus was presented as

a Hitler-like general, and for the same reason the play was banned in Germany when the Allied

forces captured Berlin. In Paris in 1933/34, there was a staging of the play that was supposed to

promote the anti-Republican forces, which were against the corrupt democratic regime.

Unfortunately, the staging caused such an outrage that the play was banned. At the same time in

1935, there was a staging in Moscow that showed Coriolanus as a detached leader who betrayed

his people. The use/misuse of the play did not change even after World War II. The 1964 Bertolt

Brecht play was pro-communist to the extent that he gave names to all the plebeians, because the

masses were important. In more recent decades, the fate of this play did not change. Zhouhua Lin

(2007) directed the play in China. The play was radical in the sense that it used heavy metal

music, which is a symbol of revolt in China. The reviews were overwhelmingly positive, and Lin

commented how he was finally able to stage a play with a strong anti-regime political message.

It is also worth mentioning that Ralph Fiennes (2011) filmed his version of the play in Serbia,

although, it has to be said that it was shot in such a way that it could have been any other

country. Nevertheless, the play presents a response to political and social issues just as it did in

Shakespeare’s day when tension was high between the people and James I.

Macbeth was also a presentist play when it was written. It was staged in honor of James I,

and it is assumed that the magic in the play was used since James was known to be a scholar of

witches and witchcraft. In 1936, Orson Welles staged the play in Harlem with The Negro

Theater Unit. The government funded this project, and Welles chose a Caribbean island setting

and all black actors and stage workers. At the time, Haiti was in the news because of the issues

with slavery, so the play was a commentary on this issue. The play was popular regardless of the

protest carried out by the Harlem communists. Geoffrey Wright (2006) filmed his version of the

play and chose the Australian underworld as the setting. He commented on the rising problem of

mafia and turf wars in Australia. It is interesting that the papers were not so forgiving for the use

of modern language in the film and the blood and gore. However, when the movie was shown in

156

America the public was not bothered by any of these segments. Leonardo Henriquez had the

same idea when he made his film (2000). He filmed it as a black and white film and showed the

current issue with gangs in Venezuela. In South Africa, Norman Maake (2008) created a film in

which he showed the experience of the South Afrikaans while using historical and contemporary

contexts. There is a parallel between South African politics and the Zimbabwe dictatorship of

Robert Mugabe in the film. It is interesting that Maake uses Zulu and Xhosa language instead of

English, which makes this adaptation interesting, since there are those in academia who believe

that such endeavors are futile, since Shakespeare is ‘untranslatable.’ Yet, this is not the first

African adaptation. In 1999, Alexander Abela filmed his movie in the coastal village Faux Cap

on Madagascar. The film follows the original story, but the setting is authentic to their way of

life as is the language. The villagers decided to make the film, because they believed that the

story shows the political ambition and violence that they too have experienced in their village.

Tom Magill (2007) chose a different approach to filming this play. He filmed it in a prison in

Northern Ireland. The setting is the jail and the actors are all inmates. In the film, they had to act

out their own crimes and come face to face with the consequences. However, the film had a

political message as well. Magill wanted to point out Northern Ireland’s political struggle for

decolonization as well as the poor treatment of prisoners in correctional facilities. Vishal

Bhardwaj (2004) tried his hand at Shakespeare again with an adaptation of Macbeth. The film

was successful and he, too, tackled the underworld in India just as Wright and Henriquez did in

their countries. It is important to note that all of these adaptations that were filmed on different

continents kept their local settings and versions of witchcraft.

Romeo and Juliet has many adaptations on all continents. The everlasting story of true

young love resonates equally through various cultures. Surprisingly, it has been politicized. As

the newspapers show in the United States, the story has developed a life of its own to the extent

that there is a “Romeo and Juliet law,” which is an attempt to mitigate the harsh penalties for

teenagers who engaged in consensual sex. Currently, the public demands that the law includes

homosexual relationships as well. Yet, the connection between this play and homosexuality

began in 1979. John Bell staged the play in Australia as a heterosexual play in which the manly

Mel Gibson played Romeo. Apparently, the play was staged a short time after the first gay and

lesbian parade, and it was intended to appease the relatively homophobic audience. Some years

later, the mood of the public would change as it became more open to the gay/lesbian issues, so

157

Baz Luhrmann was able to film the adaptation with a much younger and more feminine

Leonardo DiCaprio. After a few decades of sexual liberation, the Australian public was ready for

a somewhat androgynous Romeo. His film was also presentist because it addressed the gang

violence that resonates with the current situation in Australia, and unfortunately many other

places in the world. Aleta Chappelle (2016) is the first African-American woman to film this

play. She chose Harlem as the setting and she was proud to make a version that non-Caucasian

people could relate to; it is the racial background that makes their love impossible. Eve

Annenberg (2011) did a similar film a few years before Chappelle. However, the problem in the

film is the difference between an Ultra Orthodox Jewish family and a secular Jewish family. It is

interesting how in a modern-day New York City society the tensions within subcultures are just

as intense as the ones between them.

Yet, is there anything more to presentist and postmodern adaptations other than adding a

contemporary setting? The intention of these adaptations is to bring the plays closer to the

modern-day audience. It can be done through the change of the plot, setting, and language.

Without getting into the discussion on authenticity and is it Shakespeare anymore if we change

all of that, we can say that most directors feel that they can reach their targeted audience with

such changes. It is evident that with such changes there is a newfound popularity of his plays.

The hallmark of Shakespeare’s works is that they are highly adaptable and ‘usable.’ At the

World Shakespeare Congress in London (2016), Nikita Milivojevic was a participant in one of

the panels at the Globe. He shared a story of a group of women who live somewhere in a small

village in Turkey. They stumbled upon Shakespeare’s Works and decided to stage the plays.

They are all women and simple housewives who have found something recognizable in these

plays. When he asked them why Shakespeare they said that all of those problems in the plays

they have in their little village. It his insight into the nature of human relationships and problems

that has made him accessible everywhere, and it is the argument of presentists that this portrayal

of human nature will vary from one culture to another and from one age to the next. Culture,

politics, and social norms dictate adaptation and reception equally, which are always a reflection

of their age, and this is the tenet of presentism as a hermeneutical approach. The hermeneutical

situation changes all the time. Some, like Neema Parvini, believe that a new wave of new

historicism is on the rise. Scholars are interested in the everyday objects and the depiction of the

quotidian. If so, then there is need to explain how we perceive such objects today and how such

158

readings affect the present readers and scholars. Presentists argue that there will always be the

need for presentism, since the present readers are always changing and are always representative

of their own age.

159

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http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/#PreEteGroUniThe

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Rebellion in a Shakespearean Adaptation, Sponsored by the Ministry of Culture.” MTV

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25.

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trumps-bad-boy-appeal-is-a-tale-as-old-as-time

Critical Editions of Shakespeare’s works:

Shakespeare, William. Coriolanus. Ed. Peter Holland. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. New York: Bloomsbury:

2013.

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Eds. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason. New York:

Bloomsbury, 2015.

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Coriolanus. Dir. Ralph Fiennes. Perf. Ralph Fiennes, Gerard Butler, Vanessa Redgrave.

Lionsgate, 2011.

Entabeni. Dir. Norman Maake. Perf. Dumisani Dlamini, Malusi Skenjana, and Zikhona Sodlaka.

South African Broadcasting Corporation, 2008.

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Canal+ and Carolco Pictures, 1990.

Hamlet. Dir. Kenneth Branagh. Perf. Kenneth Branagh, Derek Jacobi, Julie Kristie, and Kate

Winslet. Castle Rock Entertainment, 1996.

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Julia Stiles. Miramax, 2000.

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173

Hamlet. Dir. Grigori Kozintzev. Writer. Boris Pasternak. Perf. Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy,

Mikhail Nazvanov, and Elza Radzina. Lenfilm Studio, 1964. Russian.

The Bad Sleep Well. Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Perf. Toshiro Mifune, Masayuki Mori, and Kyoko

Kagawa. Toho Studios,1960. Japanese.

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Motion Pictures, India, 2014.

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Kati Oulinen. Villealfa Filmproduction Oy. Finnland, 1987.

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Studio Center, 1948.

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Films, 1971.

Macbeth. Dir. Geoffrey Wright. Perf. Sam Worthington, Victoria Hill, and Chloe Armstrong.

Film Finance and Mushroom Pictures, 2006. Australia.

Macbeth. Dir. Justin Kurzel. Perf. Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, and Sean Harris. See-

Saw Films, 2015.

Makibefo. Dir. Alexander Abela. Perf. Martin Zia, Neoliny Dety, and Gilbert Laumord. Blue Eye

Films, 1999. France/Madagascar.

Maqbool. Dir. Vishal Bhardwaj. Perf. Irrphan Khan, Tabu, and Pankaj Kapur. Kaleidoscope

Entertainment, 2004.

Mickey B. Dir. Tom Magill. Perf. David Conway and Sam Mcclean. Maghberry Prison. Northern

Ireland, 2007.

Men of Respect. Dir. William Reilly. Perf. John Tuturro, Katherine Borowitz, Dennis Farina, and

Stanley Tucci. Grandview Avenue Pictures, 1990.

174

Sangrador. Dir. Leonardo Henriquez. Perf. Daniel Alvarado, Karina Gomez, and Francisco

Alfaro. Centro Nacional Autonomio de Cinematografia, 2000. Venezuela. Spanish.

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Meyer, 1936.

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Media Group, 2014.

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O. Dir. Tim Blake Nelson. Perf. Mekhi Phifer, Josh Hartnett, Andrew Keegan, and Julia Stiles.

Lionsgate, 2001. Film.

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Nigel Barrett, Nicholas Daniel, Monadhil Daood, Bashar Al-Ibrahim, Mohamed Kefah

Al-Khous, Amana Wali. Sulayman Al-bassam Theater. Kuwait.

Ten Things I Hate About You. Dir. Gil Junger. Perf. Heather Ledger, Julia Stiles, Joseph Gordon-

Levitt. Touchstone Pictures, 1999.

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Danes, Brian Dennehy, and John Leguizamo. 20th

Century Fox, 1996.

175

9. Biografija Autora

Zorica Jelić rođena je 1972. godine u Valjevu. Diplomirala je 2005. godine na Katedri za

engleski jezik i književnost California State University, Fullerton. Magistrirala je 2007. godine

na Katedri za engleski jezik i književnost California State University, Fullerton sa naslovom

Equivocal Female Sexuality in Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems. Godine 2011. upisala je

doktorske studije na Filološkom fakultetu Univerziteta u Beogradu (Katedra za engleski jezik).

Objavila je stručne radove u udžbeniku California State University (Fullerton) za predmet

Theories of Response to Composition kao i naučnim publikacijama Journal of the As You Like It

Shakespeare Society, Global Challenge: International Journal of Linguistics, Literature, and

Mythology. Od 1996. godine do sada radila je kao nastavnik engleskog jezika u Novom Sadu a

potom kao predavač na Mt. San Antonio College (California), Corinthian Colleges (California),

Southwestern College (Kansas). Takođe učestvuje sa radovima na domaćim i međunarodnim

konferencijama.

176

Изјава о ауторству

Име и презиме аутора Zorica Jelić _____

Број индекса 11056-D _______________________________

Изјављујем

да је докторска дисертација под насловом

Presentism as a contemporary hermeneutical approach and presentist interpretations of William Shakespeare's tragedies

резултат сопственог истраживачког рада;

да дисертација у целини ни у деловима није била предложена за стицање друге дипломе према студијским програмима других високошколских установа;

да су резултати коректно наведени и

да нисам кршио/ла ауторска права и користио/ла интелектуалну својину других лица.

Потпис аутора

У Београду, __12.09.2016._______________

_________________________

177

Изјава o истоветности штампане и електронске верзије докторског рада

Име и презиме аутора ______Zorica Jelic___________________________________________

Број индекса ____________11056/D_____________________________________________

Студијски програм Nauka i književnost

Наслов рада


______________________________________________________

Ментор dr Zorica Bečanović-Nikolić, vanredni profesor

Потписани/а Zorica Jelić_____________

Изјављујем да је штампана верзија мог докторског рада истоветна електронској верзији коју сам предао/ла ради похрањена у Дигиталном репозиторијуму Универзитета у Београду.

Дозвољавам да се објаве моји лични подаци везани за добијање академског назива доктора наука, као што су име и презиме, година и место рођења и датум одбране рада.

Ови лични подаци могу се објавити на мрежним страницама дигиталне библиотеке, у електронском каталогу и у публикацијама Универзитета у Београду.


У Београду, 12.09.2016. ___________________________________________

_________________________

178

Изјава о коришћењу

Овлашћујем Универзитетску библиотеку „Светозар Марковић“ да у Дигитални репозиторијум Универзитета у Београду унесе моју докторску дисертацију под насловом:


која је моје ауторско дело.

Дисертацију са свим прилозима предао/ла сам у електронском формату погодном за трајно архивирање.

Моју докторску дисертацију похрањену у Дигиталном репозиторијуму Универзитета у Београду и доступну у отвореном приступу могу да користе сви који поштују одредбе садржане у одабраном типу лиценце Креативне заједнице (Creative Commons) за коју сам се одлучио/ла.

1. Ауторство (CC BY)

2. Ауторство – некомерцијално (CC BY-NC)

3. Ауторство – некомерцијално – без прерада (CC BY-NC-ND)

4. Ауторство – некомерцијално – делити под истим условима (CC BY-NC-SA)

5. Ауторство – без прерада (CC BY-ND)

6. Ауторство – делити под истим условима (CC BY-SA)

(Молимо да заокружите само једну од шест понуђених лиценци. Кратак опис лиценци је саставни део ове изјаве).


У Београду, 12.09.2016.

__________________________________________________

179

1. Ауторство. Дозвољавате умножавање, дистрибуцију и јавно саопштавање дела, и прераде, ако се наведе име аутора на начин одређен од стране аутора или даваоца лиценце, чак и у комерцијалне сврхе. Ово је најслободнија од свих лиценци.

2. Ауторство – некомерцијално. Дозвољавате умножавање, дистрибуцију и јавно саопштавање дела, и прераде, ако се наведе име аутора на начин одређен од стране аутора или даваоца лиценце. Ова лиценца не дозвољава комерцијалну употребу дела.

3. Ауторство – некомерцијално – без прерада. Дозвољавате умножавање, дистрибуцију и јавно саопштавање дела, без промена, преобликовања или употребе дела у свом делу, ако се наведе име аутора на начин одређен од стране аутора или даваоца лиценце. Ова лиценца не дозвољава комерцијалну употребу дела. У односу на све остале лиценце, овом лиценцом се ограничава највећи обим права коришћења дела.

4. Ауторство – некомерцијално – делити под истим условима. Дозвољавате умножавање, дистрибуцију и јавно саопштавање дела, и прераде, ако се наведе име аутора на начин одређен од стране аутора или даваоца лиценце и ако се прерада дистрибуира под истом или сличном лиценцом. Ова лиценца не дозвољава комерцијалну употребу дела и прерада.

5. Ауторство – без прерада. Дозвољавате умножавање, дистрибуцију и јавно саопштавање дела, без промена, преобликовања или употребе дела у свом делу, ако се наведе име аутора на начин одређен од стране аутора или даваоца лиценце. Ова лиценца дозвољава комерцијалну употребу дела.

6. Ауторство – делити под истим условима. Дозвољавате умножавање, дистрибуцију и јавно саопштавање дела, и прераде, ако се наведе име аутора на начин одређен од стране аутора или даваоца лиценце и ако се прерада дистрибуира под истом или сличном лиценцом. Ова лиценца дозвољава комерцијалну употребу дела и прерада. Слична је софтверским лиценцама, односно лиценцама отвореног кода.

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