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More Than Kids' Stuff
English prof explores history of British pantomine, which often had fairy tales at its core but was trimmed with social commentary
BY REBECCA KENDALL
Last month, Shrek the Third broke box office records by generating $122 million in its opening weekend. Part of the film's appeal, for some, is the multi-layered humour and double entendre that are communicated through the movie's classic fairy-tale characters such as Prince Charming, Snow White, Cinderella and Puss in Boots. Although this is a seemingly innovative addition to modern children's entertainment, Prof. Jennifer Schacker, English and Theatre Studies, says it's nothing new.
“We tend to see fairy tales as something for children, and we think of films like Shrek and others that seem to be talking at several levels as modern, when in fact this kind of self-parody has a 500-year history,” says Schacker. She is in the final stages of a four-year study examining the history of British pantomime, a traditional form of Christmastime theatre that often has a fairy tale at its core and is trimmed with varying degrees of social commentary throughout.
The project, titled “Cross-Dressed Tales: French Fairy Tales and the British Pantomime Tradition,” looks at the structure of the fairy tale within British pantomime and how a number of French fairy tales from the late 1600s and early 1700s found their way to the English stage.
“For hundreds of years, panto's appeal has crossed lines of age and class, and yet the content and style of the performances run counter to many dominant North American assumptions about family entertainment,” she says, noting that issues of class, gender, sexuality and politics were commonly addressed — playfully and with bawdy humour — in this forum.
In the history of fairy tales as entertainment in the English language, there's a missing chapter, says Schacker. There's a lot of scholarship, criticism and awareness surrounding what goes on in the adaptation of fairy tales into film and animation, but such adaptations are usually compared directly with earlier print versions, she says.
“There's a gap in our accounts of the history of the fairy tale. Theatrical adaptations of tales co-existed with the print versions and early cinema. For example, early British cinema drew extensively on the personnel and stage-craft of the early English music hall and pantomime. There's an intersection between these media that hasn't been fully accounted for.”
Pantomime is often considered to be quintessentially English, says Schacker, but it has elements of French influence embedded in its history.
“In pre-revolutionary France, writers used the fairy tale to talk about issues they couldn't address directly in ‘serious' tracks. The genre was seen as common and trivial and associated with women and children, but at the same time, this marginality is exactly what gave it its power. A group of French writers, most of whom were female, were addressing topics that were dangerous to talk about openly. But in the context of the literary tale, one could perform subtle and coded critiques of the monarchy, matrimony and so on because people could dismiss the seriousness of the subject by saying it was all just a fairy tale.”
The French fairy-tale tradition became popular in England, but many scholars have assumed that the subtext of the social commentary was lost in translation, she says, adding that this resulted in a “flattening” of the potential of the art form to speak as effectively to audiences.
This is often found in contemporary children's adaptations of fairy tales, which tend to be fairly linear, message-driven narratives, she says.
“The cheap, easy jokes that try to be up-to-the-minute don't demand much self-reflection from audiences and don't ask us to question anything about our current culture. I like stories that leave audiences a bit unsettled and get people talking and thinking about matters they usually take for granted. Children's entertainment as we know it has completely retreated from that. Much of it is formulaic, moralistic and without much potential to cultivate intelligent audiences. In many recent fairy-tale adaptations, I find little of the narrative and moral ambiguity that characterize earlier versions of tales.”
Schacker is currently planning an interdisciplinary colloquium on the materiality of the fairy tale to be held Nov. 2 at U of G's TransCanada Institute. Featured speakers will include scholars from New York, Utah, Colorado, Tennessee, Massachusetts and Guelph.
“One of the things going on right now in fairy-tale studies is a fundamental reconsideration of the genre's received history,” she says. “Much of what's been taken for granted, like the fairy tale's supposed function as an ‘escape' from reality or the genre's ‘oral origins,' is now the subject of pretty heated debate.”
There's sometimes a divide between people who study the literary fairy tale and those who study oral traditions, she adds.
“Oral, written and theatrical forms don't have completely separate histories. What's exciting about taking pantomime into consideration is that it changes our understanding of the various ways this genre has addressed matters of social, sexual, political and scientific change. And most scholarship on the history of the fairy tale completely overlooks British pantomime.”
The fairy tale, she says, is alive and well, not only in animated films but also in children's literature and various adult genres.
“The genre is part of our culture, and it's important to historicize that. In oral, written, theatrical and cinematic form, these stories, set long ago and far away, have demonstrated their potential to interrogate and explore the here and now. The subversive potential of the fairy tale is powerful. It has a history, and it can open up new ways of exploring our own social climate.”