Feature Stories
“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”
Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene IV
THE GREATEST WORDSMITH OF ALL TIME
By Rachelle Cooper
What’s so great about Shakespeare, anyway? The Bard died almost 400 years ago, yet it’s impossible to go about your life without having a reference to one of his plays smack you in the face. It seems like Willy’s popularity is growing with age. In the last few years, he’s been cleaning up at the box office and the Oscars, with stars like Gwyneth Paltrow (Shakespeare in Love), Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes (Romeo and Juliet), Michelle Pfeiffer (A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream) and Ethan Hawke (Hamlet) lining up to be in recent film adaptations of his work. Shakespeare is also making headlines in Canadian newspapers because a portrait was pulled out from under Grandmother Sanders’ bed in Ottawa.
When U of G English professor Daniel Fischlin was just starting his career, he thought the last thing the literary world needed was another book on Shakespeare’s work.
“I swore that I would never do Shakespeare research because I knew it was such a saturated field and I couldn’t bear the thought of having to add to that,” he says.
But when Fischlin, whose specialty is early modern Renaissance studies, was assigned large Shakespeare classes as a young professor, he found himself trying to figure out how to get hundreds of students interested in the work. He decided that looking at adaptations of the Bard’s work was a good way to get students hooked.
“It was a way of showing how contemporaries were dealing with Shakespeare, and it often provided a nice platform for transitioning back to his original texts.”
When Fischlin went looking for a resource on world adaptations of Shakespeare to use in his classes, he couldn’t find one, so he ended up writing Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology in 2000 with colleague Mark Fortier, who recently came to Guelph as director of the School of English and Theatre Studies (SETS).
Fischlin’s research and interest in Shakespearean adaptations grew despite his early self-admonitions as he found Canadian plays, comic books, cartoons, movies, songs and jazz improvisations all dedicated to giving a Canadian perspective on Shakespeare’s work.
After close to four years of research completed by 30 undergraduate and graduate students and post-docs, he launched the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP) website (www.canadianshakespeares.ca) in 2002. It is the largest and most complete website in the world dedicated to showing Shakespeare’s cultural influence on a nation and was funded in part by a provincial Premier’s Research Excellence Award and a federal Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant. CASP contains more than 10,000 pages of information on some 500 plays that have been transformed and adapted in Canada, and it’s accessible from anywhere in the world for free.
Fischlin admits that every time he publishes something on Shakespeare, “I shudder because I swore I’d never do this. It’s more than a little ironic.”
It just goes to show that the power of Shakespeare’s cultural presence can’t be avoided.
Filmmakers and playwrights continue to produce his plays and make their own adaptations of his work because “it provides a powerful, recognizable iconic source of cultural capital that you can rely on to draw in an audience,” says Fischlin. “There’s a sphere of ideas that are part of our environment, and Shakespeare is a crucial part of that sphere because he generated so many of the words, phrases and ideas that are now in use in our language.”
So how could one man create so many plays, 37 to be exact, that have had such an impact on our world?
The number of words Shakespeare invented is in the thousands — including amazement, assassination, colourful, critical, downstairs, excitement, fashionable, majestic, puke, satisfying, upstairs, useful, vulnerable, torture and zany — and his vocabulary included some 29,000 words. This may be due, in part, to the fact that he spent about 2,000 more hours a year in school than kids do today.
“He was extremely educated as a youth by anybody’s standards,” says Fischlin, adding that Shakespeare lived at a time when English was defining itself as a valid European language. It’s estimated that, between 1500 and 1659, 30,000 new words were added to the English language. Some scholars suggest that as many as 10 per cent came from Shakespeare’s pen.
Although it may seem hard to get young people today to relate to a guy who was growing up in the late 1500s, the rate at which technology was changing people’s lives back then was similar to what’s occurring now, says Fischlin.
“Today we may have computers and fancy gadgets and iPods, but in Shakespeare’s moment, you had the language as a technology that was being deployed in enormously successful ways. Kids who are dependent on gadgetry still require language, and I think pointing that out maybe makes Shakespeare seem not so foreign and alien.”
In addition to being a playwright, poet and actor, Shakespeare was a clever businessman. When the Globe Theatre was incorporated in 1599, it was one of the first corporations, if not the first corporation, says Fischlin. The theatre was owned by a consortium of actors, including Shakespeare, who were all shareholders with complex investment agreements. “It was the world’s first entertainment business, and it did very well, pulling in thousands of people a night for certain shows.”
Shakespeare also dabbled in property development. In 1597, he bought one of the most prestigious properties in all of Stratford, the New Place. Later, he bought a considerable amount of land in Stratford, doubling his investment.
So whether you’re an artist or a business person, Shakespeare the man offers something anyone can relate to, says Fischlin, and whether you like him or not, you can’t deny there’s “a power there — a great artist at work — like a Bach or a Michelangelo.”
But the power of the Bard goes well beyond the man in his time. A greater source of Shakespeare-mania is what Fischlin calls “the Shakespeare effect.”
“It’s the globalization of how Shakespeare gets used across multiple cultures. You empower yourself by piggybacking your vision onto the cultural capital that’s already invested in Shakespeare.”
This is done all over the world in dozens of languages. Shakespeare’s plays are extremely adaptable thematically because love, death, tragedy, comedy and political corruption occur regardless of where you live or what your values are, says Fischlin.
“Your culture doesn’t protect you from tragedy, and that’s one of the things that transposes beautifully and why Shakespeare gets adapted.”
Aboriginal adaptations of Shakespeare are especially interesting, he says. “Very often these adaptations are framed as a healing instrument for dealing with colonial history and what it has done to aboriginal people in this country.” The CASP website includes a spotlight on aboriginal adaptations “to memorialize the gesture of taking on this icon of colonial culture and then using it to remember and try to heal some of the effects when Canada became a country.”
Just because a play happens to use the same theme as one of Shakespeare’s plays, does that really mean it was influenced by the Bard’s work? Fischlin recalls a conversation he had with renowned Canadian actor William Hutt, who argued that many works simply “hijack” or “bastardize” Shakespeare’s work. There’s no question there’s a lot of anxiety around identifying adaptations. Fischlin says CASP met with resistance from some of the authors whose works were classified as adaptations.
“Our decision was to be inclusive because adaptation is the basic descriptor to how we are in the world,” he says. “Adaptation can range across a huge spectrum from the most orthodox slavish doing-duty to the sanctity of the Shakespearean text to the most creative, wild, barely connected anarchic kind of work. We’ve seen examples from across that whole spectrum in the research we’ve done.”
Based on that definition, Shakespeare is probably closer to influencing our lives than we thought. Anyone can probably name a handful of adaptations without thinking too hard. There have been 300 film adaptations of Shakespearean plays since the 1930s. The musical West Side Story is based on Romeo and Juliet. The film Strange Brew is a takeoff on Hamlet. The band Dire Straits sings a song called Romeo and Juliet. The list goes on and on.
But it isn’t the well-known Canadian adaptations — like Harlem Duets, the Djanet Sears adaptation of Othello, or the hundreds of plays performed at the Stratford Festival — that come to mind when Fischlin thinks of the research that’s been compiled by CASP. It was the unknown local adaptations that he found most interesting. He was particularly intrigued by a play he stumbled across that had been written in 1915 by a nun at an all-girls’ school in Winnipeg.
“Sister Mary Agnes wrote a play that had different girls in the school, at their moment of graduation, play female characters in Shakespeare. The play, A Shakespeare Pageant, made comments on contemporary Canada and the war, which was a radical thing for this nun to do in her own cultural moment.”
Fischlin wrote a piece about the play and had the play script published in the Canadian Theatre Review. “I sent it proudly to my mom, and she phoned me back and said: ‘Did you know that your grandmother and your great-aunt went to that school?’” It turned out that several women in Fischlin’s family had been taught by Sister Mary Agnes and had possibly performed in her play.
“It drove home to me how tightly-knit connections are in Canada and how the formation of so many young people involves making a journey through Shakespeare, making Shakespeare their own and reflecting on what it means to be Canadian via what they were doing with Shakespeare.”
When members of the CASP team began their work, they were struck by the number of local people who had been involved in adaptations. Theatre studies professor Judith Thompson wrote a highly successful loose adaptation of Hamlet called Lion in the Streets. Lewis Melville, a longtime research associate in the College of Biological Science, started a band called The Williams. All the musicians jokingly changed their names to William and performed songs about Shakespeare’s plays. In 2004, two U of G students wrote and acted in a hip-hop version of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. Steven Bush, a sessional instructor in SETS, was involved in a film version of Hamlet.
“Because CASP is here, we’re a place that ferments this sort of activity,” says Fischlin. “And now that we have the ‘Shakespeare: Made in Canada’ festival coming up, that’s ramping up the activity in a whole other way.”
CASP definitely served as a catalyst for the festival, he says. “It came out of the fact that we were collecting all these artifacts and the research was generating so much activity.