Adam Hansen

Writing, London, and the Bishops’ Ban of 1599

This article examines a set of events in London in 1599 that have come to be known as the Bishops’ Ban, when several specific literary works were identified as dangerous and burnt at the behest of the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury. By situating these events within the conditions of censorship, literary production, and urban life at the time, we can not only understand why the Ban occurred, but also begin to explore London’s role in the motives, implementation, and effects of the Ban. Not much has been written about the Ban; still less has been said about London’s significance to it. This paper aims to redress this, to contextualize the Ban — and the creativity it affected — in relation to a specific cultural and geographical location. Were London’s censors censoring an unsettled city’s images of itself?

The Politics of Popular Music in Contemporary Shakespearean Performance

This chapter tries to reread, or to hear again, examples of the ways popular music has been used in some recent productions of Shakespeare. Given their number, this account can only be selective, suggesting ways of addressing what happens when popular music meets Shakespearean performance that go beyond the focus here on two different productions: one fairly faithful to an editorially established Shakespearean text, and one looser, more radical adaptation. In turn, this chapter contributes to a field of study developed by Stephen Purcell in his Popular Shakespeare, where he says ‘an area … which remains as yet relatively unexplored is that of Shakespeare and ‘the popular’ in performance’. We might note that there has been even less attention paid to Shakespeare and popular music in performance, and this silence continues. Titus Andronicus, directed by Pia Furtado in 2014 in a Peckham car park, featured ‘beatboxing, breaking and more’. One review praised the production’s ‘visual impact’, while complaining it was ‘full of loud music’: this was the extent of the analysis of the staging’s sonic aesthetic. This chapter’s rereading, or rehearing, tries to address several questions, questions informed by research into the interactions between music and literature, as articulated by William E. Grim: The first way in which music may influence literature is on the inspirational level. … This is the case of music being the writer’s muse. … Music can also influence literature at a metaphorical level. At this level, music serves as the subject matter, point of departure, or intertextual reference within the work of literature. … The third type of influence that music may have on literature is at the formal level. At this level, the work of literature utilizes or attempts to imitate musical forms and/or compositional procedures within a literary context. On reading this, one might wonder what it has to do with popular music in recent Shakespearean performance. Grim focusses on what classical (not popular) music does to or for literature as text (not as performance), and on the creation of texts (not their consumption).

’Give me my sin again’: Disco Does Shakespeare

In recent years, part of my research has been trying to address a series of questions: how have Shakespearean characters, words, texts and iconography been represented and reworked through popular music?1 Do all types of popular music represent Shakespeare in the same ways? And how do the links between Shakespeare and popular music complicate what we think we know about Shakespeare, and popular music? During this research I came across a 1977 disco album called Romeo & Juliet credited to Alec R. Costandinos and the Syncophonic Orchestra (Casablanca).2 Disco is — or was — many things to many people: syncretic, synthetic, kinetic, somatic, erotic, moronic. But rarely has it been seen as tragic, unless in that peculiarly contemporary sense of banal, kitsch or naff.3 So, the existence and success of Costandinos’ Romeo & Juliet prompted another question: what made this synthesis of Shakespearean tragedy and disco possible or desirable? Part of my answer derives from Raymond Williams’ comment in Modern Tragedy: ‘tragic experience, because of its central importance, commonly attracts the fundamental beliefs and tensions of a period, and tragic theory is interesting mainly in this sense, that through it the shape and set of a particular culture is often deeply realised’ (1966, p. 45). Recognising this means we might develop a compelling instance of how, in Marjorie Garber’s words, ‘Shakespeare makes modern culture and modern culture makes Shakespeare’ (2009, p. xiii).