Graham Holderness

Text and Stage: Shakespeare, Bibliography, and Performance Studies

Copyright Cambridge University Press [Full text of this article is not available in the UHRA]

“Author! Author!”: Shakespeare and biography

Since 1996, not a year has passed without the publication of at least one Shakespeare biography. Yet for many years the place of the author in the practice of understanding literary works has been problematized, and even on occasions eliminated. Criticism reads the “works”, and may or may not refer to an author whose “life” contributed to their meaning. Biography seeks the author in the works, the personality that precedes the works and gives them their characteristic shape and meaning. But the form of literary biography addresses the unusual kind of “life” that puts itself into “works”, and this is particularly challenging where the “works” predominate massively over the salient facts of the “life”. This essay surveys the current terrain of Shakespeare biography, and considers the key questions raised by the medium: can we know anything of Shakespeares “personality” from the facts of his life and the survival of his works? What is the status of the kind of speculation that inevitably plays a part in biographical reconstruction? Are biographers in the end telling us as much about themselves as they tell us about Shakespeare?

Vanishing point: looking for Hamlet

This essay begins with the aesthetic experience as an encounter with loss, exemplified by the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911, when thousands flocked to view the blank space on the wall from which the painting had disappeared. This principle is then applied to writing itself via the work of Blanchot and Derrida. Writing also famously begins with a blank sheet, from which what you are about to write is by definition absent. But as the writer takes possession of it, as it comes to be, so it becomes something other, something lost, something—like the Ghost in Hamlet—“vanished from our sight” (Hamlet 1.2.219). The “vanishing point” is that disappearance of presence that makes the vanishing point itself visible, and constitutes the aesthetic experience as a form of bereavement. For Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida the “vanishing point” is the point of origin where writing both begins and ends; for Stephen Greenblatt and Christopher Pye it is both the anchor of visual perspective in painting, and the Lacanian “real”, that element of the subject that cannot be known, yet constitutes the structure of the whole being. In all these models reality is to be found at the point where presence and absence meet and part company. This approach is then applied to Hamlet, where the reality of the play is in my reading constituted by the unseen, by what vanishes. From this perspective Hamlet is a play about the afterlife, a fundamentally spiritual and religious meditation on death and on Judgement. The plays preoccupations are then linked with the religious wall-paintings in the Guild Chapel at Stratford, which Shakespeare would have partially known as a boy. The paper focuses in particular on one he could not have seen, the great fresco of the Last Judgement which was defaced under the supervision of his father John Shakespeare. The whitewashed wall which under its “dull façade” (Eliot Little Gidding 2) housed a potent vision of the Last Days is compared with the blank space left by the stolen Mona Lisa. Both are prototypes of art as loss and return, absence and presence, death and resurrection. These illustrations are then finally linked with the “Catholic Shakespeare” question that has recently been brought into much greater prominence by Richard Wilson, and latterly by Stephen Greenblatt. The work aspires to be a contribution to Catholic Shakespeare literature as well as to the “New Aestheticism” promoted by critics such as John Joughin.

“Half God, half man”: Kazantzakis, Scorsese, and The Last Temptation

You may have heard of the Blessed Mountain.It is the highest mountain in our world.Should you reach the summit you would have only one desire,and that to descend and be with those who dwell in the deepest valley.That is why it is called the Blessed Mountain.Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam

The Winter’s Tale: Country into Court

The two-part structure of The Winter’s Tale, with its shift from courtly Sicilia to pastoral Bohemia, isolates and defines its image of court society with an unmistakable clarity. The Winter’s Tale has hatred in the first part and love, where there was hatred, in the last … Not only does the middle part stir the mind and heart of itself, but by the contrast of its beauty, love, youth, confidence, happiness, country life, and venial roguery, it intensifies the dramatic effect of the ugliness, the oppressive adult madness, hatred and murderous crime at court in the first part.31 Within the starkly-distinguished antitheses of pastoral convention, the Sicilian court is represented as the scene of suspicion, mistrust, surveillance, conspiracy, injustice, and tyranny; while the Arcadian simplicity of rural Bohemia reveals a society of freedom, openness, community and love. The two antagonistic stage-worlds of the play revolve around the polar axis of the famous sixteen-year gap, with its fill-in Chorus from a personified Time, and throw off a series of ancillary and subordinate oppositions: art versus nature; class-division against communal solidarity; tragedy confronted by comedy. As always in pastoral discourse the locus amoenus of the bucolic paradise provides a constant point of reference by which the constraints, inhibitions, corruptions and injustices of the court society may be measured.

This is not Shakespeare

This chapter surveys a number of works by Anthony Burgess—his novels Nothing Like the Sun and Enderby’s Dark Lady, his biography Shakespeare, and his unproduced Hollywood musical The Bawdy Bard, in order to demonstrate continual interpenetrations in his work between historical scholarship, literary criticism, and fiction-making. Holderness then goes on to demonstrate how these different methodologies can be made to interact, introducing extracts from his own short story, “The Seeds of Time.” Underpinned by a cultural materialist study of the presence of Shakespeare in a series of national festivals—the great Exhibition of 1851, the Festival of Britain in 1951, and the London Olympics of 2012—this story uses imaginative methods to pursue a critical inquiry, combining documentary evidence and critical argument with imaginative speculation.

'Silence bleeds': Hamlet across borders : The Shakespearean Adaptations of Sulayman Al-Bassam

This article addresses the writing and performance work of Anglo-Kuwaiti director Sulayman Al-Bassam, tracing the development of his various adaptations of Shakespeares Hamlet into English and Arabic ‘cross-cultural’ versions between 2001 and 2007. Al-Bassams work presents English as a ‘language in translation’. His works move from early modern to modern English, from Arabized English to Arabic, from one linguistic and geographical location to another, their forms moulded and remoulded by complex cultural pressures. The study focuses on specific examples from three adaptations to show in practice how in these works English is ‘constantly crossed, challenged and contested’.

Shakespeare's "whole history" : drama and early modern historical theory

Copyright Taylor and Francis / Informa [Full text of this article is not available in the UHRA]

Terrorism and Culture: Macbeth, 9/11 and the Gunpowder Plot

This article offers a critique of Robert Appelbaum’s work on Shakespeare and terrorism, particularly his reflections on Macbeth and the Gunpowder Plot. It argues that terrorism such as that exemplified by the Gunpowder Plot and 9/11 may, whatever their ostensible motives, be in reality nihilistic, merely destructive and offering (in Derrida’s words) “nothing good to be hoped for”. The achievement of Shakespeare’s Macbeth is to expose, via the languages of poetry and religion, the ‘mystery of iniquity’ (2 Thess. 2.7) that lies behind all terrorism.

You Only Live Twice: A Tale of Two Bonds

This chapter draws on critical theory and autobiographical memoir to compare two versions of Bond. The first is the one encountered by a working-class grammar-school boy in the early 1960s, and the second the version subsequently developed in the 1980s by a professional literary critic influenced by post-structuralist criticism. Focusing on the ‘Cold War’ novels From Russia with Love (1957), Casino Royale (1953), Live and Let Die (1954) and Moonraker (1955), the chapter analyses Fleming’s approaches to class, gender and patriotism, and argues that the naive initial reception of the fiction was in many ways truer and more valid than the subsequent critical revision.