The temptation to meddle with Shakespeare has proven irresistible to playwrights since the Restoration and has inspired some of the most reviled and most respected works of theatre. Nahum Tate’s tragic-comic King Lear (1681) was described as an execrable piece of dementation, but played on London stages for one hundred and fifty years. David Garrick was equally tempted to adapt King Lear in the eighteenth century, as were the burlesque playwrights of the nineteenth. In the twentieth century, the meddling continued with works like King Lear’s Wife (1913) by Gordon Bottomley and Dead Letters (1910) by Maurice Baring. But many of these twentieth-century works display a complexity and ambivalence quite at odds with their theatrical predecessors. Plays like Lear (1971) by Edward Bond and Seven Lears (1989) by Howard Barker use elements from Shakespeare’s play to write critically about contemporary politics and literature, while Lear’s Daughters (1987) by the Women’s Theatre Group expands the role of female characters as a way to challenge restrictive representations of femininity. These plays express more varied and problematic positions toward literature and society than Tate and Garrick, suggesting not only that the nature of adaptation has changed but that the playwright’s relationship to Shakespeare has changed as well.
To understand how adaptation has changed and why, chapter one examines the differences in works by Tate, Garrick, and the burlesque writers, locating traditional critical models – which characterize adaptation as either collaborative or repudiative – within a more historicized framework. Chapter two considers how changes in early twentieth-century Shakespeare criticism impacted adaptations by playwrights like Bottomley, and how traditional models of adaptation begin to break down when applied to more ironic works by Baring and Stoppard. Chapter three evaluates a new model of adaptation in regard to plays by Bond and Barker which articulate a more problematic relationship to Shakespeare, a model that is further tested in chapter four against feminist adaptations by Paula Vogel, Ann-Marie MacDonald, and the Women’s Theatre Group. This new model conceives of adaptation as a complex double gesture that collaborates with Shakespeare and rejects him at the same time; it allows playwrights to acknowledge their debt to Shakespeare while commenting on contemporary issues and expressing modern beliefs. It allows playwrights to express more modern subject positions with regard to their literary heritage and to themselves, and to engage with broader debates about how art, society, and the self interact.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/1343 |
| Date | 13 February 2009 |
| Creators | Bradley, Lynne |
| Contributors | Rabillard, Sheila |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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