< previous page page_9 next page >

Page 9

abuse. When Angelou started to speak again, an episode not recounted in that book, she recited Portia’s “quality of mercy’’ speech for her church congregation. Quite literally, Shakespeare returns to Angelou her voice (discussed in Lootens 1996:96). Recitation, of course, can turn citation into parody. Prince Charles’s rewriting of Hamlet’s “To Be or Not To Be,” discussed by Kamps, may be unintentionally comic in its effect, but Stoppard’s “Fifteen-Minute Hamlet,” a brilliant parody, is based on nothing but a ruthlessly trimmed version of Shakespeare’s now very incomplete text. Quotation and interpretation of Shakespeare can also be agonistic or compensatory. George and Cocoa, in Naylor’s Mama Day, use King Lear to argue about their relationship. The father from one of Osborne’s romances, The Lady Who Hated Shakespeare, combats grief by reading Shakespeare to his unreceptive daughter.

On a larger scale, Shakespearean appropriation can involve, as Rich says, entering a text from a new angle. Margaret Atwood’s very short story, “Gertrude Talks Back,” is a monologue that rewrites Hamlet’s closet scene from the perspective of Gertrude, its passive auditor, and ends with a witty twist: “Oh! You think what? You think Claudius murdered your Dad? … It wasn’t Claudius, darling. It was me” (Atwood 1994:19). Dialogic encounters with Shakespeare, of course, can also involve larger revisions of plot and literary form. Mama Day’s experimental form, Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue, the change of protagonists in A Thousand Acres —all emerge at least in part from the dynamics of appropriation. Even the smallest revision can be significant. In a recorded version of a concert performance of Othello’s last speech, for instance, Paul Robeson (Robeson 1992) talks about the dignity of the Moor’s culture, then—in the role of Othello—asks that this audience speak of him as one who “loved full wisely, but too well.” The line makes no sense theatrically, but it speaks volumes about Robeson’s relation to Shakespeare and his investment in Othello as a character.

Often appropriation involves what Bloom would call a strong misprision or misreading of the parent text. It may also involve a kind of simplification that sets appropriation and the study of it apart from other forms of Shakespearean criticism, particularly historicizing criticism. While recent readings of Othello, for instance, explore the multiplicity of racial identities imposed on the Moor (see Neill 1998), Robeson’s reading of the character narrows that array of identities down to the one that explains best his alienation, that of the African American slave. The same is true for Naylor’s

< previous page page_9 next page >