Shakespeare's Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (review)

A perennial problem for performance criticism is finding a balance between textual analysis, production analysis based on anecdotal evidence, and simple review-writing. Pascale Aebischer's Shakespeare's Violated Bodies succeeds admirably in striking this balance. Focusing on a very limited number of plays (Titus, Hamlet, Othello, and Lear) and a wide range of theatrical and filmed productions (Ira Aldridge, Anthony Quayle, Orson Welles, Antony Sher, Julie Taymor, Oliver Parker, and Mark Rylance are just a few of the important names that occur in these pages), Aebischer examines some ways in which variously marginalized Shakespearean characters have been represented for different audiences in different eras.

The central argument of the first chapter, on Titus, is that the text "represents Lavinia as trapped by social structures that punish her self-expression even when it is designed to vindicate her chastity and her family's honour" (57). Aebischer then sets about to examine ways in which productions and audiences do or do not become complicit in Lavinia's punishment. While the usual suspects are on display in this chapter—Peter Brook, Julie Taymor, Deborah Warner, Trevor Nunn—Aebischer's eclectic range is evident and yields exciting results. Besides referring to such exotic artifacts as Christopher Dunne's 1998 super-low-budget video of Titus and Antony Sher's novel The Feast (which rather disturbingly incorporates elements of Shakespeare's play), Aebischer also discusses the 2001-02 Kaos touring production. In this fringe production Aebischer finds a representation of Lavinia's suffering that "was not subsumed under Titus' vocal grief and the politics of the play" (49). And in her discussions with queasy audience members during the show's intermission, Aebischer makes a profoundly simple observation about audiences and the nature of theatrical violence:

since they did not know the plot, they were eager to know where the story was heading and asked me to outline what was going to happen. When I told them that the play would end with the Andronici's revenge, they decided to stay: they wanted to watch the rapists die. Put off by the spectacle of violence, what they were craving was further violence.

(52)

Aebischer's second chapter, "'Not dead? Not yet quite dead?': Hamlet's unruly corpses," is by far the best in the book. It begins with a discussion of what Aebischer calls the "promiscuity" of dead bodies in Red Shift's 1999 touring production of Hamlet Q1, and of how these "troped modern criticism's and performance practice's (perverted) relation with Hamlet, the interpreters' tendency to exhume one or another of the play's textual instantiations and, in their appropriation of it, reject the competing texts as so many rotting corpses that must be hidden from sight" (65). Here, as later in her discussion of Lear, Aebischer is somewhat vague and allusive when discussing the differences between competing early texts (Q1, Q2, and F). But her theatrical sense is keen and specific, and she has many fascinating things to say about the dead and undead bodies that populate the stage in Hamlet, and especially about Yorick's skull—a "potentially polysemic signifier that is fairly indiscriminate in its signifieds (anything from a lawyer to Alexander the Great is possible)," and which can "at any moment disrupt the fictional framework of the theatre and find a signified in reality" (89).

Chapter 3 takes up Othello and the intersection of sexual and racial marginalization in the spectacle of the jealous Moor and his beautiful, dead wife. The character of Aaron in Titus is also discussed, to a lesser extent. Though she surveys a characteristically wide range of Othellos, Aebischer focuses most heavily on two film versions, those of Orson Welles and Oliver Parker. She finds these films to be symptomatic of the dominant reading (Aebischer's term) of this play evident in its performance history: Welles's film underemphasizes Othello's otherness so that the director "seems to identify Othello's point of view...