Appropriating the Bard

The playwrights under scrutiny in Shakespeare’s Surrogates, the author informs us, “frequently worked metaphorical violence on corpses that represent the literary corpus.” In selected works by Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Müller, Samuel Beckett, Eugene O’Neill, and Tom Stoppard, “adaptation has appeared as grave robbery, skinning, cannibalism, haunting, and even disembodiment.” In effect, “the body of the Bard is broken, sacrificed, consumed.”

Rest easy, dear reader: Shakespeare’s Surrogatesis not as grand guignolas all that, although it does keep to the (sometimes) gruesome theoretical path outlined above. In this very brief study (133 pages without introduction, afterword, notes, and index), Shaw and Brecht tie for first place, with 31 pages each, followed by Müller with 22, Beckett 16, O’Neill 13, and Stoppard 12. All of these playwrights, according to author Sonya Freeman Loftis, have challenged, rewritten, replaced, sought to destroy, tried to forget, or attempted to become William Shakespeare.

Brecht, as student and imitator of Shaw—both men “conceived of the act of adaptation as one of violent desecration”—rewrites Coriolanusand Hamlet. Müller, in adapting Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, and especially Hamlet, struggles to “destroy and yet to preserve the [Shakespearean] corpse/ corpus of the past”; Loftis examines “cannibalism as a symbol of literary adaptation” in the “highly acclaimed and influential” Hamletmachine. In Beckett, she perceives a movement “from embodiment to disembodiment,” a “desire to forget or erase Shakespeare rather than to remember him.” She sees Long Day’s Journey into Nightas being “haunted by the memory of O’Neill’s father,” a Shakespearean actor, and finds that the character James Tyrone “often stands in for” Shakespeare himself. And as for Stoppard, his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Deadis his “comic take on performing death and replacing Shakespeare.”

Back to the Shaw chapter, whose title is inspired by his essay, “Blaming the Bard,” published in the Saturday Reviewon 26 September 1896 (and reprinted in Bernard F. Dukore’s The Drama Observed[1993], 2:660–66). In this much-expanded version of a similarly titled article published in SHAW29 (2009), which focused exclusively on Heartbreak House, Loftus widens her net to illustrate, in a handful of works, Shaw’s “lifelong struggle to present himself as a cultural surrogate for Shakespeare.” His “attempts to rewrite Shakespeare’s canon” include Heartbreak House, Caesar and Cleopatra, Cymbeline Refinished, and Shakes versus Shav. What we have in these works is, in a word, surrogation: “the act of destroying Shakespeare and replacing him with Shaw.”

“Under the thin veneer of provocative hyperbole, undeniable egoism, and outrageous metaphor,” writes Loftis, Shaw “attacks what he saw as the primary problems of Shakespeare’s canon: aestheticism, fixed morality, romantic ideals, and the passivity that Shaw equated with pessimism.” In support, she quotes from a 1909 letter from Shaw to Lady Gregory, in which he denounces “the old cry of despair—Shakespeare’s ‘As flies to wanton boys so are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport’—the most frightful blasphemy every uttered, and the one from which it is my mission to deliver the world.” For Shaw, “Shakespeare was always an icon of the past, a symbol of the old canon that prevented creative and artistic evolution, a force that bound a passive society to conventional morality.” Shakespeare’s heroes, therefore, are but mere “victims of pessimism and fixed morality.”

All of this is exemplified by a number of examples of Shaw’s engagement with the Bard. In Heartbreak House, Ellie is lulled into “metaphorical passivity” by reading Shakespeare, “the artistic and cultural father.” In Caesar and Cleopatra, Caesar’s rejection of Cleopatra “is the rejection of aestheticism.” In Cymbeline Refinished, “Shaw continues his attack on passivity, romantic ideals and ready-made morality.” And the Shakespeare of Shakes versus Shavis “a symbol of a stagnant past that inhibits the future.” I will let curious readers find out more for themselves.

Despite the book’s original thesis—that Shaw...