The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature

Chapter 5: Cardenios for Our Time

C h a p t e r 5 Cardenios for Our Time La España de charanga y pandereta, cerrado y sacristía, devota de Frascuelo y de María, de espíritu burlón y de alma quieta, ha de tener su mármol y su día, su infalible mañana y su poeta. —Antonio Machado As the reception of Double Falshood both in the eighteenth century and in our own time demonstrates, the critical anxiety about finding the hand of “the Bard” in the play has largely occluded the important question of the early modern dramatic use of Spanish sources in England. I turn now to how the Spanish question recurs in contemporary recreations of the lost Cardenio, by the noted Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt and the playwright Charles Mee, on the one hand, and by the director Gregory Doran for the Royal Shakespare Company, on the other.1 Their texts and productions suggest that matters of intellectual property and national belonging remain central to our own negotiation of an Anglo-Spanish heritage, in an ongoing and vibrant tussle over representation. Because of the tremendous stakes where the Shakespeare canon is concerned, the play continues to serve as a lightning rod for questions of attribution and originality. Moreover, as a marvelously efficient synecdoche for Cervantes and Shakespeare, the two most canonical figures in their respective national traditions, Cardenio remains a privileged site for exploring the complexities of literary transmission from Spain to England . In what follows, I explore how translatio changes in our own time, for practitioners faced with the exigencies of making classical theater viable and Cardenios for Our Time 99 relevant in the modern world, even as transnational collaboration offers the occasion for redoubled Cardenios. Disavowal As the recipient of a Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation in 2002, Greenblatt decided to turn to playwriting in order to explore the “theatrical mobility” of texts, as he put it in the essay he later wrote about the experience.2 Greenblatt’s explicit interest lay in “what happens with materials being recycled, what happens when things are moved from one place to another, one culture to another, one mind to another.”3 Hence his affinity for the work of Charles Mee, whose plays rework classical sources, and whom Greenblatt admiringly describes as a “cunning recycler.”4 On Mee’s website, The (Re)Making Project, which details his creative process, the playwright provocatively describes his work on his sources as pillaging, and invites others to repeat this operation on his own plays: Please feel free to take the plays from this website and use them freely as a resource for your own work: that is to say, don’t just make some cuts or rewrite a few passages or re-arrange them or put in a few texts that you like better, but pillage the plays as I have pillaged the structures and contents of the plays of Euripides and Brecht and stuff out of Soap Opera Digest and the evening news and the internet, and build your own, entirely new, piece—and then, please, put your own name to the work that results.5 Yet there are limits to the use of the plays; certain kinds of taking clearly constitute piracy, less fancifully construed, in the playwright’s eyes. He adds: “But, if you would like to perform the plays essentially or substantially as I have composed them, they are protected by copyright in the versions you read here, and you need to clear performance rights,” and concludes with the contact information for his agents. For Mee, then, dismantling the Romantic cult of the author by no means implies forgoing the right to ownership of intellectual property. Greenblatt and Mee joined forces to update Cardenio as a romantic comedy of Americans in Tuscany, a play subsequently advertised and discussed primarily with reference to Shakespeare. Although Burt Sun’s poster for the Figure 5. Burt Sun, poster for Stephen Greenblatt and Charles Mee’s Cardenio at the American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cardenios for Our Time 101 play shows the Bard emblazoned on the unhappy groom’s ball-and-chain, Shakespeare was clearly supposed to provide the weighty ballast for a frothy comedy of contemporary manners, which received its first U.S. production at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge in May 2008. On the theater’s website, an interview with the co-authors further...