Effacing Rebellion and Righting the Slanted: Declassifying the Archive of MacMillan's (1965) and Shakespeare's (1597) Romeo and Juliets

Juliet, in Shakespeare's tragedy and in Kenneth MacMillan's balletic adaptation, is a revolutionary character inveighing against immediate patriarchal machinations. Editors of the First Folio (1623) of Shakespeare's complete dramas eschewed the performance-oriented, mass-produced and mass-circulated, magazine-sized first quarto (Q1, 1597). Instead, they forcefully redacted the more literary second quarto (Q2, Garden) text to concoct a mythology of a timeless, blotless bard. Opting for lyricism, symmetrical balancing, and female acquiescence to patriarchal will, the editors enforce structures resisted by both the early theatrical and later balletic Juliets.

In 1964–65, MacMillan with dancers Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable concocted a Juliet who would challenge fundamental balletic conventions of femininity. Juliet's revolutionary personality was constructed to declassify ballet through defiant stillness, off-balance choreography, and unconventional facings. Economic, moral, and aesthetic concerns waged against Seymour's rebellious Juliet, and the premiere as well as the internationally disseminated film (1966) of Juliet were performed by Margot Fonteyn. Fonteyn's classifying instinct effaced these balletic transgressions and recast Juliet into an aesthetic of grace and verticality.

Decisions at the hands (and feet) of authors, editors, choreographers, dancers, and boards may work to classify or declassify an archive. Beginning with literary and literal examples of concepts of effacement and marginalization central to critical theory, similar strategies emerge for the continuance of hegemonic power and tactics for resistance to acts of rebellion against these networks that infuse the inception of Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet (first performed in Covent Garden, February 9, 1965). In the case of both the Folio's Romeo and Juliet and MacMillan's choreography, assertions of power against the character of Juliet reflect familiar patriarchal machinations. In the case of Lynne Seymour's creation and performance of Juliet, the confluence of the character-dancer role creates a dynamic where specific decisions aimed at taming Seymour have produced lasting effects on the character of Juliet as archived.

Q1 and the Threat of Juliet

In their introduction to the First Folio edition of Shakespeare's dramas (1623), editors John Heminge and Henry Condell console readers that Shakespeare's "mind and hand went together: and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers" (Shakespeare 1623). As both had been actors in Shakespeare's company, it is curious that Heminge and Condell seemingly dismiss the notion that actor input, improvisation, and redactions in light of audience receptivity at least informed Shakespeare's writing.¹ In a classifying move synonymous with the Renaissance, the editors imposed an artificial five-act structure upon the plays' texts, which had previously flowed without the imposition of acts and scenes (Edmondson and Wells 2011, 26–27). Printed on paper of quality equal to the most expensive Bibles, framed by clear margins, clean lines, and classical structure, the Folio presented itself as the unique, authoritative vista into Shakespeare's unhesitating, unerring, versified cogitation, and it discounted, excised, and rearranged any evidence to the contrary. Regarding the Folio, John Jowett surmises, "The way it presented Shakespeare was very carefully calculated to make a collection of theatre works look plausible as what we would now call works of literature. The book not only gives us the texts; it gives us Shakespeare as a cultural icon" (2007, 92).²

In the case of Romeo and Juliet, one problematic sample of evidence to be effaced or heavily redacted is the earliest printing of the play: a magazine-sized quarto published in 1597 called Q1 (for first quarto).³ In comparison with Q2, which appeared two years later and was the basis for the Folio version, Q1 streamlines the dialogue and exhibits ostensibly less complicated speech.⁴ In the early twentieth century a team of scholars, dubbed the New Bibliographers, purported to have applied positivist scientific scrutiny to the examination of texts. While this gaze did not completely deny Shakespearean authority over Q1, his authorship was deemed visible only in pieces, and Q1 was thus denigrated to a "bad quarto...