Shakespeare's multiple metamorphoses: authenticity agonistes.

Shakespeare's multiple metamorphoses: authenticity agonistes. "Who's there?" This finally unresolved question,which opens Shakespeare's Hamlet and establishes the atmosphere ofuncertainty that haunts the atmosphere of uncertainty that haunts theplay, may well be asked of Shakespeare himself and the entireShakespearean enterprise--broadly conceived to include the varioustraditions of performance, scholarship, education, tourism, andmarketing--that finds its origin and ever-expanding range in his works.Shakespeare's most recent dispersion into western popular culture(a decade's worth of profitable films: Mel Gibson in Hamlet,Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing,Midwinter's Tale, Love's Labour's Lost, BazLuhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo+Juliet, IanMcKellen's Richard III, Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night, LaurenceFishbourne in Othello, Joe Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love, AlPacino's Looking for Richard, Kevin Kline in Midsummer Night'sDream, Julie Taymor's Lion King and Titus, Ethan Hawke in Hamlet,and the bevy of teen Shakespeares--Ten Things I Hate About You, NeverBeen Kissed, Get Over It and most recently O) has, not surprisingly,generated considerable anxiety about the authenticity of theseShakespearean cinematic metamorphoses (Is Shakespeare there and to whatdegree?) and, moreover, has raised questions about the very meaning ofauthenticity itself (How do we go about determining what it means toanswer the question "who's there?"). This anxiety over "things Shakespearean" is, of course,just one part of a more generalized crisis in authenticity,characteristic of a skeptical post-modernity which has learned thatorigins frequently, perhaps inevitably, turn out to be previousdestinations, and that causes are frequently, perhaps always, alreadyeffects. This, often disquieting, recognition that we live adrift insimulacra makes our desire for the center all the more insistent.Fearing its absence, we look for a stable center upon which can beerected a conceptual framework which will provide certainty. Moreover,we want this framework to be necessary rather than contingent: it cannotsimply be our wanting it that makes it so; it needs to appear to us as afact of nature. This double recognition--one, that we have a desire fora center, and two, that the centers we desire may in fact be contingentupon our desire for them--creates an ontological panic. Unsure of theverities, we become ever more desirous of them. The cinematic return to Shakespeare is similarly fraught. One theone hand, the films revisit the West's most valued andheavily-invested cultural commodity, providing reassurance that auniversal standard still stands--the now heavily contested notion of thetimeless Bard that speaks to all people at all times. (1) Yet, standingbetween us and the origin are these very cinematic repetitionsthemselves, these timely, not timeless, re-circulated Shakespeares,which, of necessity, by their being repetitions, call attention to theirdifference from the original. Paradoxically, the answer to the question"Who's there" (Shakespeare), inevitably leads us to backthe question itself (Really? Prove it!) The sanest among us have concluded that it is pointless to look fora definitive Shakespeare, given that no matter how deeply we dig, wenever can get to the bottom of this bottomless dream. The whole projectof uncovering the "real" Shakespeare, whether it is the"real" man (Shakespeare, Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, etc.), the"real" biography (Honan, Rowse, Schoenbaum, etc.),"real" texts, (prompt books, good quartos, bad quartos,folios, etc.), is interminable, and, thus like all things interminableis both endlessly tantalizing and inevitably disappointing. (2) The cultural dilemma here is the same one Dorothy confronts in TheWizard of Oz. When Toto pulls at the curtain, at least two possibilitiespresent themselves: the Wizard at the levers can be as he appears on thescreen, or he can be the ordinary "carny" Dorothy left back inKansas. If the wizard is truly a wizard, Dorothy experiences therevelation she sought (the divine fulfilment of desire in all itssplendor and terror); if he is not, the revelation is disillusioning,showing that all is smoke and mirrors. To our great disappointment, whenwe seek out an origin, we rarely find the divine. All we seem to get areeither mere simulacra--hyperbolic and hyper-real images on thescreen--which answer to a cultural longing, but leave us spellbound inan epistemological darkness; or, we get an unexpected or irrelevantreal--a "true," "real" and "ordinary" manbehind the curtain, but one too diminished to satisfy our enormousexpectations of him. In many respects, the current diversity of approaches to, andconstructions of, Shakespeare and his work is a product of this dilemma.When the real is shown to be at best ordinary and at worst hollow, wecan abandon our bardolatrous fantasies and acknowledge the historicalfacts in front of us. Grappling with this real, we engage in the kind ofacademic demystification prevalent in New Historicist and CulturalMaterialist criticism of Shakespeare. New Historicism pulls us deeperand deeper into a remote Renaissance, revealing how time-bound andparticular, rather than timeless and universal, Shakespeare is; itfocuses our attention on the playwright at the levers, revealing howother and how different he and his art are. Cultural Materialism, bycontrast, shows how the myth of this timeless and universal bard can beput to the timely special interests of a particular few in the present:it shows us how the images projected on the screen are produced andconsumed over time. (3) However, given our current fears about the contingency of originsand foundations, and given Shakespeare's time-honoured utility inassuaging these fears, bardolatry is not easily put to rest. Westernculture is quite attached to its Shakespeare myths, these historicallyevolving artifacts, which together with their interpretations, haveunderwritten various notions of identity, gender, genius, nationhood,romantic love, etc. A likelier response to the revelations behind thecurtain is to deny what we have just learned. Recoiling at the disparitybetween the real and its appearance, we can reject the real we havefound and construct even more idealizing simulacra to fill in the gap.This phantasmatic rejection of the real leads to the popularre-mystification of Shakespeare epitomized in most recent Shakespearefilms. The construction and the legitimization of these recent simulatedShakespeares require complex cultural operations, and it is theseoperations that we want to focus on in this paper. At the end of"Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the HumanSciences" (1978), Derrida presents two contrasting responses to therecognition that the various ontological starting points and/orteleological end points which have structured human thought arecontingent, not necessary. Lamenting the loss of the center, we can,with what he call "Rousseauistic" nostalgia, search for thecenter all the more. Or, liberated from the conceptual boundaries thecenter once established and guaranteed, we can, with a "Nietzscheanaffirmation," carry on with what we have been actually doing allalong: establishing new centers and conceptual frameworks of our owndesign. Now that the gods of our making have been killed off, we can ask"What next?" As Derrida suggests, these two imperatives are two sides of thesame coin. What we most frequently encounter is a Nietzschean will tomeaning "no longer turned toward the origin, affirm[ing] play"disguised as a nostalgia "which seeks to decipher, dreams ofdeciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play" (1978, 292).The "Nietzschean affirmation," after consciously willing newcenters and structures into being, quickly forgets that the new gods(conceptual structures, paradigms, myths, call them what you will) thathave been willed into being, have no ground apart from the act of willthat brought them into being. This amnesia, which, if complete, erasesall tracks and traces, then allows the new conceptual space to beexperienced as necessary (i.e., having an origin that precedes the actof willing) rather than contingent (i.e., having no origin separate fromthe act of will that affirmed its existence). This amnesia then allowsthe return of nostalgia. Having forgotten that the origin it searchesfor, or laments the passing of, is necessarily of its own making, thenostalgic can continue as it did before: searching fororigins--comparing, establishing and discarding facts; authenticatingsources--largely untroubled by the shifting sands upon which itsprovisional foundations stand. This is, in many ways, Hamlet's predicament. He has tied hisreason-for -being to an act of remembrance, to follow the injunction ofthe apparition that may or may not be his father: "Rememberme" (1.5.91). Only by committing to a reading of the past (aninnocent father slain by a jealous and villainous uncle), a readingwhich Hamlet himself has had a hand in writing, does he find ajustification for his "setting things right," a course ofaction, which as the play unfolds, we discover to our horror entails thedeath of his mother, uncle, lover, her brother, her father, and hisformer friends. If Hamlet is mad and the ghost is only a delusion, allof his actions lose their raison d' etre and his enterprise loseswhatever meagre justification it might have had. Alternatively, bywillingly suspending disbelief and thus accepting the Ghost'sindependent existence and the validity of its message, Hamlet invents alogo-centric "cue for passion," and so long as questions aboutorigins (the Ghost's existence, the Ghost's identity) can befended off, he can go about his revenger's business as usual. It is precisely this kind of compromised nostalgia--a nostalgia fora past that never was and which finds its origins in our currentlongings--that informs the vogue for the new Shakespeare films. Themechanisms at work here are laid bare in Christopher Nolan'sMemento, a film which asks the question "how can you face thefuture when you can't remember the past?" (Memento 2001, DVDliner notes). Like Hamlet, Memento is a story about remembrance andrevenge. Yet in Memento, the avenger has a rare form of amnesia, which,while preserving (as it turns out unreliably) old memories, makes himincapable of forming new ones. Leonard Shelby finds himself in aperpetual present; his memory of the recent past wiped clean. His stableknowledge of his own past ends the moment his wife dies. In order tofill the gap this trauma creates, he repeatedly and variously constructsa partial narrative out of Polaroids, old insurance and police files,things people tell him, and tattoos that he inscribes on his body. Thisaccumulating story, which the man he was repeatedly hands down to theman he is, a narrative which his present self then reads, misreads, andrewrites, commits him to avenging his wife's murder. As Mementounfolds, we discover that he may have unwittingly killed her himself.The story he tells himself persuades him that a John G. has killed hiswife; hence, he hunts down a John G. and kills him. Within moments, heforgets that he has accomplished his revenge and rededicates himself tofinding another John G. Endlessly in search of an ever-elusive enemy, hefalls prey to the schemes of various people he meets along the way. Allof these characters knowingly take advantage of his inability to learnfrom the past and manipulate him into accomplishing their own murderousagendas. Now, a serial killing machine--he wakes each moment fullypersuaded of his need to revenge, fully persuaded that the murder he isabout to commit is right and good, and utterly implacable in carrying itout. By substituting invention for discovery, self-willed fiction forobjective history, the trope at work in Memento allows the new to beread as the old, and allows difference to substitute for sameness. Lennyalways has at hand a "what next" to answer the question"who's there?" He repeatedly invents a new target for hisrevenge, a new John G. His amnesia, however, allows him to forget hisown complicity in constructing the target. Lenny's condition is thepost-modern condition, and, thus, our condition as well. As such, it isvery much at work in our invention of Shakespeare. Shakespeare is, asGary Taylor reminds us, always re-invented, a constantly changingtarget, a John G. always the same, always different. Once we reinventhim, and once we remember to forget our hand in reinventing him, he thenbecomes the "center," the authorizing presence informing allof the productions made in his name. The real Shakespeare, as opposed tothis invented Shakespeare, remains safely secreted behind the curtainthat history provides. However, like Dorothy and her fellow travellers,we are so taken with the images projected on the screen, and the imageof the man that we construct based upon those images, that we frequentlyfail to see the man working the levers behind the curtain at which Tototugs. The absence of a real Shakespeare to authorize and justify all thethings we do with Shakespeare does not preclude our going about businessas usual. Within the amnesiac space the Memento reflex opens up, it isas David Byrne reminds us "same as it ever was" ("Once ina Lifetime"). All of the creative, critical, and commercialactivities of the Shakespeare enterprise--what Kuhn calls "normalscience"--can be accommodated within. Within these borders,nostalgic performances can piously observe the imperatives of theversion of Shakespeare currently in circulation. Within these borders,willful transgressors resist the burden of influence, writing texts thatare more concerned with self-affirmation than allegiance. Neither showmuch interest in stepping outside the frame in search of a realShakespeare. The contingent Shakespeare (not a pre-existent,self-evident essence or cause, but a product established withconsiderable cultural investment) works just fine, better, in fact. Michael D. Friedman has recently advocated a five-part scale forassessing the authenticity of Shakespearean performances. He argues foran authenticity that is entirely text-based: "An authenticperformance, then, may be defined as an enactment that expresses oneversion of the significance of a text that demonstrably falls withinthat text's range of meaning" (2002, 38). Quite correctly, hedraws our attention to the foundational value of the text. However, thisattention to the text must be complemented by the recognition that textsare always situated in contexts, and that these contexts always exert aninterpretive pressure on the text. For example, the meaning of the line"I am but mad north-northwest: when the wind is southerly I know ahawk from a handsaw " (2.2.378-9) is not self-evident. Whether weread the "hawk" or "handsaw" in light ofaristocratic codes of falconry or read them as humble working men'stools, or both simultaneously, depends entirely on the contexts wedeploy. Such contexts are always the contingent products of social,cultural, and political forces, and, as such, the contexts that at anyhistorical moment are felt as "necessary" proceed fromparticular structures of value. As readers, we always have some choicein the contexts that we will use to constrain or liberate the texts weread. Thus qualified, Friedman's scale is a useful tool fordiscussing the degrees of fidelity and betrayal in new Shakespeares. Inbrief, Friedman argues that a performance's authenticity is arelative, not an absolute, phenomenon; it admits of degrees which fallwithin five "categories of regulation: the text either forbids,discourages, allows, encourages, or demands any specific performancechoice" (2002, 47). When we examine, for instance, Michael Almereyda's Hamlet, thefirst thing we note is that, setting the story in New York in the year2000, Almereyda has moved some distance from the traditionalShakespearean setting, but has kept the items that Friedman rightly seesas crucial--the dialogue, sequence of events, and nature of the stageaction. The film is recognizably a Hamlet, not a Macbeth, not a DonQuixote. We can argue about whether or not the contemporary setting andthe implicit critique of corporate capitalism work, but there is littlequestion that on Friedman's scale, they fit into the category of"allowed," and fidelity is observed. Once we accept thevalidity of the setting, other elements, such as the surveillancecameras, the laptops, the limousines, the video store, etc. can even beseen as encouraged or demanded. The question becomes: how far can we gobefore what is encouraged or demanded by the new situating of the playbecomes something discouraged or forbidden by Shakespeare's textthat anchors the film and constitutes the basis of its claim to ourattention in the first place? As in any Shakespearean play given amodern setting, the boundaries are constantly being threatened while thefilm struggles to contain that threat. For example, the casting of BillMurray as Polonius introduces a greater threat of betrayal into the filmthan does the presence of the skyscrapers. Bill Murray enters the filmbearing considerable semiotic freight, freight that no doubt was a majorfactor in casting him in the first place; he is attended by a cast ofprevious characters: various characters from Saturday Night Live, thegroundskeeper in Caddyshack, the Camp Counsellor in Meatballs, FrankCross in Scrooged and Bob in the eponymous What about Bob?Almereyda's Hamlet tries to minimize the subversive potentialinherent in such casting by using various strategies of containment:e.g., acting style, adherence to script, to basic dramatic situationsand their outcomes, and to power relationships among characters. Afamiliar Polonius overwrites the other Bill Murray characters. A goodexample of this iterative adherence to the original is Polonius'advice to Laertes. This remains a pretty standard scene of a fathergiving practical advice about the ways of the world to his departingson, the implicit acknowledgement of the son's naturally growingmaturity and independence. There is nothing really jarring, unsettling,or unexpected here; no sudden eruption of one of Bill Murray'sother characters; in short, no real gesture of betrayal that would markAlmereyda's film as trying to differentiate itself from itsShakespearean progenitor. Similar points could be made about the castingof Kyle McLaughlin as Claudius, Julia Stiles as Ophelia, Sam Sheppard asthe Ghost, and Ethan Hawke as Hamlet. While the film minimizes thesignifications that attend these actors (except those that areappropriate to their characters in Hamlet), these infiltratingsignifications cannot be, nor are they intended to be, completelyexcluded. These characters are contained; they remain palimpsests. By contrast, John McTiernan, in Last Action Hero, allows ArnoldSchwarzenegger--more or less one single character with many names:Conan, the Terminator, Jack Slater--to overwrite Hamlet. In an amusingscene, McTiernan parodies and subverts the play by deliberately staginga massive betrayal by the sign known as Arnold Schwarzenegger, allowingit to transgress and thus transform Hamlet. Arnie, armed to the teeth,poses the defining question "To be or not to be." Unlike thedithering Dane, he finds a "cue for passion" decides theanswer is "Not to be" and cleanses the rotten state of Denmarkwith a load of C4. Clearly, everything in this two-minute scene isstrictly forbidden by Shakespeare's text in the sense that noreading that takes account of the entire play--whether it be in goodquarto, bad quarto, or folio--will give us Hamlet as the unreflective"just do it" kind of hero Schwartzenegger embodies. What goes on within single Shakespeares also goes on within thewhole enterprise. All of the new Shakespeares, despite theircontingency, go about their business as usual, and fall into theirvarying positions along the scale from "demanded" to"forbidden" by the text. Ian McKellen's Richard III, forinstance, situating the narrative of usurpation, double-crossing, andmurder within a fascist Britain of the 1930s appears on the surface tobe a radical departure, a gesture of defiance, but, just likeAlmereyda's Hamlet, this film retains the original language, therelationships among characters, the principal events, most of the basicpolitical themes--in short, it is decidedly in keeping with the dramaticdemands of the play text and is ultimately conservative. In hisintroduction to the screenplay, McKellen notes that: Mixing words and pictures, the screen has its own language. So, in adapting Richard III I was translating. Translation is an inexact art, carrying responsibilities to respect the author's ends, even as you wilfully tamper with the means. I hadn't asked for Shakespeare's permission to fashion a film from his play. The least I could do was, change by change, cut by cut, ask myself whether he would have approved. ... Not having him present to consult, I think of his having just left the rehearsal room, soon to return with the gentle query I've sometimes heard from living playwrights: "What the hell do you think you're doing to my play?" (McKellen 1996, 15). McKellen himself is striving to ensure that his translation, thechange from one system of representation to another, of Richard IIIreveals the underlying reality of the original despite a radicallydifferent surface appearance: "I had to make sure that Shakespearedid not become overwhelmed and that, however it was decorated, the filmwould remain rooted in his words and intentions as I understoodthem" (1996, 27). Here, fidelity is an avowed motive and McKellenis largely successful. Kenneth Branagh's Henry V as a whole falls within that whichis allowed or encouraged by the text, but there are signs of betrayal inthat he makes his Henry rather more reflective (more Hamlet-like) thanthe text encourages and either whitewashes or effaces the most negativeparts of Henry's character--his war crime in ordering the executionof prisoners, the cold and calculating aspects of his character.Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing largely constrains itself to thehistorical setting of the play and includes elements that are certainlynot encouraged by the play, but are not strictly forbiddeneither--Benedick struggles with a lawn chair at one point and Dogberryand his men are horseless and so adopt the "pretend horseriding" motif from Monty Python. These comic elements are notdiscordant enough in themselves to constitute a betrayal. Similarly, thecasting of the African-American actor Denzel Washington, while neitherdemanded nor encouraged by the text is still allowed by it. Julie Taymor's Titus is far more interesting and complex inthe light of altered settings. She has mingled together ancient Rome,fascist Italy, and a young boy from our own times in a highly-motivatedeffort to stress the permanent relevance of Shakespeare's messagein the play. Taymor succeeds in replicating Titus Andronicus'principal themes, and she preserves significant quantities of theplay's plot, characters, and speeches. Although she does notpresent the events of the play in the same order as Shakespeare,incorporates various anachronistic elements into the depiction ofImperial Rome, and adds material, such as a wedding feast and later anorgy, that accentuates the decadence of Imperial Rome, she is faithfulto the sense the play gives us that the Andronici, especially Titus,represent older Republican values and a way of life that has no realplace in Rome as it now is. Like Shakespeare's, her Titus willnever be happily reintegrated into his society, and indeed has become asource for the horrors that follow, precisely because of his unbending,pious, adherence to the old ways. Nonetheless, Titus is inauthentic inone major respect. Taymor betrays Titus Andronicus in trying to wrest ahopeful close from a profoundly pessimistic play. She uses theexperience of the young modern boy who is pulled into the film andbecomes young Lucius as a framing device and as an impliedbildungsroman. She wants to believe, contra the text of the play, thathis direct experience of, and involvement in, horrific violence istherapeutic, purging violence out of the boy's system and allowinghim, and the society in which he will eventually assume a leadershiprole, to move on to a purer future. The problem with this ending to thefilm (the visual equivalent to the play's inauthentic alternatetextual ending) is that Taymor hasn't shown how this inoculationworks nor given us any particular reason to think that it could, nor,and this is most significant, responded to anything in the play that isthe source for her film. While the play certainly can be said to containan anti-violence message, it is, on the whole, much darker thanTaymor's reading would suggest. She imposes on a resisting playtext an ending in which young Lucius acts as a nurturer, carryingAaron's baby out of the coliseum into a brave new world. Thisending is flatly contradicted by the film itself in scenes showing youngLucius learning the blood-soaked lessons his grandfather Titus teacheshim. Taymor is trying very hard to be faithful to the play, but ends upbetraying the text despite herself. (4) Al Pacino, in his pseudo-documentary Looking For Richard, purportsto be attempting to revivify the play, and indeed Shakespeare himself,by putting them on what he regards as an authentic foundation. Onreflection, it becomes apparent that he is challengingShakespeare's legitimacy, revivifying his own will to power overthe text. At one point in the film, he proclaims, "I want to beking!" Like McKellen, Pacino remains faithful to the basicnarrative structure of Richard III. He depicts the apparent resolutionof a civil war with the installation of a new royal family; thecontinued presence of members and supporters of the previous regime whocan organize an effective opposition in the course of the play; anambitious younger member of the new royal family who plots to win thecrown by whatever means prove necessary; his winning of the crown byeliminating all rivals including the sons of the King; his marrying thewidow of an opposition member he has killed; the desertion of hisclosest supporters as his brutality increases; his tendency to confidein the audience and gloat about his crimes; and a climactic battle inwhich the usurper is killed by a member of the opposition who thenmarries a member of the usurper's own family. Thus far, faithful.In fact, his dramatization of key scenes from Richard III are thepredictable creatures of the "floppy hats and wrinkled tights"tradition that McKellan ridicules in the introduction to his screenplay.Faithful, and competent, but hardly revivifying. The betrayal occurs at the documentary level of the film, in whichPacino as director gives us two narratives both of which replicate muchof Shakespeare's story about Richard III, but which suppress itstragic implication. The two narratives of Pacino's frame, whentaken together, create an unsettling dissonance within the film, onewhich should cause us to question its happy democratic sense of itselfas a film that merely attempts to make Shakespeare's play moreaccessible to the American public. The first of these narrativescontained in the frame is a successful quest romance called"Looking for Richard" which contends that the "authenticspirit" of the play has been lost, due to the impotence of Britishtraditions of performance and scholarship, but is found and renewed bythe modern hero, Al Pacino, This aspirant, from the virile young nationof America, is analogous to the Princes in the Tower, the future hopefor the realm. This narrative is a comedy, not a tragedy: no usurperthreatens the "rightful" claims of the new generation. Unlike this manifest narrative (the film as it wishes to be seen),the second, repressed, narrative provides us with a Richard more likeShakespeare's humpbacked dissembler. As in the first narrative, theShakespearean tradition (British) is moribund, dismissed or ignored byPacino. Pacino as dramatized director is, like Richard, an unlikelyprospect for the elevation he seeks (Richard's physical and moraldeformities become Pacino's crass American accent and speech, andhis baseball cap worn reversed); he has, like Richard, created a vacancyby removing his rivals (Branagh, McKellen, etc.) the expected successorsto the crown. As Richard and Buckingham manipulate the commoners, todemand Richard become king, so Pacino interviews the "man in thestreet," those who clearly need someone to reclaim Shakespeare forthem, and then, like Richard, offers himself as the necessary successor,the one who should command from the throne of the Globe Theatre.Appropriately, Pacino travels to the holy site, the reconstructed GlobeTheatre, to deliver the opening lines of the play. UnlikeShakespeare's Richard, Pacino seems to get away with it: he hasdisplaced all rival Shakespeareans, and installed himself center stageat Sam Wannamaker's restored Globe Theatre--the newAmerican-sponsored Euro-Shakespeare theme park. And there is no Richmondin sight or on site to challenge him. The dramatized scenes in the filmlook for and find Shakespeare's play; the film itself, however,looks for and finds its titular character, and makes him a victorioususurper. Pacino is less concerned with making Shakespeare accessiblethan he is with creating an apparent need for a radical change insuccession. Pacino plays the usurper to Shakespeare, occupying thecenter of the O of the Globe at the play's end. (5) When we move from films purporting to give us performances ofShakespeare to those that make no pretence to be anything other thanadaptations, the application of the "demands to forbids" scalecan be even more generous, since in the first place we are not expectingsuch films to be entirely, or even mostly, faithful to a play text, andin the second, the fidelity striven for is more likely to have as itsobject Shakespeare himself as perceived within the current culturalmoment. Hence, we will get films that implicitly claim to be faithful tothe "spirit" of Shakespeare, to be drawing upon his alleged"universality," his "timeless wisdom," etc. Moreoften than not, such films will in effect harness the name and prestigeof Shakespeare to some current ideological agenda, be it conservative orradical. Ten Things I Hate About You is a case in point. This teen film,modelled loosely on The Taming of the Shrew, concerns Kat Stratford, whohaving had an unpleasant and disillusioning experience with men, hasbecome a shrew. Her shrewishness frequently takes the form of aresistant feminism and an independence of males. A young man who wantsto take Bianca to the prom hires a Petruchio figure to date Kat; hedevelops a genuine affection for her and she for him and thus Kat istamed, as it were. This film, in essence, uses Shakespearean capital tounderwrite a relatively conservative message: that all Kat needed wasthe right guy and she would be like all the other girls and that havinga date and going to the prom is very important. In positioning the entire Shakespearean enterprise within thisamnesiac space, a space which undermines all claims to a fixed, finalidentity of the author and any claims to authenticity dependent uponthat identity, we are not claiming, as some have, that there is"nothing outside the text." There is an historical archive,and, finally, the play of fidelity and betrayal that takes place withinthis space must contend with that archive. There are biographical facts:not as many as some would like, but some which, nonetheless, seem fairlycertain. There are the play texts themselves, which exist in variousforms and are surrounded by various disputes, but which are,nonetheless, stable enough for performances derived from them to have arecognizable identity. What we are claiming, though, is that thishistorical record is always read from a vantage point within thisamnesiac space. Like Memento's Lenny, it is in terms of our presentinterests that we return to the archive--wills, deeds, playbills, townrecords, architectural remains, portraits, testimonials, relics,chapbooks, quartos and folios--seeking confirmation of our current needsand desires. Like Hamlet, we always decide in the present whatobligations the injunction to remember imposes. This point can be demonstrated by pulling the curtain on theSanders Portrait. This alleged portrait of Shakespeare was the cause ofconsiderable interest in North America the summer of 2001. Why is itthat this recycled and much disputed portrait surfaces now and providessuch a seemingly agreeable answer to the question, "Who'sthere?" Just as Pacino was looking for his Richard, so too have webeen looking for our Shakespeare. The last fifteen years witnessed anunprecedented outpouring of Shakespeare-based film. The Shakespeare ofthe Droeshout portrait may have provided an adequate ground to the filmsof Olivier, Welles, and Brook, but it was hard to imagine this bard asthe animating presence behind Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet orJulie Taymor's Titus. The more these new films appeared, the moredifficult it became to square them with the image of the bard that beganthe century. The then received Shakespeare seemed out of step with thenew films produced in his name. The discrepancy between the image of thebard available to us and the bard we desired exacerbated a moregeneralized crisis in legitimation plaguing all of post-modernity. Thus,all the urgent questions about these films: were they reallyShakespearean? Were they doing justice to the plays? Were they faithfulto the Bard or did they betray him? We liked the fact that Shakespearewas back and giving voice to contemporary cultural concerns. The newShakespeares resonated with current anxieties about gender identity,sexual relations, war and death, revenge, mutilation, and socialbreakdown, etc. However, the more Shakespeare was used to voice ourconcerns the more anxious we became about what might be our acts ofventriloquism. If Shakespeare had simply become a ventriloquist'sdummy, he could hardly be useful in the task of buttressing identitiesalready anxious about their own authenticity. It had to be the other wayaround: we wanted a timeless and authoritative Bard speaking through us.We craved the assurance that indeed there was a bard that could havewritten plays that contained the contemporary sensibilities expressed inthese films, a Shakespeare who would be completely at home in Hollywood,and yet could still speak to us with all the authority that theRenaissance, or better yet, eternity, conferred upon him. And there hewas--Joe Fiennes as Will Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love. Here,finally, was the Shakespeare we anticipated: MTV handsome, genderconflicted, entrepreneurial, adolescent, obsessed with notoriety. One ofus, but better: he is fallible and ordinary in many ways, subject toself-doubt, afflicted by writer's block, in constant financialstraits, unhappily married, in therapy, tenuously employed, but at thesame time personable, charming, attractive, resourceful, and plucky. AShakespeare who, when the conditions are propitious, when the rightinspiration comes along, produces a play that transforms the chaos ofhis personal life into an art that shatters barriers of class, gender,and history itself. But having imagined him, and then invented him (somuch so that we could actually make a film in which he appeared), we nowneeded to know that he was more than simply our invention. Thus, likeMemento's Lenny selectively turning back to consult his polaroids,we returned to the archive in search of corroborating evidence. And whatwe found there was the appealing, but previously dismissed, Sandersportrait. (6) Now, with conditions ripe for its approval, the portraitreturned to circulation and was greeted with renewed enthusiasm.Acceptance of it was, not universal, but sufficient. This was a facethat could launch a thousand new movies, just as Droeshout's hadlaunched a thousand plays. The Sanders portrait validated the Bard wehad been inventing, and provided it with sufficient historicaljustification to insulate us from the crisis in authenticity the filmshad created. Needing a bard behind the curtain capable of expressing theexuberance in the films, we found him. If we had not found him, we wouldhave had to invent him, or likely resort to other strategies forauthenticating our (W)ill. This "discovery" then opens the door to new"discoveries." It establishes a new field of inquiry whichencourages us to rearrange and revalue the archive. Having found a gaypositive Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love, we then "happenupon" a portrait of that may or may not be Henry Wriothesley--thealleged inspiration of the Sonnets. This portrait now corroborates the homoeroticism that our newShakespeare seemed to endorse. Interestedly rummaging through thearchive, we find a suitable "master/mistress" for our newShakespeare's passion. (7) The reorchestration of the archive that has occurred here is notthe exception, but the rule. The entire Shakespearean enterprise,despite its contingency, or perhaps because of that very contingency, iscontinually subject to revision. Memento asks "how can you face thefuture when you can't remember the past?" and shows us thatthe future faced constantly changes as a result of how the past isremembered. Leonard Shelby repeatedly attaches new faces to his quarry,the ever-elusive John G., by remembering to return to his archive andthen promptly forgetting that his additions and deletions have changedthe past that archive constructs. Just as Lenny reinvents John G., so wereinvent Shakespeare. We have always reinvented Shakespeare, and wealways will. Nonetheless, even as we acknowledge that he is a creatureof our will, we must also recognize that our will is constrained by thearchive available to us. Lenny cannot have just anyone stand in as JohnG.; likewise, we cannot have just any Shakespeare. All of ourShakespeares must be minimally consistent with a plausible reading ofthe state of the archive at the time the reading is done. An amusingproof of this necessary constraint is the recent attempt to legitimize aKlingon Hamlet and hence a Klingon Bard, instigated by ChancellorGorkon's (David Warner) aside to General Chang (ChristopherPlummer) that "Shakespeare is so much better in the originalKlingon" (Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country). The idea thatShakespeare was Klingon and that Hamlet first appeared in Klingonclearly exceeds current limits of acceptability. And it does soprecisely because the existing archive and the various investments thatwe have made in that archive over the last four centuries, precludethere ever being a Shakespeare who was a Klingon. Hence, the KlingonHamlet is, and currently remains, inauthentic. We may not know exactlywho the wizard behind the curtain is, but we can be absolutely certainthat the answer to the question "Who's there" is not aKlingon bard. If it were, we could join with the Bard in believing that"The enterpise is sick" (Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.103). Notes (1) See Holderness (1988), Hawkes (1986, 1992) and Taylor (1989). (2) We are not claiming that the project of establishing andvalidating texts, and sorting through and authenticating biographicalfacts is useless. Quite the contrary, the process of adding to anddeleting from the archive, these elaborations and interventions, allowsus to do new things with Shakespeare, and is requisite in legitimizingthe new things that we do. They ground the contingent authenticity ofthe whole enterprise. (3) For a detailed account of the differences between these twocritical perspectives, see Wilson (1995). (4) See Fedderson and Richardson (2002, 70-80). (5) See Fedderson and Richardson (2000, 119-27, 1998). (6) This portrait had been examined and dismissed by Spielman(1909). For studies detailing the more recent scientific analysis of thematerials of which the portrait is constituted (the wood it is paintedon, the paint, etc.), and which indicate that the portrait does indeedcome from the appropriate time and place, see Marie-Claude Corbeil,"The Scientific Examination of the Sanders Portrait of WilliamShakespeare," (available online athttp://www.cci-icc.gc.ca/whats-new/portrait_e.shtml); Marie-ClaudeCorbeil et al., "Examination Results from the Analytical ResearchLaboratory of the Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI),"(available online athttp://www.ago.on.ca/www/information/exhibitions/shakespeare/science.cfm); and Dault (2002, 72-78). For the controversy and hype reported in,and in part created by, the press, see, for example, the series ofarticles by Stephanie Nolen, the reporter who broke the story and hasedited a collection of essays on the portrait (2002, 2001a, 2001b,2001c, 2001d, 2001e)--as well as DePalma (2001), Gillis (2001), McIlroy(2001) Stoffman (2001), Taylor (2001), and "New Image (2001). (7) For more information about the controversies surrounding thisportrait see Holden (2002), Riding (2002), and Nolen (2002b). Works Cited Shakespeare. 1997. The Riverside Shakespeare: The Complete Works.2nd ed. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. Boston and New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. Byrne, David. 1999. "Once in a Lifetime" Stop MakingSense. Warner Bros. Dault, Gary Michael. 2002. "The Bard Stripped Bare."Canadian Art 19.1 (Spring): 72-78. DePalma, Anthony. 2001. "Behold That Special Face: Is ItShakespeare's?" The New York Times, 24 May. Available onlineat http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/24/arts/24ARTS.html. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. "Structure, Sign, and Play in theDiscourse of the Human Sciences." Writing and Difference. Trans.Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fedderson, K., and J. M. Richardson. 1998. "Looking forRichard in Looking for Richard." Postmodern Culture 8.2 (January).Available online at http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/text--only/issue.198/8.2.r_fedderson-richardson. --. 2000. "Praising and Burying the Bard: Epideictic Dilemmasin Recent Cinematic Adaptations of Shakespeare." In RelocatingPraise: Literary Modalities and Rhetorical Contexts, ed. A. G. DenOtter. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press. --. 2002. "Titus: Shakespeare in Pieces." SRASP:Shakespeare and Renaissance Association of West Virginia Selected Papers25: 70-80. Friedman, Michael D. 2002. "In Defense of Authenticity."Studies in Philology. 99.1 (Winter): 33-56. Gillis, Charlie. 2001. "Portrait's Subject May Not BeBard, U. S. Scholar Says." National Post, 18 May, A 8. Hawkes, Terence. 1986. That Shakespearean Rag. London: Methuen. --. 1992. Meaning by Shakespeare. London: Routledge. Hamlet. 2001. Dir. Michael Almereyda. Miramax Films. DVD. Henry V. 1989. Dir Kenneth Branagh. Renaissance Films and SamuelGoldwyn Company. VHS. Holden, Anthony. 2002. "That's no lady, that's..."The Observer, 21 April. Available online athttp://www.observer.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,687778,00.html. Holderness, Graham, ed. 1988. The Shakespeare Myth. Manchester:Manchester University Press. The Klingon "Hamlet": The Restored Klingon Version. 2000.Restored by Nick Nicholas and Andrew Strader. New York: Pocket Books. Last Action Hero. 1993. Dir. John MacTiernan. Columbia Pictures.VHS. Looking for Richard. 1996. Dir Al Pacino. Fox Searchlight Pictures.VHS. McIlroy, Anne. 2001. "Careful Analysis Finds Nothing toDispute Authenticity." The Globe and Mail, 12 May, A7. McKellen, Ian. 1996. "Introduction." In WilliamShakespeare's "Richard III": A Screenplay Written by IanMcKellen and Richard Loncraine, Annotated and Introduced by IanMcKellen. Woodstock, N.Y.: The Overlook Press. Memento. 2001. Dir. Christopher Nolan Newmarket Group. DVD. Much Ado About Nothing. 1993. Dir. Kenneth Branagh. RenaissanceFilms and Samuel Goldwyn Company. VHS. "New Image of Bard Revealed in Canada." 2001. TheGuardian, 25 May. Available online athttp://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6190,496536,00. Nolen, Stephanie. 2001a. "Expect Bard Mania, National GallerySays." The Globe and Mail, 16 May, A7. --. 2001b. "Is This the Face of Genius?" The Globe andMail, 11 May, A1, A5. --. 2001c. "It's Time to Reveal Shakespeare to theWorld." The Globe and Mail, 12, May, F8. --. 2001d. "Portrait Piques World Interest." The Globeand Mail, 12 May, A1, A7. --. 2001e. "Seeking John Sanders." The Globe and Mail, 10July, R1, R3. --. 2002a. Shakespeare's Face. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf. --. 2002b. "Was This Male Face Shakespeare's Love?"The Globe and Mail, 7 May, A13. Richard III. 1995. Dir. Dir. Richard Loncraine. United Artists.VHS. Riding, Alan. 2002. "Not Just Another Pretty Face," NewYork Times, 6 May 6, B1, B3. Shakespeare in Love. 1998. Dir. John Madden. Written by Marc Normanand Tom Stoppard. Miramax Films. DVD. Spielman, Marion Henry. 1909. "The 'Grafton' and'Sanders' Portraits of Shakespeare." The Connoisseur,February. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. 1991. Dir. Nicholas Meyer.Paramount Pictures. VHS. Stoffman, Judy. 2001. "Bard's Image Likely to Stay inCanada." The Toronto Star, 12 May, A26. Taylor, Gary. 1989. Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural Historyfrom the Restoration to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Kate. 2001. "The Eternal Lure of WilliamShakespeare." The Globe and Mail, 12 May, A7. Ten Things I Hate About You. 1999. Dir. Gil Junger TouchstonePictures. VHS. Titus. 2000. Dir. Julie Taymor. Twentieth Century Fox. DVD Specialedition (2 Discs). Wilson, Scott. 1995. Cultural Materialism: Theory and Practice.Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Figures Figure 1: Library of Congress, photograving by the TypographicEtching Co., c. 1882. After engraving by Martin Droeshout from the FirstFolio of the Works of Shakespeare. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Figure 2: [C]All rights reserved. "SandersPortrait"--Reproduced with the permission of the CanadianConservation Institute of the Department of Candadian Heritage, andLloyd Sullivan of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, owner of the SandersPortrait, 2008. [FIGURE 2 OMITTED] Figure 3: Shakespeare as a Klingon, by Gennie Summers, used withpermission. [FIGURE 3 OMITTED] Figure 4: Portrait of Henry Wriothesley (1573-1624) Third Earl ofSouthampton, c. 1590-93 (oil on panel) by John de Critz (1555-1641)(attr. to) [C] Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library. [FIGURE 4 OMITTED] Kim Fedderson is a professor of English at Lakehead University(Canada) and Dean of its Orillia campus and the co-author of A Case forWriting. J.M. Richardson is a professor of English at LakeheadUniversity and co-author of The Existential Joss Whedon: Evil and HumanFreedom in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Angel,""Firefly," and Serenity." The recently discovered Sanders portrait, allegedly an authenticand contemporary representation of Shakespeare, has again stirred up ourpervasive anxieties about who Shakespeare is and what sort of man standsbehind these highly influential plays and poems. The Sanders portraitfeeds an appetite within our culture for a stable and sure foundationupon which we can ground our use of and interest in Shakespeare'sworks. To be effective, this foundation must appear as necessary ratherthan contingent. It must appear as a fact of nature, not an artifact ofculture. This double recognition--one, that we have a desire for afoundation, and two, that the foundations we desire may in fact becontingent upon our desire for them--contributes to our currentontological panic. Not being sure of the verities, we become ever moredesirous of them. This paper explores some of the manifestations of this anxiety incontemporary representations of Shakespeare, focusing primarily onShakespearean cinematic adaptations. We conclude that it'spointless to look for a definitive Shakespeare. No matter how deeply wedig, we will never get to get to a final uncontested center of things.The whole project of uncovering the "real" Shakespeare,whether it's the "real" man (Shakespeare, Bacon, the Earlof Oxford etc.), the "real" biography (Honan, Rowse,Schoenbaum, etc.), the "real" texts, (prompt books, goodquartos, bad quartos, etc.), is interminable, and thus like all thingsinterminable is both endlessly tantalizing and inevitably disappointing.