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Article Excerpt
"Who's there?" This finally unresolved question, which opens Shakespeare's Hamlet and establishes the atmosphere of uncertainty that haunts the atmosphere of uncertainty that haunts the play, may well be asked of Shakespeare himself and the entire Shakespearean enterprise--broadly conceived to include the various traditions of performance, scholarship, education, tourism, and marketing--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, Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo+Juliet, Ian McKellen's Richard III, Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night, Laurence Fishbourne in Othello, Joe Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love, Al Pacino's Looking for Richard, Kevin Kline in Midsummer Night's Dream, Julie Taymor's Lion King and Titus, Ethan Hawke in Hamlet, and the bevy of teen Shakespeares--Ten Things I Hate About You, Never Been Kissed, Get Over It and most recently O) has, not surprisingly, generated considerable anxiety about the authenticity of these Shakespearean cinematic metamorphoses (Is Shakespeare there and to what degree?) and, moreover, has raised questions about the very meaning of authenticity itself (How do we go about determining what it means to answer 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 that origins frequently, perhaps inevitably, turn out to be previous destinations, and that causes are frequently, perhaps always, already effects. This, often disquieting, recognition that we live adrift in simulacra makes our desire for the center all the more insistent. Fearing its absence, we look for a stable center upon which can be erected a conceptual framework which will provide certainty. Moreover, we want this framework to be necessary rather than contingent: it cannot simply be our wanting it that makes it so; it needs to appear to us as a fact of nature. This double recognition--one, that we have a desire for a center, and two, that the centers we desire may in fact be contingent upon our desire for them--creates an ontological panic. Unsure of the verities, we become ever more desirous of them.
The cinematic return to Shakespeare is similarly fraught. One the one hand, the films revisit the West's most valued and heavily-invested cultural commodity, providing reassurance that a universal standard still stands--the now heavily contested notion of the timeless Bard that speaks to all people at all times. (1) Yet, standing between us and the origin are these very cinematic repetitions themselves, these timely, not timeless, re-circulated Shakespeares, which, of necessity, by their being repetitions, call attention to their difference from the original. Paradoxically, the answer to the question "Who's there" (Shakespeare), inevitably leads us to back the question itself (Really? Prove it!)
The sanest among us have concluded that it is pointless to look for a definitive Shakespeare, given that no matter how deeply we dig, we never can get to the bottom of this bottomless dream. The whole project of 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 interminable is both endlessly tantalizing and inevitably disappointing. (2)
The cultural dilemma here is the same one Dorothy confronts in The Wizard of Oz. When Toto pulls at the curtain, at least two possibilities present themselves: the Wizard at the levers can be as he appears on the screen, or he can be the ordinary "carny" Dorothy left back in Kansas. If the wizard is truly a wizard, Dorothy experiences the revelation she sought (the divine fulfilment of desire in all its splendor and terror); if he is not, the revelation is disillusioning, showing that all is smoke and mirrors. To our great disappointment, when we seek out an origin, we rarely find the divine. All we seem to get are either mere simulacra--hyperbolic and hyper-real images on the screen--which answer to a cultural longing, but leave us spellbound in an epistemological darkness; or, we get an unexpected or irrelevant real--a "true," "real" and "ordinary" man behind the curtain, but one too diminished to satisfy our enormous expectations of him.
In many respects, the current diversity of approaches to, and constructions 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, we can abandon our bardolatrous fantasies and acknowledge the historical facts in front of us. Grappling with this real, we engage in the kind of academic demystification prevalent in New Historicist and Cultural Materialist criticism of Shakespeare. New Historicism pulls us deeper and deeper into a remote Renaissance, revealing how time-bound and particular, rather than timeless and universal, Shakespeare is; it focuses our attention on the playwright at the levers, revealing how other and how different he and his art are. Cultural Materialism, by contrast, shows how the myth of this timeless and universal bard can be put to the timely special interests of a particular few in the present: it shows us how the images projected on the screen are produced and consumed over time. (3)
However, given our current fears about the contingency of origins and foundations, and given Shakespeare's time-honoured utility in assuaging these fears, bardolatry is not easily put to rest. Western culture is quite attached to its Shakespeare myths, these historically evolving artifacts, which together with their interpretations, have underwritten various notions of identity, gender, genius, nationhood, romantic love, etc. A likelier response to the revelations behind the curtain is to deny what we have just learned. Recoiling at the disparity between the real and its appearance, we can reject the real we have found and construct even more idealizing simulacra to fill in the gap. This phantasmatic rejection of the real leads to the popular re-mystification of Shakespeare epitomized in most recent Shakespeare films.
The construction and the legitimization of these recent simulated Shakespeares require complex cultural operations, and it is these operations that we want to focus on in this paper. At the end of "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (1978), Derrida presents two contrasting responses to the recognition that the various ontological starting points and/or teleological end points which have structured human thought are contingent, not necessary. Lamenting the loss of the center, we can, with what he call "Rousseauistic" nostalgia, search for the center all the more. Or, liberated from the conceptual boundaries the center once established and guaranteed, we can, with a "Nietzschean affirmation," carry on with what we have been actually doing all along: establishing new centers and conceptual frameworks of our own design. 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 the same coin. What we most...
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