Pub Date : 2023-02-09DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2023.2173986
Emma Rose Kraus
Upon arrival at the Globe there was no mistaking the spectacle of the English monarchy and its hold on the British public. The queue of people who had gathered on that crisp autumn day waiting to view the Queen’s coffin was but metres from the playhouse’s gate, making it impossible for any of the approaching audience members to ignore. Those involved in the theatre’s 2022 production ofHenry VIII could not have anticipated that it would, for a time, coincide with the pomp and circumstance surrounding the death of the United Kingdom’s longest-reigning monarch. The performance – a reworking by Hannah Khalil of William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s collaboration – was based on a text that originally explicitly celebrated the English monarchy, functioning as a piece of royal propaganda. As Mark Rankin has suggested, the entertainment was likely ‘designed specifically with a Stuart royal audience in mind’. However, in taking the position of third author, Khalil revised Henry VIII – rewriting, realigning, and even crafting new scenes – as a play for the common person, critical of the crown and other organisations of power. In her version of the script, Khalil added two women (Debbie Korley and Anna Savva) to act as semi-choral characters and audience surrogates. By clearly coding both of these women as much lower in status than the other – generally named – characters of the play, the new script positioned itself as a play for the British public interested in its relationship to modern structures of power, especially the English crown. Even without the Queen’s death being so present in the minds of the modern audience, Khalil’s script already offered an explicitly timely critique of excessive spending and its effects on the general public. The first dialogue of the play took place between the two women, who complained about England’s investment in the expensive and yet politically futile Field of the Cloth of Gold. In lines repurposed from Henry VIII’s Duke of Norfolk, one of the two women remarked, ‘I think / The peace between the French and us not values / The cost that did conclude it’ (1.1.87–89). This exchange was directly relevant to the current fears of
{"title":"Review of Hannah Khalil’s Adaptation of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII (Directed by Amy Hodge) at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, 16 September 2022","authors":"Emma Rose Kraus","doi":"10.1080/17450918.2023.2173986","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2023.2173986","url":null,"abstract":"Upon arrival at the Globe there was no mistaking the spectacle of the English monarchy and its hold on the British public. The queue of people who had gathered on that crisp autumn day waiting to view the Queen’s coffin was but metres from the playhouse’s gate, making it impossible for any of the approaching audience members to ignore. Those involved in the theatre’s 2022 production ofHenry VIII could not have anticipated that it would, for a time, coincide with the pomp and circumstance surrounding the death of the United Kingdom’s longest-reigning monarch. The performance – a reworking by Hannah Khalil of William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s collaboration – was based on a text that originally explicitly celebrated the English monarchy, functioning as a piece of royal propaganda. As Mark Rankin has suggested, the entertainment was likely ‘designed specifically with a Stuart royal audience in mind’. However, in taking the position of third author, Khalil revised Henry VIII – rewriting, realigning, and even crafting new scenes – as a play for the common person, critical of the crown and other organisations of power. In her version of the script, Khalil added two women (Debbie Korley and Anna Savva) to act as semi-choral characters and audience surrogates. By clearly coding both of these women as much lower in status than the other – generally named – characters of the play, the new script positioned itself as a play for the British public interested in its relationship to modern structures of power, especially the English crown. Even without the Queen’s death being so present in the minds of the modern audience, Khalil’s script already offered an explicitly timely critique of excessive spending and its effects on the general public. The first dialogue of the play took place between the two women, who complained about England’s investment in the expensive and yet politically futile Field of the Cloth of Gold. In lines repurposed from Henry VIII’s Duke of Norfolk, one of the two women remarked, ‘I think / The peace between the French and us not values / The cost that did conclude it’ (1.1.87–89). This exchange was directly relevant to the current fears of","PeriodicalId":42802,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare","volume":"19 1","pages":"423 - 427"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45269069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-08DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2023.2170702
Bailey Sincox
{"title":"Taking Shakespeare in Stride: Lady Macbeth at the American Repertory Theatre","authors":"Bailey Sincox","doi":"10.1080/17450918.2023.2170702","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2023.2170702","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42802,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44112044","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-24DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2023.2170188
Jane Rickard
{"title":"Playbooks and their Readers in Early Modern England","authors":"Jane Rickard","doi":"10.1080/17450918.2023.2170188","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2023.2170188","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42802,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare","volume":"19 1","pages":"249 - 250"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43887005","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-16DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2022.2158686
D. Cartmell, Peter J. Smith
Staged as the third in a series, following 2 and 3 Henry VI (titled Rebellion and Wars of the Roses), this Richard III shared its designer – Stephen Brimson Lewis – with the other two productions. What started out as a series of stage-floor platforms in Part 2 had decayed into fractured and half-buried duckboards of a World War I trench in Part 3. By the time of the opening of Richard III, the unchanging set was a huge red box with a clear, uncluttered stage, over which towered a replica of Sir Edwin Lutyens’s Cenotaph, dedicated in 1920 to the fallen of the Great War and rededicated in 1946 to those lost in World War II. (Figure 1) Richard III reminds us, in the various scenes of mourning mothers and queens, that war ruins female as well as male lives and in 2005, John W. Mills’s memorial to the Women of World War II (further north along Whitehall) underlined the suffering of those left behind the front. In Lewis’s design, the phallic brutality of the Cenotaph suggested both the generations of those lost and being lost as well as the macho vanity of the great dictator – Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler and now, bare chested on his steed, or seated at the end of a Brobdingnaggian conference table, Putin. As Shakespeare’s play demonstrates, while men skirmish to realize political or territorial ambition, women and children pay the price. In the production’s final moments, a wreath of red and white roses was laid at the base of the Cenotaph as though such tokenism could possibly ameliorate the slaughter that prompted it. Never have Richmond’s (Nicholas Armfield) sanctimonious pieties – ‘That [peace] may long live here, God say “Amen”’ (5.6.41) – sounded so hollow. As the assembled cast knelt upstage to face the Cenotaph, the play’s most desperate casualty, Queen Margaret (Minnie Gale), crawled out from stage left, curled up on the floor, facing downstage, her back to the memorial, and died.
《理查三世》是继《亨利六世》第2部和第3部(分别名为《叛乱》和《玫瑰战争》)之后的第三部，这部《理查三世》与其他两部作品的设计师是斯蒂芬·布里姆森·刘易斯。在第二部分中，一开始是一系列的舞台平台，在第三部分中，这些平台已经腐烂成一战时战壕的破碎和半埋的鸭板。到《理查三世》开演时，布景变成了一个巨大的红盒子，上面有一个干净整洁的舞台，上面耸立着埃德温·鲁琴斯爵士(Sir Edwin Lutyens)纪念碑的复制品，这座纪念碑于1920年献给一战中的阵亡者，1946年重新献给二战中的阵亡者。(图1)在悼念母亲和女王的各种场景中，理查三世提醒我们，战争摧毁了女性和男性的生活。2005年，约翰·w·米尔斯(John W. Mills)为二战女性建造的纪念碑(沿着白厅往北)强调了那些留在前线的人的痛苦。在刘易斯的设计中，纪念碑的阳具残暴既暗示了逝去的和正在逝去的一代，也暗示了大独裁者的阳刚虚荣——墨索里尼、斯大林、希特勒，以及现在赤裸着胸膛骑在马上，或坐在Brobdingnaggian会议桌上的普京。正如莎士比亚的戏剧所表明的那样，当男人为实现政治或领土野心而战斗时，妇女和儿童付出了代价。在演出的最后时刻，在纪念碑的底部放置了一个由红白玫瑰组成的花圈，似乎这样的象征可能会改善导致它的屠杀。里士满(尼古拉斯·阿姆菲尔德饰)虚伪的虔诚——“愿[和平]在这里长存，上帝说“阿门”(5.6.41)——听起来从未如此空洞。当全体演员跪在舞台后面面对纪念碑时，剧中最绝望的受害者玛格丽特女王(米妮·盖尔饰)从舞台左边爬出来，蜷缩在地板上，面朝舞台下面，背对着纪念碑，死去了。
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Pub Date : 2023-01-05DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2022.2160654
Grace Mold
This year it was Sheffield Theatres’ turn to lead the annual Ramps on the Moon production. Ramps on the Moon is a collaborative partnership between seven powerhouse theatres and venues from around the UK, who take turns to host productions each year. The goal behind the project is to ‘enrich stories, and the ways in which they are told, by normalising the presence of deaf, disabled and neurodiverse people both on and off stage’, as the director, Robert Hastie, put it in his programme notes. Sheffield Theatres chose to perform Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, a play that currently seems to be having a moment of particular prominence with the likes of the National Theatre and the Globe both putting on productions during the same run, as well as the RSC earlier in the year. The production took to the stage of the Crucible during its 50th anniversary year. The play opened with the cast, which was a mixture of deaf, neurodiverse, disabled and non-disabled performers, introducing their character’s name and detailing their costume for the benefit of audio description. Their opening lines were interlaced with jokes from the off, with Benedick announcing that he was wearing a blue suit, trainers and ‘a chip on my shoulder’. The play was made up of a combination of British Sign Language, Sign Supported English, visual storytelling and physical theatre so each character also introduced what techniques they would be using as each actor differed in this respect. Although this amount of information seemed overwhelming at first, one soon relaxed as the play began to flow and it became clearer how the story would be communicated. The characters tended to come in pairs whereby one performer signed the lines and the other simultaneously spoke them, swapping for each character’s lines, so all grounds were covered at almost any time. As opposed to having audio describers or sign language interpreters placed at the perimeter of the stage, accessibility was built into the roots of the performance. Additionally, each side of the stage had digital caption boards. Emily
{"title":"Review of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing (Directed by Robert Hastie for Ramps on the Moon) at the Crucible, Sheffield Theatres, 20 September 2022","authors":"Grace Mold","doi":"10.1080/17450918.2022.2160654","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2022.2160654","url":null,"abstract":"This year it was Sheffield Theatres’ turn to lead the annual Ramps on the Moon production. Ramps on the Moon is a collaborative partnership between seven powerhouse theatres and venues from around the UK, who take turns to host productions each year. The goal behind the project is to ‘enrich stories, and the ways in which they are told, by normalising the presence of deaf, disabled and neurodiverse people both on and off stage’, as the director, Robert Hastie, put it in his programme notes. Sheffield Theatres chose to perform Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, a play that currently seems to be having a moment of particular prominence with the likes of the National Theatre and the Globe both putting on productions during the same run, as well as the RSC earlier in the year. The production took to the stage of the Crucible during its 50th anniversary year. The play opened with the cast, which was a mixture of deaf, neurodiverse, disabled and non-disabled performers, introducing their character’s name and detailing their costume for the benefit of audio description. Their opening lines were interlaced with jokes from the off, with Benedick announcing that he was wearing a blue suit, trainers and ‘a chip on my shoulder’. The play was made up of a combination of British Sign Language, Sign Supported English, visual storytelling and physical theatre so each character also introduced what techniques they would be using as each actor differed in this respect. Although this amount of information seemed overwhelming at first, one soon relaxed as the play began to flow and it became clearer how the story would be communicated. The characters tended to come in pairs whereby one performer signed the lines and the other simultaneously spoke them, swapping for each character’s lines, so all grounds were covered at almost any time. As opposed to having audio describers or sign language interpreters placed at the perimeter of the stage, accessibility was built into the roots of the performance. Additionally, each side of the stage had digital caption boards. Emily","PeriodicalId":42802,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare","volume":"19 1","pages":"419 - 422"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43793384","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2023.2183086
Laurie Johnson
ABSTRACT Shakespeare’s Shylock, Marlowe’s Barabas, and other Jewish characters are often thought to have been portrayed on early modern stages with a large false nose. This essay will explain how this commonplace view began as a falsified proposition by John Payne Collier in 1836, which subsequent scholarship has failed to properly dispel, instead projecting a post-Enlightenment stereotype onto early modern culture. I argue that by studying the use of the false nose in recycled fashion across contiguous plays in repertory it becomes possible to recognise that this stage property called on its audiences to negotiate its meanings from a range of possible sources, including the other plays in the same sequence. Using the repertory of the Lord Admiral’s Men and Lord Chamberlain’s Men at Newington Butts in 1594, I discuss some of the ways in which the stage nose represented villainy, risibility, and ribaldry without necessarily signifying Jewishness at this time. That Barabas could signify all of these things and also be a Jew may nevertheless have contributed to later generations identifying the nose as one of the stereotypical features of the early modern depictions of Jews on stage.
{"title":"The Nose Plays: Nasiform Negotiations at Newington Butts","authors":"Laurie Johnson","doi":"10.1080/17450918.2023.2183086","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2023.2183086","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Shakespeare’s Shylock, Marlowe’s Barabas, and other Jewish characters are often thought to have been portrayed on early modern stages with a large false nose. This essay will explain how this commonplace view began as a falsified proposition by John Payne Collier in 1836, which subsequent scholarship has failed to properly dispel, instead projecting a post-Enlightenment stereotype onto early modern culture. I argue that by studying the use of the false nose in recycled fashion across contiguous plays in repertory it becomes possible to recognise that this stage property called on its audiences to negotiate its meanings from a range of possible sources, including the other plays in the same sequence. Using the repertory of the Lord Admiral’s Men and Lord Chamberlain’s Men at Newington Butts in 1594, I discuss some of the ways in which the stage nose represented villainy, risibility, and ribaldry without necessarily signifying Jewishness at this time. That Barabas could signify all of these things and also be a Jew may nevertheless have contributed to later generations identifying the nose as one of the stereotypical features of the early modern depictions of Jews on stage.","PeriodicalId":42802,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare","volume":"19 1","pages":"24 - 37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48424934","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2023.2183093
H. Bachrach
ABSTRACT Black vizard masks, worn as a fashion accessory in the early modern period, were a source of mixed anxieties: while they were worn by many women, they were associated with sex workers. Vizards preserved pale beauty but also could conceal the lack thereof. This essay proposes that William Shakespeare’s comedies tap into these tensions, first by proposing that fashionable vizard masks were indeed worn onstage. Using Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing as key case studies, I then argue that these costume masks, weighted with the baggage of both offstage prostitution and the stage history of cloth racial prosthetics, carried specific semiotic meaning, allowing playwrights a shorthand for reflecting on contemporary fears regarding women’s whiteness, sexual availability, and the impossibility of ever knowing a woman’s heart by looking at her face.
{"title":"‘What els do Maskes, but Maskers Show’: Masked Ladies in Shakespeare’s Comedies","authors":"H. Bachrach","doi":"10.1080/17450918.2023.2183093","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2023.2183093","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Black vizard masks, worn as a fashion accessory in the early modern period, were a source of mixed anxieties: while they were worn by many women, they were associated with sex workers. Vizards preserved pale beauty but also could conceal the lack thereof. This essay proposes that William Shakespeare’s comedies tap into these tensions, first by proposing that fashionable vizard masks were indeed worn onstage. Using Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing as key case studies, I then argue that these costume masks, weighted with the baggage of both offstage prostitution and the stage history of cloth racial prosthetics, carried specific semiotic meaning, allowing playwrights a shorthand for reflecting on contemporary fears regarding women’s whiteness, sexual availability, and the impossibility of ever knowing a woman’s heart by looking at her face.","PeriodicalId":42802,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare","volume":"19 1","pages":"8 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47313334","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2023.2183094
Sophie Duncan
ABSTRACT This article is mindful of two separate phenomena: that recent years have seen a plethora of methodologically diverse and rewardingly curious works on theatre props, and that the Covid-19 pandemic halted in-person dramatic performance in the UK to a greater extent and for a longer duration than at any time since 1660. Accordingly, this essay offers four broad headings for enquiry, situating theatrical props in their longer past as well as theatre and archival conditions as we recently knew them: definitions, racialised props, methodologies, and futures.
{"title":"Knowing What we are Making: Props, Scholarship, and the Pandemic","authors":"Sophie Duncan","doi":"10.1080/17450918.2023.2183094","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2023.2183094","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article is mindful of two separate phenomena: that recent years have seen a plethora of methodologically diverse and rewardingly curious works on theatre props, and that the Covid-19 pandemic halted in-person dramatic performance in the UK to a greater extent and for a longer duration than at any time since 1660. Accordingly, this essay offers four broad headings for enquiry, situating theatrical props in their longer past as well as theatre and archival conditions as we recently knew them: definitions, racialised props, methodologies, and futures.","PeriodicalId":42802,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare","volume":"19 1","pages":"125 - 141"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46534429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2023.2183091
Matthieu Chapman
ABSTRACT In this autoethnographic essay, the author reflects upon and interrogates racialised trends in American theatre stemming from participation as the silent role of ‘Othello’s man’ in a college production of Othello. Using black flesh as an object to be exploited for cultural capital by white theatregoers and theatremakers, the author adopts an Afro-Pessimist methodology to consider how non-speaking black characters in early modern dramatic performance become a spectacle emptied of actual agency or ‘being’, akin to a stage property. The inclusion of black actors in mostly white Shakespeare productions often leads to mental anguish for the performers, who inevitably become enmeshed in the anti-blackness of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy.
{"title":"Shakespeare for Everyone? History, Dramaturgy, and the Black Flesh as Prop in Transracial Shakespeare","authors":"Matthieu Chapman","doi":"10.1080/17450918.2023.2183091","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2023.2183091","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this autoethnographic essay, the author reflects upon and interrogates racialised trends in American theatre stemming from participation as the silent role of ‘Othello’s man’ in a college production of Othello. Using black flesh as an object to be exploited for cultural capital by white theatregoers and theatremakers, the author adopts an Afro-Pessimist methodology to consider how non-speaking black characters in early modern dramatic performance become a spectacle emptied of actual agency or ‘being’, akin to a stage property. The inclusion of black actors in mostly white Shakespeare productions often leads to mental anguish for the performers, who inevitably become enmeshed in the anti-blackness of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy.","PeriodicalId":42802,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare","volume":"19 1","pages":"80 - 92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47877259","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2023.2183095
Chelsea Phillips, Kenzie Lynn Bradley, Veshonte Brown, Luke Davis, Kate Fischer, Alycia Gonzalez, J. Bean Schwab, Timothy Storey, Sarah Stryker
ABSTRACT What does Ophelia carry with her on stage in Act 4, scene 5 of Hamlet? She names a variety of botanicals, but productions have often replaced these with sticks, bones, pills, toys, or nothing at all. These replacements seek to provide modern audiences with more accessible or relatable symbols but can rarely capture the complexity and ambiguity of the originals. On page and stage, Ophelia’s bouquet has become a key to interpreting her in her madness – the meaning ascribed to her plants going hand in hand with the presumed qualities she displays in the scene, from childish innocence to overt sexuality to defiant anger. This essay details a series of staging experiments conducted in a graduate Shakespeare class to investigate the dramaturgical possibilities of Ophelia’s bouquet, asking how these items shape our perception and understanding of Ophelia, her mental state, and place within the play.
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