To quote Hamlet, “The play's the thing'

Making the case that Shakespeare's works are celebrities in their own right.

When you buy tickets to see a Shakespeare play, especially one of his more famous works such as Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, there are certain beats you expect to see: Hamlet holding the skull, Juliet appearing on her balcony. They are moments of recognition, continuations of tradition, an echo of hundreds of past productions. But when those iconic beats fail to appear, outrage among the audience can ensue. In fact, directors who deviate from the script when staging Shakespeare are often seen as committing sacrilege.

Louise Geddes, PhD, professor of English and associate dean for student success strategic initiatives in the Adelphi University College of Arts and Sciences, investigates this phenomenon in her new paper, "Celebrity Plays and Embodied Fidelity" (Shakespeare, February 2023),¹ which posits that Shakespeare's plays have become, themselves, celebrities in their own right. "The assumption of what constitutes the canon expands to accommodate not only the work's staged history, but the staging practices that have become attached to it, and the speculative futures that it is imagined to hold," she argues.

In this way, Shakespeare's plays exert a kind of pressure that Dr. Geddes terms "embodied fidelity," or a restrictive influence based on a "rich and often hegemonic cultural mythology that is embedded in the collective understanding of a particular play," according to the paper. The plays' "celebrity encompasses both the actual contents of the play and the mythology that accrues from its repeated circulation."

Past stagings have also become part of the source text itself. As Dr. Geddes puts it, this transforms the play into its own archive, which different viewers will have different relationships to. "Some people want a replication of the thing that they know and love. Other fans want the work broken out of its confines, or a character broken out of what they consider to be an oppressive or unfortunate text."

Audience expectations of fidelity are, Dr. Geddes acknowledges, a departure from earlier uses of Shakespeare. In the 18th and 19th centuries, when Shakespeare was known by name alone, impresarios went to great lengths to sell tickets, including overhauling the plays' endings and adding new characters. In recent years, however, a growing culture of "Bardolatry" among theater fans and practitioners has lent the "canon" of the Folio itself a powerful weight.

Today, new stagings of Shakespeare, and Shakespeare adaptations like West Side Story, are most often judged based on notions of what a Shakespeare play should look like. "When we talk about whether a production is good, or whether it's faithful or successful," Dr. Geddes said, "we're thinking about the idea that it is faithful to this kind of preconceived notion." Preconceived notions of Hamlet include not only the famous skull scene, for instance, but the idea that Hamlet is a young white man.

This raises the stakes even higher. As the paper notes, "theatre's capacity as memory machine means that lineages develop that can actively dictate performance and casting strategies, making implicit decisions about who is granted access to 'authentic' Shakespeare-and who is not." In other words, embodied fidelity can insist upon "conditions of performance along lines of race and gender, ability, and class."

How, then, might these expectations be countered? Acting against the pressure of past productions can be revelatory, Dr. Geddes believes. An awareness of the concept of embodied fidelity will, she hopes, allow more directors and performers to take risks when staging Shakespeare, no matter how intimidating the fame of the plays themselves.

"The joy of live theater is the potential for the unexpected happening," she said. "The fact that you won't see the same thing every single night-it's not a movie, it's not permanent. Certain things were done in a particular way because that's how people got into a groove. People hopped on the train track and traveled down a particular line, but it's not the only path. It's very exciting to think about how liberating that can be."

Biography

Louise Geddes, PhD

Louise Geddes, PhD, is associate dean for student success strategic initiatives and professor of English in the Adelphi University College of Arts and Sciences. Her research interests include Shakespeare in performance, theater and popular culture, 20th-century British theater, digital theater, and fan studies. Dr. Geddes is the co-author of The Shakespeare Multiverse: Fandom as Literary Praxis, published by Routledge in 2022, and a general editor of the journal Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation.

^{¹Geddes, L. (2023). "Celebrity Plays and Embodied Fidelity." Shakespeare, 1-19. doi:10.1080/17450918.2023.2176719}