The Spectre of Straight Shakespeare: New Ways of Looking at Old Texts in Goodnight Desdemona and Mad Boy Chronicle more

CTR I! I Summer 2002 Adapting Shakespeare in Canada Edited by Daniel Fischlin and Ric Knowles am Stroud and Winnipeg's Contemporary Dancers fought against Hamlet's misogyny / allowing Gertrude (Nina Battison, above) and Ophelia spaces to express themselves, ie "Dancing with Shakespeare," p. 43. HOTO BY IAN MCCAUSLAIMD CONTENTS 22 Redescnbing a World ATTvely look at four dramatic adaptations of Shakespeare, from Gertrude and Ophelia to Harlem Duet, working towards a theory of Shakespearean adaptation as parody. LINDA BURNETT The Spectre of Straight Shakespeare Goodnight Desdemona and Mad Boy Chronicle provide new ways of looking at old texts - finding them a little queer. ELLEN MCKAY Virtually Canadian Web sites ranging from the- atre promotions to educa- tional cartoons bring "the artist of the millennium" home to Canada. SUSAN BENNETT 28 Adapting the Bard: A Virtual Guide From Bard on the Beach to Shakespeare by the Sea, Canadian Shakespeare festival web sites adapt Shakespeare for media- savvy audiences. JENNIFER AILLES 33 A Midsummer Night's Mash-up "To dream, perchance to rave." Serenity Industries serves up a passing strange Midsummer Night's Dream as a Canada Day rave. MARK MCCUTCHEON 43 Dancing with Shakespeare Tom Stroud and Winnipeg's Contemporary Dancers have been dancing around the words of Shakespeare for nearly a.decade. In 2001 The Garden located Hamlet on a dirt-covered stage. "The air is so thick you could cut it with a bare bodkin." MARK FORTIER 15 Dave veut jouer Richard III What if the actor playing Shakespeare's deformed King had a real handicap? asks Montreal's Nouveau Theatre Experimental. LEANORE LIEBLEIN CAN AD IAN THEATRE REVIEW 46 Shakespeare in a Blender What happens when the Marx brothers make coffee for the Monty Python gang at a slumber party where everyone is watching Bugs Bunny? Ottawa's Company of Fools makes fun out of Shakespeare. JESSICA SCHAGERL 50 Kate Lynch's All-Woman Dream Kate Lynch, director of Theatre Passe Muraille's stellar all-woman produc- tion of A Midsummer Night's Dream, discusses gender, doubling and dreaming in a wide-ranging interview. "Can we talk about the gender politics of your show?" TANNER MIRRLEES SUMMER 2002 1 CONTENTS, continued 60 Loreena McKennitt, Merchant of Song When Richard Monette asked internationally acclaimed Canadian Celtic bard Loreena McKennitt to write music for The Merchant of Venice he got a mixture of themes that remind us of snakes writhing out of baskets and gypsies dancing sinuously through the streets. JUDY VAN RHIJN 63 Adapting Shakespeare to the Prairie Landscape Is Shakespeare a prairie playwright? The Free Will Players and the realities of outdoor Shakespeare in Edmonton. STEPHEN HEATLEY SPECIAL ■ DOCUMENTS SH -" v^Mfcifr V. * .:74:--^';:::v;;. liiv.ilri<.il-^il«iptiifiii(iv *" ...oi sh.iki^^e^iiJ1 " ■ J£ - Hihliiifiniphl'^'" ■£ ■ ...ii:rii.;.=^-:>-. ' l^.iiiK'i I wKlin. OhilujtU^Q^J/t..- .-I: ■ Cnmmvhcwtfy'rtiSy, I D.inifl ht\hjni VIEWS AND REVIEWS 88 Two-Tier Theatre? Commentary by Matthew Hays on what the Mirvishes' success means for Canadian theatre. 91 Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, edited by Daniel Fischlinand Mark Fortier. Rout ledge, 2001. Reviewed by Christie Carson. 96 Shakespeare in Canada: A World Elsewhere?, edited by Diana Brydon and Erena R. Makaryk. University of Toronto Press, forthcoming 2002. Reviewed by Catherine Graham. ■ ii\ih moi" /V"|""V S '■''li-'i'-"',:,.r ■' 1 ^ 11 ^ •■jji'rdj-' n'.">; V:vi'J■lyil.iiiiM,; ri!-li'ij""ii::'f ■■:'*i"ii--"6 lii.-i". f:."'SiV-iw.'H"1^rr '—"*rtr"i!'e-fJiT-.- tVs i.!'-- ,iMi;:v.^?^.-'-'ii:Ni--f*i^Y^Vi ii,t ' i.-.i.: i i-uil-.*- r.ii;:!:.ii-oi l.i^ii!-" ."fl.. ■ Hii:5To?:Y.qAi-jrkL>iuoi^"''. CANADIAN THEATRE REVIEW NUMBER 111 SUMMER 2002 Alan Filewod Ric Knowles Harry Lane Allan Watts Ann Wilson Daniel Fischfin Ric Knowles Lorraine Camerlain Reid Gilbert jenny Munday Margaret-Gail Osachoff Catherine Graham Claire Tansey Phyllis Reynen Audrey Greenwood Audrey Greenwood David Knight Ned Morgan Don Rubin Joseph Green University of Toronto Press The Canada Council Le Consdl des Arts ontario arts council for the Arts <lu Canada conseil des arts de l'ONTARIo CTR gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. 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Editorial Committee Guest Editors Editorial Advisory Board Review Editor Editorial Assistant Editorial Secretary Advertising Coordinator Cover Design Production/Layout Artist Copy Editor Founding Editors Publisher CD 2 CTR 111 The Spectre of Straight Shakespeare New ways of looking at old texts in Goodnight Desdemona and Mad Boy Chronicle. by ELLEN MACKAY The constitutive Shakespeareanness of Canadian theatre is a fact little neglected by either its histo- rians or its critics. Yet the imperial logic that brought about this cultural paradox, and that sur- faces, for instance, in Tyrone Guthrie's invention of Shakespeare as the prerequisite to a national stage, or in Michael Langham's grumpy contention with the "unnerv- ing assault of Canadian nationalism" while at the helm of the Stratford Festival (7), remains a beguiling topic of crit- ical inquiry, particularly for its flagrant, unapologetic visi- bility. What is perhaps less conspicuous - or rather, what lies hidden in plain sight - is the degree to which this insti- tutionalization of Shakespeare at the heart of Canadian theatrical culture has promoted, by Stratfordian repetition, straight and narrow gender roles. Even those few produc- tions that have foregrounded national issues rather than the putatively universal appeal of young or dynastic love - Langham's Anglo/Quebecois Henry V, for instance, or the Lepage/McCall Romeo & Juliette - only illustrate the reflexiveness with which Shakespearean dramatizations of courtship and marriage have been tapped as allegories of reconciliation for Canada's "two solitudes."1 In other words, Canadian Shakespeare, when it acknowledges its local habitation, disseminates politics in terms and acts of heterosexual love. The omnipresence of this idiom makes itself felt in the very architecture of Canada's pre-eminent Shakespearean stage. For in its self-conscious evocation of the Globe, Stratford's Festival Theatre, the locational ne plus ultra in the teleology of mainstream Canadian actorly, directorial and designer achievement, is haunted by het- eroerotic romance and, which is all too much the same thing, heteroerotic disaster. That burnished playing space is dominated by a second-story gallery, supported by columns that demarcate a latter-day discovery space below. The overall effect is of a Tudor wooden glow, but more particularly, the Festival stage's furnishings call to mind the architecture of Romeo's ascendant wooing scene, with its balcony always already "o'erperched" by "love's light wings" (2.1.108) and its room beneath imprinted by the "mistress" discovered there "murdered in her bed" 10 The "bona fide" Desdemona, played by Alison Sealy Smith in the Canadian Stage pro- duction of Goodnight Desdemona {Good Morning Juliet) in 2001, directed by Alisa Palmer."Shakespeare really watered her down, eh?" PHOTO BY MICHAEL COOPER (5.1.192). These associations are not anecdotal. A glossy, souvenir publication entitled Shakespeare: Court, Crowd, and Playhouse inscribes as the exemplary use of "the gallery above the stage" the "balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet" (69)2; to turn to a more high-brow authority, The Norton Shakespeare similarly lists Juliet's balcony first and fore- most among the dramatic places mapped onto the "above" space (3287). Likewise, the "poisoned sight" of wife-mur- der that concludes Othello is the spectacle most searingly bound up with the discovery space (5.1.362); to account for this theatrical locale, the New Globe web site explains that its curtains "could be opened up to show a king's throne, or Desdemona's bed, or the body of Polonius" (Gurr, "Experimenting ..."), though, as Michael Neill has proved in his discussion of the astonishing output of illustrations of Othello's bedchamber scene, it is the second of these examples that has most tenaciously gripped the popular imagination and best fed the public's "voyeuristic com- pulsions" (267). So it is that before the gender dynamics of its Shakespearean repertoire are taken into account, the Festival stage is inflected by what D.A. Miller calls the "hetero-structuration of the visual field" (109). When they are taken into account, the critical com- plexity of those gender dynamics tends to be not very much in evidence either in the interpretative practices of the Stratford directoriate or in the more abstract and gen- eralized understanding of Shakespeare as a man and a dramatic legacy. For though academics have long detected in boy actors, cross-dressing characters and certain sonnets rich opportunities for questioning how stable and norma- tive heterosexuality was to Shakespeare, his work is nonetheless writ large in mass culture as the stuff straight love stories are made on. Richard Burt takes this argument to its corporeal extreme by illustrating the frequency with which Shakespeare's plays have been appropriated, adapt- ed and cited in pornographic films; Othello: Dangerous Desire (Joe D'Amato 1997), The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and CTR 111 Juliet (A. P. Stootsberry 1968) and Hamlet: For the Love of Ophelia (Luca Damiano 1996) - to cite three of Burt's numerous examples - demonstrate as explicitly as any critic could hope that the plays from which they derive exert a heterosexual imperative. Less raunchily, the Oscar- winrdrig Shakespeare In Love (John Madden, 1999) makes the same point, by imagining the playwright's literary achievement to depend upon his own lived history of glamorous (if brief) romance. Indeed, the bet cinematized Shakespeare wins for having dramatized "the true nature of love" - the kind, of course, that dare speak its name - is clinched by virtue of the fact that he embodies and literal- ly stands in for his own romantic hero of Romeo; more- over, he does so upon a stage made safe for the Hollywood mainstream by its unhistorical incorporation of a clearly female Juliet. (In what seems like an anxious refutation of Judith Butler's claim for the performativity of gender, het- erosexual love in this imagined inaugural production is not feigned by men and boys but is instead emphatically, biologically authentic.) So whatever the mdeterrninacy of his sexuality, and whatever gender radicalness scholars might detect in his work and theatre, Shakespeare is pop- ularly embraced as a figure altogether straightened out,3 to the degree that Romeo and Juliet is no mere play, and its author no mere playwright, but serve as metonyms for true, perfect and - as in all ideology, it goes without say- ing - heterosexual love. As the RSC director Barry Kyle recounts in an interview about Shakespeare's enduring popularity, The stories told {and retold) by Shakespeare have become "myths" that people respond to almost subconsciously. A friend once told me about a con- versation with a boyfriend and this guy said, "Look, it may not be Romeo and Juliet, but I still love you." That's why the plays continue to interest us. (Cooper, N.35) To look to Shakespeare as the core of Canada's the- atrical practice is therefore to see, if not necessarily to per- ceive, canonical drama as heteronormative drama. It is this tradition of sexual tradition, as it were, so surrepti- tiously imprinted upon Canadian theatre and public con- sciousness, that is interrogated by Ann Marie MacDonald's Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) and Michael O'Brien's Mad Boy Chronicle - two plays that use Shakespeare to uncover and display a broader spec- trum of gender behaviours. Their strategies of Shakespearean usage prove particularly canny, for by hitching their plots to the star of Canada's most presti- gious theatre festival, both MacDonald and O'Brien endow their plays with a claim to critical importance (and indeed, both plays have been recognized with awards and accolades4), even as they seek to undermine the narrow- ness of vision that comes with reverentially restaging his works. Both Goodnight Desdemona and Mad Boy play off, and profit from, the fetishization of Shakespeare by engag- ing in a conceit of textual priority: each play represents itself as a more authentic, more historical account of the travails of characters adulterated by the Bard - as MacDonald's Constance succinctly puts it, after an encounter with the "bona fide" Desdemona, "Boy, Shakespeare really watered her down, eh?" (49). The mechanics of this operation differ from play to play: while Goodnight Desdemona dramatizes an untenured female lec- turer's magical quest for the ur-text that Shakespeare phmdered to create Othello and Romeo and Juliet, Mad Boy stages, with abundant comic license, thirteenth-century Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta Danorum, the acknowledged source of Hamlet. Both works, however, by bringing into focus the illusion of Shakespeare's originali- ty, not to mention the impossibility of retrieving his "orig- inal" texts, make it possible to see Shakespearean plays as fictions and constructs rather than as masterful illumina- tions of trans-historical truths. The implications of this rather postmodern observation - one normally confined to Desdemona exhibits a martial ferocity to rival Othello's. Alison Sealy Smith and Andy Velasquez as Desdemona and lago at the Canadian Stage. PHOTO BY MICHAEL COOPER SUMMER 2002 11 academic discussion - are particularly pronounced when the plays treat issues of gender. For instance, when she recovers the "real" Romeo from Shakespeare's allegedly "corrupt" script (15), Constance discovers that the true nature of his love is that it "swing[s]" like a "capricious pendulum" (66) in its gender preference; so unabashedly polymorphous is Romeo's desire that he switches his attentions in an instant from Juliet to the apparently male "Constantine," and resolves to "wear a woman's gown" in order to embody the "piece of skirt" he feels sure his new love seeks (66). In scenes like this one (and she scripts sev- eral), MacDonald imagines Shakespeare's world-picture to be a bowdlerization of a much more diverse historical real- ity, replete with individuals entirely (and rather hilarious- ly) unfettered by supposedly natural sexual alignments. As befits rewrites of Shakespeare, both Goodnight Desdemona and Mad Boy have garnered critical attention for their literary achievement, the former for MacDonald's "skill ... in making up pseudo-Shakespearean blank verse" (Crew), the latter for O'Brien's "amusing debasefment]" of "the exquisite poetry of Shakespeare" (Morrow), or, somewhat less ambivalently, his creation of a "silly yet plausible dialect" that is "wonderfully suited to a portrait of the Vikings as dirty, crude, cruel and none too bright" (Taylor). But while these plays manifestly rewrite and rework Shakespeare's verse,^ and thereby broaden the scope of what good - i.e., Shakespearean - theatre sounds like, they also, arguably more crucially, revise the iconog- raphy of Shakespearean performance. For though Canada's preoccupation with Shakespeare originates with the acknowledged excellence of his writing - his plays ini- tially substituted for a national dramatic literature that had yet to emerge, then set an impossible standard for it to achieve - the ideological impact of his work lies less in what it says that in what it looks to be saying. Take, for example, Hamlet apostrophizing Yorick's skull, a posture of soliloquy frequently reproduced, and associated particularly with Lawrence Olivier's 1948 black and white film - not coincidentally, the first production of the play to penetrate mass culture.6 Hamlet's self- described "readiness" that follows his encounter with the remains of Yorick is not as grand as the warmongering machismo of Henry V, but it has set a pattern and privilege of masculinity: that of stoicism in the knowledge of death's implacable force. The diffusion of Hamlet/Hamlet as epit- omized in this iconic pose, however, transmits more than what such a contextualized reading would tell. For in the pensive Hamlet, iconographically not much different from Rodin's "The Thinker," the act of study, the enterprise of metaphysics, the prerogative of solitude, the very self- awareness that is the prerequisite for melancholy, are all gendered male, classed aristocratic and raced white. While not everyone has read the story of Hamlet, it is nearly impossible to have avoided contact with this sight of him, and to have failed to absorb the message that it canonizes by virtue of the play's own cultural canonicity - namely, that the script of heroic masculinity (as written by the most "tmthful" and "universal" of authors) celebrates the nobil- ity of the nobleman's philosophical struggle, and romati- cizes his antisocial (not to mention misogynist) deport- ment. Juliet is clearly undaunted by the heterosexual imperative. Ann-Marie MacDonald as Constance and Cara Pifko as Juliet (l-r)."Heavenly days, what's come over you?" PHOTO BY MICHAEL COOPER Contrast this image of Hamlet to the Mad Boy Horvendal in O'Brien's play, on a "frozen swamp" addressing the skull of a "cannibalized wolf" with suicidal fervour, pleading for the "dead doggie" to lead the way to oblivion, once he has bashed a hole in the ice with its cra- nium to provide himself an exit from the mortal plane (130). And the companion spectacle to this reconfiguration of Hamlet's momento mori is Lilja, Ophelia's equivalent, holding the severed head of her disastrously unpaternal father in a pose that similarly calls to mind Hamlet's Yorick scene (save for the fact that Lilja has just performed her father's decapitation). While these re-visions smack of par- ody, Mad Boy Chronicle defuses such a misapprehension by representing itself as the source that Shakespeare appro- priated, and not as an appropriation of Shakespeare. And while this claim is something of a tongue-in-cheek author- ial gambit - O'Brien acknowledges "scop[ing] inspiration" from works that had no influence on Shakespeare, like Jane Goodall's Life Among the Wild Chimpanzees and Hrafnkd's Saga "by some Icelandic monk," as well as from Shakespeare himself (8) - there is truth to the historicity of the gendered behaviour he puts on display; to wit, Sela, a Norwegian princess affiliated with the Amleth (or Hamlet) story, is presented by Grammaticus as "a skilled warrior and experienced in roving" (Grammaticus 23), praise well suited to the take-charge character of Lilja, who does not suffer tyranny (domestic or monarchical) gladly. By proffering these kinds of striking iconographic subversions and inversions, and by presenting them as original scenes which Hamlet debased (and not vice versa), O'Brien makes visible Shakespeare's contortion of a rather nasty history of equal opportunity violence into a Renaissance fable of masculine loss and transcendence. In other words, O'Brien outs the constructedness of Hamlet's idealized masculinity, thereby dispelling the aura of time- less archetype that it has come to acquire. At the American 12 CTR 111 debut of Mad Boy, directed by Denise Gillman at the 24th Street Theatre in Los Angeles, the production poster accosted its audience by taking this gesture of outing even further: the caption attached to the fierce-looking Viking who dominates the frame proclaims "Hamlet is a pixie boy!" The significance of this promotional come-on is tricky to tease out: on one hand, the Viking might repre- sent Fengo/Claudius, taunting his nephew in typical Helsingor style, albeit using Renaissance nomenclature. But if it is Shakespeare's character - the one who actually goes by the name of Hamlet - that the Viking is referenc- ing, then Gillman's Mad Boy Chronicle would seem to announce a larger ambition, which is to read back into that most famous of tragedies a script of male heroism that is, by comparison to Grammaticus's saga, a little queer. Though the tone is of a locker-room insult, the effect is to restore to Hamlet the kinds of sexual alignments and gen- dered behaviours all but eradicated by present-day invest- ments in glorifying the Shakespearean protagonist as a masculine, and thus inevitably straight, hero. In Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) Ann Marie MacDonald engages in exactly this kind of restora- tive re-vision by retooling, like O'Brien, the iconic moments of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies. To return to the heteroerotically haunted "above" space, for instance, MacDonald rewrites the scene of Juliet's wooing into a scene of Juliet as wooer, with the ostensible ingenue clad in men's apparel, appealing to the perplexed and bal- conied Constance from Romeo's place below. Labouring under the misconception that Constance is a boy - "a "Alas poorYorick" revisited: the Mad Boy (Shaun Smyth) pleads for doggie-assisted suicide in the Alberta Theatre Projects playRites Festival production in 1995, directed by Bob White. PHOTO BY TRUD1E LEE young deviant of Greece" in point of fact (68) - Juliet appeals to her love in familiar terms, but with some criti- cal differences: Oh Constantine, wherefore are thou bent? [...] Deny thy preference and refuse thy sex; Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And henceforth never will I be a girl. (68) Like Romeo, Juliet is clearly undaunted by the het- erosexual imperative that her tragedy has helped to enforce. But as MacDonald argues, her character's sexual brashness is not a belated invention, but a recuperation of a defiance already authentically present in the text. In an interview with the Washington Post, MacDonald asserts that her impulse to write Goodnight Desdemona was her frustration with the fact that the women in Shakespeare "were all a bunch of wimps" (Sommers). Upon closer analysis, however, MacDonald noticed that "the fault lay not so much with Shakespeare as with the productions [she] had seen at Stratford [Ontario]," in which "characters such as Desdemona and Juliet were depicted as gossamer, delicate, feminine in the extreme." In lieu of Stratford's tradition of extremity, MacDonald provides her own equally radical vision of Shakespearean fenuniruty, displacing Juliet from her perch and Desdemona from her bed. The former acquires a capacity to desire that refuses modern categorization (and points back to the Renaissance as an era that lacked a rigid concept of sexual identity), while the latter exhibits a mar- tial ferocity that rivals Othello's. Attired like an Amazon, Desdemona proves herself as "gullible and violent" as her husband (85), and in the end it is she who suffers the hal- lucinatory jealousy and wields the lethal pillow in MacDonald's play. The discomfort that these role reversals engender - as Constance says to Juliet, "heavenly days, what's come over you?!/You're supposed to be all inno- cence" (69) - only highlights the synonymousness of ideal- ized womanhood with passivity and renders obvious the performative and ideological limitations of that construct. . The slyest re-vision of Shakespeare at work in Goodnight Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet, however, is the writer/actor simultaneously embodied by Constance - and enacted in turn, in Canadian Stage's 2001 revival, by MacDonald herself - whose on-stage presence makes visi- ble the author's role in scripting human "nature" (and doesn't merely reflect it back in some impartial mirror). Like Shakespeare, whose conjectured performance as the Ghost in his own tragedy literalizes his spectral presence in Hamlet, Constance/MacDonald stands at the centre of Goodnight Desdemona and impels a certain kind of story to be played out. That is, her dramatized perception of Desdemona and Juliet produces a different, but no less authentic, take on these women. The resulting play demonstrates that revision is a viable alternative to domi- nant Shakespeare, but it is the elusive manuscript Constance seeks that finally explains the necessity of her repositioned gaze: "For those of you who have the eyes to see: Take care - for what you see, just might be thee" (86). What this aphorism seems to say is that Canada's peculiar compulsion to discern its culture in performances SUMMER 2002 13 of Shakespeare entails, as the legacy of this myopia, the inscription of apparently Shakespearean - but, more accu- rately, Stratfordian - ideologies onto Canadian audiences. As MacDonald and O'Brien prove, a fine way of disrupt- ing the conservative gender politics disseminated by the visual culture of Shakespeare is to stage his plays' own revisionist tendencies, as well as the blinkered interpretive conventions that govern Shakespearean production. By reconfiguring the iconography of Othello, Romeo and-Juliet and Hamlet, and by doing so with the aim of painting a truer historical and'literary picture, Goodnight Desdemona and Mad Boy Chronicle demonstrate that the performance of gender exhibited across Canada's most famous stage, and at play in the works of Canada's most revered author, is just that: a performance, ctr Notes 1 In his article "From Nationalist to Multinational: The Stratford Festival, Free Trade and the Discourses of Intercultural Tourism," Richard Paul Knowles discusses the "cynic[ism]" of Langham's gesture at Canadian content in this 1956 produc- tion (24). 2 This colourful guidebook is sold at London's New Globe gift shop. 3 For a sharp and detailed account the ways Madden's film straightens out its subject, see Sujata Iyengar's "Shakespeare in HeteroLove." i 4 Goodnight Desdemona received the Dora best play award, the Governor General's Award (1990) for Drama, and the Chalmers Award (1988). Mad Boy was nominated for the Governor General's Award (1996). 5 In MacDonald's case, this reworking blurs the divide between Shakespeare's reverenced verse and Goodnight Desdemona's additions to it, for although the print text of her play italicizes quotations from Shakespeare, audiences have no way (save prior knowledge) of segregating new lines from old. By this indistinction, MacDonald broadens the repertoire of canonical drama and problematizes the obviousness of Shakespeare's lit- erary supremacy. 6 So well received was his film that Olivier earned a Best Director and a Best Actor Oscar for his effort. Works Cited Burt, Richard. Unspeakable Shaxxxpeares: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. Cooper, Jeanne. "What's Shaking in Washington Theater? Shakespeare, All Over" The Washington Post 4 February 1994: N 35. Crew, Robert. "Goodnight Desdemona Puts a Twist on The Bard." The Toronto Star 4 April 1988. C 5. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: Norton, 1997. Iyengar, Sujata. "Shakespeare in HeteroLove." Literature/Film Quarterly 29. 2 (2001): 122-7 Knowles, Richard Paul. "From Nationalist to Multinational: The Stratford Festival, Free Trade and the Discourses of Intercultural Tourism." Theatre Journal 47 (1995): 19-42. Langham, Michael. Introd. The Stratford Scene 1958-1968.EA. Peter Raby. Toronto: Clark, Irwin, 1968. 6-12. Laroque, Francois. Shakespeare: Court, Crowd and Playhouse. Trans. Alexandra Campbell. London: Thames and Hudson, 1993, 1997. MacDonald, Ann Marie. Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet). Toronto: Coach House Press, 1990. Miller, D. A. "Visual Pleasure in 1959." Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film. Ellis Hanson, Ed. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. 97-128. Morrow, Martin. "A Viking free-for-all, February 6, 1995." Reprinted in Michael O'Brien. Mad Boy Chronicle. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 1996. Neill, Michael. '"Unproper Beds': Race Adultery and the Hideous in Othello." Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama New York: Columbia UP, 2000. 348-412. Madden, John, dir. Shakespeare In Love. Miramax: 1998. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Harold Jenkins. London: The Arden Shakespeare, Routlege, 1982. —. Othello. Ed. E. A. J. Honigmann. London: The Arden Shakespeare, Routlege, 1997. — . Romeo and Juliet. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: Norton, 1997. Sommers, Pamela. "Get Thee to a Funnery; Shakespeare is Hot. But Why Will? And Why Now?" Washington Post 20 February 1994: G 4. Taylor, Kate. "Mad Boy Chronicle: Black Spoof Charming If Lightweight." The Globe and Mail 23 August 1997. Ellen MacKay is a doctoral candidate in theatre at Columbia University. Grammaticus, Saxo. Historica Danica. Trans. Oliver Elton. London: D. Nutt, 1894. In Joseph Satin, ed. Shakespeare and his Sources. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966. Gurr, Andrew. "Experimenting with the Globe." 11 December 2001. Available: http://www.rdg.ac.uk/giobe/ArticIes/experiments.htm — . "The Shakespearean Stage" The Norton Shakespeare. Gen. Ed. 14 CTR 111