ABSTRACT

I focus here on bardicide in the modern theatre, in Marowitz and especially in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona

(Good Morning Juliet), but the practice can be found in a number of forms – in the film Last Action Hero, where Arnold Schwarzenegger applies high explosives to the high culture of Olivier’s Hamlet, or in Richard Curtis’ closet mini-drama ‘The Skinhead Hamlet’, which also levels Shakespeare’s élite art (reducing the entire ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy to the one-liner, ‘To fuck or be fucked’), or Margaret Atwood’s closet monologue, ‘Gertrude Talks Back’, a revisiting of the tragedy from the Queen’s point of view (‘I am not wringing my hands. I’m drying my nails’ [Atwood 1992: 15] ), or the novel A Thousand Acres, by Jane Smiley, which rewrites King Lear as a story about the consequences of the sexual abuse of daughters and the agribiz desecration of Nature. In each case, with lesser or greater gravity, the revisionist artist prosecutes a brief against Shakespeare, who emerges as an author of and for the social élite or, more often, as an apologist for patriarchal or imperialist violence. In each case, the revisionist’s implicit claim to value is founded on an artistic revolution against the politicomoral authority of Shakespeare – the poet-kingpin of the Western tradition.