ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 explored how writers such as Gordon Bottomley, Maurice Baring and Tom Stoppard use characters to link their adaptations back to their Shakespearean originals. In their works, characters like Lear and Goneril function both independently as characters and as a means of evoking the remembered or imagined Shakespearean King Lear. The effect of these character bridges is that two narratives end up running simultaneously – one existing in the present (the onstage adaptation) and the other existing in the mind of the audience (the remembered original) – two narratives that interact in compatible (Bottomley) or dissonant (Baring and Stoppard) ways. In the case of dissonant interactions, the audience is challenged to re-evaluate these narratives and encouraged to choose the adaptation over the original, effecting the (temporary, imaginative) replacement of Shakespeare. It is in such dissonant interactions that the complicated double gesture of modern adaptation emerges – a gesture that both relies on Shakespeare and repudiates him at the same time.
