A Small Rewrite and “Becomings-Hamlet”

[Reposted from my ‘Shakespeare in Translation’ class’ blog.]

I was reading Rosenbaum’s New Yorker article, which I hadn’t had a chance to finish earlier, and I was reminded of this great comedy sketch featuring William Shakespeare (Hugh Lorrie) and his imagined editor (Rowan Atkinson). Gold.

While I think it’s a hilarious sketch, it points to something interesting about the editing/translation history of Shakespeare in positing the fantasy of a contemporary publishing practice in which a ‘decisive’ text is arrived at through compromise between writer and editor. It may illustrate some of the assumptions (along with their attendant problems) made by the so-called ‘Revisers’ in thinking that editorial practices should/do conform to an artist’s changing intention and that contemporary understandings of authorship can serve as a suitable model or analogue for the translating into print of what was/is a collaborative work and art form. We should consider that in its infancy cinema still had some ways to go before the arrival of the ‘auteur’ films of directors like (for instance) Kurosawa. Only with the rise of that auteur ideal were movies conceived as the product and expression of a single creative genius to which all other collaborators were subsumed.

Those who adhere too strongly to the ‘Reviser’s camp (that the different versions of Hamlet – however you want to connect them – represent Shakespeare’s revisions to his play) are in some ways suggesting that the notion of a final cut or Director’s Cut Hamlet is desirable and that Hamlet should be reducible to some singular authorial vision which can remain stable and from which all other interpretations and translations of Hamlet will depart and necessarily fall short from the ‘True’ Hamlet. It also suggests that the ‘essence’ of Hamlet (if I can use that loaded term), for the ‘Revisers,’ lies in some original and author-itative text.

What the Arden ‘Super-Hamlet’ edition does is to displace the supposition of ‘Hamlet-as-singularity’ and showcases the continually contested nature of the most contested text of the most contested author of the Western literary canon. In revealing the persistent instability of the text, the Arden displaces the arborescent model of “which came first” or “which text is closer to the origin” and instead levels each early Hamlet into a plane of immanence from which all Hamlets emerge and which they ultimately become a part of.

I think this Deleuze-Guattari rhizomatic model is interesting precisely because it enlarges, broadens and reshapes the range of possible Hamlets and relationships between them. We would no longer have a unidirectional chain or genealogy of Hamlets but a Hamlet molecule made up of the vast network of Hamlet translations more or less engaged with one another.

This may begin to answer the question: why are so many of Shakespeare’s plays such popular choices for adaptation? Because they have no center, only vast, shifting boundaries and what Deleuze and Guattari call “a zone of proximity or copresence.” In this scheme, Dogg’s Hamlet, Hamletmachine, Legend of the Black Scorpion, Almereyda’s Hamlet, etc. are as much a part/translations of Hamlet as Hamlet is a part/translation of these texts. I think artist-translators intuitively recognised this feature of the plays, that they can effectively be edited ad infinitum. And who could resist the appeal of rewriting “Shakey”?