DCI Shakespeare

Another occasional #LitCritForTeachers post.


Shakespearean Allusion in Crime Fiction: DCI Shakespeare by Lisa Hopkins, 2016 (Palgrave Macmillan)

Hopkins tells us:

‘Shakespeare is a pervasive presence in detective fiction’ (1)

She notes there are three main ways in which this can happen - 

• quotation
• merely touching on a detail
• called on as a detailed guide to human character

Shakespearean allusion in crime writing is a way of borrowing Shakespeare's status to assert that the detective novel (etc) is a literary form in its own right. 

‘Shakespearean allusion serves a variety of purposes. First and most obviously, Shakespeare is an unimpeachable source of cultural capital, but at the same time one perceived as popular enough to be free of any connotations of elitism or inaccessibility.’ (8)

Referring to details that you recognise also helps to balance out the fact that the text is trying to deceive you, the reader: 

‘Shakespearean allusion also has consequences for the reader and for the status of the text itself: it interpellates the reader and establishes the literary status of the text. G.K. Chesterton notes in ‘The Ideal Detective Story’ that ‘The detective story differs from every other story in this: the reader is only happy if he feels a fool,’ and yet feeling a fool is also a potentially unnerving and unsatisfying state. It can however be counteracted if one does not feel quite such a fool because one can at least recognise Shakespeare’ (10)

Hopkins also notes of crime writing that: 

‘It is a commonplace of the genre that a fine line divides the detective from the criminal’ (17)

which is a particularly useful thought when considering Hamlet as part of Elements of Crime Writing.

Hopkins notes the massive number of Shakespearean quotations and allusions in both the work of Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh, among others. One of the functions Shakespeare fulfils in these works is to demonstrate the status of the detective - to make him one of the 'good guys', because he is educated. She makes the argument that this is necessary because of the need to position readers on the same side as the detective: 

‘Detective fiction needs to position readers in this way for two main reasons. In the first place, it is generally nervous about the legitimacy of its own enterprise, because it can by no means be taken for granted that detection itself is a legitimate enterprise. Alongside a rather vaguely felt conviction that it is a citizen’s duty to help the police typically sits an often more powerful view hat doing so will almost certainly entail things that are literally, inherently and in absolute terms deplorable: reading other people’s correspondence, eavesdropping on conversations and generally prying into a sphere radically and inalienably constituted as private.' (11)

 ‘The only thing that can justify violation of this ethos of privacy being sacrosanct is if the policeman too is an insider, and allowing to quote Shakespeare is a foolproof way of constituting him as one; this is particularly marked in the case of Ngaio Marsh’s Alleyn, both the most intrinsically inquisitive and also the most sustainedly Shakespearean of detectives’ (11)

She refers to Golden Age detective fiction here, and it would be interesting to see if the same attitudes can be found in modern crime fiction.

Hopkins also notes that there are three plays which are more commonly alluded to in crime fiction than others: unsurprisingly Hamlet and Macbeth are two of the three. The final one is oddly, Midsummer Night's Dream: 

‘On the surface the least likely of plays to be connected to crime, Dream proves to have a surprising affinity with the genre because it speaks to so many of its key concerns: drug-taking, land ownership, violence against women, and the question of artisanship versus mass production, with attendant implications for the literary status of crime fiction itself.’ (184)

Finally, there's a link here to an open access article on Shakespearean allusion in the crime novels of Georgette Heyer: https://www.nature.com/articles/palcomms201652

Crack another eggcorn

I know that I've written about eggcorns before [small delay while I truffle off through the new Blogger interface to find the right link] but I've just read an email that resulted in me looking something up.

I saw a student last week and thought I saw a 'sea change'. Another tutor saw her a few days later and saw a 'seed change'. That's odd, I thought. Being aware that my English has two characteristics 1) words I learned through reading that I consequently have no idea how to pronounce and 2) words I learned through family speaking that I have never seen written down anywhere, I went off in search of the connection between the two phrases.

[Side note. My mother and various other members of my family pronounce the word 'picturesque' as 'picture-skew-only-it's-not-really-it's-picturesque-because-you-have-to-be-careful-because-I-had-a-friend-at-school-whose-family-pronounced-it-pictureskew-as-a-joke-and-she-grew-up-thinking-that-was-really-how-it-was-pronounced-and-used-it-in-a-university-interview-and-was-subjected-to-ridicule'. So usually I can rely on family phrase pronunciation being correct. However, I recently discovered that the verb 'to be overfaced' is a Yorkshire, or at least a Northern, usage only. So there are things in my everyday vocabulary which I think are universal which turn out to be local dialect. Which is why it never hurts to be careful.]

Turns out 'Sea change' is from The Tempest (natch), but that 'seed change' is an eggcorn - or false etymology - for the same phrase, because it is a change which precedes some major growth. Interesting. If you're me.

And that leads me to Shakespeare and the brill production of The Winter's Tale which I saw yesterday (and am going to see again with someone else in a couple of hours). Never seen or read it before. Normally a new Shakespeare is reason for me to be sitting there going 'oh, that's where that phrase comes from'. Not so much yesterday, except for one classic: 'tumbling in the hay'. I shall be listening out for more this afternoon.

Dane-jà vu

If there's one Shakespeare play you can guarantee to find on stage at some point during the year, it's Hamlet. I think I've seen it on stage four times (Michael Maloney, Sam West, David Tennant (both RSC) and, last week, the Northern Broadsides). Every time I'm staggered again by the fact that so many of our everyday phrases and sayings come straight from the page. All Shakespeare plays have contributed something to the English language. Hamlet did it by the shovel-ful.

But, is it really necessary to put on quite so many versions of it? I saw the RSC production in January of last year (and it really blew me away - far and away the best production of any Shakespeare play I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot!) and then, as I said, last week I went to see the Northern Broadsides production at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. And for the first time, it fell a bit flat. It wasn't a bad production - in fact it was good, and the girl playing Ophelia did a fantastic job with one of the hardest female characters to pull off, without the madness going over the top, or being too silly, or being too soppy or just requiring a good slap, which she usually does. There was a young actor in the main role, who was a lot better in the second half than the first, which might have been part of the problem. Rosencrantz and Guildernstern were creepy and practically Tweedledee and Tweedledum like in their similarities - played by real life brothers. I think on the whole. But really, it was just suffering by comparison to the clearest, most thoughtful interpretation I'd ever seen. Too soon to see it again, apparently, though I could have been to see two other versions (including Jude Law in the title role), if I'd so desired.

The reason I went to see it was the Northern Broadsides. I've blogged before about them, and their greatness, so I shan't repeat myself here. They are one of two companies whose productions are reliably brilliant. The other is Propeller - an all male Shakespeare company who always do two plays at once, touring with them, either alternating or doing one then the other for a solid block.

I discovered them last year when they were performing at Oxford Playhouse. Having watched The Merchant of Venice open mouthed, at the end of the performance I went straight to the Box Office to buy a ticket for the following days A Midsummer Night's Dream. This year just before Easter I had to traipse out to the Watermill Theatre near Newbury - a lovely and slightly surreal theatre that is basically in the middle of nowhere - to see their Richard III. Richard Clothier in the title role gave a wonderfully creepy and magnetic performance, that left the audience in reluctant sympathy for the murdering, conspiring, ambitious villain. Propeller pride themselves on the vitality (ironically) of their performances and this one was no exception - the murder by chainsaw, with spurting blood and lumps of flesh was probably the highlight of the violence in this play. It reminded me strongly of the King Lear a couple of years ago that saw an eyeball bitten out on stage then spat out into a trough directly in front of the audience. Propeller made an ultra-creepy production, with the actors not involved in the specific scene disguised with white coats and stretched white masks to act as attendants, torturers, and passersby. At the end of the interval one be-masked man craned over the shoulder of the woman at the end of my row to read her programme, coming closer and closer until she jumped a mile. If you want Shakespeare that grabs you, Propeller is my bet. I'm off to Hampstead in June to see A Comedy of Errors, since I couldn't get to it in Newbury. I hope their Pocket Propeller productions manage to hook a new generation of Shakespeare audiences. And even better, they keep doing plays I haven't seen done to death!

To bleed or not to bleed, that is the question...

So this year I've already seen three Shakespeare plays - a total I'm extremely pleased with, especially since two of them were ones I'd never seen before, and one of them I'd never even read (Hadn't read King Lear, hadn't seen Othello, and I've read and seen Hamlet at least twice before.). Two of them have been in London, and one, as I may have mentioned before, is at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds. One had realistic but restrained amounts of blood (Hamlet), one had no blood at all, despite quite a number of fatal stabbings (Othello) and one had copious amounts of blood and a scene where someone bit out someone else's eyeball, rolled it around in her mouth and then spat it out into a trough at the front of the stage (Lear).

So which makes for a better production? I honestly don't know. The audience was revolted and horrified by the gore in Lear, although the eyeball almost provoked a laugh of disgust. There was no question that the violence in Othello was highly believable. Lack of blood didn't wake us from the suspension of disbelief. Strangely, these two, representing two extremes, were also the two set in venues where the stage and seating are intimately collocated, so that you are very very close to the actors. Sitting in the front row of the WYP, I had to uncross my legs at one point to bring my feet in for fear of kicking the actors dragging off the body of Roderigo.

You could argue that the difference lies in the plays. Lear is a play which revels in its violence, as the country descends into a bloody mess. But then, Othello can equally be seen as doing so, creating a sea of blood surrounding the central murder - the symbolic smothering of Desdemona, whose husband is deaf to her voice. The point is, you don't need the prop. The theatre is essentially a place of artifice, as someone much more knowledgeable than me says, and it is not realistic. Yet if we can believe that the same basic set is several different castles, or in different countries, if we can accept that the same actor can play several roles in the same play, and yet see the characters not the actor, why would we need realistic blood? Lear went one step further with a real rain storm on the 'blasted heath' (yes, I know, that's from Macbeth) which was spectacular, and fun, but fundamentally unneccesary. Maybe that's the answer: you don't need the blood, but sometimes a ketchup-splattered stage is just plain fun.

P.S. On another but related matter, I wrote an article for The Oxford Student earlier this term wondering about the current trend for celebrities taking on Shakespearean roles. I excluded David Tennant and Patrick Stewart because they were well-known Shakespearean actors before they became famous on television, but did mention Pete Postlethwaite as King Lear and Lenny Henry as Othello. Luckily, they both came through, with Lenny Henry in particular proving that he is indeed capable of acting his socks off. Pete Postlethwaite was slightly hampered by a production that only worked in places (blood being one of them). However, I have to admit, I'm not going to rush to see Jude Law as Hamlet...

"The world is broad and wide"

If you've had even half an ear on arts news recently you will know that Lenny Henry has been making his Shakespearean debut as Othello at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. What you may not have known is that he is doing so under the auspices of a company called Northern Broadsides, whose USP is the just that - they perform Shakespeare's plays, and occasionally those of other people, in broad northern accents. This is not just regionalism. It makes more sense than that. The poet Jackie Kay talking about this production for Front Row, the Radio 4 arts programme, was most taken not by the transformation of Henry from comedian to tragic hero, but by the sheer accessibility of Shakespeare when uttered with a northern twang.

I could at this point attempt a long and linguistic explanation of how the vowels of the northern accent are phonologically closer to those of the sixteenth century and how the Great Vowel Shift created a problem for us, but frankly it would all be rubbish. I suspect that it has more to do with the cadences of the accent, and also that the stressed syllables of Shakespeare's lines are closer to the natural stresses of the north than they are to the south, or rather, to RP, which is what Shakespeare tends to be performed in. With the exception of the comedic characters of course. They get regional accents because regional accents are 'funny'.

I've been to see quite a few Northern Broadsides productions since we first saw them in my teens. They're always excellent productions, clear and mostly quite traditional. The Wars of the Roses plays make much more sense done in Lancastrian and Yorkshire accents... it's easier to tell who's siding with who. Pity the two middle aged ladies on the row in front of me during Richard III (my first Broadside); one turned to the other in the interval and said, without a trace of irony, in the most posh accent you can imagine "It's very good, but I do wish they'd speak properly. I can't understand a word they're saying." I think she'd missed the point.

So if you get the chance, go see Othello. It's a very good production, with almost nothing out of place. And Iago was BRILLIANT....