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Remixing Shakespeare

Moderator: Mary Fuller
Diana E. Henderson Peter Donaldson: February 15, 2007; Running Time: 1:43:53

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

All hail Sir William Mix-a-Lot, da mash meister Shakespeare! These panelists sing his praises as an inspiration for crossover and convergence art, and discourse on the endless reworking of his oeuvre.

Says Diana Henderson, “When I hear people talking about digital and multimedia, I’m always forced to say yes, but that’s nothing new.” 50 years after Shakespeare’s death, King Lear’s ending received an extensive rewrite, Henderson recounts, where “Edgar and Cordelia have a nice romantic relationship and a happy ending.” We may mock this today, but “in its historical moment,” notes Henderson, when a generation was threatened by the usurpation of the throne, “it was not so silly.” Song and dance was added to serious dramas – a comic thought today -- but this paved the way for Verdi’s much celebrated opera version of Othello. While “it’s hard not to laugh” at some extreme Shakespeare revision, we need to develop a broader, historical perspective, Henderson urges. By way of showing how malleable the various ways of thinking about Shakespeare can be, Henderson plays clips from a stylized silent movie of Othello, and from a 1982 Paul Mazursky version of The Tempest, with a Liza Minnelli “New York, New York” soundtrack. They tap into assumptions about high and low culture, and different sociopolitical moments, she says. “It’s the reason some of us take a whole lifetime looking at Shakespeare, not just because of a particular play text but because of four centuries of how a remix allows you to reflect on the culture at large.”

While Peter Donaldson isn’t sure Shakespeare achieved the kind of miracles of remix in his own time that DJ Z-trip does live with two turntables, Donaldson does appreciate contemporary remixes of the plays. He delves deep into Michael Almereyda’s 2000 Hamlet, where Ethan Hawke ponders the big questions with the help of a kid’s Pixelvision camcorder. “He makes videos to try to understand his experience,” says Donaldson, which “cuts him off in a most severe way from the rest of the world around, capturing grief in a way that many Hamlets do not.” The most artistically significant Shakespeare films feature “elaborate remixing,” where the director is “moving around in a learned way within the tradition.” Donaldson has also dipped a toe in the wide, but not necessarily deep waters of YouTube, where Matrix and Star Wars elements somehow figure in Shakespeare mash-ups (e.g., Banquo and Macbeth fighting with light sabers). However, he hits pay dirt with a clip of Peter Sellers channeling Laurence Olivier in Richard III, and reciting the lyrics of The Beatles “A Hard Day’s Night.”

Lecture Details

Location: 3-270

“Some of us find ourselves spending a whole lifetime looking at Shakespeare. It’s not just because of a particular play text but it’s because of these four centuries of how the remix allows you a reflection on culture at large.”

Diana Henderson

About the Speakers

Moderator: Mary Fuller

Associate Professor of Literature, MIT

Mary Fuller specializes in Renaissance and Medieval literature, and the literature of travel and exploration. More generally, she is interested in genre: what gets called literature, what gets called history, and what the consequences are of making the distinction. Within the broader field of Renaissance literature and culture, she is particularly interested in lyric poetry by both men and women, and in early English travel writing.Her publications include Voyages in Print: English Travel to America 1576-1625, as well as a number of articles and chapters on Guiana, Newfoundland, the American South, Algiers, and Constantinople or (otherwise put) English contacts with Islam, post-colonial poetry, and the use of gender in writing about discovery.

Fuller received her B.A. in English from Dartmouth College and Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Johns Hopkins.

Diana E. Henderson

Professor of Literature, and Dean for Curriculum and Faculty

Diana Henderson's most recent book is Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media (Cornell University Press, 2006). She has also written Passion Made Public: Elizabethan Lyric, Gender and Performance, and is editor of A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen. She is involved in several collaborations with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Henderson is a winner of the 2005 Everett Moore Baker Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Before coming to MIT, she taught in the Humanities Program at Columbia, and was Assistant Professor of English at Middlebury College.

Henderson received her M.A. and Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

Peter Donaldson

Ann Fetter Friedlaender Professor of Humanities and Head of the Literature Faculty, MIT. Director, Shakespeare Interactive Archive

Since 1992, the Shakespeare Interactive Archive has used computers to develop new ways of studying the text, image and film records of Shakespearean publication and production.

Peter Donaldson is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1964, a B.A. from Cambridge University (Clare College)in 1966, an M.A. from Cambridge University in 1970, and his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1974.