PRODUCTION Betrayal [Beipan]
Data Type：production background
Author：Greenblatt, Stephen
Title：The Cardenio Project
Source：Betrayal Performance Program
Place：Taipei
Publisher：Chinese Culture University, Department of Chinese Drama [Zhongguo wenhua daxue zhongguo xiju xuexi]
Date：2013
Language：English
Abstract：An account of Stephen Greenblatt and Charles Mee's collaboration from its inception, process, exploration and achievement.
Stephen Greenblatt
Harvard University
An influential American literary critic, theorist and scholar, Stephen Greenblatt has written and edited numerous books and articles relevant to new historicism, the study of culture, Renaissance studies and Shakespeare studies, and is considered a leading expert in these fields. His most recent work The Swerve: How the World Became Modern won the 2011 National Book Award for Nonfiction and 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Norfiction.
Shakespeare's imagination worked by restless appropriation, adaptation, and transformation: he was certainly capable of making stories up on his own, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream, but he clearly preferred picking something up ready-made and moving it into his own sphere, as if the phenomenon of mobility itself gave him pleasure. And he never hinted that the mobility would now have to stop: on the contrary, he seems to have deliberately opened his plays to the possibility of ceaseless change. The multiple texts in which several of his major plays exist－including, among others, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear－suggest that Shakespeare and his comanyfelt comfortable making numerous cuts, additions, and other changes perhaps linked to particular performances, play spaces, and time constraints. This comfort-level, registered intimately in the remarkable openness of the plays to reinterpretation and refashioning, has contributed to the startling longevity of Shakespeare's achievement: the plays lend themselves to metamorphosis.
But the question remains: how can one do justice to theatrical mobility, that is, how can one get sufficiently close and inward with its processes in order to study it and to understand it? Several years ago I felt I had at least glimpsed a possibility when I first encountered the brilliant work of a contemporary American playwright, Charles Mee. Mee is a cunning recycler who is particularly gifted at registering the original charge of the material he has lifted while moving that material in new and unexpected directions. I had been especially dazzled by a play, Big Love, which Mee largely created out of the odd, surviving fragments of lost Greek plays and had been greatly impressed as well by his many other plays, which he generally posts, without copyright protection, on a website that encourages others to feel free to use them in an ongoing process of appropriation and transformation.
I contacted Mee and told him that I would like the opportunity to watch the creation of one of his plays, from its first inception to its actual production. Throughout my career, I explained, I had been studying the creative mobilization of cultural materials in Shakespeare, but it was always at a 400-year distance. I wanted to be able to be close enough to track and understand every move, and I could only hope to do that with a living playwright, someone to whom I could ask questions and from whom I could get direct answers. I added that I had received a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation that would enable me to pay－handsomely, by the standards of a working playwright－for this privilege.
Mee declined. He was not interested in money, he said, and he did not particularly like being watched. But, he added, if I could come up with an idea for a play, he would consider writing something with me. For a Shakespearen, the choice was a fairly obvious one: I proposed that we write a modern version of Shakespeare's lost play, Cardenio. This was a play written in collaboration with his younger colleague, John Fletcher, whom Shakespeare near the end of his career seems to have chosen as his successor. Two of their collaborations－Henry VIII(All Is True) and The Two Noble Kinsmen－survive, but Cardenio, performed on several documented occasions in 1613 and registered for print in mid-century, does not. The reason for its disappearance is unclear but entirely unsurprising: only a fraction of sixteenth and seventeenth century plays were preserved.
Shakespeare and Fletcher evidently took their plot from the story of Cardenio as it is episodically recounted in Part One of Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605). When we set out to devise a modern version of Cardenio, Charles Mee and I started in the obvious place, with the Cardenio story, but we immediately ran into a problem: the story seemed relatively difficult to set in motion. The difficulty lay not in its themes of betrayal and madness. Rather, it lay in the motivating premise of an immensely powerful social hierarchy－something far more compelling than wealth alone that allows－the plot to unfold.
Mee and I could have found some contemporary equivalent to the hierarchical social code of the Renaissance－in the army perhaps, or in certain extreme business or academic communities. But the task felt artificial and labored, and successful aesthetic mobility thrives on ease or at least on the illusion of ease. Where something immediately clicked for us was not in the principal Cardenio story but rather in the distorted mirror-image of that story that a priest in Cervantes' novel reads to Cardenio at an inn.
The priest's story centers on a young man, Anselmo, whose irrational anxiety about his wife's fidelity leads him to insist that his best friend Lothario attempt to seduce her. The story has a predictably disastrous outcome, but we chose to give it an ending suitable for a comedy.
The version of Cardenio that Charles Mee and I wrote and that was performed at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge in 2008 incorporates a series of characteristic Shakespearean motifs. It is a celebration of the impulses of the heart and the willingness to gamble on love. And the plot as a whole drivers, as Shakespearean comedy so often does, through confusion to clarification and forgiveness.
The project was an experiment that enabled me to explore the interplay of freedom and constraint in the practice of cultural mobility of which Shakespeare was the great master. I decided to explore it further with an additional experiment. Making contact with theater companies in different parts of the world, I invited them to take the same materials, now including the play Mee and I had written, and to rework them into a form that is appropriate for their particular culture.
I have been privileged to witness an array of these adaptations: in India, Japan, Turkey, Spain, Brazil, South Africa, Serbia, Croatia, Egypt, and now, as the final and climactic instance, Taiwan. The scripts, production details, and performance videos have been posted on a website. The productions I have seen have confirmed in remarkable detail the blend of contingency, license, and constraint that characterized my own personal experience of cultural mobility. None of the adaptations closely resembles the other, and none replicates our own play, though all clearly derive from the narrative materials we had provided and all are, in significant ways, versions of the Cardenio story. Taken together, they reveal the extraordinary force of diverse national theatrical traditions. They provide powerful clues to the ways in which the human imagination in a particular place and time is shaped by its distinct history and shapes in turn whatever it takes within its creative grasp.
Harvard University
An influential American literary critic, theorist and scholar, Stephen Greenblatt has written and edited numerous books and articles relevant to new historicism, the study of culture, Renaissance studies and Shakespeare studies, and is considered a leading expert in these fields. His most recent work The Swerve: How the World Became Modern won the 2011 National Book Award for Nonfiction and 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Norfiction.
Shakespeare's imagination worked by restless appropriation, adaptation, and transformation: he was certainly capable of making stories up on his own, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream, but he clearly preferred picking something up ready-made and moving it into his own sphere, as if the phenomenon of mobility itself gave him pleasure. And he never hinted that the mobility would now have to stop: on the contrary, he seems to have deliberately opened his plays to the possibility of ceaseless change. The multiple texts in which several of his major plays exist－including, among others, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear－suggest that Shakespeare and his comanyfelt comfortable making numerous cuts, additions, and other changes perhaps linked to particular performances, play spaces, and time constraints. This comfort-level, registered intimately in the remarkable openness of the plays to reinterpretation and refashioning, has contributed to the startling longevity of Shakespeare's achievement: the plays lend themselves to metamorphosis.
But the question remains: how can one do justice to theatrical mobility, that is, how can one get sufficiently close and inward with its processes in order to study it and to understand it? Several years ago I felt I had at least glimpsed a possibility when I first encountered the brilliant work of a contemporary American playwright, Charles Mee. Mee is a cunning recycler who is particularly gifted at registering the original charge of the material he has lifted while moving that material in new and unexpected directions. I had been especially dazzled by a play, Big Love, which Mee largely created out of the odd, surviving fragments of lost Greek plays and had been greatly impressed as well by his many other plays, which he generally posts, without copyright protection, on a website that encourages others to feel free to use them in an ongoing process of appropriation and transformation.
I contacted Mee and told him that I would like the opportunity to watch the creation of one of his plays, from its first inception to its actual production. Throughout my career, I explained, I had been studying the creative mobilization of cultural materials in Shakespeare, but it was always at a 400-year distance. I wanted to be able to be close enough to track and understand every move, and I could only hope to do that with a living playwright, someone to whom I could ask questions and from whom I could get direct answers. I added that I had received a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation that would enable me to pay－handsomely, by the standards of a working playwright－for this privilege.
Mee declined. He was not interested in money, he said, and he did not particularly like being watched. But, he added, if I could come up with an idea for a play, he would consider writing something with me. For a Shakespearen, the choice was a fairly obvious one: I proposed that we write a modern version of Shakespeare's lost play, Cardenio. This was a play written in collaboration with his younger colleague, John Fletcher, whom Shakespeare near the end of his career seems to have chosen as his successor. Two of their collaborations－Henry VIII(All Is True) and The Two Noble Kinsmen－survive, but Cardenio, performed on several documented occasions in 1613 and registered for print in mid-century, does not. The reason for its disappearance is unclear but entirely unsurprising: only a fraction of sixteenth and seventeenth century plays were preserved.
Shakespeare and Fletcher evidently took their plot from the story of Cardenio as it is episodically recounted in Part One of Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605). When we set out to devise a modern version of Cardenio, Charles Mee and I started in the obvious place, with the Cardenio story, but we immediately ran into a problem: the story seemed relatively difficult to set in motion. The difficulty lay not in its themes of betrayal and madness. Rather, it lay in the motivating premise of an immensely powerful social hierarchy－something far more compelling than wealth alone that allows－the plot to unfold.
Mee and I could have found some contemporary equivalent to the hierarchical social code of the Renaissance－in the army perhaps, or in certain extreme business or academic communities. But the task felt artificial and labored, and successful aesthetic mobility thrives on ease or at least on the illusion of ease. Where something immediately clicked for us was not in the principal Cardenio story but rather in the distorted mirror-image of that story that a priest in Cervantes' novel reads to Cardenio at an inn.
The priest's story centers on a young man, Anselmo, whose irrational anxiety about his wife's fidelity leads him to insist that his best friend Lothario attempt to seduce her. The story has a predictably disastrous outcome, but we chose to give it an ending suitable for a comedy.
The version of Cardenio that Charles Mee and I wrote and that was performed at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge in 2008 incorporates a series of characteristic Shakespearean motifs. It is a celebration of the impulses of the heart and the willingness to gamble on love. And the plot as a whole drivers, as Shakespearean comedy so often does, through confusion to clarification and forgiveness.
The project was an experiment that enabled me to explore the interplay of freedom and constraint in the practice of cultural mobility of which Shakespeare was the great master. I decided to explore it further with an additional experiment. Making contact with theater companies in different parts of the world, I invited them to take the same materials, now including the play Mee and I had written, and to rework them into a form that is appropriate for their particular culture.
I have been privileged to witness an array of these adaptations: in India, Japan, Turkey, Spain, Brazil, South Africa, Serbia, Croatia, Egypt, and now, as the final and climactic instance, Taiwan. The scripts, production details, and performance videos have been posted on a website. The productions I have seen have confirmed in remarkable detail the blend of contingency, license, and constraint that characterized my own personal experience of cultural mobility. None of the adaptations closely resembles the other, and none replicates our own play, though all clearly derive from the narrative materials we had provided and all are, in significant ways, versions of the Cardenio story. Taken together, they reveal the extraordinary force of diverse national theatrical traditions. They provide powerful clues to the ways in which the human imagination in a particular place and time is shaped by its distinct history and shapes in turn whatever it takes within its creative grasp.
