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Reality Czech: Tom Stoppard Discovers Shakespeare behind the Iron Curtain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2016

Paul A. Cantor
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Abstract

Tom Stoppard's Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth offers fresh evidence of the universality of Shakespeare's genius. The play juxtaposes a perfunctory performance of Hamlet in an English boarding school with a courageous staging of Macbeth as a protest against Communist tyranny in 1978 Czechoslovakia. The play shows that, paradoxically, Shakespeare's plays have less of an impact in England than they do in foreign countries, where differing political circumstances, far from forming an obstacle to appreciating Shakespeare, actually bring his plays to life with a new power. By portraying the secret police interrupting the Czech Macbeth, Stoppard explores how artists can struggle against totalitarianism, and, in particular, how they can develop secret codes to express their dissidence, even under the watchful eyes of the surveillance state. Encountering Shakespeare behind the Iron Curtain, Stoppard developed a new seriousness as a playwright and a new interest in the relation of art and politics.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 78 , Special Issue 4: Shakespeare's Politics in Honor of the 400th Anniversary of his Birth , Fall 2016 , pp. 663 - 679
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2016 

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References

1 For example, Delaney, Paul reports that Stoppard “enacted the role of Vaclav Havel's defence lawyer in a Munich re-creation of the trial of the Czech playwright for political dissidence” (Tom Stoppard: The Moral Vision of the Major Plays [London: Macmillan, 1990], 82)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Stoppard's view of Havel, see, for example, the introduction to his play Rock ’n’ Roll (New York: Grove, 2006), ix–xix.

2 See Levenson, Jill L., “‘Hamlet’ Andante / ‘Hamlet’ Allegro: Tom Stoppard's Two Versions,” Shakespeare Survey 36 (1983): 27Google Scholar and Gianakaris, C. J., “Stoppard's Adaptations of Shakespeare: Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth ,” Comparative Drama 18 (1984): 228Google Scholar.

3 Stoppard portrays a similar process in Professional Foul. Its protagonist, a philosophy professor named Anderson, has to move from the realm of abstract ethical speculation to the concrete world of ethical decision when faced with the Czech mistreatment of a dissident. In an interview with David Gollob and David Roper in Gambit (Summer 1981), Stoppard said: “I wanted to write about somebody coming from England to a totalitarian society, brushing up against it, and getting a little soiled and a little wiser” (in Tom Stoppard in Conversation, ed. Paul Delaney [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994], 156). In some ways, Stoppard could have been describing his own experience in Czechoslovakia here.

4 Toucatt, Ralph, “Cross-Cultural Stoppard,” Threepenny Review (Spring 1981): 20Google Scholar.

5 Stříbrný, Zdeněk, “Shakespeare as Liberator: Macbeth in Czechoslovakia,” in Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions, ed. Kishi, Tetsuo, Pringle, Roger, and Wells, Stanley (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 275Google Scholar. For further discussion of Shakespeare's role in Czech culture, see Stříbrný, ’s The Whirligig of Time: Essays on Shakespeare and Czechoslovakia (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007)Google Scholar, especially the essays “Shakespeare in Czechoslovakia” (165–77) and “Shakespeare in the Cold: Production and Criticism in Former Communist Countries” (214–33). See also Stříbrný, ’s Shakespeare and Eastern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar for a broader treatment of Shakespeare outside Western Europe (including Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Czarist Russia, and the Soviet Union). For another informative treatment of Shakespeare in Czech culture, see Prochazka, Martin, “Shakespeare and Czech Resistance,” in Shakespeare: World Views, ed. Kerr, Heather, Eaden, Robin, and Mitton, Madge (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 44–69 Google Scholar.

6 Stříbrný, “Shakespeare as Liberator,” 276.

7 Ibid.

8 The classic essay on this subject is Thomas De Quincey, “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” originally published in The London Magazine in 1823.

9 I quote the play from Stoppard, Tom, The Real Inspector Hound and Other Entertainments (London: Faber and Faber, 1993)Google Scholar. This line appears on p. 194. Future page references will be incorporated into the body of the essay.

10 On the role of the inspector, see Sammells, Neil, Tom Stoppard: The Artist as Critic (New York: St. Martin's, 1988), 120–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Performances by the Living-Room Theater were in fact routinely interrupted by Czech authorities. See Prochazka, “Shakespeare and Czech Resistance,” 60: “From its beginnings in 1976 to the early eighties (when performances became impossible owing to increasing harassment and pressure) the shows took place under close surveillance. Some of them were even gate-crashed by the police, and actors as well as their audiences were detained, interrogated, or just brought in cars to deserted places some fifty miles from Prague and left there.”

11 See Strauss, Leo, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952)Google Scholar. For the most comprehensive discussion of Strauss's concept of esoteric writing, see Melzer, Arthur M., Philosophy between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Strauss's esotericism, see also Zuckert, Catherine H. and Zuckert, Michael P., The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 115–54Google Scholar and Cantor, Paul A., “Leo Strauss and Contemporary Hermeneutics,” in Leo Strauss's Thought: Toward a Critical Engagement, ed. Udoff, Alan (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1991), 267–314 Google Scholar.

12 For a discussion of dissident writing under totalitarianism, see Codrescu, Andrei, The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990)Google Scholar. For “Aesopean language” in Russian writing, see Morson, Gary Saul, “Who Speaks for Bakhtin?,” in Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on His Work, ed. Morson, Gary Saul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 10, 16Google Scholar. For more on the issue of esoteric writing in the Russian literary critic M. M. Bakhtin, see Cantor, “Leo Strauss,” 300–305. For a more general discussion of esotericism in Russian and Soviet writing, see Melzer, Philosophy between the Lines, 131–33, 206, 303–4.

13 Of his situation with fellow dissidents in Communist Romania, Codrescu writes: “we developed community through the use a of subtle and ambiguous language that could be heard in one way by the oppressor, in another by your friends. Our weapons of sabotage were ambiguity, humor, paradox, mystery, poetry, song, and magic” (Disappearance of the Outside, 38–39).

14 For the relevant passages in Wittgentstein's Philosophical Investigations, see sections 2–21.

15 On the importance of the boarding school setting, see Toucatt, “Cross-Cultural Stoppard,” 19.

16 On the incomprehensibility of the text of Hamlet to the students, see Felicia Hardison Londré, Tom Stoppard (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981), 130; Whitaker, Thomas R., Tom Stoppard (London: Macmillan, 1983), 154–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Diamond, Elin, “Stoppard's Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth: The Uses of Shakespeare,” Modern Drama 29 (1986): 596CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Whitaker writes of the students: “Their absurd condensation of Hamlet now suggests a woefully inadequate grasp of its tragic richness; but it is also, of course, a lightly satirical comment on our own reductive schooling” (Tom Stoppard, 155). For more on Dogg's Hamlet as Stoppard's attempt to “criticize the institutional appropriation of Shakespeare” in England, see Diamond, “Uses of Shakespeare,” 594–95.

18 Toucatt writes of the schoolboy performance: “In the kinds of schools Stoppard is mocking here, form is everything: the solid, routine, traditional life repeats itself over and over, and one need not understand the words of a particular speech to know what is being said. … Having been told repeatedly that the Bard is the greatest English writer, and having performed (or witnessed the performance of) infinite numbers of earnest Hamlets in the course of their educations, over-educated Britons find the truncated play hilariously iconoclastic” (Threepenny Review, 19).

19 Toucatt observes: “The play is not just about Shakespeare in Czechoslovakia, but about Shakespeare in Czechoslovakia as opposed to Shakespeare in England—and that makes all the difference” (Threepenny Review, 20).

20 See Diamond, “Uses of Shakespeare,” 594 and 599: “In Dogg's Hamlet, Shakespeare's text serves the oppressor; in Cahoot's Macbeth, Shakespeare's text subverts the oppressor.”

21 From an interview with Roger Hudson, Catherine Itzin, and Simon Trussler (Theatre Quarterly, May 1974), in Delaney, Tom Stoppard in Conversation, 53.

22 The video is available at https://charlierose.com/videos/11157. The passages I quote occur early in the interview, from about 2 minutes in to 4:45. Stoppard expressed similar ideas in an earlier interview with Charlie Rose, on December 3, 1998. Beginning at roughly 38:30 and continuing to the end, he speaks extensively on art and politics, covering, among other subjects, Turgenev, Mandelstam, Lenin, and Stalin. He laments the fact that in a free society “the writer lost his privileged isolation” and he concludes that “it's only in suppression that the artist achieves his dignity.”

23 Stoppard writes in the preface to the volume in which Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth was published in 1993: “Czechoslovakia is a different country now, a great joy to all concerned but not without its ironies, for while there is no longer a need for an underground Living Room Theatre, the above-ground theatre has lost the generous subsidies which came with obedience under Communism, and times are hard” (Stoppard, Real Inspector Hound, viii).

24 Codrescu describes a similar situation in totalitarian Romania: “The few books of literary rather than purely propagandistic value that the Party let be published … were published only grudgingly, and in editions too small to meet popular demand … . Where else but in a country where books are viewed this way will people line up at five in the morning outside a bookstore when there is a rumor that a new book of poems by a daring young poet will go on sale that day?” (Disappearance of the Outside, 22). Codrescu was happy to escape to the West, but in the midst of its abundance of books, he found literature devalued: “I began to devour books, sleep books, dream books. But these books, suddenly so easily available, were not the same in a world where reading was not secret. And the things I had to say seemed to have lost something when said out loud. They had carried more weight whispered, and certainly more power forbidden” (116).

25 Similarly, Stříbrný reports that “Peter Brook stated that his King Lear was received much more intensely between Budapest and Moscow than in the West” (Shakespeare and Eastern Europe, 78).

26 For reflections on Shakespeare's universality, see my essay “Playwright of the Globe,” Claremont Review of Books 7, no. 1 (Winter 2006/7): 34–40 Google Scholar.