SOURCE: Skrebels, Paul. “Transhistoricizing Much Ado About Nothing: Finding a Place for Shakespeare's Work in the Postmodern World.” In Teaching Shakespeare into the Twenty-First Century, edited by Ronald E. Salomone and James E. Davis, pp. 81-95. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Skrebels attempts to bring out the universal human themes in Much Ado about Nothing by comparing the circumstances of the characters in the play with those of members of the British royal family in late-twentieth-century England—a pedagogical approach Skrebels calls “transhistoricization.”]

Teachers and students studying Shakespeare's plays in the classroom (and teaching is surely another form of study) face a crisis, but the crisis is not a new phenomenon. It has existed at least since the early years of the twentieth century, when bodies charged with implementing educational policies in English-speaking societies—the Newbolt Committee in Britain after the First World War is often cited, but each nation has its own equivalents—saw fit to reaffirm the place of “Shakespeare” in the school curriculum as a cornerstone of literacy and a mark of the educated citizen. The resulting establishment-sponsored educational programs, supported by the New Critical agenda of academics on both sides of the Atlantic, took root very quickly, so that the heads of English Literature departments in schools and colleges who declare Shakespeare study optional sooner or later find themselves called to account by concerned civic groups, often via the press.

The attitude of Professor Michael Wood, in a keynote address to British English teachers, that “Shakespeare can look after himself, he is not an endangered species, and doesn't need our protection” (Wood 1994, 19), may be refreshing to some and profoundly threatening to others. But without the daily classroom efforts of teachers, the species' gene pool surely would have diminished to the point where the creature would now be confined to a highly specialized habitat and only occasionally observed at night. Our concern that this may already be the case is not eased by Wood's adding teasingly that if Shakespeare “couldn't look after himself, it would not … be at all a bad idea for someone else to have a spell as national poet. Marlowe, for instance, or Webster, or Aphra Behn” (19). Fine, but those of us in the rest of the English-speaking world committed to and charged with passing on Shakespeare to the next generation might be left crying, like Caliban, “The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!” (Temp 1.2.366-67), as we scratch around desperately looking for a replacement. Our “national poets” occupy a different cultural space from that allotted to Shakespeare, whose work, historically placed at the very brink of the English colonial project, is one of the few common links we have between “English” cultures that need not involve the names of fast-food chains or multinational media empires. And emerging anglophone societies (including economically advanced ones like Australia, struggling to define itself through concepts such as multiculturalism) seem constantly to find in Shakespeare a perfect forum for questioning and experimenting with the culture which, willy-nilly, is theirs as well.

Given the prominence of Shakespeare in our heritage and his place in our educational systems, what then is the “crisis”? It is simply when students find themselves unable to engage with a text—typically an early modern one—either at the formal linguistic level, or at the broader narrative or structural level, the elements of which are usually taught under the labels of plot, character, and theme. This in turn gives rise to a condition of aporia that causes many students to dismiss the text as boring, old-fashioned, and irrelevant.¹ They have a point. Recent critical discussion has reaffirmed the place of the reader/auditor/viewer in the process of making meaning, particularly in the interdisciplinary activity of sign system analysis called Cultural Studies. Antony Easthope, a proponent of the Cultural Studies line, explains the old “modernist” literary studies method as one which treats the text as “a self-defining object … sufficient to itself,” and then brings the reader to the text to appreciate its inherent and unified meaning. This process Easthope diagrams as

Reader r Text (=Author)

because it also involves a wish “to disclose the personality within the poem, the author within the text” (Easthope 1991, 12).

The emphasis now is on the inherent pluralities of texts, which do not exist independently of readers. It is the reader who imposes unity on a text, and readers can interpret texts in many different ways according to the circumstances of their reading. The process is one “in which text and reader interact dialectically” (20-21), thus:

Reader x Text

The equal place afforded to readership in this paradigm raises the issue of the place a text can have in the lives of those who either cannot read it or cannot identify with it. For while it may be argued that even a papyrus scroll to someone unversed in hieroglyphics may convey an aura of “Ancient Egyptianness,” its inaccessibility as literary text must limit its role in the life of the observer. In our society, too, “Shakespeare” and “Shakespearean” can connote many things—usually associated with a hierarchy of cultural values—even for those who have never read a playtext or watched a performance. But what service are we doing students if our teaching of Shakespeare only reinforces such vague and possibly damaging associations, and fails to achieve at least a few points of reconciliation between them and the text?

Henry Giroux, in a recent article about the pedagogical value of cultural studies to modern youth, expresses urgency in his appeal for teaching practice to address students' changing needs:

This is a world in which old certainties are ruptured and meaning becomes more contingent, less indebted to the dictates of reverence and established truth. While the circumstances of youth vary across and within terrains marked by racial and class differences, the modernist world of certainty that has traditionally policed, contained and insulated such difference has given way to a shared postmodern culture in which representational borders collapse into new hybridized forms of cultural performance, identity, and political agency.

(287-88)

In a culture where “identities merge and shift rather than become uniform and static” (288), it is not—and probably never was—enough to “do Shakespeare” and trust that exposure to the great man's work will cast its civilizing spell. Objects preserved in glass cases, as beautiful and valuable as they may be, are still only the detritus of the past. In preserving them we render them fixed and lifeless, and leave to chance the possible impact they may have on people's lives. But to insist that a cultural product be maintained within the curriculum is to state ipso facto that it is of vital importance in the lives of our students. More than ever, students need strategies for understanding—or at least coming to terms with—the world in which they must operate. Writing about the place of historical novels in children's literature but expressing similar concerns, John Stephens says that ours is a “highly technological and extremely acquisitive society, with great personal mobility and information resources,” but whose “systems and structures … tend to value doing and getting more than being” (203-4). A consequence of this has been “a loss of curiosity about and devaluing of interest in the historical past in late twentieth-century Western society caused by pressures to exist in the present and consider only the immediate future.” His conclusion should be regarded as foundational for the present discussion: “For teachers, the question becomes a matter of how readings of the past can be offered as a corrective to living in a fragmented, reified world” (203-4).

The methodological basis for teaching Shakespeare has to be derived from finding a place for his work in the postmodern world, and I believe that this concern already drives, at least implicitly, most pedagogical approaches. Teachers and educational resource groups strive constantly to make literary texts “relevant.” In the case of Shakespeare this involves strategies such as cartoon Macbeths and rock-opera Tempests, which under the formalist banner of New Criticism (the critical school which informed the learning of most teachers of English Literature) are scorned as paraphrase. Teachers may feel guilty that their classes are not really studying “literature”—perhaps they are not, and that may be a good thing. But while it is not the purpose of this paper to deal with the linguistic difficulties students may have in making meaning from Shakespeare, I hope to assuage some of the guilt by suggesting a way (or lending support for existing ways) of reading his plays within the specifics of the culture in which teachers and students coexist.

There is a certain irony underpinning this conciliatory process. Although students tend to feel more keenly any gaps between the teaching of literature and their perceived needs in the “real world,” the theoretical positions of teachers and students often reflect the opposite. Michael Wood sums up this “most common clash between student and teacher in our discipline today” thus: “The teacher's a historicist and the student isn't. The student believes in universals and the teacher doesn't” (18). The point is well made, for even without the support of theory the teacher is more likely to promote a contextual approach simply through a wider knowledge of the circumstances of a text's production, setting, characters and so forth. This difference also, I suspect, has something to do firstly with the way people, particularly the young, are positioned by the media as “global villagers” and consumers of information, entertainment, and products promoted and distributed on a worldwide basis. Education and social status tend to make teachers more resistant to (but by no means immune from) this positioning, as does time of life, which is the second factor. Young adults are facing up to the “big questions” of existence for the first time, so that attention is directed to universal emotions at the expense of immediate cultural and historical circumstances. Nevertheless, as Wood points out, “The students are not wrong, of course; or rather the teachers are not simply right.” Whatever our “different critical heritages, … we need a dialogue here, not a simple conversion experience” (18).

That students are better at dealing with universals than with contingent aspects of Shakespeare's plays is likely to become more pronounced when the play under study is not obviously historiographical. The romantic comedies of the 1590s are particularly difficult to historicize: they seem to be “about” universal binaries such as love/hate, loyalty/deceit, and trust/jealousy, with little concern for the precise time and location of the action and fairly tenuous links to the political and social issues of the era of their production. It is no wonder that so often they are produced with eclectic, ahistorical, or anachronistic costumes and settings (“When in doubt, choose the Edwardian era,” I once heard a theater practitioner say), Kenneth Branagh's film version of Much Ado About Nothing being an obvious example. During my one opportunity so far to teach Much Ado, my efforts to deal with the play along broadly historicist lines proved rather limited. Students were able to describe the possible literary sources of the play, and to note that these in turn were indebted to classical sources.² Acknowledgment of the influence of Castiglione's The Courtier on the exchanges between Beatrice and Benedick elicited discussions about relations between the sexes among the aristocracy, and spilled over into considerations of Elizabethan notions of courtliness. But for the most part, there was the ever-present danger that students would regard the play rather as Ben Jonson damned the efforts of Shakespeare and other rivals as “a mouldy tale, / Like Pericles, and stale / As the shrieve's crust” (Jonson 1975, 283). This seemed particularly so when dealing with the linchpin of the plot, Don John's slander against Hero's virginity and Claudio's subsequent denunciation of her. While some students saw this as an inroad for considering Elizabethan sexual politics, their overriding reaction was that the incident no longer carried the same weight as it once may have. The significance of the episode was, for the students, grounded firmly in the past, and served to reinforce their sense of alienation from the text. Thus I ended the semester with a strong sense of missed opportunity, and a desire to historicize the play, and probably Shakespeare generally, from a different angle.

The poststructuralist critical project called New Historicism³ in the American academy and usually equated with Cultural Materialism in the British calls for texts to be read not as simple reflections of larger historical movements or of unified world pictures, but as constituents of the thing itself we call “history.” This thing in turn “is always ‘narrated’,” so that the past itself can only be “represented” as a text, and the concept of “history” as a single entity becomes instead a collection of “discontinuous and contradictory ‘histories’” (Selden 1989, 95). A literary text should be seen “as largely replicating in its own dynamics and structure those of the culture at large … a molecular representation of the entire cultural organism, as it were” (Buchbinder 1991, 114-15). In other words, the tensions, contradictions, and struggles in the society in which the text was produced may be read in the text, as well as/instead of society's dominant and apparently unifying ideologies and philosophies.

There is another side to the new historicist agenda, however, which is of great value to the teacher of literature but which tends to get lost in the rush to revise our concepts of Elizabethan England or Romantic Europe. For if history is always a process of mediating the past, then

We can never transcend our own historical situation. The past is not something which confronts us as if it were a historical object, but is something we construct from already written texts of all kinds which we construe in line with our particular historical concerns.

(Selden 95)

Thus the new historicisms would seem to have more to offer the teacher of literature if the shift in emphasis moves away from analyzing past cultures through plays, popular songs, legal documents, iconography, travelers' tales, and so on, to examining aspects of our own culture and the way its texts are constantly shaped out of a reading of the past. Howard Felperin states the case well, in an essay which admits an important place in modern criticism for the often discredited romanticist notions of an idealized Shakespeare:

At a certain level, the historical text must always offer itself, and be received, as timeless and universal textuality even as it remains at another level remote and specific historicity—if it is to [be] interpreted at all. Otherwise the historical text would remain mute and impenetrable to any but its own culture and movement.

(14; original emphasis)

We are at last well on the way to reconciling the predisposition our students have for the universal qualities in texts with our own niggling concerns that somehow we must contextualize works within the specific cultures of their production. By allowing, as Felperin claims Coleridge and Hazlitt did, “for the possibility of analogy and communality between past and present based on linguistic and cultural continuity, … for a certain transhistoricity (as distinct from ahistoricity or transcendence),” we can be released from “the historical meaning of the text” (15), so that the culture we may concentrate on in our classes is our own.

Given this approach as a basis for classroom practice in the teaching of Shakespeare, the first step is to choose material from our own culture for reading (or viewing or hearing) in parallel with the play. The Cultural Studies agenda is concerned with “outlining ways high and popular culture can be studied alongside each other as forms of signifying practice” (Easthope 103), one of its premises being that “the split between high and popular culture—and the hegemonic effect likely from the superiority of high over popular culture—is vanishing in postmodern culture” (102). It might be added that this split was partly a product of time: what was “popular” once (commercial theater in Elizabethan times, for example) became “high” later; and partly of ideology: certain texts are privileged over others within a culture because they are seen to define a particular view of its “essence” (“conservative” Shakespeare is a compulsory part of the British school curriculum; “radical” Milton is not). The principle of a canon of literature works on what Easthope calls “the usual binary structure which includes one by excluding the other” (103), but in our eclectic world of information overload, can we justifiably study one text and not another on canonical grounds if “both … develop equally on the common ground of textuality” (103)?

I do not wish to promote, or be accused of, the idea that Cultural Studies and the new historicisms are merely different labels for the same set of practices. Nor do I have any illusions as to what we get up to as teachers of English Literature. As long as the discipline survives—and Easthope and others maintain that it has not much life left—English Literature will be about privileging certain texts in a manner with which exponents of Cultural Studies need not (and certainly would not) concern themselves. This discussion, after all, is about maintaining such a position for Shakespeare. But in the postmodern eclectic spirit we can borrow from the shared aims and methodologies of the new historicisms and Cultural Studies to break down some of the elitism associated with “Eng. Lit.” Both schools of criticism “defy traditional distinctions between high and popular culture by breaching disciplinary boundaries” (Easthope 120) in their willingness to read non-canonical texts in conjunction with accepted literary ones. And the image of the “cultural materialist believ[ing] that his or her head is already under the water” rather than “standing safely on shore and gazing at the sea of history” (Hawthorn 1994, 134) is a valuable one for teachers adopting a historicist approach to literature. It

requires that the investigator take full account of his or her historical location and of the historical life of literary works (including their life in the present time of the investigator), not just the historical situation of the work's creation and composition.

(134; my emphasis)

The approach outlined below does not dwell much on the theory that says that all text-making is ideological; nor does it prescribe necessarily “correct” readings based on class, gender, race and so on. Nevertheless, it is hoped that what follows upholds what Mellor and Patterson call “the right of English to claim for itself a specific type of pedagogy: one that focuses on developing in students the ability to interpret texts through the technique of ‘problematisation’” which in turn gives rise to the “production of particular readings” (49). And for those who think this is ideologically too thin, remember that teaching practice is ideological: by bringing cultural studies/new historicist methods to bear in literary study, we are adopting a specific ideological stance in relation to traditional hegemonic views about “literature.” This in itself should serve as a caveat to the unwary teacher who, casting about widely for texts from high and popular sources, may be called to account for those choices by students, parents, school heads, and the media.

The slur on Hero's chastity and her rejection by Claudio at the wedding is the aspect of Much Ado About Nothing which to modern readers might justify the play's title. This incident and the two characters involved are strongly tied to the generic formula of comic (but typically bordering on tragic) love complications and their eventual resolution. The whole originates from the older stories that make up the play's sources (reappearing in various forms in Othello, The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline [Cook 1980, 31]), and is an obvious target for the “mouldy tale” accusation. As such, it tends not to attract the same sort of interest as those things we like to think of as uniquely “Shakespearean,” epitomized in Much Ado in the characters of Beatrice and Benedick and their verbal battles. It is, after all, the “gloriously witty couple” (Branagh 1993, vii) that many famous acting duos choose to play. The challenge, then, is to transhistoricize the characters of Hero—described by one actress as “A dull and boring girl” and “a terrible part which it is almost impossible to make interesting” (quoted in Cook 49)—and Claudio—“an impossibly unromantic figure” (Mulryne 1965, 35; original emphasis)—and their predicament such that postmodern readers can accommodate them within their own culture.

One solution lies in teaching Much Ado in concert with the vast amount of material about the Charles and Diana scandals in the British royal family. Leonato's household is for all intents and purposes a court in miniature, and the manners and attitudes of its members and guests represent the traditions and customs common to contemporary European nobility. These traditions, customs, and attitudes still exist in the form of the various royal families of Europe, and nowhere more so than in the British monarchy, its very large extended family, and the aristocratic system actively promulgated in British society. Attitudes that the members of this system no longer have any influence must be qualified not only by the fact of their still considerable wealth, but by the amount of media space they continue to occupy and the debates in which they feature, for instance in Australia, where the pros and cons of republicanism flare up with every royal indiscretion revealed. The place of gossip, slander, and scandal in any construction of fame or celebrity is an important aspect of research into the lives of “the rich and famous,” and provides a convenient and, in terms of the popular culture in which our students are steeped, relevant point of entry for comparing the contexts and concerns of Shakespeare's era with our own.

Leonato may use the image of his daughter “fall'n / Into a pit of ink” (4.1.139-40) to describe the blackening of her honor, but the British royals would regard this as a very apt description of the gallons of printer's ink expended in exposing every aspect of their lives and reputations in recent years. The anecdotes, observations, surmise, gossip, and media “beat-ups” published in unchartable numbers are the modern equivalent of the old chronicles in which “most chroniclers tended to take their information as they found it, and made little attempt to separate fact from legend” (Abrams 1988, 26).⁴ The brief analysis that follows draws on a number of the more “respectable” of these latter-day chronicles: mainly works that have appeared in book form—although a number have been serialized in newspapers, particularly the Murdoch press—some shorter news items, and a television documentary. The Branagh film merits attention not only because for many students it is likely to be the first, if not the only, means of dealing with the play as a performance text, but for its part in the current celebrity/royal-watching process. Less squeamish researchers will find the pit of ink getting deeper (and murkier) as they delve into the seemingly endless mass of related material appearing in the tabloid press, gossip magazines, current affairs television, and even the odd mini-series. Nevertheless, the value of such an undertaking in terms of the space that it creates for Shakespeare study in the postmodern world, and for the light it sheds on our own culture, cannot be overestimated, and should by no means be regarded as trivial or undignified.

The question of Hero's virginity is not simply one of whether or not she is a virgin. Don John's scheme involves Claudio's witnessing Hero supposedly playing the “contaminated stale” (2.2.25) the very night before her wedding, so the focus is not so much on virginity for its own sake as on “Hero's disloyalty” (2.2.48) and subsequent rejection in the interests of what “would better fit [Claudio's] honour” (3.2.104-5). Claudio's denunciation of her at the wedding is nevertheless couched in analogies of chastity and its opposite.

You seem to me as Dian in her orb,
As chaste as is the bud ere it be blown;
But you are more intemperate in your blood
Than Venus. …

(4.1.57-60)

His classical reference begs for comparison with the Dian[a] of our own era, the Princess of Wales, who, despite attacks from her in-laws, the publication of a taped phone conversation with an alleged lover, and photographs of her bathing in the Caribbean or working out in a gym, manages still to maintain—as Hero does to Claudio, indicated in his use of “seem” and not “seemed”—an aura of the wronged heroine and the victim of the machinations of palace and media.

Diana's rise from “stunning mediocrity” (Dempster and Evans 1993, 58) to “Pop Princess” (Burchill 1992, 237) was a direct result of her suitability as a virgin bride for the Prince of Wales:

Unlike some of the prince's previous girlfriends, she had no “past,” no lovers to “kiss and tell.” Nor had she been in love before; the prince could expect that, as her first love, he would also be her last. She was young enough to be moulded to the role of wife and mother according to the needs of the monarchy.

(Dimbleby, 16 Oct. 1994: 2.1)

Innocence makes Diana malleable—grist to the monarchy's mill, to be refashioned into a future queen—and “in love.” Yet, just as Benedick ironically calls the newly smitten Claudio “Monsieur Love” (2.3.35-36) because one who “was wont to speak plain and to the purpose, like an honest man and a soldier” (18-19) has now become “the argument of his own scorn by falling in love” (11-12), so Charles, brought up in a family notorious for its lack of emotional display, was out of his depth in playing the Inamorato. Thus “the Prince's attitude towards women was hardly admirable,” and according to “one of his polo friends,” in a tone that might well be Benedick's, Charles “is shy, he is sensitive, he is sometimes devastatingly lonely, but he is also a shit” (Dempster and Evans 105). But what is not mentioned in the many unfavorable reminders of Charles's response “Whatever ‘in love’ means” in the television interview given after the announcement of their engagement, is that Diana choruses “Yes” (The Windsors part 4). The dynastic imperative forces love out into the margins of marriage—an optional, if desirable, extra; hence the importance of loyalty as the standard for judging the behavior of both Hero and Diana.

Claudio's efforts to assess Hero's suitability also seem quite loveless. He bothers Benedick with “Is she not a modest young lady?” (1.1.153) and “I pray thee tell me truly how thou lik'st her” (165-66), and to Don Pedro's recommendation that “the lady is very well worthy” he asks brazenly, “Hath Leonato any son, my lord?”—to be reassured that “she's his only heir” (274-75). In a similar mix of uncertainty and brashness, Charles formed one attachment after another, and had no qualms when “the faces [of his girlfriends] … were paraded—like bartered brides-to-be—before the populace for its delectation” (Dimbleby, 23 Oct. 1994: 2.2) by a story-hungry press.⁵ Meanwhile, “The difficulties of finding a suitable bride were becoming larger every day, given the age factor—the older Charles got, the more difficult it was going to be to find a convincing and tasteful virgin—and given the press attention that by now was building up around the issue” (Dempster and Evans 106). Wilson obviously has missed the point in wondering “how or where this obsession with virginity developed” (Wilson 1994, 48), but he notes that “by the time Prince Charles was thirty years old, the mood had reached fever pitch” (48).

Charles at last made his choice in Lady Diana Spencer, and the fever pitch was such that their wedding on 29 July 1981 became “the greatest ceremonial event ever mounted in the history of the British monarchy” (Dempster and Evans 126). It was “the subject of the stupendous, unimaginably intense observation: 600 million people watched it on television” (Wilson 175), with the Archbishop of Canterbury—crosier in hand like Prospero's staff—declaring it “the stuff of which fairy tales are made” (Dempster and Evans 126). But if the romance comedy tradition as employed by Shakespeare in the 1590s demonstrates anything, it is that the story often does not end with the wedding:

either a wedding is legalized or about to be celebrated, or a union is consummated, early or in the middle of the play, but then the completion of the marriage is abruptly interrupted, and the heroine or her allies must perform a difficult task or resolve a quandary connected with the law before there can be a celebration on the stage.

(Salingar 1974, 302)

In Much Ado, Hero is denounced in the “overtly ‘theatrical setting’” of the church wedding itself (Mulryne 35), and must “die” in order to be “reborn” as the chaste and fitting bride for a suitably chastened Claudio. Diana, “a real-life Cinderella—a bride who had so recently been the unhappy child of a broken marriage, miraculously reborn as an instant princess” (Dempster and Evans 126), soon found herself and her marital problems exposed to “all eyes, tongues, minds, and injuries” (4.1.243) on the stage of the world media.

In hindsight, there were signs threatening the fairy-tale image of the Wales' marriage from the outset. Charles, ever vacillating, and now lacking the guidance of his uncle the Earl Mountbatten, his Benedick and Don Pedro rolled into one but killed by an IRA bomb in 1979, came close to calling off the engagement, especially when Diana asked, “Would you marry me if I were not a virgin?” (Dempster and Evans 118). On a broader social scale, at the actual time of the wedding there were riots, looting, and burning in various parts of England, most notably at Toxteth, carried out by a “deprived, unhappy, disadvantaged population” (The Windsors part 4). The very minor position occupied by ordinary people in any construction of romance is made very clear in representations such as Branagh's film, where they are servants, revelers (only a step or two away from becoming rioters), and the crowd at the wedding, but voiceless and powerless otherwise. Their only champions in the play, Dogberry and Verges, are portrayed at the very least as ridiculous and in the Branagh film as “mad” (Branagh 58 and 75), and the household breathes a sigh of relief as they exit.

Phyllis Rackin notes that “In a chronicle, the story of England is the story of its kings” (24), and Salingar points out that during the 1590s, “Shakespeare was writing comedies in alternation with the national history plays … And his comedies are related in form to his chronicles of the national monarchy” (254). Both form a part of the publicity that the Tudor monarchs actively sought “to authenticate their questionable claim to the throne” (Rackin 1990, 4), and Steven Mullaney's observation about how this was achieved makes clear how the process of textualizing authority positions us—the “common people”—as outside looking in:

In forums ranging from wonder cabinets to court masques and popular romances, from royal entries and travellers' narratives to the popular playhouses of Elizabethan London, the pleasures of the strange are invoked to solicit our attention as spectators, auditors, or readers.

(Quoted in Rackin 15)

Here we are, too, peering through chinks in the palace walls by means of television (the “wonder cabinet”), newspapers, and fifth columnist royal observers. The Windsors have been branded “the greatest performing monarchy in history” (Dempster and Evans 126) in their own efforts to court popularity and publicity, but as the current chronicles tell, they have paid a heavy price. Instead of being satisfied with covering royal turns at special occasions and then going away, like the helpful but aggravating Dogberry, the media intensified its royal watching to the point where they have been accused of anything from causing the breakdown of the three Windsor children's marriages to actively plotting the overthrow of the monarchy itself in the interests of republicanism.⁶ Shakespeare's plays, too, position audiences as royal watchers: his “stage world gravitates towards the great house or the court. He depicts the gentry from the outside, but they stand at the centre” (Salingar 255). But while “the Privy Council and the Court nourished the professional drama … because it served their own interests” (Montrose 58), the drama in turn could not always accommodate the wish-fulfillment of its patrons. The requirements of the genre, rather than “doctrinal ends” (66), determine the world-picture. Call the tale a romantic comedy and the protagonists are set “on the threshold of marriage and parenthood” but not yet at the stage of “the consummation and procreation which guarantee the continuity of the socio-economic order” (67). On the other hand, call it a chronicle and the dictates of time take over, and “Time reveals not the restorative action of romance but the destructive action of history” (Kastan 1982, 75).

In recording the action of time, the chronicles of Diana and Charles show how the marriage soon made Diana feel the opposite of the fairy-tale princess. In Much Ado, Hero's continued attraction for the menfolk despite (and maybe even because of) her supposed guilt is revealed in the curiously paradoxical terms of her denunciation at the wedding, where she is called “pretty lady” (4.1.98), yet “most foul, most fair” (103) and “pure impiety and impious purity” (104). Diana, rapidly acquiring star quality “of truly international magnitude” (Dempster and Evans 138) the more she was courted by the media and the public, and for whom “the world was now literally a stage” (Burchill 238), nevertheless felt herself “the biggest prostitute in the world” in having “to live someone else's idea of who and what [she] should be” (Morton 1994, 2:1). Although the target of Don John's calumny, Hero is more the victim of the credulousness of Don Pedro and Claudio and their puffed-up sense of honor, not to mention her own father's willingness to join in the denunciation. Similarly, whatever stories might be circulated in the media, Diana's feelings of guilt and inadequacy arise from the attitude of the royal household itself, exemplified by the “four stinging letters from the Duke of Edinburgh” which “argued that Diana was far from innocent in the breakdown of her marriage and that it was difficult to blame Charles for seeking comfort with [Camilla] Parker Bowles” (Morton 1994, 2:2). By contrast, the Duke wrote Charles “a long and sympathetic letter … praising what he saw as his son's saint-like fortitude” (Dimbleby, 23 Oct. 1994: 2.3). Small wonder that Diana “began to suspect plots against her” (Morton 1994, 2:2), or that the rest of the chronicles to date tend to deal with Diana's exacting retribution from the Windsors in ways that cast her as Hero, Claudio, and even Don John. The necessarily brief summary that follows is nevertheless sufficiently revealing.

As Claudio she becomes jealous and uncertain herself, suspicious “that her husband was persistently unfaithful” despite Charles's Hero-esque “declarations of loyalty and fidelity” (Dimbleby, 16 Oct. 1994: 2.2). As Hero she feels martyred to the cause of the monarchy: “Docile Diana” (Dempster and Evans 141) through whom “the royal family would be renewed, protected and loved for generations to come” (133). Yet just as Hero is reborn “Another Hero” while reasserting herself “a maid” (5.4.62 and 65), so Diana has re-emerged as “the Princess as Pop Star” and “an icon of sexy saintliness” (Burchill 240 and 243)—no longer a maid, to be sure, but one who attracts a loyalty that operates “beyond divorce and dishonour” (244). Part of this process of self-fashioning (to use a term of New Historicist guru, Stephen Greenblatt) involved Diana's almost certain active collusion in the production of that landmark chronicle of the Windsors, Andrew Morton's Diana: Her True Story, which painted the Wales' marriage as fraught with problems between an insensitive husband and a long-suffering wife (Wilson 1994, 54 and 143). Charles in turn authorized Dimbleby's biography, initiating “an extraordinary war … in print between the Prince and his wife … to bring [each] other into ridicule and contempt” (144). Like Don John, both parties cry out, “How canst thou cross this marriage?” (2.2.8).

It is as a potentially destructive influence on the Windsors that Diana plays Don John. In a secretly taped telephone conversation to a supposed lover in December 1989 published in the press as the so-called “Squidgygate” transcript in 1992, Diana bemoans the emptiness she feels “after all I've done for this fucking family” (Dempster and Evans 240), and makes other disparaging remarks about the Windsors.⁷ New historicist criticism often focuses on the way rulers legitimize their authority by making use of “already constructed dichotomies which establish the deviance of certain classes and groups” in order to “cast out specific others” (Selden 97). One of these forms of deviance is perceived as “sexual liberty” (97); but if the “demonisation of sexual deviance” is a means of reasserting “the relations of power” (97), then the assertion of sexual liberty can be regarded as a means of establishing a form of autonomy from the main power structure. Diana's apparent adultery (in word if not deed) is an assertion of this autonomy, and reinforces the chastity/loyalty association that prizes the virgin with no other loyalties, past or present. The extent to which she has become powerful enough in her own right to resist being cast out by the palace (and of the latter's growing impotence in her case) may be gauged in comparison to the fate of her sister-in-law, Sarah, Duchess of York.

Sarah tried to follow Diana's example by getting the press onside in her own marriage breakdown with Prince Andrew. But with the publication of the notorious “toe-sucking” photographs, the demonization of Sarah was complete: “Her position was irrecoverable … and her sordid life … contributed to the general cheapening of the Royal House in the eyes of the Press” (Wilson 1994, 153).⁸ Curiously, the Branagh film chose for its Margaret character a red-haired and freckled actress very reminiscent of Sarah. Yet in the film's depiction of the indiscretion which Borachio sets up to discredit Hero (which is only reported in playtext), there is no real possibility of an audience mistaking the Margaret-actress for the petite brunette cast as Hero.⁹ The film (made in 1992, The Windsors' annus horribilis) seems to highlight the moralistic/voyeuristic dichotomy intrinsic to our constructions of celebrity: “Everyone agreed that it was morally insupportable that such photographs [of Sarah's St. Tropez holiday] should be in circulation, and everyone bought the Daily Mirror on the morning that they were published” (Wilson 152). Helped by the conventions of romantic comedy, Margaret finds forgiveness in Leonato's household; lacking the support of media, public, and palace, Sarah is banished from the royal circle “under a cloud” (Campbell 1993, 207).

The transhistoricization of Much Ado opens up many other possibilities for analysis. One is the use of trickery and deception as romantic comedy trope and for gathering news. In the Branagh film point-of-view camera angles, eavesdropping, masquerade, and decoying are all used to excellent effect, suggesting paparazzi with telephoto lenses, bugged telephones, leaked stories to the press, and other devices that have eked out the Diana and Charles chronicles. Another issue is the nature of status, privilege, and celebrity, which not only depend upon publicity yet are so easily its victim, but also seek legitimation through mutual association. Thus members of the royal family try to broaden their popularity base by sharing the spotlight with film and media stars, from the Mountbattens visiting Chaplin in the thirties to the Windsors taking part in a celebrity TV game show in the eighties. Again, the Branagh film is a useful springboard in its transatlantic mingling of old- and new-world dynasties of stars celebrating a common Shakespeare heritage.

This discussion has attempted to support and develop the ways in which classroom teachers keep open a dynamic space for Shakespeare in the postmodern world, which is much more than just helping him to maintain a precarious foothold associated with half-forgotten rituals in rarefied environments. As Hamlet urges Polonius to see the members of the acting troupe “well-bestowed” and “well used,” because they (“and presumably their product” [Patterson 1988, 100]) “are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time,”¹⁰ so should we teachers of Shakespeare—frequently in danger of becoming Polonius-like in our opinions of our own learning—not scorn the use of the chronicles of our time to bridge the critical gap between “universal human themes” and the specific historical and cultural circumstances of a text's production and reception.

Notes

1. See Hawthorn 6-7 for an explanation of aporia. My use here is in the generalized sense of “irresolvable doubts and hesitations thrown up by the reading of the text” (Hawthorn 7). While Hawthorn points out that the term is “not normally used … in a pejorative sense” by critics (7), I believe that my use of the term is apt. Getting students to the stage of using this condition as a “site” where they discover “the freedom to play with the text” (7) is of course the rationale of this paper.

2. See Humphreys 5-23 for a detailed discussion of the play's sources.

3. Throughout this paper, New Historicism/Historicist denotes the specific (mainly American) school of criticism; new historicism/historicist is used for the general poststructuralist movement regardless of national/cultural adherence.

4. Wilson also employs the term “chronicles” to describe these texts (for example, page 46).

5. Some idea of these “faces” may be gained from the photographs in Dempster and Evans and in Campbell. The photographs in Morton, Diana: Her True Story, not only parade the stages of Diana's life before the reader, but do so in an intimate and perhaps even questionable manner, in effect positioning the reader as “catalogue browser” and Diana as potential “mail-order bride.”

6. See, for example, The Windsors part 4 for opinions about the role of Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corporation papers have regularly printed controversial material about the Windsors. Murdoch's status as Australian-turned-American citizen with huge interests and influence in Britain carries many resonances for an “empire writes back” perspective and critique. His father, Keith, a news correspondent in World War I, set a family precedent for attacks on the British establishment by daring to lay the blame for the military disaster at Gallipoli in 1915 on the ineptitude of British generalship; see C. E. W. Bean, Anzac to Amiens (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1946), 170.

7. Charles, of course was guilty of his own indiscretions in the “Camillagate” tape made at almost exactly the same time as Diana's conversation, and published in January 1993. While there was obviously a great deal of the double standard operating in relation to the two incidents in official circles, Charles seems to have lost much popular support as a result of the revelation, and “A sense of shame tormented him for months” (Dempster and Evans 220). Transcripts of both tapes appear in Dempster and Evans 231-64. See also Campbell 157-58 for some startling claims about parts of “Squidgygate” not released for publication.

8. The details of the incident are described in Dempster and Evans 205-8, who claim that the revelation of “Squidgygate” four days later actually saved Sarah from further ordeal by the media (208). It should be bourne in mind that Sarah was already separated from Andrew at the time; Diana and Charles were not yet separated when the “Squidgygate” and “Camillagate” tapes were made.

9. “One seriously cool gal” claims the caption to an off-camera shot of her with sunglasses and cleavage (Branagh 126), as if desperately trying to offset the “boring girl” image of Hero and substitute instead a version of “pop princess.”

10. I owe the use of this quotation from Hamlet 2.2 to Patterson's very fine New Historicist “recovery” of the circumstances surrounding Shakespeare's theater.

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