In my college Shakespeare courses, I have often asked students to textually intervene in a play or poem, to take something about the play and tweak it in some way, resulting in a new “writing/reading” of that play. For example, what would happen were we to re-write Romeo and Juliet in the present (as Baz Luhrman does in his film Romeo + Juliet)? Another tweak on Romeo and Juliet could be to set the lovers in modern day Washington DC and have them be the children of a pair of feuding Republican and Democratic senators. What twenty-first century political statements could the play then be made to allude to? Or perhaps the play could be tweaked so that Juliet is played by a man instead of woman, altering the play’s central themes significantly. There is no end to the creative possibilities for textual intervening in these plays. In this sense, the plays’ scripts serve as the creative clay with which students can then shape their own ideas and themes, mixing their own creative energies with that of Shakespeare.

One of my biggest challenges in asking students to get their hands dirty in Shakespeare and create such a textual intervention comes in their steadfast belief that there is a certain holiness in Shakespeare’s words that they are not allowed or worthy to mettle in. They perceive a “right” and a “wrong” way to read and understand Shakespeare and fear that their muddying in his works comes close to sacrilege. They don’t believe that they have the right to mix their own creative energy with Shakespeare’s.

I’m presently working on a paper exploring textual intervention in the study of Shakespeare, and want an early section of the paper to address our right to get our hands dirty with Shakespeare. I wholeheartedly believe that Shakespeare’s plays are intended for all people (see my previous rantings in this blog) and also that all of those who experience Shakespeare have the right to get involved creatively in his plays. There is nothing holy in his writings that prevent this.

In fact, people have been getting their hands dirty with Shakespeare’s plays for centuries. Actors influenced Shakespeare’s plays directly as well as book publishers. I wrote yesterday that I was curious about how these publishers influenced the plays that we read today, but in addition to being curious about it, Lasser provides some evidence for me to further my argument that Shakespeare plays are indeed properly classified as collaborative projects. Lasser suggest that no “single, authoritative work lay behind the multiple texts of a given play” and that Shakespeare himself meddled in his own plays, changing them (14). Further print played a role “in the creation of the author function in the early modern period” meaning that our idea of Shakespeare the author was something that was shaped after Shakespeare wrote (14-15). Gary Taylor has wrote that Shakespeare’s reputation as literature’s elite writer did not develop until many decades after his death, and that in the Restoration playwrights adapted Shakespeare’s plays for their particular stages, shaping it to fit the needs of their audience.

I’m going to play a bit more with some of Lasser’s sources and see if I can dig up a bit more on this theme.

Peace out everybody! Wish you all the best!