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Exorcising Shakespeare: intertextual hauntings, lethal inheritance, and lost traditions

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Exorcising Shakespeare: intertextual hauntings, lethal inheritance, and lost traditions

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Exorcising Shakespeare:
Intertextual Hauntings, Lethal Inheritance, and Lost Traditions

by

Richard A. Edinger

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

May 2018

Copyright 2018 Richard A. Edinger

ii
Dedication

To my wife Allison, with love and gratitude

iii
Acknowledgements

I am delighted to have this small space to show my appreciation for everyone who has
been amazingly supportive during the process of putting this dissertation together. A huge thank
you to my patient and generous committee: Bruce Smith, Rebecca Lemon, and Virginia Kuhn.
To Bruce, especially, thank you for cheering me on with every email and conversation we had.
Your reassurances gave me the confidence I often lacked. Many thanks to the English faculty
who guided me, educated me, and tolerated me, in particular Jim Kincaid, who encouraged me to
start and models for me how to never stop. To my friends and colleagues in the English
Department and the Thematic Option Honors Program, thank you for reminding me that each
step of the way was a triumph. Penny Von Helmolt, who warned me that pursuing a Ph.D. would
make me insufferable, thank you for suffering through it with me. Flora Ruiz, knowing that you
had my back made me a better student and advisor myself. Thank you to Stephen Pasqualina for
debating my arguments with me and convincing me that my work was interesting. To my father,
who always asked me to repeat what I was writing about, know that your questions always
helped me recenter my priorities. Finally, thank you to my mother. You inspired my love of
literature and academia, and so I share this achievement with you.

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Table of Contents

Dedication ii

Acknowledgments iii

Abstract v

Introduction: The Scholar and the Ghost 1
Speaking to Intertextual Hauntings 4
The Case Studies 13

Chapter One: Haunting 20
Shakespearean Indigestion 28
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Summoned 46
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Haunted 59
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 70

Chapter Two: Possession 80
Possession in A Thousand Acres 88
Intertextual Agriculture 94
An Intertextual Body 102

Chapter Three: Exorcism 118
Modes and Motives 120
’Tis Gone 129
Exorcism and Tradition 134
Traditions in Throne of Blood 138
Warning Signs 159
The Haunted Ambient 171

Conclusion: Giving Up the Ghost 192

Works Cited and Consulted 199

v
Abstract

My dissertation reconsiders how contemporary works that engage with Shakespeare have
often been read, interpreted, and valued through the occasion of that engagement as opposed to
the experience of effects and meanings that are produced by the work itself. This re-viewing
allows me to articulate a theory of intertextuality expressed as a haunted relationship between
texts. As a paradigm for analysis, intertextual haunting draws our attention to how the triangle of
relations between the text, the “original” it reworks, and the reader leave little space for
alternative voices to be heard over that of Shakespeare. The circulations between the three
vertices produce a range of expectations that drive toward a sense of the text inevitably bending
toward Shakespeare, affecting plot, characters, conventions, significances, and the reception
experience. In representing Shakespeare within textual interactions as a ghost that haunts, this
project seeks to address, broadly speaking, questions of cultural inheritance and the maintenance
of traditions. What is our relationship to what has come before? Can we have a healthy
relationship with the past? If not, why do we return to it again and again? Why do certain
memories survive, and can we survive these memories? Tying haunting with concepts suggested
by possession widens the ways we can read texts that struggle under the weight of their
relationship with Shakespeare. By invoking the possibility for exorcism, we can investigate texts
that might resist, successfully or not, the threat of possession he poses. Through three main case
studies – Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand
Acres, and Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood – the critical themes of haunting, possession, and
exorcism are explored both in theory and in practice.

1
Introduction
The Scholar and the Ghost

But soft, behold—lo where it comes again!
William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1.1.107)

The scholar, Horatio, is drawn into Hamlet to stand witness, perhaps for many things, but
initially so he may see the Ghost and “approve [the guards’] eyes and speak to it” (1.1.27).
1

Speaking to a thing has a double meaning of communication and testimony. Horatio will be able
to verify what the guards have seen by experiencing the Ghost himself and thus will be able to
corroborate its existence. The double meaning returns when the apparition returns, as Horatio is
implored, “Thou art a scholar – speak to it, Horatio. [. . .] Question it, Horatio” (1.1.40, 43). Not
only is he to address the ghost, he is to account for it: “Mark it, Horatio” (1.1.41). Horatio asks
his questions: What are you? Why have you come now? Why in this form? He demands an
explanation – “Stay, speak, speak, I charge thee speak” (1.1.49) – but gets no answers. Horatio
can see the Ghost and can try to “speak to it,” an attempt at communication, but it will not speak
back. His recourse is to “speak to it,” an attempt at description, though being definitive is
difficult for Horatio. It looks like the King (1.1.41 and 1.1.57-58). It has the King’s form (1.1.45-
46). Without an answer from the Ghost, without knowing its intent, what more can Horatio say
except what it is like or what it seems to be? Description is not the same as identification.
Horatio is a reader, like us, who is confronted with an object that stirs curiosity and
questions yet is unwilling (or unable) to tell its secrets. Similarly, when we engage with a text,
we read to try to make meaning, but the text holds back from committing to our reading.

1
All Shakespeare quotations are taken from The Norton Shakespeare.

2
Perhaps, what we sense is how a text, as Wolfgang Iser notes, “cannot adapt itself to each reader
it comes into contact with” (“Interaction Between Text and Reader” 108–09). The reader can ask
questions of the text, but “can never learn from the text how accurate or inaccurate are his views
of it” (“Interaction Between Text and Reader” 109). The reader’s recourse to silence is to note
the form and, as Horatio determines, “impart what we have seen” (1.1.150). In Iser’s words, the
reader “is drawn into the events and made to supply what is meant from what is not said” as “it is
the implications and not the statements that give shape and weight to the meaning” (“Interaction
Between Text and Reader” 111).
When confronted with the Ghost Hamlet, the scion, also speaks to it. Yet, rather than ask
questions as Horatio had done, Hamlet provides it with an identity, that of his king and father:

Thou com’st in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee. I’ll call thee Hamlet,
King, father, royal Dane. O answer me!
Let me not burst in ignorance, but tell
Why thy canonized bones, hearsèd in death,
Have burst their cerements, why the sepulchre
Wherein we saw thee quietly enured
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws
To cast thee up again. (1.4.24-32)

When Hamlet speaks to the Ghost and insists on answers rather than “ignorance,” the Ghost
speaks back. Yet Hamlet receives more than answers; Hamlet is charged – called upon to act and

3
to plot – by the spirit of his father, who provides the impetus: the story of his murder. But,
Hamlet is not the origin, the source, the inscriber; Hamlet is not the author. Hamlet receives a
narrative that in turn shapes the rest of his own story.
2
Succinctly, Hamlet recognizes the
“canonized bones” of his father and heeds their call, “Remember me” (1.4.91).
Through this call, the Ghost – the “questionable shape” that was thought to have been
“quietly enured” – is “cast [. . .] up again.” Importantly, the Ghost is not Hamlet Senior himself,
but an echo of him; it is neither the original nor the source, but akin to Barthes’ “threads of the
‘already written’ and the ‘already read’” (qtd. in Allen 5–6). The Ghost is a ghosting, an illusion
of/allusion to the prior, a trace, though not one without power. “For it is as the air invulnerable”
(1.1.126), we discover, perhaps because the bones of Hamlet Senior were “canonized” and so
even in after death, the Ghost can maintain authority. “Remember me,” it commands. In a sense,
this is the commandment of a tradition, the received narrative that calls on us to act. In the
context of this project, the Ghost is that of Shakespeare’s play, what I will label beta-text, while
Hamlet – the scion, the inscribed, that which is haunted – may be read as the palimpsest, or what
I will label the nu-text. Unlike the playwright, Shakespeare’s works are unable to stay “hearsèd
in death.” They linger on, cast up again and again, circulating promiscuously through various
times, spaces, cultures, and media; they haunt us, and when we encounter them, charge us
remember.

2
Which, we should not forget, includes Hamlet working through his father’s narrative by re-
working another prior text, The Murder of Gonzago.

4
Speaking to Intertextual Hauntings

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie
outside of books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is
as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library
seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-
old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a
living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure
of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had
produced them or had been their conveyers.
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (286)

The “murmuring” of books speaking to other books and the disturbing realization that the
dialogue never ceases as texts “surviv[e] the death of those who had produced them” suggest an
extraordinarily haunted intertextual landscape. This unsettling world novice monk Adso walks
into casts a dark tone to Bakhtin’s argument that “[e]very conversation is full of transmissions
and interpretations of other people’s words.” By this, he explains, “At every step one meets a
‘quotation’ or a ‘reference’ to something that a particular person said, a reference to ‘people say’
or ‘everyone says,’ to the words of the person one is talking with, or to one’s own previous
words, to a newspaper, an official decree, a document, a book and so forth” (682). Though Julia
Kristeva is credited with the term “intertextuality” (Allen 14), she was informed by and
responding to the work of structuralists like Bakhtin (15). Theorists like Barthes picked up the
word and explored how “The idea of the text, and thus of intertextuality, depends [. . .] on the
figure of the web, the weave, the garment (text) woven from the threads of the ‘already written’
and the ‘already read’” (qtd. in Allen 5–6). The opening Hamlet metaphor is reflected in Bakhtin,
whose conception of the “authoritative word” helps bridge my Danish allegory with a theory of
discourse: “The authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it
binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally; we encounter it

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with its authority already fused to it. [. . .] It is, so to speak, the word of the fathers. Its authority
was already acknowledged in the past. It is a prior discourse” (683). Bakhtin’s paternal metaphor
helps transpose what can be read in the Ghost of Hamlet Senior into a theory of intertextual
haunting. Bakhtin’s “authoritative word,” like the words of the Ghost, demands and binds “us.”
But, outside of a revenge plot, what does it mean to “acknowledge” prior discourse and what
does it mean to “make it our own”?
These are the questions of inheritance that my project pursues. They require a laminated
response as there are two interlocutors to consider: Hamlet and Horatio, or, the remembering text
and its reader. Rather than “layered,” these two are merged, inseparable, a fused composite
produced by various processes. These two axes translate into two of this project’s areas of
exploration: how a text speaks to its own ghosts, how a text remembers; and how we as readers
speak to the text’s ghosts, how we impart our encounters. Critically, Horatio’s proposition that
the appearance of the Ghost “bodes some strange eruption to our state” (1.1.68) suggests an
inherent anxiety or distress in intertextuality, a throughline this project follows. Hamlet is a
tragedy after all. Charged as he is to remember and to act out of remembrance, nothing comes
easily to Hamlet. He leaves a trail of death and despair, and while Hamlet may have jokes and
jabs to make, these are couched within questions of his stability. The entry and intervention of
the Ghost into Hamlet’s existence turns mourning to trauma, and yet, what is Hamlet without the
Ghost? Horatio, meanwhile, is witness to it all, with an inability to intercede. Still, the cliché
goes, he lives to tell the tale. As a scholar myself, this project provides an opportunity to act as a
witness to haunting and to ask questions of the Ghost, mark what I see, and speak to it.
In curating my case studies for theorizing a haunted intertextuality, I have moved away
from Shakespeare’s own plays to use postmodern contemporary texts. While “[t]he prevailing

6
interpretation is that postmodernism offers a value-free, decorative, de-historicized quotation of
past forms,” I second Linda Hutcheon’s argument that “that postmodernist parody is a value-
problematizing, de-naturalizing form of acknowledging the history (and through irony, the
politics) of representations” (The Politics of Postmodernism 90). Hutcheon is a central figure in
contemporary studies of intertextuality and so, before moving ahead with her thoughts on
postmodern texts, let me clarify that what Hutcheon refers to with her term “parody” is
intertextuality. Her choice of “parody” marks a distinction from the intertextuality described by
Kristeva and Barthes; where the poststructuralists saw constellations of virtually all texts woven
from previous texts, Hutcheon refers to more recent theories of intertexuality that posit the term
in conjunction with concepts of appropriation and adaptation. Despite its conceptual usefulness,
Graham Allen writes, “this substitution of parody for intertextuality can lead to unhelpful
complications, and on occasion Hutcheon would fare better by employing the term intertextuality
rather than continue to reshape and redirect notions of parody” (184). Indeed, Hutcheon’s
decision to redefine terms such as parody that most readers understand to mean something
specifically different can be quite confusing. As with the decision to allude to Shakespeare, it
may be nearly impossible to erase centuries of meaning, connotative or Webster.
Hutcheon, and Allen’s response to her, demonstrate how the terms in circulation about
the topic of intertextuality are problematically variable and legion. Before considering the how or
the why, a rundown of terminology helps address what am I talking about. In other words, it is
crucial to establish the language with which objects of study may be identified. This is not an
attempt at definition; rather an attempt at differentiation. My catalogue is by no means
exhaustive, and the rise of terms and the theoretical stances behind them would be its own book-
length project. Wikipedia, in fact, has a section within the entry for “intertextuality” headed

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“Competing Terms.” The following, then, are the main terms worth considering for this project:
allusion, reference, intertextuality (and its derivatives), adaptation, appropriation, citation, and
quote. In addition, there are others I choose to neglect at this time, such as “parody,” “pastiche,”
“re-play,” or “recycling” as they seem to be either a subcategory that falls under one (or more) of
the aforementioned main terms, a genre that functions through one (or more), or an un-/helpful
alternate and/or more esoteric reiteration. After Julia Kristeva’s introduction of the term,
intertextuality has developed into different directions of meaning. The term has become all
encompassing. Are we speaking of the mere relationship between texts? Are we talking about the
enormity of the relationship between texts, that is “Discourse”? The internet-age loans a potential
follow-up: hypertext, a world wide web of texts with no “original” or concept of “primary.” Such
a borrowing from internet jargon suggests that intertextuality itself may be thought of as a kind
of technology: an innovation, technique, method, and process, all in one. So, despite its
variability, intertextuality as a complex and flexible term serves well.
Regarding the labels of the texts in question, the difficulty may be sidestepping implicit
biases that can shape arguments in unforeseen ways. A common method of developing terms in
this area of research is to suggest the nature of the relationship between the texts – the degree of
“independence” one has from the other – and connect that state to each text’s contribution to the
construction of meaning. Derived from intertextuality, intertext appears as a fairly bias-free term
for the text that draws on others. However, it tends to be partnered with source text, a loaded
term that seems to grant that text authority as the antecedent and the “original.” Some critics
have used the more poetic term palimpsest for the reworking text, notably Gerard Genette, who
takes the word for the title of his book. Palimpsest derives from archaeological terminology, and
suggests two texts “on the same parchment, one text [. . .] superimposed upon another, which it

8
does not quite conceal but allows to show through” (Genette 398). The term, however, suggests
an attempt at effacement, a concept that this project will explore, but to which it is not limited.
I would consider a quotation to be a precise reproduction of some segment of the
“original.” In a written text, a quotation almost always appears within quotation marks, a signal
that brackets the line out of its context to indicate that the line appears elsewhere and that
elsewhere precedes temporally the text in which the quotation appears. In film or television, a
quotation may be similarly bracketed with a screen appearing within the frame, say, a monitor
playing another film within the film. Indeed, “framing” may be a way to spot a quotation; a
quotation is cued or distinctly indicated that it is a quotation. The term doubles as a noun and as
the particular act of reproduction. Citation may take this a step farther by explicitly supplying the
identity of the source, the term doubling as a noun and as the process of attribution. By clearly
demonstrating a source, a quotation and citation seem to exist independent of the text in which
they appear. The ability for either a quotation or citation to help construct meaning or take on
new meanings due to context within the text in which it appears is mediated by the strong
association with the source. Reference seems similar to an extent, but is overly broad; it lacks a
specificity that can be teased apart to make the term useful. It indicates a source, but not a
relationship to that source. The term indicates that it may be spotted in the text in which it
appears, but reference does not gesture toward how it may function within that text.
Appropriation seems to be a wider term, potentially encapsulating others, though it has
its distinctiveness: a political charge. Perhaps this stems from the concept of “cultural
appropriation” with its pejorative and exploitative connotations. Indeed, there does seem to be an
element of larceny within appropriation, an implication of a crime and a guilty party: somebody
has taken something that does not belong to them. Given that Shakespeare is an “object” of high

9
value, to use appropriation in the context of this project invites a particular slant in how texts that
“take (from)” Shakespeare would be understood. Appropriation will be used in Chapter Three in
conjunction with an elaboration on aspects of Japanese cultural heritage, but only to the extent
that the connotations of the term are used as part of an argument.
Equally complex is adaptation, though the objects the term may identify vary greatly
from critic to critic. Despite this instability, the term is widely used. Unlike terms like allusion,
quote, citation, or appropriation, adaptation does not convey a sense of a unit within a larger text.
It seems to indicate a text unto itself, the whole rather than a piece, and thus has a degree of
independence from a source. However, the ability to “hold its own” depends on the adaptation
and so depends on what one considers an adaptation. Throne of Blood, which I would consider to
be Kurosawa’s adaptation of Macbeth, can be viewed without knowledge of Macbeth. It “works”
on its own. Similarly, Jane Smiley’s adaptation, A Thousand Acres, is intelligible without
foreknowledge of King Lear. How far from the original must an adaptation venture to be an
adaptation? Is that distance qualitative or quantitative or does there even need to be distance? Is
every performance of a scripted play an adaptation? How does adaptation relate to the
transformation between media forms? The main concern, even with all its possible uses, is that
“adaptation” is a loaded term: it suggests a “value judgment” (Yoshimoto 259) that comes to the
fore with Shakespearean intertextuality as the adapted play is almost always cherished as the
masterpiece, while the adaptation’s status is debatable. In an exploration of intertextual haunting,
to have a term prefigure a power differential results in an inability to see past haunting as
inevitable.
An allusion marches on its intelligibility; it is to be recognized. Meaning is constructed
via the source and that meaning can be carried forward through the allusion. Yet, the allusion can

10
also be reshaped by its context to some extent. A once tragic line can become humorous. The
allusion is both dependent and independent in relation to its source and to the text within which it
appears. Unlike a quote, an allusion may not be framed. So, what happens if it is not recognized?
Does the unit cease to be an allusion? This question does not raise questions of authorship and
intent as much as it raises questions of who or what is responsible for the construction of
meaning in the text in which the allusion appears. The author places the allusion in the text, but
the author cannot ultimately choose the reader (arguably) and the reader’s knowledge is no
guarantee. Who or what fails in such a situation: the author, allusion, text, reader, or the source
or the author of the source? To what extent is a text intelligible if its allusions are not?
Importantly, an allusion almost hails the reader in an Althusserian sense; the allusion asks for
participation from the reader. Allusion is collusion. It draws in the reader in a way useful to this
project, however the term is simply not always appropriate to what the text under observation is
doing.
Out of a need and a hope to get around many of the above issues, I have decided to
develop my own two terms to think through intertextuality. Beta-text is my word for what others
have called the source text or origin text. The term beta-text suggests a text that is not an origin
point (as “alpha-text” would imply) and still far from the end of intertextual development. Nu-
text (pardon the pun) envelops the re-working, re-telling, adaptation, etc. Nu-text implies a text
down the line from the beta-text, but still only about half-way down. The nu-text is not the end or
summation (as “omega-text” would imply). There will always be future iterations. The nu-text is
also a cohesive whole and does refer to an aspect or unit. Allusions, references, quotes, pastiche,
and so on may appear in and contribute to the construction of a nu-text, but the appearance of
any one of these does not guarantee the text in which it appears is a nu-text. D. J. Hopkins and

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Bryan Reynolds help structure my understanding of the beta-text and nu-text within the context
of intertextual haunting when they ask us to “[r]ecall that at a séance, the ‘medium’ is the
controlling, conjuring figure through whom others – no longer living – enter to be among those
still alive and in attendance” (272). The nu-text is the “medium” through which the ghost of the
beta-text is conjured and enters to be among those of us in attendance.
What term best describes the party in attendance, encountering the text? “Viewer” seems
too passive in this case. One can view or watch and not comprehend or even attempt to
comprehend. “Audience” is also weak and too easily slips toward the phrase “intended
audience.” Receiver also seems passive. Given these concerns, I have settled on “reader” for this
project. Intertextuality must be read, with the connotation of activity and capacity as opposed to
“viewer” or “audience.” Even when moving to other kinds of texts in other media forms, reader
functions well. Regarding a film, for instance: a sound can be said to be read, as can color,
camera angle, blank space, lighting, or movement.
Last, I want to note my use of “Shakespeare” and our relationship to him. There is an
implicit and useful slippage between the man and his works, the historical Shakespeare and the
body of plays and poetry we ascribe to him. Further, there is some swirling combination of the
two we might conceive as the myth or, for the purposes of this project, the ghost, of Shakespeare.
When I speak of Shakespeare, I mean to suggest this expansive, inclusive, and perhaps more
preternatural understanding that is encountered through creative acts of intertextuality.
Postmodern texts that summon the ghost of Shakespeare – as understood in this way – draw him
close to us as they complicate their as well as our relationship to him. Intertextuality, from
Hutcheon’s perspective, “does not disregard the context of the past representation it cites, but
uses irony to acknowledge the fact that we are inevitably separated from that past today – by

12
time and by the subsequent history of those representations.” That is, “[t]here is continuum, but
there is also ironic difference, difference induced by that very history” (90). Irony here is another
problematic term of Hutcheon’s with an unclear definition or analogue. It can only be understood
then by what it does: it acknowledges separation and establishes difference. It seems to be the
strategic component of intertextuality in a postmodern text, an awareness of sorts. Further, she
notes that irony “makes these intertextual references into something more than simply academic
play or some infinite regress into textuality: what is called to our attention is the entire
representational process” (90). Hutcheon’s repeated use of the first person – “we” and “us” –
indicates that the intertextual strategy of postmodernism is oriented toward the reader without
whom there is no irony, no “mak[ing] these intertextual references into something,” no
“representational process” at all. The reader is thus drawn together with the making, that is, the
making of meaning.
Barthes reached a similar conclusion in “The Death of the Author”: “The reader is the
space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being
lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination” (qtd. in Allen 73). In his call for a
poetics of reading, Jonathan Culler works through the rationale for the kind of analysis Barthes
suggests, one which takes the reader and the reading process as its subject. Culler proposes that
to “explain facts about the form and meaning works have for readers is to construct hypotheses
about the conditions of meaning, and hypotheses about the conditions of meaning are claims
about the conventions and interpretive operations applied in reading” (49). The goal, then, is to
better understand meaning as an ongoing effect of our reading by looking at contemporary texts
that acknowledge their own “written-ness,” as Allen describes it, a reflection of Kristeva’s
“vision of texts as always in a state of production,” in which “ideas are not presented as finished,

13
consumable products, but are presented in such a way as to encourage readers themselves to step
into the production of meaning” (Allen 33). Borrowing a qualification from Culler, “This is to
say that in concentrating on the reader one is not attempting to strip the author of all his glory,
suggesting that he does nothing and that the reader does all; one is simply recognizing that the
activities of readers provide more and better evidence about the conditions of meaning” (51).
Studying intertextuality allows us to reconsider the conflated concept of reading and
interpretation, how, as Allen writes, “the reader no longer ‘discovers’ meaning but follows the
‘passage’ of meaning as it flows, explodes, and/or regresses” (65). Studying intertextuality
through the metaphor of haunting allows us to reconsider how the interpretive process both
facilitates and interferes with the “passage” of meanings, how the tensions between the beta-text,
the nu-text, and the reader motivate and interrupt the flow, explosion, and regression of
meanings.

The Case Studies

We are in a period of a postmodern intertextual explosion, much of it tied to Shakespeare.
In October 2015, the New York Times ran an announcement of a new series of Shakespearean re-
tellings from publisher Hogarth headlined, “Novelists Reimagine and Update Shakespeare.”
Each author chosen was given an “assignment”: “Choose any Shakespeare play she wanted, and
adapt it into a novel.” Notably, the list of authors hired are all well-know and well-respected:
among them are Jeanette Winterson (Written on the Body, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit),
Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl), Tracy Chevalier (Girl with a Pearl Earring), Anne Tyler (The
Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons) and Margaret Atwood. Of interest to this project in

14
particular, author Howard Jacobson explains to the journalist that though he will be
“modernizing” his chosen play, he will be “sure to preserve the problematic aspects.” As if in
response to the imagined question of why he insists on such a preservation, Jacobson makes clear
that he “would never dream of cleaning up Shakespeare.”
We can all quickly name quite a few works that touch on Shakespeare, either as
adaptation, sequel, prequel, through allusion or reference, or intermediated into a movie, opera,
ballet, or comic book. An exhaustive archive then is not just impossible but also unhelpful; there
must be limited factors. For this project, the contemporary texts I have chosen showcase
intertextuality in their relationship to Shakespeare in such a way that they might be read as meta
to varying degrees. Though both attributes, intertextual and metatextual, are in no way recent
inventions, my choice of relatively recent postmodern texts derives from these works’
heightened visibility of their strategies. As Hutcheon observes, “Not only is there no resolution
(false or otherwise) of contradictory forms in postmodern parody, but there is a foregrounding of
those very contradictions” (90). Such contradictions the reader must negotiate within herself
when confronted with intertextuality. Further, beyond the symptomatic level perceived by the
reader, the meta level at which these particular texts foreground their own contradictions
provides insight into the tense negotiation within the nu-text of “prior” versus “new” material.
Though Jack Halberstam claims that “to tell a ghost story means being willing to be
haunted” (qtd. in Schwarz 179), the willingness to be haunted does not necessarily mean being at
ease with ghosts. Shakespeare is not friendly like Casper; Shakespeare is a “heavy.” He has
weight and stature. I find it no coincidence that such descriptive language is physical;
Shakespeare is visible and felt when he appears. Shakespeare has “canonized bones” and is a
recognized genius, and winner of countless hyperbolic titles. Crucially, he is a cornerstone of

15
Western education, the high value placed on his works impossible to overestimate. Consider that
his specific name appears nine times in the U.S. Common Core standards for English Language
Arts and Literacy alongside other recommended literature broadly labeled “classics” in the 2015
web guide (www.coresstandards.org/ELA-Literacy); in other words, the standards state students
should read Shakespeare plus whatever other works the teacher may choose. Shakespeare’s
ubiquity is precisely what gives him both weight and position as a go-to for intertextuality.
Notably, not all plays are read in pre-college schooling, only the “big ones”: Hamlet, King Lear,
Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, The Tempest, and Romeo and Juliet. Hence,
these are the ones that most often reappear in nu-texts, re-circulating through the culture, and
perhaps leading back to them being thought of as the most important and thus the ones that
should be taught in schools. This may be why we will never hear about the new teenage
blockbuster re-telling Coriolanus or that exciting new novel by a Pulitzer winner that serves as a
prequel to Pericles, Prince of Tyre.
If ever there was a specter demanding “Remember me!” it would be he who “was not of
an age, but for all time!” How astute Ben Jonson seems as Shakespeare has become an
omnipresence, a great known. My primary texts then respond to Shakespeare not just as a
lingering haunting presence, but as part of an effort to get out from under his weight, to push
back against Shakespeare as a force that threatens to overshadow, overreach, and overwhelm;
these texts not only speak to the ghost but may be trying to exorcise it. Why? Often, the threat of
Shakespeare takes the form of questions of authorship and originality. Who is really responsible
for the nu-text? Other times, the threat concerns inevitability: once you use Shakespeare, does his
text dictate where a nu-text must go? Stepping back to wider textual continuum, does using a
canonical beta-text throw a nu-text into harsh relief and a relegation of not canonical? Or does

16
Shakespeare legitimate and lift the nu-text, whether or not that is the nu-text’s intention? The
central question is, can a reader see past – more accurately, read past – Shakespeare? That is, do
we relinquish Shakespeare to the nu-text for a period, but ultimately return him to where we
know and what we know?
In other studies of Shakespearean intertextuality, primary texts are used as case studies to
uncover source texts or illustrate definitions, but rarely do such inquiries read intertextuality as a
process actively being worked through by the nu-texts, as a continual and confrontational
relationship. In addition, many scholars seem interested in pointing to the success or failure of
the nu-text, especially in relation, whether they are conscious of this or not, to the achievements
of Shakespeare. There is a sharp divide between high and low culture expressed in many critical
texts that leads to certain nu-texts given certain kinds of consideration and others sheer dismissal,
as, for example, indicated by Richard Burt’s value-laden portmanteau, “Schlockspeare” (7, 10).
The primary nu-texts used in this project have been chosen because they too have achieved
recognition as canonical works, however the discourse that surrounds them still constructs a
power differential that grants Shakespeare authority and tends toward questioning the nu-texts as
Shakespeare-adjacent. This tension is reflected in much of the terminology explored earlier; my
own terms are intended to depower the tools with which we discuss intertextuality, so we do not
enter into an investigation with our bias set by them.
The chapters represent a movement across three themes: haunting, possession, and
exorcism. Each chapter explores its theme through a case study that focuses on a nu-text
confronting its relationship with its beta-text. By holding to just one nu-text per case study, each
chapter can present an in depth investigation into how the work elaborates the chapter’s theme,
rather than having the theme diffused across multiple readings. Indeed, not all nu-texts may be

17
read as haunted and many more do not appear to be in conflict with their beta-texts, so the
archive that can be drawn on for this kind of study may have a limited scope. Nu-texts like O or
West Side Story, for instance, do not immediately appear to be struggling with their
Shakespearean beta-text, and so fall outside this project. However, as a concept, intertextual
haunting offers new insights to such works. The nu-texts featured in the next chapters speak to
their haunting, and are, in their own ways, all ghost stories. Structuring my project around the
triangle of relations between beta-text, the nu-text, and the reader, we can assess what Laurie
Osborne calls “bard sightings/citings” (129) within the circulation of Shakespearean ghost
stories.
Chapter One frames the project by developing an understanding of intertextual haunting
through a combination of synthesizing various theorists and taking contrarian stances against
others. Drawing significantly from Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the
Sociological Imagination, the observed presence of the beta-text within the nu-text is read as a
ghosting, a lingering effect that interrupts and intervenes as it is recognized. For the case study,
Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead models how the ghost of the beta-text
is summoned into and comes to haunt the nu-text. Stoppard’s play tasks us to see our own role in
haunting as readers that expect because of our familiarity with the determining beta-text.
Haunting escalates to possession in Chapter Two, a reading of the relationship between
the beta- and nu-text through their structured power differential. The canonical work has cultural
weight that impresses on the nu-text, eventually overwhelming the nu-text and silencing its
voice. The case study work, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, considers its own possession by
King Lear and scaffolds an analysis through overlapping metaphors of agricultural poisons and

18
incestuous rape. Intertextuality becomes re-viewed as an antagonistic relationship in which the
nu-text strives to resist and push back against the crushing weight of the beta-text.
In Chapter Three, intertextual exorcism develops ways to render the beta-text absent
through the recovery of alternate traditions within the nu-text. Alternate traditions do not haunt,
but do have a determining effect on the nu-text, contributing to both its content and form and
producing effects on its readers. By providing space apart from haunting, the alternate tradition
lets the voice of the nu-text come through despite the beta-text’s volume, allowing us to hear that
the nu-text may be saying something quite different from the beta-text. The extensive use Akira
Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood makes of traditional Japanese art forms and filmmaking techniques
derived from them positions the film as an ideal case study for locating alternate traditions and
seeing their impact on the nu-text in ways unrelated to the beta-text’s influence. As the capstone
of a progression, the chapter concludes with a reading of the haunted ambient of Kurosawa’s
film, demonstrating how exorcism creates possibilities for the exploration and interpretation of
an intertextual work without attending to it as repetition of a beta-text.
Using the themes of haunting, possession, and exorcism as extended metaphors for
reading both nu-texts and criticism, my goal is to consider how “books speak of books” and
theorize what Adso only imagines: the “imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and
another.” How can we listen in and how can we make sure we hear more than one, louder side of
the dialogue? On the whole, my project seeks to re-view both scholarship around Shakespearean
intertexuality and Shakespearean nu-texts themselves as haunted in a way that limits our
understandings of Shakespeare’s plays, contemporary re-workings of them, and the intertextual
relationships between texts. We may think about Shakespearean nu-texts as works that have
turned to well-known plays out of a deep appreciation, even love, and this impacts how we

19
choose to read, interpret, and interrogate beta- and nu-texts in relation to each other. Haunting,
possession, and exorcism challenge the assumed laudatory relationship and suggest that
Shakespeare may be seen as a threat and the reworking of his plays a risk, evidenced by the
production of readings and analyses that summon his ghost again and again at the expense of the
nu-text. Exorcising Shakespeare, then, becomes a model for reading nu-texts that may relate to
Shakespeare without the constraints brought about by a reading for Shakespeare.

20
Chapter One
Haunting

GUILDENSTERN (irritated): You've heard of him—
ROSENCRANTZ: Oh, I've heard of him all right and I want nothing to do with it.
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead (109)

Near the beginning of A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon and Siobahn O’Flynn
suggest some reasons why an author may choose to adapt or appropriate from an earlier work
ranging from the attempt to “call it into question” to “the urge to consume and erase the memory
of the adapted text” to “the desire to pay tribute by copying” (7). None of these possible
intentions are mutually exclusive and all are problematic, particularly when the adapted text is a
Shakespeare play. First, canonical texts may be frequent – and often, justified – targets for
critical re-imagining, but Shakespeare seems to maintain a kind of inoculation against being
questioned out of circulation. Second, I cannot imagine any relatively sane author aspires to have
his or her nu-text “erase the memory” of Shakespeare as it seems an insurmountable and thus
futile task. This chapter responds most directly to the third proposed intent, “the desire to pay
tribute”: how do we respond to the assertion that a work appropriates or adapts Shakespeare does
so to express praise, respect, or love? My goal is not to point to an unacknowledged sub-genre of
intertextual works that rebel against their beta-texts, but to use the extended metaphor of
haunting to draw out unacknowledged hesitations, frustrations, and anxieties that dispel the
default laudatory mode we grant Shakespearean intertextuality.
Introduced to many high school students as a darkly humorous companion to Hamlet,
Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (hereafter R&G) makes for a

21
compelling object of study because its relationship to Shakespeare’s play is rarely called into
question in this way. Laughter seems to displace angst. The unconscious reticence to read the
unsettling aspects of the play as much more than an absurdist stylistic choice attributed to
Samuel Beckett’s influence (K. H. Smith 146) holds off re-viewing the existential and bleak
elements as signs of intertextual haunting. On the critical side, I similarly find a general sense
that Stoppard’s play stands in awed deference to Shakespeare, using Hamlet as more of an
unimpeachable model for aspirational worship than mere inspirational and canonical source
material. Heebon Park-Finch, for example, uses the same categorization series from Hutcheon
and O’Flynn’s book in her analysis of R&G as a hypertextual adaptation. She concludes that, out
of the three, the only appropriate choice is that R&G pays tribute to Shakespeare, “preserving
and at the same time revitalizing [Stoppard’s] literary and artistic heritage” (187). The evidence
for her conclusion includes little more than the fact that Stoppard’s beta-text is a Shakespeare
play, and thus, naturally, the nu-text adopts a reverential and affirmative stance toward its
canonical predecessor.
The portion of dialogue from R&G I quote at the start is, of course, taken out of context,
but the attitude expressed by Rosencrantz resonates with the alternative perspective toward
intertextuality I wish to explore throughout this project.
3
What might come of suggesting that a
nu-text operates with an awareness of its beta-text, but “want[s] nothing to do with it”? While
R&G might be thought of as an “homage to Shakespeare” structured through “a symphonic play
of intertexts, rather than textual deviance or dissidence” (186), taking the contrarian position

3
This dialogue comes from near the end of play as the titular characters are on the boat en route
to England with Hamlet. Unsure of how they will proceed with delivering the prince and
Claudius’s directive letter, they roleplay with Rosencrantz acting as the King of England and
refusing to get involved. The “him” referred to is, of course, Hamlet.

22
destabilizes the intertextual relationship as the structure of a nu-text appears as fraught with
deviance and dissidence. Critical perspectives are equally destabilized as dissidence forces a
reassessment of statements of dependence into questions of textual independence. Consider
Charles Marowitz’s assertion that R&G, “despite its autonomy as a work of art, remains
thematically related to Hamlet and still operates within the orbit of the original work” (9). He is
not wrong; certainly Stoppard’s play springs from Shakespeare’s. But why state the obvious and
thus qualify the play’s “autonomy as a work of art”? Similarly, Martin White reminds us that
Stoppard “uses an existing play as a launchpad for what is, in effect, an entirely new work”
(221). Again, the qualification: “in effect, an entirely new work.” White holds back from entirely
committing to a conception of the play as a new work. As mild, or even fair, as his perspective
may seem, the quiet implication remains. The intertextual act renders a text that somehow falls
shy of or is in some way lesser than its beta-text or an “original” work.
In Stoppard’s play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern themselves express clearly what might
be the subtle bias at work:

GUIL (turning on him furiously): Why don't you say something original! No
wonder the whole thing is so stagnant! You don't take me up on
anything—you just repeat it in a different order.
ROS: I can't think of anything original. I'm only good in support. (104)

The notion of “support” set in opposition to “original” constructs a relationship between nu-text
and beta-text that delimits the agency, the self-determination, of the new work, producing a
tension that some critics (e.g., Hutcheon and O’Flynn or Harold Bloom) describe using language

23
of competition. Michael Worton and Judith Still concisely generalize that “[e]very literary
imitation is a supplement which seeks to complete and supplant the original” (7). I find this
broad generalization to be a paradox. How is it that a supplement – a term that indicates that a
nu-text is not a whole itself, but a piece of something greater – “seeks to complete [. . .] the
original” – an oppositional term for the beta-text that would suggest something already whole? A
supplement is something different from a continuation or a conclusion; it is an accretion to the
original: it supports, it maybe fills in here and there, but it does not represent an end or an
independent entity. How might a supplement ever “supplant” that which it supplements? The
start of a solution emerges if we infer from these critics the unspoken impression that if the nu-
text “seeks to complete” the beta-text, the beta-text must be incomplete, still in production. The
“original,” then, is suggestive of a larger or wider concept than the just the earlier work in a
simple, almost material, sense. There is Hamlet, the written text lying on my desk, in its multiple
quartos, seemingly sealed off and complete. But, there is also the Hamlet that haunts, with all its
historical resonance and socio-cultural weight, continually generating and in no way set or
stable.
Haunting, as a metaphor for intertextuality, seeks to not just upend the idea of the nu-text
as a supplement, but to entirely reverse the way we commonly think about the engagement
between works. Hutcheon and O’Flynn deploy their own supernatural metaphor, but they stop
short of fully realizing its implications. They attempt to set parameters for the idea of the
supplement: “An adaptation is not vampiric; it does not draw the life-blood from the source and
leave it dying or dead, nor is it paler than the adapted work. It may, on the contrary, keep that
prior work alive, giving it an afterlife it would never have had otherwise” (176). To suggest that
the nu-text is not “vampiric,” to feel a need to deny that what others call merely a supplement is

24
monstrous, indicates a fairly intense anxiety about the impact a derivative work might have on an
“original” and downplays the agency of a nu-text by shifting it to the beta-text. Such a transfer is
often described in warmer language akin to Park-Finch’s notion of Stoppard “preserving and
[. . .] revitalizing [. . .] literary and artistic heritage.” This kind of positive – or at the worst,
neutral – articulation is meant, like Hutcheon and O’Flynn’s non-vampiric insistence, to balance
the intertextual dynamic between beta-text and nu-text and ease any perceived tension. It allows
for arguments about R&G that we can find reassuring despite the play’s palpable angst, such as
Alan Sinfield offering that “In adjusting the Shakespeare text, Stoppard does not aspire to
dislodge it from cultural space, but to alter the configuration so that there is space for him too
and for his kind of writing alongside Shakespeare” (“Making Space” 131). Indeed, Stoppard
does not displace Hamlet, however what does he have to forfeit to create a space for his own
voice and to what extent does it co-exist “alongside Shakespeare”? Sinfield adds, sardonically
perhaps, that R&G “touches the hem of Shakespeare’s garment and some of his power is
conducted in the new work” (133). Haunting suggests that more than power is “conducted in the
new work”: Stoppard sacrifices agency, and lets in the ghost.
It may seem like I am making opposite arguments about the directionality of the power
flow in the intertextual relationship between Shakespeare’s beta-text and Stoppard’s nu-text,
however what I want to point out is the power differential itself, which drives the direction I
observe. Returning to Hutcheon and O’Flynn, we need to follow through the vampiric
comparison to its unrealized conclusion. They claim that the nu-text “does not draw the life-
blood” from the beta-text, while it does “keep that prior work alive, giving it an afterlife.” There
is a certain kind of monster that is kept alive, given an afterlife via another body: a vampire. In
other words, they begin to imply, but hold back from conceding, that the beta-text, not the nu-

25
text, is vampiric. Does it draw the life-blood from the nu-text, and “leave it dying or dead”? That
may be extreme, though as far as rendering the nu-text “paler,” descriptors like “supplement” or
“support,” as opposed to “original” or “source,” gesture toward the lesser status with which the
nu-text is regarded relative to the beta-text. Power resides in the beta-text, then; it is the power
source which bestows something – plot and/or characters, perspective, readers, cultural capital? –
onto the nu-text. The nu-text, in turn, “preserves” the beta-text by continuing its circulation and
affirming its empowered status through repetition and reference.
4

As Chapter Two of this project more directly concerns the affective directionality at play
between beta-text and nu-text, I want to hold off on pursuing any further the vampiric metaphor
and the questions of dominance and subjection it provokes. This chapter focuses on the metaphor
of haunting, that is, the ghostly presence of the beta-text within the nu-text and its effects and
complications, so the above paragraph serves to establish a distinct perspective on the
relationship between texts that informs intertextual haunting. I am far from the first to try to
rethink the intertextual relationship and the stigma that seems attached to nu-texts. In “Tradition
and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot challenges the supplement-original dynamic by rejecting
“our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least
resembles anyone else” (27). He questions the value placed on and autonomy granted to texts
that demonstrate pure originality. Eliot goes on to suggest that, on the other hand, “if we
approach a poet without this prejudice we shall find that not only the best, but the most
individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their
immortality most vigorously” (27–28). Notably, the latter part of his alternate approach has

4
There are echoes of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic here. In the simplest sense, there is
reciprocity between the beta-text (master) and nu-text (slave), but the relationship, pivoting on
questions of recognition, is inherently unstable.

26
echoes of the vampiric metaphor as well as my project’s haunting structure, but in a far more
positive sense than I wish to consider. The vigor with which a beta-text asserts itself in textual
haunting produces an intense and evident anxiety, which we as readers experience as haunting in
nu-texts like R&G.
Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters provides a framework for understanding haunting that
greatly influences my own, though her sociological analysis certainly has significantly different
objects of study and conclusions than my literary investigation. Her work uses the concept of
haunting to explain, broadly speaking, how “organized forces and systematic structures that
appear removed from us make their impact felt in everyday life in a way that confounds our
analytic separations” (19). Haunting in the literary context similarly helps us think through how
beta-texts, such as Shakespeare’s works, that may seem to be removed from us as historically,
linguistically, and artistically from a prior moment – their continued existence and canonical
status a result of “organized forces and systematic structures,” for example primary education –
persist within and have an impact on contemporary creative acts and culture in a way that
confounds our understanding of originality, authority, and autonomy. The tonal shift from Eliot’s
affirming of an assertion of immortality toward a more ominous reading is flagged in Gordon’s
further description of haunting as “how that which appears to be not there is often a seething
presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities” (8). “Seething”
suggests, if not malice, then at least restlessness or agitation. More than stubborn persistence,
haunting carries the potential for “meddling” as beta-texts interrupt and intervene with nu-texts.
The first section of this chapter re-views intertextuality through the extended metaphor of
haunting and reveals how beta-texts come to act on nu-texts despite, to borrow from Hutcheon
and O’Flynn’s Freudian turn-of-phrase, the nu-text’s “urge to consume” the beta-text.

27
R&G provides a case study for haunting in the second section, as Hamlet interrupts
Stoppard’s play to the extent that the characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (if that is even
who they are) are swept up into the predominating force of Shakespeare’s play, which, in turn,
threatens to relegate the pair into subservient parts while they try to maintain themselves as
centers of their own play. The title even reminds us of what we already know – Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern will die. Are they already dead when the play begins if we know they will die, like
some bizarre twist on Schrödinger’s cat? R&G in particular interests me as it has achieved
canonical status itself, so its haunting by Shakespeare’s play can potentially be considered
outside value judgements about Stoppard’s play as the “lesser” work. By sidestepping
considerations of relative value, we can return to Eliot’s claims, but with a shift in focus from
how “we praise” to how “we praise.” With this adjustment, Eliot helps thrust the argument back
onto us and our tendencies. Likewise, in the final section of this chapter, I will use haunting to
speak to the participatory role we play as readers in summoning the ghost of the beta-text.
5

Gordon writes that “[b]eing haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always
a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold
knowledge, but as a transformative recognition” (8). What transformative recognition might we
experience if we grant that we as readers are complicit in intertextual haunting?

5
While “audience” may seem more appropriate for a work of theater, “reader” has wider and
more useful implications. “Audience,” to a degree, implies passive spectatorship; “reader”
suggests engagement and interpretation. The value of “audience” for me is the sense of the
collective, therefore when the concept is relevant, I will use “community of readers.” There are a
handful of moments, however, when “audience” is the most appropriate term given the context
of the argument.

28
Shakespearean Indigestion

Often when my wife and I watch a television show, we see an actor we recognize, but
can’t entirely place. We take a guess at his name or where else we might have seen him, and
ultimately grab the nearest iPhone to “IMDB” him for an answer. “Ohh…it’s the guy from
Person of Interest. He played that guy. Remember? What happened with his character again?”
Down the internet rabbit hole we go, inevitably either missing some of the current show we are
watching or pausing it while the search goes on. Recognition leads to interruption. After some
period of questioning and digging, we reach a degree of satisfaction with the web we have spun
(as opposed to a web that we have revealed) and we go back to our regularly scheduled program.
But, weaved in to the experience now is a kind of addition. An intervention has occurred as
recognition leads to another text slicing through, carrying with it possible irrelevance, but also
possibilities for relevance from which we may choose to make meanings.
6

My suggestion here is that intertextuality similarly interrupts, the beta-text asserting itself
within the nu-text as we recognize something we have seen before, something about which we
have prior knowledge. There is little smooth about intertextuality, no matter how talented the
author may be. Quite the contrary, intertextuality is a ripple, like a bump we find in fabric as we
try to smooth it out, caused by the presence of something lying underneath. The acts of reading,
interpreting, making sense, and activating meanings – perhaps a kind of “smoothing” of the text

6
Of course, in the anecdote above, the casting of a particular actor is not necessarily done to
carry meanings. Though, casting with an actor’s persona in mind is frequent, and is not always
just a reflection of typecasting. The amalgam of an actor’s past roles, characteristics, physical
appearances, even accents, can often serve as a shorthand for a new role that can invoke complex
meanings through reinforcement or subversion of the persona. In a way, then, casting may be
thought of as implicitly intertextual.

29
– are brought to our attention in the moment of an interrupting intertextuality. Graham Allen
explains that “[w]orks of literature, after all, are built from systems, codes and traditions
established by previous works of literature” as well as the “systems, codes, and traditions of
other art forms and of culture in general” (1). The author might then be described as a coder of
sorts, “a compiler or arranger of pre-existent possibilities” (14). The additions of “traditions” and
“pre-existent possibilities” in Allen’s understanding of the creative process as coding points to
how recognition leads to interruption: the linear movement toward the potential or the unknown
is disrupted by the pre-existent, meaning the movement becomes predictable or definitively
known.
Intertextuality, as a kind of technology of making meaning, makes us aware of our
reading, Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman say, as “a process of decoding what has by
various means been encoded in the text” (8). Critically, we must be expansive with what is
implied by “various means”: we decode not just what the author intentionally encoded, but what
has been encoded in the text by a wide range of external “authors” that pre-exist as well as
follow the moment of creation. The authoring of a text is not a “big bang” of creativity, with
nothingness before it happens, so no questions can be asked about pre-existent conditions, and
with all future patterns deterministically set in motion, so no questions need be asked. Just as
Allen described authoring, reading is a practice informed by systems, codes, and traditions
established by previous works of literature as well as the systems, codes, and traditions of other
art forms and of culture in general, a perspective that de-emphasizes the role of the author of the
nu-text and the moment of its authoring. Intertextual haunting suggests that the ghost of the beta-
text may be summoned in the crafting of a nu-text, but also suggests that any attending to the nu-
text – the performance of a nu-text, the reading/watching of the nu-text, or even a critical

30
analysis – is a kind of séance. Haunting is akin to Gerard Genette’s palimpsest model of
intertextuality in that it highlights the “duplicity of textual relations.” The palimpsest means two
texts, he proposes, “on the same parchment, one text [. . .] superimposed upon another, which it
does not quite conceal but allows to show through” (398). Haunting similarly indicates that the
beta-text “shows through” the nu-text, is explicitly present within the nu-text. However, while
the palimsestuous model is neutral in that it does not necessarily speak to tone, the model of
haunting stresses the interruption and intervention brought on by recognition in order to re-view
intertextuality as a disturbed and disturbing process. My purpose is to cut against the grain of
critics, such as Genette, Allen, and Barthes, who construct a conception of intertextuality as
being so ubiquitous that it seems a natural or passive phenomenon or else a neutral to laudatory
practice. Instead, “we must learn how to identify hauntings and reckon with ghosts, must learn
how to make contact with what is without doubt often painful, difficult, and unsettling” (Gordon
23). My approach to intertextuality as a haunting of the nu-text sees the practice as potentially
“painful, difficult, and unsettling” and makes use of Gordon’s idea of ghosts as “reminders of
lingering trouble” (xix) to reframe the relationship between beta-text and nu-text as complicated
by disruptive interventions.
The presence we encounter and recognize within the nu-text, the lingering trouble we
allow to interrupt our experience, is the ghost of the beta-text. In particular, canonical beta-texts
represent especially powerful ghosts we must reckon with if we are to better grasp what it means
to claim a nu-text is haunted. The plays of Shakespeare, well-known and well-trodden, amount to
seemingly unstoppable ghosts that haunt a nu-text like almost no other work, acutely so in the
West. In part, the weight of Shakespeare stems from the creative force of the works themselves,
the artistic achievement of a genius. Shakespeare’s characters are often brought up as evidence

31
of his unmatched abilities as a writer. Harold Bloom describes Hamlet, Lear, Othello, and
Macbeth as “roles [that] threaten the plays: Hamlet and Lear cannot be cabined, cribbed,
confined by Shakespeare’s text. They break the vessels that he prepared for them” (The Anatomy
of Influence 35–36). The recurrence of these characters in various forms in various texts over an
expanse of time supports Bloom’s assertion that they cannot stay confined to their plays. But
critically, if they are so powerful that they “threaten” their own plays and “break” Shakespeare’s
texts, what are the potential effects on the intertextual vessels prepared for them? At the least, we
might conclude that the presence of Shakespearean characters threatens a nu-text by being bigger
than, stronger than, beyond the nu-text. R&G might, for the moment, be considered a play that
lifts its protagonists from Hamlet and provides a new vessel for them. The act of summoning
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern out of Hamlet and into R&G endangers the nu-text by instigating
intertextual haunting: they have been summoned out of Hamlet only to be pushed along back
into Hamlet. Perhaps that makes them only a danger to themselves.
Such an observation of Shakespeare’s characters is merely representative of the
extraordinary power of Shakespeare, which has as much to do with how he is received as it does
the merit of his works. We cannot solely blame Hamlet for being so remarkable a creation that he
or his play poses a threat to a nu-text like R&G; we must consider that we as readers, in a wide
sense of the word ranging from individuals to institutions, grant Hamlet an existence beyond his
play and beyond any nu-text in which he appears. Gordon, too, makes a point of giving her
concept of haunting a direction, an attitude toward a receiving reader: “[t]he whole essence, if
you can use that word, of a ghost is that it has a real presence and demands its due, your
attention.” Further, Gordon writes that, through haunting, “we are notified that what’s been

32
concealed is very much alive and present, interfering precisely with those always incomplete
forms of containment and repression ceaselessly directed toward us” (xvi).
Transposed to intertextuality, we find a similar attitude present in Morton Bloomfield’s
claim that “the essence of an allusion is that it be recognized” (12): to demand attention and
one’s due is akin to demanding recognition, importantly, from us. Within intertextual haunting,
then, the essence of the beta-text ghost is that it be recognized. Gordon’s notion of concealment
does not quite find its parallel in the model I am constructing, though perhaps this reflects my
sense that some kind of intertextual sprezzatura is unachievable. As stated in the previous
section, recognition leads to an interruption when we become aware of or notified of
intertextuality as the presence of a beta-text is felt and our reading is disrupted. The beta-text
then interferes with the nu-text – that always incomplete form of containment, unable to repress
or limit its beta-text – and we experience the sense of textual duplicity described by Genette. Our
recognition of the beta-text ghost demands that we attend to it and we experience a double
encounter in the moment of attendance: the nu-text and the beta-text that has been summoned
into and comes through it.
Recognition is critical to intertextual haunting, a point made especially apparent when the
ghost is that of Shakespeare. Allen offers that, with regard to a beta-text, “the name of the author
allows the work to be an item of exchange value” (69). “The name of the author,” however, can
have no value if it is not recognized, and so the implication is that the more well-known the
author, the greater the exchange value. The greater the exchange value – the more cultural,
political, and historical currency the beta-text carries with its presence within a nu-text – the
more in circulation we might expect to find it. In other words, the more significance it has the
potential to lend by appearing in the nu-text, the more frequently the recognizable beta-text may

33
be repeated. Again, to keep the focus on recognition, the “exchange” modifier of exchange value
gestures toward not just what the nu-text gains in terms of status by using a canonical beta-text,
but also the reader’s active engagement in intertextuality seen in the transfer of meanings
between nu-text, beta-text, and reader. In the aptly titled The Role of The Reader, Umberto Eco
explains the movement within this triangle: “Every character (or situation) of a novel is
immediately endowed with properties that the text does not directly manifest and that the reader
has been ‘programmed’ to borrow from the treasury of intertextuality” (21). Eco positions the
reader as just as significant a repository of potential meanings as either textual pole of
intertextuality, which further implies that intertexuality is essential to all reading. Indeed, the
programming aspect of reading he puts forward, the habit or practice of bringing foreknowledge
to bear on the nu-text, drives the exchange more than either beta-text or nu-text as evidenced by
the idea that the nu-text can be “endowed with properties” it may not even “directly manifest”
coupled with the relocation of the sprawling network of intertextual relations to a “treasury”
outside the text and inside the reader. The reader activates intertexuality.
Emphasizing the ghost of Shakespeare as fashioning a special kind of haunting, Richard
Burt and Julian Yates seem to borrow from Eco as they speak of “our excessive receptiveness [to
Shakespeare]” that renders “the reader an archive, a storage unit” (112). The reverse might be
said as well: the reader, functioning as an archive of her varied encounters with Shakespeare,
affords an excessive receptiveness to finding him again. In large part, the consistent and
pervasive circulation of Shakespeare in many forms and fragments fills this storage unit and
overdetermines the archive. Therefore, while Eco speaks of how “[m]any texts make evident
their Model Readers by implicitly presupposing a specific encyclopedic competence” (The Role
of the Reader 7), the model reader of a Shakespearean nu-text needs no such encyclopedic

34
competence, to the extent that defining the “model reader of a Shakespearean nu-text” subsumes
far too vast a range of characterizations. Shakespeare is ineffably familiar, even if it may be to
various degrees.
Surveying a handful of critics, we can briefly assemble a rough sense of how familiarity
has been discussed in ways relevant to this project.
7
From the start, there seems to have been a
kind of “receptiveness” to Shakespeare’s plays and poems evidenced by their initial permeation
into other cultural artifacts. Sayre Greenfield notes that “[f]rom Shakespeare’s lifetime until
1660, his lines were borrowed, sometimes directly quoted, occasionally praised or mocked, but
rarely alluded to knowingly.” Though absent at this time was “the modern sense of many
particular phrases from Shakespeare as a pervasive cultural presence” (132), in large part due to
the lack of recognition from author or reader of these phrases as specifically “Shakespearean,”
these years represent the first stages of a developing archive, an emergent cultural presence. With
the 1623 arrival of the First Folio within that period, Burt and Yates claim, “‘Shakespeare’ [was]
launched as an ongoing splicing together of texts and readers, a viral recruitment of variously
lively hosts” (17), a bio-mechanical-textual image of the rise of a systemic “Shakespeare.” Their
use of quotation marks around his name signals the burgeoning cultural presence: the
conglomerate of meanings that spin from the man, his works, and his reception as well as
responses, criticisms, re-workings, and so on.

7
There are many significant studies that provide a complete history and valuable readings of
Shakespeare’s adoption into culture. See College Literature, 31.4, Fall 2004, edited by Elizabeth
Abele and Ana Castaldo, for several excellent articles on this topic as well as “Part XVIII:
Shakespeare and Popular Culture” of The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare. For
specifically the American context, see “Chapter One: William Shakespeare in America” of
Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America and
Alden T. Vaughn and Virginia Mason Vaughn’s Shakespeare in America.

35
Jumping through time and across an ocean, the presence of Shakespeare in American
culture represents a shift from his seventeenth century status as he and his works become
recognizable, are alluded to knowingly because of familiarity, and gain weight as the cultural
presence, “Shakespeare,” though notably here in an almost synecdochical fashion. In her study of
American popular culture’s incorporation of Shakespeare, for instance, Elizabeth Abele refers
specifically to Hamlet when she reflects on the “familiar relationship American culture has with
the ‘shreds and patches’ of this complex tragedy, its strong identification with a collection of
cultural signifiers.” She observes that such a familiarity is “often independent of any real
understanding of the play as a unified text” (1). Though such an observation may not be limited
to the one play, I think it fair to generalize her point to include the major works as well as the life
of and the myths around Shakespeare. How many learn the phrase “To be or not to be” well
before they are exposed to Hamlet? I would guess an image of the balcony scene from Romeo
and Juliet exists in many people’s heads even if they have never seen the play. The sounds,
sights, and even interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays circulate as “shreds and patches” in ways
we can scarcely imagine or predict. Abele is careful to say that there may be no “real
understanding of the play as a unified text,” but holds off from suggesting that the “collection of
signifiers” may not be recognized as Shakespearean. Bloomfield, alternatively, does argue that
“[c]ertain Shakespearean quotations even if not recognized as Shakespeare’s have acquired a
canonicity and monumentality themselves as anonymous sayings” and so “[w]hen Shakespeare
is quoted and alluded to in a written context, [. . .] the desire that the phrase be recognized
becomes less important” (10). Given that he also makes a claim that recognition is the essence of
an allusion, we must reconcile Bloomfield’s points. Granting that we are indeed excessively
receptive to Shakespeare as Burt and Yates state, and thus references to Shakespeare’s plays and

36
poetry are something distinct from references to other works, partially explains how
Shakespearean quotations might acquire “monumentality” to the extent that they become
untethered from the source, yet maintain exchange value. They are recognizable even when not
recognized.
The argument is circular though: it could also be said that we are excessively receptive to
Shakespeare because of the unique way shreds and patches of his works attain status despite
being dissociated from their whole, these scattered pieces attaining a collective force like gravity
that draws us in. When Bloomfield says that it is not necessary that “the phrase be recognized,”
he means it may not be recognized as stemming from specifically Shakespeare, but it can still be
recognized as carrying the weight of canonicity. However, the implication of “the desire that the
phrase be recognized” within an exploration of recognition turns too far toward a consideration
of the nu-text’s author. For my purposes, recognition – as well as interruption and intervention –
is centered on reception, rather than intent, within the exchanges that occur between beta-text,
nu-text, and reader. From this perspective, reception opens up questions of continual production
rather than an authorial position closed off to us. In addition, my theory of intertextual haunting
emphasizes that there must be some act of attribution within the reader, an acknowledgment of
the reference as coming from a beta-text and from the weighty cultural presence (that is,
“Shakespeare” rather than Shakespeare). In other words, recognition, in the context of
intertextual haunting, is not possible if the reference has been seen or heard before, but could
have come from anywhere. That would be an intertextual bridge to nowhere. It is not enough to
recognize that the phrase, the image, or whatever form the reference takes comes from
somewhere or someone else; the ghost not only must be known to us, it demands to be known by
us.

37
Despite my movement away from intent, I do not want to suggest that the appearance of
the beta-text ghost is somehow a random occurrence. Barthes argues that “some objects become
the prey of mythical speech for a while, then they disappear, others take their place and attain the
status of myth.” Despite this exceptional status, he wonders, “[a]re there objects which are
inevitably a source of suggestiveness [. . .] ? Certainly not: one can conceive of very ancient
myths, but there are no eternal ones” (Mythologies 110). Yet, if we shift focus to the concept of
the textual ghost, Shakespeare’s works appear to be objects that are “inevitably a source of
suggestiveness” and have lasted into the twenty-first century, with no signs of impermanence.
We would likely have to limit the list of Shakespearean “myths” to only the most well-known
plays that have most permeated Western culture, including Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Merchant of Venice,
Taming of the Shrew, perhaps Richard III, Henry V, As You Like It and Twelfth Night. No doubt
the list is debatable, though it would seem that other works, like Cymbeline: King of Britain,
have not moved into our culture as myth in quite the same way. Not only have Shakespeare’s
texts acquired the status of myth with no indication of decline, in large part their continuance,
their frequent resurrections, their inevitable reappearance even as fragments can be attributed to
their inevitable suggestiveness. It is hard to argue about what is eternal, but if we did try to
identify any potential eternal myths, Shakespeare would have to make the list. Ben Jonson, of
course, said of Shakespeare, “He was not of an age, but for all time!” Many others after have
similarly endorsed his work with the epithet “timeless,” a conceit that reveals how we tend to
deny the historicity of Shakespeare; by touting his timelessness, we maintain something and hold
back from renewing or advancing. I want to carefully clarify, though, that to claim that
Shakespeare’s works, at least some of them, are inevitably sources of suggestiveness and might

38
be thought of as mythic is quite different from claiming they are a source of universal truth. The
ghost produces and provokes various effects and meanings, but it does not produce truth.
Simply, when we encounter Shakespeare as a ghost, inevitably we find it saying something and
asking something of us.
As we think about our role in intertextual haunting and consider questions of reception –
how ghosts, in their essence, are “directed toward us” – we must be careful not to make the
cognitive leap to assuming that we then control the phenomenon, that, as readers with agency,
we can choose to perceive a text as haunted or not. This, too, is a key difference between
conceptualizing intertextuality as a haunting as opposed to Genette’s palimpsest model. Allen
points out that, “[t]o say, as Genette finally does [. . .] that the reader has a choice between
reading the text for itself or in terms of its intertextual relations is a kind of bad faith. Such an
approach divides what is indivisible with the work, its textual structure and its intertextual
relations.” For such a reading to be possible, we would need to “[perform] a kind of negative
forgetting of the intertextual dimension” (110), a willing concealment of the beta-text. To what
extent could we even pretend to not sense or see the presence of the beta-text? Certainly, we
cannot watch R&G blind to its intertextual relationship to Hamlet, though granted Stoppard’s
play is an extreme example. To be clear then, Allen’s “negative forgetting” is distinct from
simply not knowing, not being able to recognize, a ghost as a ghost. Therefore, any nu-text with
an obscure or even unknown beta-text might have to be categorized as something other than
“haunted” and thus falls outside the scope of my project. Likewise, it is quite possible that a
reader can be unfamiliar with the beta-text and so might not recognize a nu-text as a nu-text.
Such a scenario also falls outside my work, though I would argue that the concept of haunting
may still open up questions with regard to either possibility.

39
Shakespeare represents a significant and palpable presence when he appears in nu-texts
and thus demands recognition in a such a way that these “Shakespearean nu-texts” might be read
through the metaphor of a haunted intertextuality. The intertextual balance between beta-text and
nu-text is clearly tipped toward the earlier work within haunting, which compromises discussion
of the agency or significance of the nu-text. Though it is nothing new to grant Shakespeare
overwhelming cultural authority, structuring that authority in intertextual contexts often takes the
form of direct or indirect insinuations of exploitation of the beta-text that reaffirm the imbalance
even as such arguments seem to seek balance or to shift it. That is, arguments for the agency or
independence of the nu-text – even those that slide into stating that the nu-text harms the beta-
text – tend to articulate various ways that the nu-text extracts capital, but only after the prior,
often canonical, work is granted explicitly or implicitly a surplus.
The suggestion is almost an intertextual version of the law of conservation of mass – a
law of conservation of cultural capital – that may eventually result in stability or a tilt toward the
nu-text as weight, authority, or power shifts to its side through an extraction. For instance, John
Ellis, speaking about film adaptations of literary works, argues that the “adaptation trades upon
the memory of the novel, a memory that can derive from actual reading, or, as is more likely
with a classic of literature, a generally circulated memory,” touching on the concepts of an
exchange value and how the referred to text may attain that value from circulation – becomes a
“classic” – and “generally” circulates due to its value – because it is a “classic.” But, he makes
the same leap as Hutcheon and O’Flynn with the same metaphor of consumption: “[the]
adaptation consumes this memory, attempting to efface it with the presence of its own images”
(qtd. in Sanders 25). Why realign the activity within the intertextual relationship from “trades” to
“consumes”? The ingestion/digestion analogy implies the nu-text is enlivened through the

40
destruction of the beta-text, which it hopes to supersede. Does this practice readily occur?
Depending on how far we take the idea, consumption could signify that the beta-text is broken
down and integrated into the ambitious (and hungry) nu-text in various bits and pieces or
reconstituted into the stuff from which the nu-text is composed, which in turn motivates a
forgetting or expunging of the prior work. This process seems unlikely, especially if we are
talking about “a classic of literature, a generally circulated memory.” The memory persists as
does the classic work no matter how successful the adaptation, not because it came first but
because it is recognizable, suggestive, and has more value when experienced than effaced.
Haunting, as opposed to consumption, suggests the lingering beta-text and its active, perceivable,
and impactful presence within the nu-text.
Julie Sanders takes issue with the consumption metaphor as well: “the adapting text does
not necessarily seek to consume or efface the informing source.” Instead, she offers, “it is the
very endurance and survival of the source text that enables the ongoing process of juxtaposed
readings that are crucial to the cultural operations of adaptation, and the ongoing experiences of
pleasure for the reader or spectator in tracing the intertextual relationships” (25). The focus on
pleasure ties with her description of intertextuality having an “inherent sense of play, produced
in part by the activation of our informed sense of similarity and difference between the texts
being invoked” (25). I cannot disagree with her sense of play found within intertextual
relationships and the pleasure produced by and within the reader through the juxtaposition of
beta- and nu-texts that co-exist. However, haunting represents something different from play, an
alternative perspective that is not centered on understanding pleasure; it is not meant to help
identify similarities and differences between texts. As an approach, haunting seeks to uncover

41
effects “produced in part by the activation of our informed sense” of enduring texts – like those
of Shakespeare – that interrupt and threaten to intervene, even overwhelm, nu-texts.
Dwelling on the complications of the consumption metaphor helps clarify the insights
offered by haunting as I begin to turn to the case study of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are
Dead. Intertextuality in R&G hinges precisely on “our informed sense of similarity and
difference between the texts being invoked” though it suggests an “informed sense” can produce
lethal interventions into a nu-text. Kay H. Smith addresses R&G as she explores the intertextual
use of Hamlet with the term “sampling,” a “phenomenon” of recycling Shakespeare in films that
she writes, “extends far beyond a simple lifting of obvious plot elements” (136). She finds a wide
range of sampling “complexity and significance” as she works through an eclectic range of films
– from The Lion King, L.A. Story, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Last Action Hero,
to, importantly, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – and determines that among these
works, “of which Stoppard's is perhaps the fullest example, the text of Hamlet becomes a kind of
‘raw material’ that both has meaning in itself and also derives meaning from its rearticulation
within a new form” (137). The phrase “raw material” invokes consumption (or perhaps
construction), though Smith maintains that this beta-text material “has meaning in itself,”
suggesting at once the beta-text feedback loop of endurance to authority to endurance. Yet, her
claim that Hamlet “derives meaning from its rearticulation within a new form” seems
counterintuitive. More often we assume that the nu-text derives meaning from its rearticulations
of Hamlet, along the lines of the exploitation model. In other words, does the sampling of
Hamlet result in new meanings of Hamlet? Or, does the sampling of Hamlet provide meanings to
the nu-text? These opposing arguments point toward the troublesome subtlety of identifying the
new object as a text unto itself or the beta-text in a “new form.” The latter connotes a second

42
coming of the prior work (an impression related to possession, as I explore in Chapter Two)
while the former conveys than a nu-text that samples, without becoming, the beta-text. That is
not to say, however, that a sampling nu-text cannot be haunted.
Intertextual haunting is thus distinct from sampling in its emphasis on effect rather than
method, though Smith’s studies of sampling in the 1994 comedy Renaissance Man and the 1993
Arnold Schwarzenegger action film parody Last Action Hero provide insight into how a beta-text
can make dangerous interventions, even when the nu-text in which it is present clearly does not
seek to remake or efface it. In Renaissance Man, a class of army recruits studies and performs
lines and scenes from Hamlet as they learn not just the classics, but about themselves. Though
the basic plot of Last Action Hero is a bit more complicated (and not necessary) to explain here,
Hamlet makes a similar appearance in a classroom setting with the teenage protagonist watching
the Olivier film.
8
His not uncommon frustration with Hamlet’s all talk and no doing leads him to
daydream up a trailer of an action film Hamlet with Schwarzenegger in the lead role.
9
Going for
laughs, the imagined over-the-top trailer ends with the muscled prince on a steed, lighting a
cigar, pontificating, “To be, or not to be . . . not to be,” as Elsinore explodes in a fireball.
Smith’s choice of films is peculiar in that neither seek to integrate Hamlet or draw on
Shakespeare’s play to make significant meanings. Sampling is indeed an appropriate term for the
light lifting both films exhibit, though both might also be read as haunted. In Renaissance Man,
Shakespeare serves a touchstone for erudition and humanism in a broad sense. Granted, the
ragtag class goes to a production of Henry V and leave feeling inspired as soldiers. But, why not

8
The film is full of intertextual moments, many that take the form of cameos. Note, the English
teacher screening the 1948 film is played by Joan Plowright, Olivier’s wife until his death in
1989.
9
Likely a sneer toward Mel Gibson’s Hamlet attempt in Franco Zeffirelli's 1990 adaptation.

43
have them see a production of Hamlet, the play they discuss at length? Perhaps the connotations
that swirl around Hamlet – notably, inaction – made it seem an implausible source of go get ‘em
inspiration and thus a bad fit for sampling in the moment. Smith notes that “it turns out that these
military students are studying the wrong play” as Henry V represents “every Army recruiter’s
dream play” (144). If the film allowed for the significances of Hamlet to pervade, would the
recruits take a melancholy turn and ponder death, violence, or soldiering? Last Action Hero does
momentarily do a little more than sampling by re-working Hamlet as an action film, but the
humor emerges in large part from the action film trailer tropes employed that are ironically
paired with the intertwined classic of the play and Olivier’s film. Meaning stems more from
juxtaposition of canonical and popular cultures in a general sense than from the particular
sounds, images, or significances of Shakespeare’s text; an action film trailer parody that used
Twelfth Night or Oedipus Rex as fodder might have an equivalent effect. Still, Smith wonders,
“Why [. . .] are both of these movies unable to use Hamlet in ways that strengthen, rather than
undermine the films?” (146). The question strikes me as loaded, especially given Smith’s answer
that perhaps “it is because in both cases the contrasting complexities of Hamlet, rather than
adding depth to the films, highlight problems of plot, action, and characterization. Hamlet can be
dangerous material for the filmmaker” (146). That is, Hamlet can intervene. There is a slight bias
in her phrasing indicating that part of how Shakespeare undermines these films is that Hamlet is
simply a better achievement. Further, the question of why the play does not “strengthen” the
films is perhaps unfair given the kind of inconsequential sampling both demonstrate. The sense
of the films being undermined by Hamlet or not living up to its high standard stems from the
critical choice to compare the sampled beta-text to the nu-text. Asking “Why can’t Last Action
Hero be more like Hamlet?” becomes more of a value judgement or question of quality that takes

44
us away from the more interesting question about the collision of texts and its effects, that is,
what do we experience when a Shakespeare play haunts a nu-text.
Smith’s arguments about Renaissance Man and Last Action Hero serve as important
indicators as to how nu-texts that lift from Shakespeare, rather than adapt his plays or rework
them, develop an intertextual relationship marked by an evident inability to consume, efface, or
fully digest the beta-text. Just as with the previous two films, Smith finds that “In Tom
Stoppard’s sixties play and 1990 movie, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Hamlet does
indeed prove to be dangerous material, particularly for the eponymous heroes” (146). However,
R&G is a very different kind of text from the others with a very different kind of intertextuality
at work: its plot is built up from Shakespeare’s play, or at least finds its inspiration in the play; it
weaves together whole segments of dialogue from Hamlet with Stoppard’s content; it includes
scenes referred to in Shakespeare’s dialogue, but occur offstage; and, most importantly, it speaks
to its own intertextual relationship to its beta-text. More than a structural observation, this last
point reflects Smith’s claim that “films which ‘swallow’ chunks of Hamlet whole sometimes
have trouble digesting them. This is particularly true of films that allow key elements of the
Hamlet story to dominate them” (143). Consumption is meant to be a process of intake that
allows for absorption,which in turn provides energy. Whatever is not useful is disposed of. To
belabor the metaphor, Shakespeare, it might be said, either does not go down easily or else
comes back up. Nu-texts, like R&G, bite off more than they can digest. Rather than being
strengthened by the beta-text, we perceive an unsettled nu-text. In other words, beta-texts like
Hamlet cause intertextual indigestion.
The value of the consumption metaphor as it relates to haunting is that it begins to
destabilize the assumed distinction between beta-text and nu-text even as it denies full synthesis

45
of the two. Indigestion, like haunting, is a sign of a vexed intertextuality: lingering trouble, a
seething presence palpable in the nu-text. However, consumption and indigestion, unlike
haunting, seem to seal off the beta-text as a static, fully-formed, past, and known quantity, which
thus ensures recognizability within the nu-text. Such a perspective of the beta-text allows for the
descriptor, “chunks.” Margaret Jane Kidnie points out the flawed understanding that “[c]ultural,
geographical, or ideological differences between work and adaptation are rooted in a perceived
temporal gap between work and adaptation enabled by an idea of the work not as process, but as
something readily identifiable instead as an object” (68–69). Briefly, by “work,” Kidnie
unfortunately refers to the beta-text with a sense of primacy that exceeds just being first. By
adaptation, she refers to a wider sense of the word, much like nu-text. Her suggestion is that
separating out the beta-text as an object and creating a gap between it and the nu-text forces a
specious discrepancy between the two. Such a view holds up Shakespeare as the “heart of the
canon” (69), paradoxically untouchable and unimpeachable yet relatively vulnerable to nu-texts
that evolve, comment, react, and live. Instead of this view, Kidnie rightly insists that a
Shakespeare play, “for all that it carries the rhetorical and ideological force of an enduring
stability, is not an object at all, but rather a dynamic process that evolves over time in response to
the needs and sensibilities of its users” (2). Understanding the beta-text as an ongoing process
crucially grants that it is fluid and nimble; the beta-text lives not in spite of but because it is
known and it haunts because its presence carries ever developing and shifting eddies of
meanings. Haunting, by its nature, suggests an observable and traceable, though more ethereal –
rather than solid – beta-text. The benefit of the haunting perspective is we can be expansive in
both the nu-texts we can study and the forms of intertextuality we might explore within a
particular nu-text. Though I too am using R&G as a case study, to diverge from Smith, my theory

46
of intertextual haunting is not limited to nu-texts that similarly lift whole pieces, “chunks,” of
Hamlet. Indeed, R&G demonstrates that haunting persists even in the sections that are
completely Stoppard’s words. Unlike the associated concepts of consumption and indigestion,
haunting speaks to a perceived presence, not necessarily a present presence; the focus is on
effects within the nu-text and on the reader rather than authorial strategies (adaptation, sampling,
allusion, re-working, recycling, etc.).

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Summoned

GUIL: He was just a hat and cloak levitating in the grey plume of his own breath,
but when he called, we came. That much is certain—we came.
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead (39)

Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead presents a unique opportunity
as a case study because it actively engages with its own haunting by Hamlet and tries to work
through the tensions caused by recognition, interruption, and intervention. By summoning its
titular characters from Shakespeare’s play as well as lifting dialogue and scenes, Stoppard’s play
develops a laminated experience: two plays, stuck together, unfold simultaneously for the reader.
The interaction between the two, both onstage and within the reader, echoes Margaret Jane
Kidnie’s observation that certain Shakespearean nu-texts “suggest how the pasts we construct are
shot through with the present,” but also “how fragments from those pasts can seem to intrude
anachronistically into a later moment” (70). No doubt our construction of the past is colored by
the present moment and no doubt the present can be said to be constructed of the past. But, her
suggestion of “fragments” of the past that “intrude anachronistically” into the present signals a

47
more pointed interruption. Haunting aligns well with this kind of interruption, and R&G helps us
understand not just the ramifications interruptions suggest – what I call interventions – but also
the ways beta-text ghosts are summoned implicitly and explicitly by the nu-text and summoned
by the reader as she is called on to process the play through a kind of binocular vision. My goal
is to read the anxiety within R&G produced by its haunting by Shakespeare as a framework for
re-viewing intertextuality in terms that are unambiguously not laudatory and that draw out
questions of intervention and complicity.
Speaking to the layering of R&G, Paul D’Andrea writes that “Stoppard’s achievement” is
that “[w]e can contemplate the effects of one world on the other. [. . .] He has set up a powerful
dialectic by setting worlds in contact” (164). But, why do these “worlds in contact” pivot on
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – friends/courtiers/fall guys – rather than Hamlet himself –
perhaps the height of Shakespeare’s creative capacity for character? Why grant these two space
(if that is what it is) when it is Hamlet who like “[n]o other Shakespearean protagonist,” Harold
Bloom tells us, “so clearly abominates the play in which he is condemned to suffer and to act”
(The Anatomy of Influence 39)? Stoppard’s Guildenstern himself asks, “Who are we that so
much should converge on our little deaths?” The Player replies, “You are Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern. That's enough” (122). In Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet leaps off the page; you can
sense his potential to exist outside his text. You want him to, so he can live another day. Bloom
tells us he wants out, too. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, on the other hand, are dead and,
perhaps worse, uninteresting. Yet, it is the lack of possibility the two embody, certainly relative
to the prince, that makes them ideal – “enough” – for a dialectic between beta- and nu-text in
which the present becomes trapped in a past that haunts it. In terms of potential, while Hamlet
may seem to be on a similar set path toward death, the dynamic richness of his character

48
enhances the life he has and provokes a desire for it to continue beyond the play. To the contrary,
we have little stake in Shakespeare’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; we may feel a little sad
about their deaths, smirk a bit at the circumstances, but ultimately feel they may have gotten
what they deserved for doing Claudius’s bidding and so we move on quickly after the news from
England is delivered. These are not characters that break the vessel prepared for them; they are
very much within the vessel. The “stuckness” of the two – in Shakespeare’s play and in our
attitude toward the pair – renders them ironic, but appropriate, for transposition into a text
haunted by its own inevitability.
Questions of source seem redundant when talking about R&G, and yet, the obviousness
of an answer is complicated both within and without the play. Where might we locate the origins
of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? Are we so sure the answer is Hamlet? If not, who
are these characters? Their repetition throughout the play of “We were sent for” (taken from
Hamlet 2.2.284) and of explaining their presence with noun and verb variations of “summon”
suggests a different kind of intertextual act from lifting. Rather than an implication of stealing,
there is a notion that they are called forth from somewhere else, perhaps ordered to appear via
urgent request, and thus have a raison d'être; they have a “calling.” While in Hamlet, we know
Claudius asks them to come to Elsinore, who summons them in R&G? Guildenstern struggles to
think back to how he and Rosencrantz came to be present:

Practically starting from scratch. . . . An awakening, a man standing on his saddle
to bang on the shutters, our names shouted in a certain dawn, a message, a
summons . . . A new record for pitch and toss. We have not been . . .

49
picked out . . . simply to be abandoned . . . set loose to find our own way. . . . We
are entitled to some direction. (20)

There is a lot more going on in this brief timeline than a review of their day. The first line
suggests their import into Stoppard’s play is not a reboot of who they are in Hamlet; they are not
merely carried over, but something almost newly made – “practically starting from scratch” –
with the qualifier necessary since they do step into the roles of Shakespeare’s characters. They
are, in fact, not quite Stoppard’s and not quite Shakespeare’s. They are awakened by a man
outside shouting their names. Importantly, both Hamlet and R&G establish confusion about these
names – which is which? – with Stoppard in particular demonstrating that these two men are not
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern but labeled such by the summons. The two even have to stop and
decide which is which between them and then practice responding to the names (44–45).
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are called into existence. “Pitch and toss” refers to their coin
game, the “new record” being the unusual run of heads that indicates the laws of probability
seem to have given way to predictability. That is, they have been “picked out,” given roles that
require they follow a set “direction” prescribed by Hamlet and is thus predictable. Despite the
range of motion outside Shakespeare they are given via Stoppard’s words – regulated even as
that is – ultimately, they are not “abandoned” nor “set loose” to go their “own way” but fade
back into Hamlet with Horatio’s final words.
Who were Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern before they were given those
names? The notion of a “before” is blurry with double vision. These characters are awakened at
the inception of the nu-text, and they seem to exist only within the confines of Stoppard’s play as
their limited mobility, among other factors explored later this chapter, indicates. When they are

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assigned identities from the beta-text – so named by the nu-text, by its title, and by the reader’s
expectations brought on by naming – Shakespeare’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are
summoned into the nu-text, though in a particular way. For these two men, there is no existence
“before” Stoppard’s play, but there are pre-existing functions picked out of Shakespeare’s text
that they play out. Kay Smith writes that R&G “limits rather carefully the material that is directly
imported from Hamlet, in order to suit the need for focus and compactness on the stage” (146).
Indeed, Stoppard limits by only using a handful of scenes from Hamlet, some of its characters
(other than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), and the momentum of Shakespeare’s play toward
death. Yet, however focused and compact the stage, Hamlet itself has no such limits;
Shakespeare’s play exceeds whatever restrictions have been placed on it by Stoppard’s
selections. The nu-text suggests as much as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are unable to leave the
stage, trapped by its borders, while Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, and others come and
go, leaking out to the wings and beyond. The need for compactness and focus in R&G is in direct
response to the sprawling significances of Shakespeare, an ongoing process that cannot be
contained in, even as it pre-determines, the nu-text. The unlimited is used to limit. By layering
one on the other, oscillating between limitation and limitlessness, Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern come to be haunted by Shakespeare’s as R&G is haunted by the summoning of
Hamlet.
Driving toward the implications of summoning the beta-text, Marjorie Garber proposes
that in R&G, “[t]he Ghost has become part of the machine. The whole action is revenant, an
endless repetition. Everything and everyone is already emptied out” (Shakespeare and Modern
Culture 222). Her poetic understanding of haunting brings together process with effects.
Summoning Shakespeare renders the nu-text a repeating machine, endlessly resurrecting a

51
revenant Hamlet that threatens R&G. What might threaten a nu-text described as “already
emptied out”? “Already” suggests that before the action of Stoppard’s play begins the presence
of the beta-text has rendered it void. The question of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s identities in
Stoppard’s play hints at the paradox to which Garber points: emptiness means something can
come flooding in, namely, the ghost. The pair are outlines of men colored in by Shakespeare’s
characters. In turn, they play out those characters, and Garber’s repetition machine spins on,
threatening the nu-text by intervening in its potential for alternative action and for forward,
rather than regressive, movement.
Taking a step back from Garber and – at least momentarily – from the clear sense that the
nu-text is under stress due to haunting, the summoning of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and
associated elements from Hamlet into a new play does indeed create space for new possibilities
and the potential for Stoppard’s play to intervene with Shakespeare’s. Such interventions may
fall under two broad and not mutually exclusive headings: R&G represents an evolution of
Hamlet or R&G represents a challenge to Hamlet.
The first of these can be framed by borrowing from Margaret Jane Kidnie’s analysis of
Robert Lepage’s 1996 multimedia play Elsinore, her observation of Lepage’s work serving as a
point of reference for R&G. She argues that, “[r]ather than locating the site of production beyond
the supposedly fixed margins of the work, Elsinore self-consciously situates itself within this
palimpsest [. . .] so continuing to ‘write’ what Hamlet might yet become” (90). Elsinore does
parallel R&G in that it “self-consciously situates itself within [a] palimpsest,” but is R&G
“continuing to ‘write’ what Hamlet might yet become”? The notion can be interpreted in various
ways, further complicated by the earlier claim that Shakespeare’s work is already a continuing

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process. So, I want to focus on some ways that R&G distinguishes itself from Hamlet and on
ways that Stoppard’s play may intervene with Shakespeare to a degree.
The following double entendre from the Player, for instance, gestures toward one such
divergence: “We keep to our usual stuff, more or less, only inside out. We do on stage the things
that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an
entrance somewhere else” (28). Let us skip the bawdy level and parse his words as a digest of
R&G as a nu-text, beginning with the two halves of the first sentence. “We keep to our usual
stuff, more or less” signals a nu-text that follows a standard pattern of taking the beta-text as a
model, with some variation. The particular variation of R&G could be described as an attempt to
turn Hamlet inside out in that it acts out “on stage the things that are supposed to happen off.” In
other words, many of Stoppard’s scenes are off-stage actions either referred to in Hamlet through
dialogue, but not seen, or creatively imagined by Stoppard as filling in what is going on with
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern when the beta-text’s scenes do not include them. If the nu-text
merely repeated the beta-text, we would never see much of what we do see in R&G. Shakespeare
has Ophelia relay her harrowing encounter with Hamlet, “his doublet all unbraced,” et cetera
(2.1.78-101), but Stoppard shows it (34–35). The moment in R&G is not, however, for the
benefit of filling in Hamlet, but to set up the play’s palimsestuous approach: as Hamlet and
Ophelia perform their dumbshow, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the stage directions indicate,
remain frozen. Maybe they are in shock about what they are seeing. But maybe, rather than
witnesses, they are unable to move because, according to the beta-text, they are not supposed to
be there. The pair’s first appearance in the beta-text, in fact, is the very next scene following
Ophelia’s verbal description of what we have just seen, when Claudius welcomes them to
Elsinore (2.2). Indeed, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern unfreeze just as Claudius enters the stage

53
and initiates Shakespeare’s Act 2, Scene 2 within Stoppard’s play. The underlying structure of
the nu-text revealed by this interaction with the beta-text is that R&G has only limited freedom
within the borders of Hamlet, even when the nu-text seems to step away from the beta-text. Yet,
this is “a kind of integrity”; the nu-text can step away. The point of the double entendre, in
addition to humor, is that within those spaces created in/by the nu-text we may see things we are
not supposed to see, things that could intervene with Hamlet and move past what is
appropriate/d.
Specifically, by taking Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – minor, not noble, and stuck
characters – R&G affords a chance for us to hear voices we usually don’t hear, “off-stage voices”
that allow the play to have a political stake. Heebon Park-Finch, for example, claims, “Stoppard
offers an alternative perspective as he re-writes, re-views, re-activates and re-configures the
Shakespearean source text,” in particular “serving characters who were previously textually
oppressed and disregarded” (185). Chapter Two of my project centers on questions that relate
intertextuality to the “oppressed and disregarded,” so here I will stay brief by quoting from
Edward Said’s essay “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals,” in which he calls for
“intellectual intervention” by drawing attention to those “less powerful interests threatened with
frustration, silence, incorporation, or extinction by the powerful” (Said 24). Centering the play
on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern renders them as representatives of “less powerful interests” that
need to be heard and acknowledged, but are not. Guildenstern becomes frustrated with
intimations of his powerlessness as he verbally spars with the Player:

54
GUIL: At the court. I would say I have some influence.
PLAYER: Would you say so?
GUIL: I have influence yet.
PLAYER: Yet what?
GUIL seizes the PLAYER violently.
GUIL: I have influence! (26)

As with many moments in the play, there are contradictory possibilities brought on by the
blurring of Shakespeare’s characters with Stoppard’s. Guildenstern may be standing in for the
beta-text, if his “yet” relays a sense of something past. That is, the canonical text might yet hold
sway over the nu-text. But, not much else in the play supports this perspective. Alternatively,
Guildenstern, if he is Stoppard’s character and thus a stand-in for the nu-text, might be
expressing grave concern that he has no sway at the court, the realm of the powerful, despite
having once had a modicum of authority as a fragment of Shakespeare. Transposed into a
fragment of Stoppard, his influence fades. Simply, by focusing on these characters, R&G points
to the troubling power differential, not just on a larger socio-political scale but also within
intertextual relationships, and so might be pointing to what Hamlet could become if we read it
with the imbalance of power in mind.
R&G also plays out an alternative approach to re-viewing the balance between beta-text
and nu-text by attempting, as Julie Sanders observes, to “render Hamlet, and in particular the
figure of the prince, absurd. Aspects, events, and characters from Shakespeare’s play are visible
onstage during the course of Stoppard’s drama, but these have often been creatively decentred,
reduced to dumbshow or nonsensical fragment” (56). Stoppard’s “doublet unbraced” scene, for

55
example, parodies the Shakespearean convention of dumbshow as it makes Hamlet look
ridiculous in a moment Shakespeare has Ophelia describe with a combination of dread and pity.
The seriousness with which the great Bard approaches what, when rendered in performance,
looks hilarious puts our admiration on pause long enough to consider, even for a moment, that
perhaps Hamlet is dated or, worse, not quite the work of genius we remember.
Such mockery transitions between the interventions brought on by imagining an
evolution of the beta-text and those that might challenge the beta-text. Notably, a significant
difference between the two is a challenge to the beta-text may also represent a challenge to the
reader by confounding pre-knowledge, education, assumptions, or even reading strategies.
Umberto Eco confirms this facet, finding that “there are texts aiming at giving [the reader] the
solutions he does not expect, challenging every overcoded intertextual frame as well as the
reader’s predictive indolence” (The Role of the Reader 33). Certainly, having Hamlet as a beta-
text renders an “overcoded intertextual frame” for R&G, Shakespeare’s play spilling out from the
seams of Stoppard’s. However, rather than challenging the “reader’s predictive indolence,”
Stoppard’s nu-text leans into it, accepting that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead as a fait
accompli. The previous statement needs the qualifier of “ultimately,” however. Ultimately, the
reader is given the solution, the end, he expects, perhaps to make a statement about the inability
to challenge authority or at least the authoritative text. But, from start to predetermined finish, we
find play. On one hand, the idea of play has connotations of fun or a game – a play on
Shakespeare, playfulness with Shakespeare – and R&G has its funny moments, even if I choose
to see these as gallows humor. Play may also be slippage, movement, or maneuverability made
possible by space or gaps akin to the looseness of a screw or hinge. Off-stage action provides a

56
chance for challenges in the form of wiggle room, but such play also implies hard walls on either
side that delimit movement.
Stoppard’s text explores the limits of challenging play, especially its own limits, as
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern try to intercede with Hamlet:

GUIL: I can't for the life of me see how we're going to get into conversation.
HAMLET enters upstage, and pauses, weighing up the pros and cons of
making his quietus.
ROS and GUIL watch him.
ROS: Nevertheless, I suppose one might say that this was a chance. . . . One
might well . . . accost him. . . . Yes, it definitely looks like a chance to me.
. . . Something on the lines of a direct informal approach . . . man to man
. . . straight from the shoulder. . . . Now look here, what's it all about . . .
sort of thing. Yes. Yes, this looks like one to be grabbed with both hands, I
should say . . . if I were asked. . . . No point in looking at a gift horse till
you see the whites of its eyes, etcetera. (He has moved towards HAMLET
but his nerve fails. He returns.) (74–75)

Rosencrantz hems and haws and ultimately fails to speak to, accost, or grab Hamlet; he cannot
add dialogue to, and thus change or intervene into Shakespeare’s play. Can the nu-text “get into”
the Hamlet “conversation”? Can its voice be heard? The “direct informal approach” sounds like
how we hope we can deal with brimming conflict – taking it on “man to man” – hoping it will
not come to violence, but preparing. Could we say that R&G moves towards Hamlet, but its

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nerve fails? Rosencrantz concludes, “We're overawed, that's our trouble. When it comes to the
point we succumb to their personality” (75). The phrase “man to man” means an even playing
field; but that is not the nature of the tension between texts. Within the pre-determined limits,
those set by as awe-inducing a beta-text as Hamlet, can anything intervene or is the ghost of
Shakespeare so powerful that the nu-text must succumb? Adding insult to injury, Ophelia then
enters and Hamlet immediately acknowledges her, they exchange Shakespeare’s lines, and they
exit together. Guildenstern mocks Rosencrantz’s attempt: “Very impressive. Yes, I thought your
direct informal approach was going to stop this thing dead in its tracks there. If I might make a
suggestion—shut up and sit down. Stop being perverse” (75). Sarcasm aside, the direct approach
of trying to intervene by adding to the beta-text, creating new dialogue between Rosencrantz and
Hamlet, would indeed stop the unfolding of the nu-text according to the structure it has
established. If we accept the sarcasm, the line dismisses the attempt to intervene as pointless: you
cannot stop, using Garber’s understanding of the play, the repetition machine because you cannot
stop the pervasive and endless unfolding of Hamlet. Therefore, “shut up and sit down.” The
failed interaction between Rosencrantz and Hamlet represents the “natural” dynamic between
beta-text and nu-text and anything that threatens it is hence labeled “perverse.” Putting a button
on the dialogue as argument, Rosencrantz, in his frustration, tries one more time to break into
Hamlet by sneaking up behind Gertrude, putting his hands over her eyes, and shouting “Guess
who?!” with, according to the script instructions, “a desperate frivolity” (75). The Player comes
on stage and reveals that “Gertrude” is in fact Alfred, the young man who plays women in the
acting company. Rosencrantz has not come close to Gertrude, and his question regarding self-
identification is left hanging. Once more, the move toward beta-text intervention has been upset,
reinforcing the play’s understanding of the intertextual power dynamic.

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The summoning of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern thus produces not just a laminated
experience, but structures a differential between the beta-text and nu-text layers, one that is
seemingly relentless and haunting and performed for a reader to mirror the differential performed
by the reader. Stoppard’s Guildenstern comments on his and Rosencrantz’s position in the
scheme of things, an idiomatic description of a larger cultural hierarchy: “we are little men, we
don't know the ins and outs of the matter, there are wheels within wheels, etcetera—it would be
presumptuous of us to interfere with the designs of fate or even of kings” (110). His words belie
an understanding of the position to which the nu-text is relegated relative to canonical beta-text.
Further, he exhibits an attitude toward intervention that may be less his own than one he adopts
as he sees he must succumb: “it would be presumptuous of us to interfere,” “us” signifying the
nu-text and the presumption being that a text like Stoppard’s could impact Shakespeare, the king.
Though intertexuality in general provides opportunity for interventions – for nu-texts to produce
new meanings through and evolve the beta-text and for beta-texts to be re-viewed in light of
challenges to it posed by the nu-text – R&G demonstrates the limitations on intervention brought
on by the powerful Shakespearean beta-text in a particularly haunted intertextual relationship.
“Wheels within wheels,” Stoppard’s play becomes Garber’s repeating machine, reanimating the
revenant Hamlet and setting limits on the nu-text in the form of “designs of fate,” the narrative
momentum that builds toward Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s inevitable death.

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Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Haunted

The run of “heads” is impossible, yet ROS betrays no surprise at all—he feels
none.
[. . .]
GUIL is well alive to the oddity of it. He is not worried about the money, but he is
worried by the implications; aware but not going to panic about it.
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead (11)

While R&G puts on display the difficulties of the nu-text intervening with the beta-text,
Hamlet consistently interrupts and intervenes with Stoppard’s work. Shakespeare’s characters
and dialogue move on and off stage just as the beta-text moves in and out of the nu-text, creating
the haunting effect of Hamlet not just coming through R&G, but poised to take it over. In
response to a theatrical review of the nu-text that insists Stoppard has embraced Shakespeare’s
characterization of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Heebon Park-Finch writes that such a
perspective adheres us to Shakespeare’s portrayal of the two as less than minor, meaning
“Hamlet is still the prime focus in Stoppard’s text.” Alternatively, she argues:

“if we reverse this focus (as in R&G), Hamlet recedes into the background and we
see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern dragged into their own tragedy while
experiencing that of Hamlet through their eyes. In other words, R&G is about
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, with Hamlet palimpsestuously appearing,
retreating and reappearing. (193)

Stoppard’s play might be explained through Gérard Genette’s palimpsest model, as I considered
earlier in this chapter, except the beta-text does not merely exist underneath or within Stoppard’s

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play. Hamlet does not recede. Certainly, the text and characters from Shakespeare’s play retreat
and reappear; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, however, seem trapped on stage. They serve as
reminders that Hamlet and the ghost of Shakespeare never leave the stage and never leave the
reader. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s “own tragedy” may lay along a different path from
Hamlet’s, but it is very much the path set by Hamlet. There is a narrative fate created by
haunting, a pattern set out by the beta-text that contains the nu-text and allows for a “reader’s
predictive indolence” (Eco, The Role of the Reader 33). As Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play
their coin flipping game at the opening of the play, they encounter a break with the laws of
probability: every time Guildenstern flips a coin from his purse, it lands on heads. It seems as if
it will repeat endlessly, predictably coming up the same way. The suggestion may be no matter
how many times you “flip” Hamlet, that is, re-work it and try to make an intervention, Hamlet
persists. Rosencrantz “betrays no surprise—he feels none” as we should not be surprised that a
nu-text like R&G that summons the ghost of a beta-text like Shakespeare’s will find itself
haunted. Guildenstern “is worried by the implications” of such inevitability, and, in order to
register the “oddity” of it, we must investigate the implications of haunting.
The sense and effect of inevitability differentiates haunting from what might be broadly
labeled as “influence.” I center my argument on identifying Hamlet as the beta-text for R&G, but
Samuel Beckett’s influence has its effects. Kay Smith notes Stoppard is “indebted stylistically”
to Beckett (146) and, in particular, R&G has more than faint echoes of Waiting for Godot. For
example, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two companions sitting on the side of the road,
questioning existence, are very Vladimir and Estragon-like. However, is R&G haunted by
Beckett? I do not think so. Beckett’s influence, whether it be in the form of style, allusion, or
pastiche, is present, but it does not delimit nor threaten Stoppard’s text and tends to fall more in

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the category of authorial strategy than interruption and intervention. I can propose a simple,
though reductive, litmus test for haunting. One: Can you say, “I have seen Godot, so I think I
know how R&G will turn out”? Two: Can you say, “I have seen Hamlet, so I think I know how
R&G will turn out”? The answer to the first question is in the negative range. The answer to the
second is more complicated, though the title of Stoppard’s play sets up an expectation derived
from Shakespeare and would thus suggest an affirmative answer.
An alternative assessment tool might be made from Guildenstern’s nautical metaphor,
another moment when R&G confronts its own haunting:

Yes, I'm very fond of boats myself. I like the way they're—contained. You don't
have to worry about which way to go, or whether to go at all—the question
doesn't arise, because you're on a boat, aren't you? [. . .] I think I'll spend most of
my life on boats. (100–01)

Not only are boats “contained,” they drive forward no matter how you move within them, which
also alleviates the “worry about which way to go, or whether to go at all.” The boat is already
going. Being on the boat is being in a haunted intertextual relationship; the nu-text rides along,
no say to the direction, in the narrative wrapped around it by the beta-text. Guildenstern’s boat
thus usefully reverses the more common palimpsest understanding of the beta-text written over

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by the nu-text, the nu-text thus containing the beta-text.
10
In turn, it speaks to interruption and
intervention through delineating control and containment. The questions about “which way to go,
or whether to go at all” are questions about the potential for interventions, which “[don’t] arise”
because of the difficulties for the nu-text to intervene within a haunted intertextuality. The ghost
of the beta-text dictates how the nu-text “goes.” Beckett’s works are not “boats” for R&G. They
neither contain nor determine Stoppard’s play like Hamlet does. Nor do they align with
Guildenstern’s wistful conclusion that marks his existence as contingent on Shakespeare;
Stoppard’s portrayal of Guildenstern may be influenced by Beckett, but it is hard to describe it as
something other than a portrayal of Guildenstern, Shakespeare’s character. Guildenstern may
find life in various nu-texts – he adds, “One is free on a boat. For a time. Relatively.” (101) – but
that life and his movement are bounded by the hull of Shakespeare’s boat, the beta-text.
One might be free on a boat, but “for a time” and “relatively” are important qualifiers.
How do we make sense of the limiting effects imposed by haunting? To answer, we need to
consider these qualifiers, meaning we need to explore what R&G proposes as some of the
interventions Hamlet deploys. Coming back to the question of why Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are summoned, Stoppard’s play circles back to questioning the point of their
presence in Shakespeare’s Elsinore. From a certain point of view, their role is absurd as far as the
reader is concerned because we know what is bothering Hamlet. They are called to Elsinore to

10
I doubt that the boat metaphor indicates an intertexuality that tips the balance toward nu-text
control, meaning the boat represents the nu-text in which the beta-text is contained. In large part,
the clarity stems from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern themselves being on the boat, in fact
finding themselves on the boat to England with Hamlet just when they think at the end of Act
Two that they have permission from Hamlet to be, according to Rosencrantz, “free”; “He said
we can go,” Rosencrantz insists (95). Act Three opens with the pair surprised to be there and
surprised Hamlet is there with them. Hamlet “shanghais” them, as the beta-text sweeps up the
nu-text. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and R&G are not given the freedom to break from the
direction determined by Shakespeare’s play.

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entertain the prince and discover the cause of his melancholy, but we readers have no need to
glean anything from Hamlet. We actually know much more than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
will ever learn. Their value may be as a frame of reference for the level of diegetic knowledge:
through them we learn how little everyone else in the play knows relative to us. In the case of
R&G, the presence of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern becomes even more irrelevant because we
know Hamlet. Even within Stoppard’s play, they quickly recognize the apparent
meaninglessness of their purpose:

ROS: To sum up: your father, whom you love, dies, you are his heir, you come
back to find that hardly was the corpse cold before his young brother
popped on to his throne and into his sheets, thereby offending both legal
and natural practice. Now why exactly are you behaving in this
extraordinary manner?
GUIL: I can't imagine. (Pause.) But all that is well known, common property. Yet
he sent for us. And we did come. (51)

Rosencrantz’s summary is an exceptionally concise understanding of the events that initially
shape the action of Shakespeare’s play, save one critical piece: the ghost and its charge. Within
R&G, they cannot know about the ghost because they are not aware of it in Shakespeare’s play.
Again, we know more than they do. The end of Guildenstern’s response, likely said with
mystification mixed with resignation – “Yet he sent for us. And we did come.” – should then be
reframed as the recurring inquiry: if they are ostensibly useless, why were Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern sent for? Why did they come?

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Like Guildenstern, we should be worried by the implications of inevitability, and the
repetition of these questions highlights concerns regarding how the predominating force of
Hamlet threatens to relegate Rosencrantz and Guildenstern into their beta-textual roles as they
try to maintain themselves as protagonists in their own play. The limitations imposed by
haunting prevents the pair from having some alternative role, some alternative direction that does
not tend toward Shakespeare’s. Again, Stoppard’s play casts doubt on the identities of the two
men; they are not Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, though the haunting beta-text also denies that
they can become anything but Shakespeare’s pair. In R&G, Rosencrantz invokes their presence
in the beta-text, differentiating the security that comes from knowing the past from the blurring
identities thrust on them in the nu-text: “I haven't forgotten—how I used to remember my own
name—and yours, oh yes! There were answers everywhere you looked. There was no question
about it—people knew who I was and if they didn't they asked and I told them” (38). There is a
sense of nostalgia in his words, which are in sharp contrast to the interaction some beats later
when Guildenstern questions Rosencrantz, “What's your name?” and Rosencrantz replies
“What's yours?” (43). The script directions indicate the questions are asked “seriously,” denoting
that they really do not know, which in turn supports why, when they earlier meet the players for
the first time, they mix up who is who (22).
The confusion to some extent is a lift from the beta-text, when Claudius gets them wrong
and Gertrude corrects him (2.2.33-34). But, in R&G the frequency of misidentifications gestures
toward significance. Gertrude gets them wrong when she tries to set Claudius right (37) and later
even their supposed friend Hamlet is unsure of which is which (53). The irony of everyone
mislabeling them is that they chose which would be which and practice responding to these
names (44-45). I see two possible ways of understanding names in Stoppard’s text. First, perhaps

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Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have chosen incorrectly, which is funny and only moderately
profound. Second, it does not matter which is which, as the roles as they are in Hamlet come as a
unit, a package deal. Shakespeare makes no significant distinction between the two and, arguably
more important, in the larger cultural sphere – in us – they are completely interchangeable.
Except, ironically, when we speak of them: it is so unfathomable to dissociate them from each
other that we almost always refer to them as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and almost never as
Guildenstern and Rosencrantz. Though Stoppard establishes unique character notes for each
(11), and we may even see unique personalities emerge as the play goes on, Hamlet is beyond
Stoppard’s control. The potential for them to be these new characters slips away at as the nu-text
moves in the direction of the beta-text. The disregard other characters have for who they “really
are” and their own struggles to know for certain does not mean they adopt the roles of
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as a set; these are signs of their vulnerability to a kind of haunting
inevitability themselves. These two are not blanks, but are, to use Marjorie Garber’s word,
emptied. Yet, to next say that they are filled with Shakespeare’s characters would be inaccurate.
Instead, it helps to gain an understanding from R&G itself: Guildenstern, trying to make sense of
the Act 2, Scene 2 conversation with Hamlet, wonders aloud, “We got his symptoms, didn't we?”
(57), “his” in reference to the prince. Guildenstern is hoping they learned what afflicts Hamlet,
and yet, to get someone’s symptoms also indicates that the sickness is contagious to those that
are vulnerable. I want to avoid putting forward an entirely new metaphor, so the key point is that
something from Hamlet is passed on to them. Transitioning to the textual level, perhaps the
choice of words suggests that Stoppard’s protagonists inherit from Hamlet the names, roles, and
deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

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Further, they inherit not only designated identities but also Shakespeare’s designated arc,
the inevitable narrative produced by the beta-text haunting the nu-text. Rosencrantz recognizes in
R&G that he and Guildenstern “have no control” (71) and “there’s only one direction” (72),
suggesting that the possibilities for alternative plays with alternative stories, alternative
directions, alternative meanings, are disrupted as Hamlet intervenes into R&G. Park-Finch
similarly notes, “Shakespeare’s text at times appears to overwhelm its modern analogue, as the
old and the new converge and when this happens, the two characters immediately fall into their
original roles, using Shakespearean English, in contrast to the modern voices that they use
elsewhere.” Yet, she concludes, “The overall effect of this juxtaposition of time and two worlds,
however, is one of symbiosis rather than division” (189). The break between Shakespearean and
modern English, the shift in language rhythm and likely actor movement, and the sudden
appearance and then exit of characters like Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, or Polonius hardly strike
the reader as points where beta-text and nu-text “converge.” The beats happen far too abruptly.
Her initial assessment of the beta-text seeming to “overwhelm” gestures at the perceived effects
of intertextual haunting. In these moments when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play out
Shakespeare’s scenes and use Shakespeare’s dialogue, our blurred vision of the two texts is made
sharp, and we see clearly the imposition of the beta-text on the nu-text. Rather than “symbiosis,”
the laminated experience gestures in the direction of a parasitic direction, a topic for my second
chapter.
Regarding the implications of haunting, the question provoked by the tension between
symbiosis and parasitism may be whether or not R&G is, as Enoch Brater claims, “invigorated
by a liberating use of a shared literary past” (211). The ways in which Stoppard’s play speaks to
its own haunting qualify as new meanings made from Hamlet, however too much of the nu-text

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makes a point of challenging any notion of liberation, the most powerful evidence for this being
that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are trapped on stage, often literally trapped by Hamlet.
Guildenstern realizes this: “As soon as we make a move they'll come pouring in from every side,
shouting obscure instructions, confusing us with ridiculous remarks, messing us about from here
to breakfast and getting our names wrong” (85). Indeed, multiple times they seem like they are
about to exit to the wings and then one of the other characters from Hamlet comes on stage and
pulls them back into one of Shakespeare’s scenes. Guildenstern has identified the recurring
intervention made by the beta-text: when R&G tries to “make a move,” Hamlet interrupts it.
The definition of “a move” is best left open and inclusive of various interpretations, but
broadly speaking we might characterize one as a step away from the beta-text. Richard Corballis
observes that “the exits marked for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet become exits for all
other characters in Stoppard” (33). In part, we can take this literally: the final lines of
Shakespeare’s dialogue for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do not prompt them to leave the stage,
as they would in a production of Shakespeare’s play. In R&G, the pair remain and Claudius and
Gertrude or Hamlet walk off. The implication is that the pair are trapped; everyone else can exit
but them. On another level, we also find that many of other characters have life beyond
Shakespeare’s and Stoppard’s stage in various creative nu-texts, while, outside of Hamlet,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern may only redevelop within Stoppard’s play. Earlier in this chapter
we looked at moments where R&G demonstrates how the nu-text cannot manage to intervene
into the beta-text. Here we must note that not only does the nu-text fail in these attempts, the nu-
text cannot exit its haunted relationship with the beta-text, cannot escape its entrapment within
the inevitable. After Hamlet kills Polonius, Claudius asks Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to find
the prince and the body, his charge to them seemingly demanding that they leave the stage as

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Hamlet is not present. In Stoppard’s play, Claudius and Gertrude walk off and the pair are left
behind to make sense of how to translate the order to “Seek him out” into purposeful movement
that might take them off the stage. They discuss a potential exeunt:

ROS: Well, it's progress, isn't it? Something positive. Seek him out. (Looks round
without moving his feet.) Where does one begin . . . ? (Takes one step
towards the wings and halts.)
GUIL: Well, that's a step in the right direction.
ROS: You think so? He could be anywhere. (86)

Confined by a haunting beta-text, the only step that represents “progress,” advancement rather
than recurrence, might be to leave the stage and abandon Hamlet. The motivation for such a
departure ostensibly is to seek out Hamlet, perhaps an insinuation that rather than being stymied
by other characters “pouring in from every side,” a “positive” development might come from
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern finding and interrupting the prince. Rosencrantz’s final line – “He
could be anywhere” – might be an observation that Hamlet moves widely off-stage in other nu-
texts, making it hard to pin him down with one significance to take on. It also sounds like a
statement of fear akin to a line from a horror movie: the ghost can be anywhere and may enter at
any moment or may be blocking every exit. Indeed, they never leave the stage; they walk around
and around, shifting direction each time they get close to the wings. The containment brought on
by Shakespeare’s play prevents them from interrupting Hamlet until he is ready for them per
Shakespeare’s play. They have to wait for their “entrance” into the next scene from Hamlet,
which in Stoppard’s play means waiting for Hamlet to enter. Sure enough, Hamlet walks on

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stage, deposits Polonius’s body (one less reason for the pair to leave), walks off, and enters again
when it is the “right time” for the two to encounter him and speak with him. The act ends with
one more chance for an exit, the hope expressed by Rosencrantz that “anything could happen
yet,” and the stage directions that read “They go” (95). However, Act 3 begins in darkness and
silence, until we hear Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s voices, ironically as Shakespeare’s play
has no further dialogue for them. But, we know Hamlet is not through with them yet: there are
still pirates, a swapped letter, England, and an execution. “We're not finished, then?” laments
Rosencrantz. Guildenstern replies, “Well, we're here, aren't we?” (97). Where else could they be?
Against any sense of progress, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are rendered inert, along for
the ride. “They'll have us hanging about till we're dead” (93), Rosencrantz realizes. Why again
are these particular characters summoned? Avery Gordon writes that “haunting [is] that moment
[. . .] when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving” (xvi).
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, as fairly insipid and possibly irrelevant to Shakespeare’s text,
should be “invisible” in the vast cultural network from which intertextuality draws, at least
relative to characters like Hamlet or Ophelia. But here they are in Stoppard’s play, trapped on
stage, locked into replaying the beta-text from which from they cannot step away. Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern are markers for, their summoning “the moment” of, haunting. The two are the
mechanisms for understanding the implications of a haunted intertextuality. Within the nu-text,
they cannot be anything other than and they cannot do anything other than what they inherit from
the beta-text. Guildenstern, “aware but not going to panic about it” (11), recognizes the
consequences of summoning the ghost of the beta-text and the implications of haunting: “Where
we went wrong was getting on a boat. We can move, of course, change direction, rattle about,
but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind

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and current” (122). He seems to take some responsibility as we watch, wondering, when are they
going to die? What is our responsibility as a community of readers? Where do we go wrong?

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

As the title of Stoppard’s play makes clear, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern will die. They
have to. Just before they encounter Hamlet for the first time, Rosencrantz asks, “Should we go?”
Guildenstern responds, “Why? We're marked now” (52). “Marked” reoccurs in the play,
indicating it holds significance. In the immediate scene, the surface level meaning is that they
have already been seen, so there is no point in going. In performance terms, “mark” refers to the
assigned position to which an actor is supposed to move. Actors are required to “hit their marks.”
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern cannot go as their marks will not allow it; there are expectations.
Last, “marked” can mean “written,” with variations that stretch definitions and connotations
further. We “make our mark,” either as we sign off on something or make an achievement
worthy of recording. We “mark things down.” A “mark” is a sign to remember and return. Using
this significant word, The Player pinpoints the “design [in] all art”: “It never varies—we aim at
the point where everyone who is marked for death dies” (79). The reference is, of course, to
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are marked for death not just by Hamlet, Shakespeare, or
Stoppard, but by readers like us as we remember and expect their end. In this final section, I
want to explore our complicity in the production of a haunted intertextuality, how our knowledge
and veneration of Shakespeare – how we mark Shakespeare in the nu-text – might stand in the
way of progress and allow alternative voices and ideas to die.

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While Heebon Park-Finch argues that Stoppard’s play “foregrounds Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern as victims of chance and coincidence” (191), the title of the play insists that chance
and coincidence are not in effect: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, meaning when the
play begins, they are already dead. We are told this right from the start; we know it will happen
before we attend. R&G foregrounds the pair – and itself, the haunted nu-text – as victims of
predetermined events set in motion. Paul D’Andrea explains that in Stoppard’s play, “text is
definitive. When Guildenstern asks who gets to decide who dies in plays, the Player switches off
his smile to intone ‘Decides? It is written’” (169). D’Andrea and the Player emphasize the
written text of Hamlet, granting it authority over Stoppard’s play as the “definitive” pattern to
follow. Except, the beta-text cannot haunt the nu-text based only on the fact that it was written
first. The concept of haunting has little to do with historico-materialist approaches and has more
to do with perception and experience, in line with reader response or phenomenology. Therefore,
we have to be expansive with what we mean by “text” if we are to say it is definitive, similar to
the wide understanding granted to the concept of “Shakespeare” when I speak of his ghost as a
continually unfolding process we encounter again and again. The Player, like us, often seems to
know more than anyone else in R&G, making insinuations that he, like us, has already
experienced Hamlet:

PLAYER: I can come and go as I please.
GUIL: You're evidently a man who knows his way around.
PLAYER: I've been here before.
GUIL: We're still finding our feet.
PLAYER: I should concentrate on not losing your heads.

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GUIL: Do you speak from knowledge?
PLAYER: Precedent. (66)

The Player’s ability to “come and go as [he] pleases,” much like Hamlet, Ophelia, Claudius, and
Gertrude do, stands in sharp contrast to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s inability to leave the
stage. Only the Player, however, seems completely unfettered from Hamlet, from “precedent,”
almost a skill he associates with having “been here before.” Though I have been speaking of
haunting as creating an effect of inevitability, is the implication here that knowledge negates
fate? Or, does knowledge allow for freedom of choice, which is not quite the same thing? Only
the reader shares with the Player a familiarity with the beta-text, and thus shares a similar
freedom. If this is true, we have to reevaluate the piece of dialogue between Guildenstern and the
Player referenced by D’Andrea. The Player brushes off the question of “Who decides?” and
points to the beta-text – “It is written” (80) – as the predetermining and predominating force in
the nu-text. Yet, the beta-text is only partly to blame for the haunting effect. The reader
contributes when choosing to let the precedent become definitive, when summoning the beta-text
into the experience of the nu-text, and thus granting authority to the canonical work and
imposing containment on the contemporary work.
The effect of haunting is experienced and produced by the reader, and R&G usefully
structures a conception of its own reader as it is, after all, the reader that recognizes the ghost of
the beta-text within Stoppard’s play. In his appropriately titled essay “What’s Hecuba to Us,”
Peter Rabinowitz demonstrates that the presence of the beta-text within the nu-text is not enough
to produce haunting. Reception is crucial: “if a pattern is also perceived by the narrative
audience, it may have broader implications [of] inevitability” (252). Rabinowitz continues:

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But even if a pattern is unambiguously recognized by the narrative audience, it
need not follow that the work is making a statement about fate. In the first place,
the narrative audience will not interpret all patterns it sees as some order
preexisting in its world. [. . .] Alternatively, the narrative audience may believe
that a pattern exists in the world, but still not consider it fate because it does not
reflect a preexisting order. (253)

Here he breaks with the concept of haunting and with the implications drawn out by R&G, in
large part because Stoppard’s play is making a statement about fate. In addition, to some degree,
Rabinowitz is denying the weight Shakespeare imposes. Shakespeare represents to a reader not
just “a pattern [that] exists in its world,” but, when she attends to a Shakespearean nu-text, a
“preexisting order.” The reader is a limiting factor. In R&G, the Player directly addresses the
inevitability we produce when he explains to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that “Audiences
know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.” In order to demonstrate
what he means, he orders “Show!” and two performers who have been set up as doppelgangers
for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – patterned after them with duplicate costumes and physicality
– fall dead before them (84). The Player’s example is specific to R&G as a nu-text: we come to
Stoppard’s play prepared to watch the titular characters die. The play rewards our expectation
that it will follow Hamlet to the end with humor, at one point Rosencrantz commenting, after
Hamlet talks circles around them, “He murdered us” (56). He says it again a few lines later, with
emphasis: “He murdered us” (57). Marjorie Garber does not see humor here as much as she sees
“a prompt to the audience, an aural double take: ‘Remember this,’ it says. Even if Rosencrantz

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doesn’t understand what he is saying, you should: you know the play” (Shakespeare and Modern
Culture 224). The reader is thus identified as another factor that intervenes into R&G, that is
responsible for haunting and containment.
Coming from the opposite direction, the play’s active prompting of the reader,
demonstrating of its patterning for the reader, and speaking to its haunting as a production of the
beta-text and the reader, may be R&G intervening with us. Stoppard’s play challenges us rather
than challenging our expectations. Theorizing broadly about intertextuality and adaptation, Linda
Hutcheon and Siobahn O’Flynn, write that a “knowing audience,” undergoes “an interpretative
doubling, a conceptual flipping back and forth between the work we know and the work we are
experiencing” (139). Stoppard’s play presents not just “an interpretative doubling” but an
oscillation between two experiences happening simultaneously. The kind of “conceptual flipping
back and forth” Hutcheon and O’Flynn describe requires a kind of surrendering to the effects of
intertextuality: the reader does interpretative work, but we are relegated to making sense of what
we receive. R&G enters into a dialogue with us, reminding us that the two experiences unfolding
are not being delivered to us, but are a production process in which we are involved. Barthes
insists that “[o]n the stage of the text, no footlights: there is not, behind the text, someone active
(the writer) and out front someone passive (the reader)” (The Pleasure of the Text 16). Barthes’
active reader in the haunted context of Stoppard’s play implicates the community of readers: we
are not restricted by our knowledge of Shakespeare as we interpret nu-texts that engage with
him, but we do restrict the meanings a Shakespearean nu-text might make.
R&G asks that we acknowledge our part in summoning the ghost of the beta-text into the
nu-text. The ghost of the beta-text is something different from a source or reference point. The
ghost indicates a given understanding of the beta-text that we bring to bear on the nu-text. More

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than imported plot, characters, or dialogue from Hamlet with which we are familiar, the ghost we
invoke has history and status, and demands that we shape our readings accordingly. Throughout
this chapter, I use “us” and “we,” not to universalize the experience of haunting, but to make a
point about collective responsibility. Stanley Fish proposes that “[i]nterpretive strategies are not
natural or universal, but learned” (220), a statement that centers the production and circulation of
meanings within communities. Regarding the events leading up to Hamlet’s moodiness that
Rosencrantz can easily list, Guildenstern acknowledges the story as being not just “well known”
but “common property” (51). This last turn of phrase notably shifts the idea of knowledge to a
concept of shared ownership. The transition marks a change from merely knowing Hamlet to
thinking of Hamlet as ours. “Common property” disavows Shakespeare’s works as inert objects
or a socio-cultural-political process at arms-length from us and requires that we reevaluate
haunting with our complicity in creating the ghost and its upsetting effects in mind.
We should be troubled, R&G warns, by our complicity in containing new or alternative
directions that a nu-text may wish to promote. There is, no doubt, a leap from claiming the reader
is involved to claiming the reader is culpable. The word complicity implies guilt, its use intended
to remind us, as Jonathan Culler does, that “reading is not an innocent activity nor a moment of
unanalyzable communion between a self and a text. It involves a complex series of operations
which ought to be described” (64). The “communion between self and text” is a complex and
active process: Stephen Greenblatt writes, “the theater elicits from us complicity rather than
belief” (Shakespearean Negotiations 119). Musing about appropriation, Barthes too speaks of “a
confidence and a complicity” (Mythologies 125). To be clear, complicity is not a negative
reconfiguration of bardolatry, though our “excessive receptiveness” to Shakespeare may be a
factor. Many would prefer to think of themselves as actively involved, but irreproachably a mere

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partner rather than responsible. Richard Burt and Julian Yates better articulate the paradoxically
passive, yet active, alternative to acknowledging complicity:

Read hard and you will, if you read rightly, glimpse the man, so receive his
impression. His words assume the aura of a code. The living, breathing bios that
he was becomes twinned with the biblion (“book” but also “niche” or “slot in a
library”) that you keep circulating, enabling him/it to live on. By this recruitment,
we become “wetware,” the biosemiotic motor or substrate to Shakespeare’s
animation in our various presents. (17)

The passage seems almost evangelical in its understanding of our role, deferring to Shakespeare
and deferring the possibility that, despite our recruitment, we might choose the manner in which
we “keep circulating” him and might shape the meanings that come from “enabling him.”
Marjorie Garber writes, “Are we dupes too? Which position, which forced casting, does the
audience prefer – to be dupes or coconspirators?” (Shakespeare and Modern Culture 114). She is
specifically addressing our response to Richard’s soliloquy in Henry VI, but the questions have
resonance here. To a degree, Burt and Yates require that we accept our role, perhaps as “dupes,”
in perpetuating a cultural force or effect that may be dangerous. In response, my analysis of
haunting leads me to take on Culler’s prompt and take a stance with regard to Garber’s pointed
question: haunting leads us to an understanding of the operations through which we, as a
community of readers, tend to marginalize new, different, or diverse voices while we bolster the
canonical weight of artists like Shakespeare.

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Our involvement in summoning the ghost of the beta-text and its haunting of the nu-text
reframes questions of whether the nu-text has its own voice as an autonomous work of art to
questions of whether our community of readers gives the nu-text allowance to have its voice. Is
Shakespearean indigestion psychosomatic? Do we even want to hear from anyone else?
Repeatedly, R&G invokes how the haunting beta-text dictates a pattern that the nu-text must
follow. Guildenstern brings the point up again in a long passage he opens with, “Wheels have
been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are . . . condemned.” Rosencrantz
responds by turning out to the audience and shouting, “Fire!” Guildenstern “jumps up”
concerned. Rosencrantz reassures him, “It's all right—I'm demonstrating the misuse of free
speech. To prove that it exists.” The stage directions then say, “He regards the audience, that is
the direction, with contempt,” and says, “Not a move. They should burn to death in their shoes”
(60). Stoppard likely imagines the audience does not react to Rosencrantz’s exclamation, that we
take it as a line rather than an actor warning his audience of impending danger. Rosencrantz
himself not only seems unsurprised by our lack of movement but seem offended, angry. There
are conventions we agree to when we go into a theatrical performance, such as actors may say
startling things, which we understand to be lines and so we sit still. Rosencrantz’s shout does not
shake us out of the expected theatrical experience. Intertextuality has its own conventions,
haunted intertextuality in particular. Rosencrantz’s call of danger implicates us as perpetuating a
set of expectations for the nu-text that engages with the canon. The danger he may sense is, in
fact, to him and Guildenstern, who we condemn to death by insisting on the authority of
Shakespeare.
Stoppard’s play makes significant strides in finding its voice by protesting its own
haunting, yet it has a telling moment near its end in which it seems to question whether it has

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managed to get out from under Hamlet. To put the lines in context, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern,
and Hamlet are on the boat to England, undertaking the action that will lead to the pair’s deaths,
all of which Shakespeare describes but does not show. They have run out of script and are, as
Rosencrantz puts it, “slipping off the map” (108). For the briefest moment, maybe they can be
free of the beta-text. Rosencrantz thinks for a second, “I could jump over the side. That would
put a spoke in their wheel.” Guildenstern, however, cannot see the potential and replies, “Unless
they’re counting on it” (108). Rosencrantz wants to create an intervention, but the correct phrase
would be “putting a wrench” in the wheel, not a “spoke.” Even language betrays his ability to
intervene, to disrupt the beta-text. Guildenstern has a point: “they’re counting on it” means that
whatever Rosencrantz might do has already been set and is expected. Rosencrantz’s action, then,
would put a “spoke” in the wheel, it would keep the wheel turning, reinforcing it. More
importantly, the pair aim their exchange at us: “their wheel” and they’re counting on it.” It does
not matter that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have moved past Shakespeare’s lines, Hamlet is
still playing out inside us. It’s our wheel.
I do not think we reject alternatives and silence voices outright. The process is both more
subtle and more insidious. In R&G, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do not actually die on stage;
we do not have to watch the abrupt consequences of cultural forces with which we are complicit.
Rather, one disappears, then the other, as the stage lights up revealing all the dead from the last
scene of Hamlet. As Horatio gives his final speech, “the play fades out” and is “overtaken by
dark” (126). We may hear other voices, but we let them fade out, let them be overtaken by the
weight of the canon. Julie Sanders calls for “a paramount shift away from the idea of authorial
originality toward a more collaborative and societal understanding of the production of art and
the production of meaning” (149). Intertextual haunting does this, it moves us toward a

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“collaborative and societal understanding of the production of art and the production of
meaning,” though it refuses to say that such a collaboration guarantees a re-viewing of
intertextual acts as positive or progressive. Instead, haunting demonstrates that we, like
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are mired in tradition. It insists on a re-viewing of intertextuality
in terms of systems of power and containment, and suggests collaboration may be better
described as complicity. What is the connection between complicity and complacency? When
Rosencrantz concludes that “Life in a box is better than no life at all” (71), he accepts that his life
has been and will be interrupted; he surrenders to an abrupt intervention. Does that make him
complicit in bringing about his own execution? To say we can reckon with the ghost is
misleading. We can recognize it, we can speak to it – in both meanings of the phrase – but we
can neither negotiate with nor escape from it. We are marked. Even as we are prevented from
denying, from unknowing the ghosts of our cultural inheritance, might we resist yielding to them
as destiny?

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Chapter Two
Possession

The chapters in this project are laid out as themes of haunting. The introduction brings
forward a mild tension between beta-text and nu-text that destabilizes the otherwise laudatory or
neutral relationship. The ghost appears and interrupts, its insistence on presence invoking
questions of paternity. The first chapter considers a play fraught with the tension of being
haunted and that seems to ultimately succumb to the ghost (give up to the ghost). There’s a
mitigated sense of “Shakespeare after all”: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern die; Hamlet lives. But
in what ways might intertexuality be perceived as aggressive, dangerous, even violent? We often
hear about the crimes committed to Shakespeare by contemporary works, whether they be direct
adaptations, creative sequels, pseudo-biographies (i.e. Shakespeare in Love), the lightest of
borrowers, or even good faith attempts at traditional performances. Consider that in his treatise
aimed for the most part at other theater directors, Charles Marowitz chooses to name the second
chapter of Recycling Shakespeare, “How to rape Shakespeare” (16).
11
His answer is we do that
when we hold up Shakespeare as “a classic,” “an entity fixed in time and bounded by the text”
(ix). I bring this chapter title up not to take issue with Marowitz’s response, but rather to
highlight the directionality we tend to assume and the severity with which we describe the
action: we can do harm, potentially heinous acts, to Shakespeare; the reverse seems absurd to
suggest.

11
Note the preface starts with, “This book is directed at two enemies – the academics and the
traditionalists” (Marowitz ix). The antagonistic tone is there from the start.

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As scholars, like Horatio before us, we learn to get past incredulity. Not only is the one-
way affective directionality too much a part of the conventional ways in which we conceive of
intertextuality, it quietly carries with it a perspective or attitude that strengthens the ghost of the
beta-text. Donald K. Hedrick and Bryan Reynolds argue that, “the term ‘appropriation’ tends to
enforce a neutralizing sense of transformation or tone that implies some ‘normal’ function of the
Shakespearean text in typical acts of cultural domination” (6). “Neutral,” “normal,” and “typical”
are words that should concern us. They imply that there is a force at work, one that “neutralizes”
and actively staves off antagonism to give the appearance that everything is fine. Nothing to see
here.
With regard to intertexuality, the “typical” sense of transformation often described by
critics positions the nu-text as hopeful, ambitious, and dominant, a process that unwittingly
normalizes a more nuanced power struggle. Adrienne Rich, for example, defines “re-vision” as
“the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical
direction” (qtd. in Cakebread 86). Note the direction and tone: the value of the new and the fresh
rests on enlivening the old text, as opposed to moving into new, unforeseen, forward-looking
directions. Rather than trajectory we have recursion. Certainly, intertextuality has an inherent
concept of a return and, at times, the return may serve a critical agenda. But, that very idea of
criticism casts the intertextual relationship in terms of a primary (beta-) and a secondary (nu-)
text. Even when we grant the nu-text a measure of creative agency as another primary text, we
are accustomed to agree, as Marvin Carlson articulates the notion, that “the retelling of a familiar
story allow[s] emphasis to be placed on subtle variations, thus providing the author with a
convenient means of stressing certain matters of content and style that [are] of particular interest
to him or her” (27). The cautious timidity expressed in the phrase “subtle variations” signals

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some concern about the consequences of “stressing certain matters” about the beta-text.
Likewise, defining the scale of the author’s intervention – “matters of content and style that [are]
of particular interest to him or her” – may be intended to endow the nu-text with a degree of
independence from the beta-text, but narrowing of the scope of intertextual transformation to the
personal compartmentalizes its potential for far-ranging significance. The implied need for
containment coincides with an implied unidirectionality of power. Independence and agency
might be read as responses that create a safe distance between the beta- and nu-text. Speaking to
a larger significance, Linda Hutcheon offers that broadly, as a postmodern form, “[parody] forces
a reconsideration of the idea of origin or originality” (A Poetics of Postmodernism 11).
12
Nothing
in Hutcheon’s statement speaks to a concern about the nu-text’s negative impact on the beta-text;
she likely finds value in destabilizing “the idea of origin or originality.” Many contemporary
scholars would agree with such a project, which fosters various reclamation and revaluation
activities. However, when we accept the postmodern reconsideration of origins or originality, we
accept a certain stance toward the canon. Its value is not lessened, but its default authority as
precursor is disrupted. A perspective that seeks to question authority, even in the search for a
balance of power, represents a shift in which the present seems to have to defuse the past. Rich,
Carlson, and Hutcheon offer useful, and accurate, concepts of “re-vision,” “reconsideration,” and
“re-telling” that are wonderfully aspirational, but they also contribute to the problematic
insistence that power only flows one way.

12
Recall Hutcheon’s term “parody,” as she uses it in A Poetics of Postmodernism and The
Politics of Postmodernism, refers widely to intertextuality rather than to the more common
understanding of parody as a specific subtype of intertextuality also called a spoof. Her choice of
term supports my argument of an implied attitude toward intertextuality that is anything but
neutral. Why is the nu-text aligned with a term that conveys mockery or a takedown of a
hallowed beta-text?

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I do think that Hutcheon has a sense of the enforcement of a “normal” critical response to
intertextuality when she observes that while “[t]he prevailing interpretation is that
postmodernism offers a value-free, decorative, de-historicized quotation of past forms and that
this is a most apt mode for a culture like our own that is oversaturated with images,” she believes
that “postmodernist parody is a value-problematizing, de-naturalizing form of acknowledging
that history (and through irony, the politics) of representations” (The Politics of Postmodernism
90). Hutcheon points to neutralization, a critical process that labels texts as “value-free” and
merely “decorative” in such a way that defuses problematization and de-naturalization. Instead,
she wants grant postmodernism, or nu-texts, a critical power over the beta-text. But in the
attempt, she participates with other scholars like Rich and Carlson in a subtler process of
silencing.
By going along with the above conclusions, we neglect to acknowledge that the
contemporary text has to contend with a ghost as weighty and powerful as Shakespeare. In direct
contrast to the power dynamic demonstrated above, Shakespeare’s promoters offer their retorts.
Harold Bloom sweeps aside all attempts at re-vision or reconsideration: “[h]istoricizing,
politicizing, even feminizing Shakespeare – all are redundant operations: Shakespeare always
was there before us” (The Anxiety of Influence xxv). Marjorie Garber more gently yet similarly
suggests that “[w]hat look like critiques, analyses, implementations of Hamlet to make some
other point (philosophical, political, psychoanalytic) dissolve to bring us back to the play itself,
not as referent, but as origin” (qtd. in Schwarz 177). Garber addresses Hamlet, but any of
Shakespeare’s plays could swap in to make her point. Attempts to problematize or de-naturalize
by a nu-text that refers to Shakespeare are an uphill battle, potentially “redundant,” if
Shakespeare always has both the first and the final word. Bloom and Garber speak from a critical

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tradition that venerates Shakespeare as timeless, an appropriate descriptor as they endow him
with an existence outside history. Not only is Shakespeare thus rendered impervious to historical
change, the claim appears to be that his works manage to anticipate their own revisions and can
nullify them. By refusing to allow Shakespeare to remain mired in his historical and political
moment, Bloom and Garber deliberately produce an inimitable specter. Regardless of
Shakespeare, the act of reference itself might belie the limitations of the nu-text, as others have
argued: “[b]ut as with almost all things, the overuse of quotation and allusion can increase an
awareness of the weakness of an argument or case. By appealing to authority too much, authority
itself becomes less authoritative and its own position is undermined” (Bloomfield 14). But with
regard to Shakespeare, the second sentence of the preceding citation turns out to be false.
Appeals to Shakespeare conjure his ghost, and, rather than rendering him any less authoritative
or undermining him, continually bolster his weight as affirmed by Bloom, Garber, and the fact
that Shakespeare’s venerated status remains unadulterated despite the long history of
Shakespearean reference.
As much as Thomas Greene in The Light of Troy attempts to salvage the intertextual act
by paradoxically suggesting that “[i]mitation at its most powerful pitch require[s] a profound act
of self-knowledge and then a creative act of self-definition” (97), the question remains, when one
imitates, or refers to, Shakespeare, is self-definition possible or does Shakespeare preclude any
definition other than himself? What might constitute a profound act of self-knowledge within
Shakespearean intertextuality? The earlier quote from Adrienne Rich has a follow-up: “[w]e
need to know the writing of the past and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to
pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us” (qtd. in Sanders 9). It is within the attempts at
self-definition – not only of getting one’s own voice heard over the volume of Shakespeare’s, but

85
more pushing aside or back against the ghost – that the insistency and hostility of his hold over
us is revealed. The more we try to break its grip, the tighter it may try to squeeze. The 1872
commemorative poem on Shakespeare’s statue in Central Park opens with a line that speaks to
the tension between the prospect that the return to Shakespeare is generative and progressive and
the assertion that Shakespeare resists all such attempts and thus persists: “He came, a household
ghost we could not ban” (qtd. in Levine 21). This line, as a profound act of self-knowledge,
reveals that the ghost of Shakespeare not only endures, he inhabits, and will not be expelled.
This chapter explores not merely how the nu-text is haunted, but how it comes to be
possessed, how intertextuality can be conceived of as a forcefully endured trauma. Julie Sanders
writes about the implied “notion of hostile takeover present in a term such as ‘appropriation,’”
but from the perspective of the nu-text’s ability to “assault” the beta-text, the canon, and the
“established literary culture” (9). Possession, on the other hand, allows us to reflect on the
hazards to the nu-text: “[t]he text adopts its legitimate progenitor, of course, not without certain
risks” (Greene 19). As we began to see in the previous chapter with Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead, there may be injustices being committed by Shakespeare to a reworking
within the intertextual act that the nu-text is trying to express. This reverse of directionality
should not only stun as counter-intuitive, but, once examined, by the aggressive force with which
it occurs. The escalation to possession is marked by strategies with which a nu-text’s complaints
against a beta-text are repressed and by the intensity with which the nu-text tries to resist and its
pleas erupt.
To an extent, the sites of possession and resistance I want to explore in this chapter’s case
study align with what other critics such as Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins have conceived
of as counter-discourse. They explain that by “reworking” beta-texts, “[c]ounter-discourse seeks

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to deconstruct significations of authority and power exercised in the canonical text, to release its
strangle-hold on representation and, by implication, to intervene in social conditioning” (qtd. in
Kidnie 67). We will put the social intervention piece of this definition on pause for now to focus
on the strangle-hold I portray as possession and the countering that manifests as resistance and
stifled complaint.
My preference for “possession” stems certainly from the extended metaphor of this
project, but also from the exercised power rendered in the concept of ownership and described in
terms of dominance and subjection. It is not just notions like “Shakespeare was there first” that
constitute possession. The ghost enters, wrests control, and suppresses, inverting the assumption
embedded in commonly-used terms like “appropriation” that the appropriating text, the nu-text,
possesses the appropriated beta-text. We can hear echoes of the language of possession
unconsciously occurring in extra-textual descriptions of Shakespeare’s ability to influence us.
Writing about the durability of certain characters in Shakespearean Afterlives, John O’Connor
opines that “[e]ach of us finds or creates his or her own Hamlet, one who reflects our core
beliefs. But the reverse happens too. Isn’t it equally true that writers like [. . .] Shakespeare
actually shape the way we think” (233). When Bloom tries to backpedal from some of his earlier
anxious convictions, he still takes the stance that you will come to “recognize[e] that what you
considered your own emotions were originally Shakespeare’s thoughts” (The Anatomy of
Influence 35). Both suggest that Shakespeare gets in our heads in a way can be disturbingly re-
read through possession as his ability to dominate and suppress.
13

13
Certainly this observation is not groundbreaking. “This notion of the dominant and the
recessive was an idea first posited by the scientific experimenter in patterns of heredity, Gregor
Mendel, in the mid-nineteenth century, but in the literary field it has been adopted to articulate a
debate about dominance and suppression that is crucial for any consideration of intertextual
relationships” (Sanders 18).

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Paired with possession, “resistance” seems an apt indicator of a sustained oppositional
process rather than mere response. “Complaint,” in turn, may be seem mild, but it is part of the
process: possession, complaint, suppression, and resistance.
14
The idea of possession highlights
the limitations on complaint and counter-discourse that are determined when “‘talking back’ to
Shakespeare” (Sanders 46) is silenced. As it fashions a false tension, the affective directionality
of intertextuality we tend toward – that a dynamic present has greater agency to reshape the past
than a static past has to contain or dominate the present – is affirmed by a critical stance that
embraces intertextuality as an instrument for reconsideration or counter-discourse, which in turn
blinds us to just how aggressively Shakespeare maintains his status by denying that he reaches
forward to possess the present.
This chapter dwells on Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, a novel that speaks to its own
possession by King Lear through a doubling metaphor of poisoned farmland and a violated body.
My analysis in the following sections draws on these two metaphors to consider the strategies the
novel deploys to confront its relationship with Shakespeare and what the discovered conflict
might reveal about our misunderstandings of intertextuality. I begin by outlining the framework
of possession in A Thousand Acres. What are its effects on the novel? What are the larger
ramifications of possession that the novel illustrates? Does intertextual possession give us
insight into Jane Smiley’s decision to retract her novel several years after its publication?
Turning to the first metaphor of agricultural production on the land, I explore the symptoms of
possession as described in the novel. How does our understanding of inheritance, environmental

14
In contextualizing the practice of exorcism in Shakespeare’s day, Stephen Greenblatt suggests
the connection between possession and complaint: “The possessed gave voice to the rage,
anxiety, and sexual frustration that built up in the authoritarian, patriarchal, impoverished, and
plague-ridden world of early modern England” (Shakespearean Negotiations 99).

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and then literary, become reshaped by the idea that the past poisons the present? The second
metaphor realigns the symptoms on the body of the narrator as possession is read through her
rape by her father. Sexual violence demands that we acknowledge the unbalanced power
dynamic between victim and perpetrator and disrupts our understanding of the self-possession of
the body as an outside force tries to possess it. In the response to rape and the suppression of the
response, we can further evaluate the often unseen – and unheard – violence of intertextuality.
Ultimately, A Thousand Acres points to the complexities of and capacities for resistance to
possession as it models failed attempts that still critically unfold a discourse of repressed rage
toward harmful inheritance and a hostile progenitor.

Possession in A Thousand Acres

Discussing her novel, A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley remembers:

“I pondered my new image of Shakespeare and I thought of him doing just what I
had done – wrestling with old material, given material, that is in some ways
malleable and in other ways resistant. I thought about how all material, whether
inherited or observed, has integrity. The author doesn’t just do something with it,
he or she also learns from it. The author’s presuppositions and predispositions
work on the material and are simultaneously transformed by it. I imagined
Shakespeare wrestling with the “Leir” story and coming away a little dissatisfied,
a little defeated, but hugely stimulated, just as I was.” (“Shakespeare in Iceland”
56)

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One of the benefits of working on contemporary literature is we often have a record of the
author’s commentaries, anecdotes, philosophies, and stated motivations to draw on. I do not
mean that we have a record of fact and truth nor that we should allow an author’s statements to
guide an analysis. But, it can be helpful to know that what we discover on the page is no accident
or coincidence. Smiley’s reflections on her own work can be hard to ignore when she makes
claims such as, “[i]n one sense, A Thousand Acres is my academic paper on King Lear, while in
another sense, it is my production of the play” (“Shakespeare in Iceland” 41). Debates of
authorial intention aside, when considering intertexuality, especially the strained intertextual
relationships I am proposing, we have the opportunity to consider construction. Smiley invites
such inquiries into her novel by positioning her work as both artifact and analysis. If writing a
nu-text means “wrestling with old material, given material,” why invite the ghost in? Is
stimulation worth the risk of possession? Also relevant, the author’s insights draw attention to
the condition of intertexuality largely ignored by critics that I wish to address. The generative
relationship is much discussed; the abusive almost never. Though Smiley herself lays out what
seems to have been a productive relationship, almost a collaboration, her language aligns with
my concerns: the notion of the beta-text being “resistant” and having “integrity” to an extent that
it transforms the “presuppositions and predispositions” of the author of nu-text indicates a kind
of possession. Some years later, in an interview with The New York Times, Smiley speaks more
to the struggle with the possessive force of Shakespeare, sharing that writing A Thousand Acres
was “incredibly exhausting, a terrible labor that I only managed to propel myself through out of a
kind of anger.” Further, she even acknowledges the violence: “Shakespeare both took me by the
hand and slapped me across the face” (qtd. in Goldstein). Especially in light of this last reveal,

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Smiley’s description of her early exposure to Shakespeare, that is, the nature of her relationship
to him as a reader before she began an intertextual relationship as a writer is notable, in large part
by her word choice: “But, though fond, I remained unpossessed by Shakespeare” (my emphasis
“Shakespeare in Iceland” 44). Yet, as Smiley attempts to “close the loop between artistic
production and cultural response to investigate the nature of composition” (“Shakespeare in
Iceland” 41) with A Thousand Acres, possession comes to shape the process of production and
frustrate response, the novel becoming a kind of allegory of intertextual possession.
Even if we did not know that A Thousand Acres was a re-writing of King Lear, Ginny,
the protagonist of the novel, points us to literary ghosts when she speaks of authors who once
were “productive,” now are “dead,” and yet still have “a kind of afterlife” (334). While Ginny
implies that the afterlife stems from the continued existence of the beta-text – the author is dead,
but the work lives on – the possessive ghost stirred by intertextuality is something different,
something apart from the beta-text. Sir Trevor Nunn, former Artistic Director of the Royal
Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theatre, pinpoints his method for definitively
recognizing Shakespeare: “it’s the language that matters – no language, no Shakespeare” (qtd. in
Kidnie 114). Nunn’s attachment to language, rather than character and plot, as the absolute
corpus of Shakespeare signals a kind of disconnecting of the ghost from the beta-text. What
constitutes, makes palpable, Shakespeare in Smiley’s novel when it lacks his language?
Providing an alternative perspective, granted from a different era, Jean Marsden explains that
during the Restoration, adaptors “felt that Shakespeare’s diction was often flawed, a by-product
of the barbaric age in which he lived rather than a foundation on which all his other beauties
rested.” It is precisely “[b]ecause playwrights did not see Shakespeare’s language as an intrinsic
element of his genius [that] they were able to treat his works as a plastic material which could be

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reshaped” (qtd. in Scott-Douglass 1282). If language is irrelevant and the plays, their plots and
characters, are “plastic material which [can] be reshaped,” we are faced with a Shakespeare that,
via an intertextual process, becomes disembodied in a way. He becomes a ghost. In the case of
Smiley’s novel, the most direct adaptation touched on in this project to this point,
15
possession by
the ghost renders a text that is at once not Shakespeare and very much Shakespeare.
King Lear’s characters and plot make up the plastic material Smiley re-works for A
Thousand Acres, yet as much as she tries to make her Lear, borrowing from Shakespeare results
in an inevitability we expect from an adaptation as we simultaneously seek out variation: “when
we go to a modern rendering of a familiar tale, we are immediately alerted. We expect the story
to be ingeniously altered, and we compare it carefully with the original” (Rabinowitz 259). The
lockstep with which A Thousand Acres unfolds occurs on a surface level. Immediately apparent,
most of the major characters share the first initial with the Shakespearean character they parallel.
Larry is Lear, Ginny is Goneril, Rose is Regan, Caroline is Cordelia, and so on. Reading the
novel can have the same pleasure as a match game as “[a]udiences are being invited to ‘read in’
the future for these characters using the Shakespearean tragedy as a template” (Sanders 53). Try
to guess which character corresponds to which, predict the future trajectory of that character
based on knowledge of Lear, and enjoy the divergences. The unexpected nature of inevitability
in Smiley’s novel is the extent to which attention is drawn to it. Near the start of the novel, Jess,
the Edmund analogue, introduces this throughline: “I always think that things have to happen the
way they do happen, that there are so many inner and outer forces joining at every event that it
becomes a kind of fate” (22). Intertextual fate comes from the joining of inner and outer forces

15
As opposed to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern which functions more like a nu-text play written
around a beta-text play. Shakespeare ultimately overrides, but we have enough non-Hamlet
material that we have a milder haunting relative to possession.

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we may identify as Shakespeare; his play’s plot and characters; our awareness of these; our
understanding of adaptation as a type of creative act; Smiley’s transposed plot and characters;
our ability to grasp the transposition and make connections to Shakespeare; and our capacity for
surprise or pleasure as we negotiate the relationship to Shakespeare.
As the Goneril analogue, Ginny with a suggestion of certainty seemingly borne from
more than hindsight, narrates that tragic events progressed “as if there were no escape, as if the
play we’d begun could not end” (219–20). Her move toward resignation to inevitability can also
be heard in her almost warning to the writer on the brink of possession or perhaps a critic who
might try to reconcile the paradox of possession: “if you probe and probe and try to understand,
it just holds you back. You start seeing things from his point of view again, and you’re just
paralyzed” (212). “[S]eeing things from his point of view again” suggests the loss of control to
the ghost of Shakespeare (“his point of view again”) tied to paralysis in the attempt to explore
that loss. The novel makes tremendous strides toward questioning Lear, as critics have noted.
16

But, the nature of these investigations is such that the novel is thrust back into confrontation with
Shakespeare. Does it ever stand alone?
17
As we consider characters in the novel mapped onto
characters from the play, we assume equivalency, in turn reducing complexity by ignoring
difference and denying new readings. We label Rose as Regan and expect Rose to be Regan. Can
Rose be wrested from Regan, from Shakespeare? To what extent do we give Rose the space to be
anything but Regan? Looking back at her family and all the horrors they endured, Ginny tries to
resist essentializing each with some put-upon adjective – such as “selfish” or “jealous” – through

16
For example, “Smiley is able to ‘flesh out’ Goneril’s violent actions against her father in the play”
(Sanders 49).
17
Smiley herself seems to be wrestling with this dilemma as she muses how, “[e]very time you’re
free, you’re lonely, and when you’re with someone, you’re not lonely but you’re not free” (qtd.
in Goldstein).

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the understanding that “[l]abeling them, in fact, prevented knowing them” (305). Her attempt
mirrors one of Smiley’s stated motives for re-writing: “to communicate the ways in which I
found conventional readings of King Lear frustrating and wrong” (“Shakespeare in Iceland” 42).
Paralysis seems to me to be the inability to reconcile that “the sought-for effect in [creative
reworkings] relies primarily upon an audience’s binocular vision – its members’ familiarity with
the previous treatment of this same material and their ability to draw comparisons between that
and the new, rival treatment” (Carlson 27) with the call to resist the predictability of preset labels
or readings that are inherent to such binocular vision.
The escalation to suppression and violence, to the dominating force of possession, is in
response to this tension. A succumbing Ginny explains that “[t]he result for us [Ginny and her
sister Rose] was that we found ourselves more or less prepared for the blows that fell – we could
at least make that oddly comforting remark, ‘I knew all along something like this was going to
happen’” (113). Yet, inevitability does not negate trauma; the blows fall. Likewise, though it
might be argued, as Caroline Cakebread does in her article on Lear and A Thousand Acres, that
“Smiley’s feminized version of Shakespeare’s play destabilizes his fixed position at the center of
the Western literary canon as her novel becomes a testing-ground for new perspectives on
‘history’” (92), Shakespeare’s fixed position ultimately has not budged. New perspectives may
strive to destabilize it, and there is some comfort in imagining the possibility, but history/his
story remains and asserts itself. To put it another way, using Cakebread’s perhaps reluctant
conclusion, “certain voices are paved over by others” (99).
The violence done by Shakespeare to A Thousand Acres is less apparent to us than the
ways the novel metaphorically works through a possessive intertextuality. But, we know from
the author’s testimony that it exists – that she felt “slapped” – and we can further infer a kind of

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suppression from Smiley’s remarkable decision to “disavow” her novel in the Washington Post
seven years after its publication. She explains that she has changed her interpretation of and
attitude toward Shakespeare and Lear, which to her means the novel that stood as a complaint
against the play is no longer viable (“Taking It All Back”). We have all experienced how our
readings of many texts change over time, so why make a public statement about an occurrence
and couple that with a retraction? Is this an act of submission? Smiley acknowledges precisely
the dangers of intertextuality her characters express as she responds to the question about
whether she would write the novel again given her new perspective: “I probably wouldn’t. The
inevitability of the characters’ downfall, the almost mechanical working out of their fates,
doesn’t appeal to me anymore. I just don’t believe it.” In the novel, the dangers are weighed as
Rose shares with Ginny, “I have this recurring nightmare about grabbing things that hurt me, like
the straight razor Daddy used to have, or a jar of some poison that spills on my hands. I know I
shouldn’t, and I watch myself, but I can’t resist” (62). Rose’s nightmare points us to the
metaphors for a hostile intertextuality – “grabbing things that hurt me” – that I want to explore in
the next sections, namely poison in relation to land and the threat of the patriarch. Even if Smiley
now believes that she should not have written the novel, the text exists as a processing witness to
violence and to an inability to resist.

Intertextual Agriculture

The farm setting of A Thousand Acres posits an image of layer upon layer of foundational
stone and soil onto which agriculture is established. New crops grow from fertile old land. But,
insecticides and chemical fertilizers that may help the process double as poisons that lead to

95
cancer and death. Read as an extended metaphor for intertextuality, the landscape of the novel
provokes questions of what lies beneath and before, and the hidden dangers that come to bare on
the present.
The past is depicted as a rich source for production as Ginny walks us through the origins
of the farm. Its history begins when her “great-grandparents settled in Zebulon County and the
whole county was wet, marshy, glistening” (9). Production becomes possible on the land with
the laying of tile that “‘drew’ the water, warmed the soil, and made it easy to work” (15).
Notably, Ginny emphasizes that the tile and its recomposition of the soil, as opposed to the soil
itself, are the generative aspects of the farm, arriving at the conclusion that “tile produced
prosperity (15). If we consider the wet soil as the raw material of the past, the tile – that which
makes is possible to “work” the soil – exists as a man-made construct that structures and renders.
The tile underlies and serves as a foundation, a creative source buried in the past yet
simultaneously operative in the present: the representative of the beta-text King Lear. Ginny
adds, “[t]he grass is gone, now, and the marshes, ‘the big wet prairie,’ but the sea is still beneath
our feet, and we walk on it” (16), reminding us that the past has given way to a present made
fecund by the persistent tile, which bridges the contemporary to the otherwise inaccessible
vastness of history.
Likewise, Shakespeare’s Lear is sustained by continuously providing rich material fit for
re-telling by a modern author like Smiley. Just as the novel repeatedly draws attention to
inevitability as one of its paradigms, so too does it drive home its agricultural metaphor. Ginny
describes the soil as “treasure, thicker, richer, more alive with a past and future abundance of
life” (132). The future abundance – the possibilities for emergent nu-texts – is not possible,

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however, without the tile, the feat that first composes – the beta-text. Ginny continues: “[o]nce
revealed by those precious tile lines, the soil yielded a treasure of schemes and plots, as well.
[. . .] Any field or farm was the emblem of some historic passion” (132). The past is rendered
into something usable, “schemes and plots,” by Shakespeare’s artistry, and the reworking of his
play into something new does not erase him, but rather comes to reaffirm his empowered
position.
Couching intertextuality in verdant terms has an established history and is repeated by
creator and critic alike. John Dryden writes in the prologue to The Enchanted Island (1667), his
musical adaptation of The Tempest:

As when a tree’s cut down, the secret root
Lives under ground, and thence new branches shoot,
So, from old Shakespeare’s honoured dust, this day
Springs up and buds a new reviving play. (qtd. in Scott-Douglass 1281)

In Adaptation and Appropriation, Julie Sanders describes the process of “extrapolating a
particular storyline or character’s trajectory from the original, and reimagining it in a new
context, historical and/or cultural” using similar language: “[t]he relationship to the original
remains present and relevant, but it is as if a grafting has taken place of a segment, or rootstock,
of the original text. The rootstock is conjoined to a new textural form, or scion, to create a
wholly new literary artefact” (55). A Thousand Acres, however, makes an important shift from a
metaphor of new growth from old roots to one of new growth from composed soil, which
furthers a more involved perspective on intertextuality, one that re-shapes the relationship

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between beta-text and nu-text. In the perspective provided by Smiley’s novel, the beta-text is
foundational and fosters creativity, but more a set of circumstances that blends history with
assembly as opposed to a singular “original” or “origin.” The nu-text is a different kind of entity
altogether that emerges from the complex below, maintains roots to that same complex, and is
consumable in the present. Further, while horticultural images of the root and shoot and the
rootstock and graft fall on a spectrum of affirmative to neutral, the agricultural metaphor of soil,
tile, and crop introduces the ominous complication of considering the hazards that seep down
and are drawn up. This alternative approach re-views intertextuality in terms of risk and
inheritance rather than as an affectless lateral movement implied by re-contextualization or
transposition.
“It’s good to remember and repeat. You feel good to be part of that. But then I saw what
my part really was” (342), Ginny concedes to her husband, bringing together a notion of
adaptation – “remember and repeat” – with a tone best described as impending, which pervades
the novel and its extended agricultural metaphor. Referring back to the primordial land and water
that was transformed into the family farm, Ginny sketches initial anxieties on the surface:

The sound of water trickling in the blackness must have drawn us, and even now
the memory gives me an eerie feeling, and not because of danger to our infant
selves. What I think of is our babyhoods perched thoughtlessly on the filmiest net
of the modern world, over layers of rock, [. . .] layers of dark epochs, and we
seem not so much in danger (my father checked the grates often) as fleeting, as if
our lives simply passed then, and this memory is the only photograph of some

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nameless and unknown children who may have lived and may have died, but at
any rate have vanished into the black well of time. (47)
18

Earlier periods and earlier texts can beckon, like “the sound of water trickling in the blackness”
beneath “layers of rock” and “layers of dark epochs.” We could think of the literary past as full
of inspirational promise in service of creative acts in the present, as evidenced by the countless
remakes, adaptations, sequels – any variety of nu-text – that proliferate within our culture.
However, here Ginny looks on with an “eerie feeling” in response to a perspective of the present
moment, “the modern world,” as trepidatiously poised on a relatively deeper, more substantial
foundation that simultaneously still shifts underfoot.
If we delimit “the modern world,” via my intertextual reading, to stand for nu-texts,
Ginny’s feeling suggests the same angst, maybe even fear, expressed by literary critics like T.S.
Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence:
contemporary works, relative to the tradition, may seem shallow, “film[y],” and “fleeting.” The
layers of works we use as beta-texts endure, while their nu-text children sometimes live and
endure as well, sometimes die as immaterial, but are fated to be subsumed. This latter point,
despite Ginny’s insistence that she does not sense danger, gestures toward a more suspicious and
aggravated relationship. Caroline Cakebread, with a similar sense, offers that, “[w]hile Larry
ostensibly signs the farm over to his daughters, their ultimate inheritance rests, not on the surface
of the land, but in the lies and secrets it covers up” (87). The implication of some hidden,

18
Regarding block quotes: Given that Shakespeare’s language is so often thought of as his
quintessence, as Sir Trevor Nunn brought to our attention, and A Thousand Acres has none of it,
I feel there is something to be gained in this chapter from putting Smiley’s own poetic turns on
display on occasion.

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foreboding thing underneath affecting, possibly damaging, what is above affords a model of a
toxic intertextuality.
The dangers come to light as we tie together the above supposition with the matter of
inheritance through the agricultural allegory. At the confluence lies the hazard: as Ginny
describes, “[a] farm abounds with poisons, though not many of them are fast-acting” (310).
Pesticides, fertilizers, among other chemicals, help a farm produce, but have consequences to
their users as well as to the land. This project is no place for a deep dive into the environmental
repercussions of American farming techniques, but we can think through the representative
textual repercussions of these “poisons.” Notably, Ginny never refers to the benefits of chemicals
on new growth, how they can stave off destructive insects or provide nutrition. She expresses
continual wariness, sharing how, for example, she must take precautions: “I knew to wear a mask
and gloves if I was handling any of these chemicals. I knew never to eat without getting all traces
of chemicals off me, especially the odor” (311). Her concerns about ingestion and the adherence
of traces and odors direct us to bodily harm, and, despite the attempts at prophylactic measures,
that the risks persist. As an example, Harold, the Gloucester analogue, is blinded following the
Lear template, however in A Thousand Acres by an accidental spray of ammonia. By removing
the human intention behind the act and the human role in carrying it out, the novel transfers
responsibility from “evil” sisters to the agricultural complex. More space will be devoted to the
body itself in the next section; here, it will suffice to understand the implication of threat present
in the metaphor of the farm and its associated mechanisms.
The ability for poisons to make their way through the farm system into food and drinking
water suggests a pattern of inheritance tied to the risk potential. The omnipresence of water and
the hazards it presents leads to the warning Ginny receives: “You can’t avoid toxins. Thinking

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you can is just another symptom of the toxic overload stage” (29). Dangerous farming chemicals
bleed into the soil, into the ground water maintained by the tile, only to make their way back to
the surface as toxins and carcinogens within the water. That water “travels from particle to
particle [of soil], molecules adhering, clustering, evaporating, heating, cooling, freezing, rising
upward to the surface [. . .] or sinking downward, [. . .] endlessly working and flowing” (16).
Once back on the surface, the water and its carried poison are ingested, the dangers of farm
chemicals “inherited” via this cycle by the body. Indeed, Ginny claims to, “feel [her]
inheritance,” when she looks back on “the loop of poison [she and her family] drank from, the
water running down through the soil, into the drainage wells, into the lightless mysterious
chemical sea, then being drawn up, cold and appetizing, from the drinking well into [her] faucet”
(370). Water is often associated with life and survival, especially within the context of a farm.
However, the cycle that Ginny lays out twists the perception of water as risk or threat to injury
and even death, confirmed as the characters come to blame the “loop of poison” for Ginny’s
multiple miscarriages and the breast cancer that eventually kills Rose.
Ginny’s intimation of inheritance as a “loop of poison” brings us back to an image of
intertextuality with a reversed affective directionality. That is, through the extended agricultural
metaphor, A Thousand Acres shapes an intertextual paradigm in which beta-texts adversely
affect nu-texts. Drawing on canonical texts such as Shakespeare as a creative act carries with it
the risk that the new work might “die.” The death of the nu-text could mean that the beta-text
overrides through inevitability; the contemporary work becomes so closely mapped that it cannot
exist outside the text to which it refers. Such a “mechanical working out” (again, Smiley’s
words) of a nu-text raises questions of silencing and the im/possibilities for meanings to be made

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outside of the meanings of the beta-text.
19
Death might also mean being overshadowed by the
beta-text’s canonical weight, the nu-text lost to history as “weak” à la Bloom (The Anxiety of
Influence 5) or merely derivative.
To conclude this section, I want to touch on looming issues provoked by reading
intertextuality through agriculture. First, what can be made of the fact that poisonous farm
chemicals originate on the surface, then sink down only to eventually return to damage those that
applied them? The reversal I propose holds as the novel does not suggest that the soil, the water,
nor the laid tiles are at risk themselves. But, the notion that the application of poisons initiates
the cycle invites questions of responsibility and blame. Does the novel blame its characters for
their own tragedies? Ginny’s continual gestures to the landscape’s pre-history and its
subterranean structure make clear that even with the water as a vector for poisons, the cycle
began long before the present-day characters experience its consequences. After all, Ginny tells
us that, with regard to a farm’s poisons, “not many of them are fast-acting” (310). For
intertextuality, the implication might be to think of a process that spans a vast period of time
rather than considering a nu-text as an artifact of just its moment. To a large extent, the above
“deaths” hinge on the authority we have given and continue to give to certain beta-texts. When
crafting a nu-text, does an author empower her chosen beta-text and prompt her own
subordination? Not exactly. The author participates in a long-running cycle, a “loop of poison,”
that started before the nu-text was even imagined, and will go on well past the point the nu-text
joins the loop. The presence of poisons everywhere on the farm and in everything from the farm

19
Consider, as an example, the 1999 film Ten Things I Hate About You, a fairly “faithful” teenage
adaptation of Taming of the Shrew. Do the stabs at feminist perspectives the film attempts fall
flat as the text succumbs to Shakespeare’s romance plot and what might be (granted, simply)
seen as the play’s gender and sexual normativity and reinforcement of a patriarchy? What new
meanings or potential for new meanings are silenced?

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strengthens such a view as it adds a final complication: risk is not just a possibility, but implicit
to intertextuality and, further, intertextuality of some kind is implicit to contemporary creative
acts. Like Jess, Rose stresses the sense of the unavoidable in a conversation with Jess and Ginny
about how they were “subordinated” by their fathers: “You both seem to think that there’s some
game going on here, that we can choose to play or not, that we can follow our feelings here and
there and just leave when we don’t like it any more” (238). An inability to avoid a situation
mitigates responsibility but shuts down choice and alternatives. In other words, intertextuality
from this perspective results in a loss of self-control (control of self) or, within the context of this
project, possession.

An Intertextual Body

A Thousand Acres opens with a line from Meridel Le Sueur’s poetic essay, “The Ancient
People and the Newly Come,” serving as an epigraph: “The body repeats the landscape. They are
the source of each other and create each other,” an invitation to read in the body what we read in
the land.
20
Thus, we can expect to read a model of intertextuality in the strained and destructive
relationships between characters in the novel with distinct attention paid to how traumatic
experiences are played out on their bodies. In the agricultural metaphor explored in the previous
section, bodies are located as the sites where environmental harm is experienced. Other than
Harold’s blinding – an injury that can be attributed as much to Lear as to ammonia and thus is
more a symptom of lockstep adaptation than an environmentalist statement – the notable serious

20
A stray observation: Le Sueur’s title nicely accords with the tension of adaptation: the “ancient
people” as the beta-text and the “newly come” as the nu-text.

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and repeated traumas that result from poisonous chemicals are, as Caroline Cakebread affirms,
“inscribed upon the bodies of women” (87). Not only women’s bodies insofar as female
characters – Ginny and Rose – are affected, but also the specificity of those traumas – multiple
miscarriages and recurring breast cancer – points to women and their reproductive systems. I
would argue that the novel strongly urges us, then, to look to women, particularly these two
women, their gendered bodies, and their relationship to acts of (pro)creation, for a perspective on
intertextuality that parallels the perspective the land represents.
The transition to bodies begins with the tension between father and daughters, in parallel
to Shakespeare’s King Lear, though in the novel conflict between familial generations makes for
a conflict between textual generations. Helping to begin to draw land and body together, Ginny
laments, “I feel like there’s treacherous undercurrents all the time. I think I’m standing on solid
ground, but then I discover that there’s something moving underneath it, shifting from place to
place. There’s always some mystery. He doesn’t say what he means” (104). Her words would
seem to apply to the agricultural metaphor and its subterranean sea of poison, but here she speaks
about her father, Larry. The idea that the father appears to be stable, but underneath something is
“shifting from place to place” stands as an apt description of the beta-text and its place with an
intertextual network. A Shakespearean play may seem a foundation onto which a nu-text can be
constructed, a base rendered solid from a prolonged and authoritative existence with a stalwart
position in the canon. Yet, the swirling of innumerable performances and reinterpretations, a
history of interpretations and connotations, questions of authorship, and use as educational tool
all layered within a web of conversations and connections with infinite other texts that precede
and succeed conspire to negate any true stability. There’s always some mystery; a text doesn’t
say what it means.

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Ginny’s apprehension collides the “treacherous undercurrents” touched in the previous
section and the inimitable “He” to shape a violently overpowering father as the novel shapes a
traumatic intertextuality. Harold Bloom insists “[i]nfluence anxiety exists between poems and
not between persons” (The Anatomy of Influence 6), in an effort to move questions of intertextual
tension from the authorial level to the interpretative. He suggests that anxiety found between
texts exists only in the reader and what is read into the relationship between texts. Yet, A
Thousand Acres pushes back against such a notion, pointing back to the personal in speaking
through the body and gender and reminding us of the associated stakes. In denying the personal,
we deny the political, meaning not that we return to the author, but that we consider processes of
construction, canon formation, and, crucial to this project, how select voices may be silenced or
try to resist.
Larry, through his dominant roles in the novel as patriarch, landowner with the largest
parcel, sole parent, as well as his role as the Lear equivalent – meaning both king and literary
icon – stands in for the weighty beta-text, in this context, Shakespeare. To maneuver between
character (Larry) and character (Lear) and bard/oeuvre (Shakespeare), I want to think through the
transpositions of authority and force between the three. As a simple example, Bloom describes
Lear as “created on so grand a scale that even in Shakespeare he has no rival to challenge him”
(The Anatomy of Influence 59). The hyperbole matches Rose’s referral to her father as “Laurence
Cook, the great I AM” (211). The quasi-deifying language – whether applied by others, as by
Bloom, or self-defined, as alluded by the biblical “great I AM” – recalls the area of scholarship
and fandom labeled “bardolatry.” Similarly, Ginny’s account of how “trying to understand
[Larry] had always felt something like going to church week after week” (20) brings together her
father and God. Further, in Ginny’s words I find a slight comment on Shakespearean language,

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which many newly-introduced students find as difficult to understand as liturgy or Latin and
couched in a kind of forced learning akin to having to sit through weekly sermons.
Bringing us back to intertextual relationships, Ginny muses about what might be “the
optimum distance for seeing one’s father”: “farther than across the supper table or across the
room, somewhere in the middle distance: he is dwarfed by trees or the sweep of a hill, but his
features are still visible, his body language still distinct” (20). She presents an image of the
balance with which a nu-text struggles as an adaptation of a well-known beta-text, like a
Shakespeare play. Further, when thinking in Ginny’s terms, “distance” helps refine our
understanding of the “father text.” Measuring “distance” between texts provokes relativistic
questions like “degree of independence from” or “the extent of the lack of reliance on,” which
are uniquely suited to intertextuality and specifically adaptation. Adaptation entails a “distance”
from Shakespeare, whether that be a separation of time, place, language, setting, gender, point of
view, or the other myriad realities and creative decisions that directly or indirectly contribute.
Notably, Ginny does not suggest such a great divide that the father/Shakespeare can no longer be
seen at all. That would signify a text existing apart from any intertextual relationship (something
scholars like Kristeva, Bakhtin, and Derrida, among others, think impossible) or at least a text
whose connections to other texts remain invisible (likely also impossible) and thus would fall
outside this project.
Ginny calls for balance, a “middle distance,” which she sketches as being when the
father/Shakespeare/beta-text stays significantly far off. Requiring that one’s father be “farther
than across the supper table or across the room” pushes him away from the immediate shared
space; she cannot even be in the same room as him. Further, the father should be “dwarfed” by
everything else around him. Interesting that this is what she thinks of as “optimum.” Her

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determination of the distance correlates to how recognizable the father remains, and her desire to
keep him removed to the threshold of his visibility suggests a concern or a fear of him
dominating space. What does it mean for the father to be closer and thus not just vaguely
apparent but fully present?
While her mapping of fathers and space was stated as a hypothetical, we get an answer as
Ginny reveals why, at least in part, her father should be kept away: “Daddy’s presence in any
scene had the effect of dimming the surroundings” (48). Translating the above into the language
of Shakespearean intertextuality, Bloom’s words about Lear, which I earlier affiliated with
Shakespeare – “[h]e has no rival to challenge him” – return. The laminated figures of Larry,
Lear, and Shakespeare need to be kept at a distance because of their shared capacity to
overwhelm: they have “no rival,” they have “the effect of dimming the surroundings,” and,
further, even when attempts are made to position them at the farthest extreme, their “features are
still visible” and their “body language still distinct.” In particular, applying this list of qualities to
Shakespeare and intertextuality suggests the nature of the conflict between textual generations
figured as a rivalry in which the novel is threatened by Shakespeare. On one side, we have the
nu-text A Thousand Acres trying to establish its own voice and make its own meanings through
King Lear.
21
On the other is the Shakespearean beta-text whose “features and body language” –
those aspects that make him “distinct” – not only cannot be diminished, but render Lear so

21
As in Thomas Greene’s paraphrasing of Petrarch, which may describe an ideal nu-text: “[t]he
fabric of the father's work is to be undone, ravelled out, so that only its blessed threads remain to
be rewoven in a new design and then to be subread later within a tissue altogether new. If it
suffers no rip [. . . ], the result of this interweaving will be so original as to cause a splash, an
explosion” (102–03).

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imminent that the surrounding text of A Thousand Acres may be dimmed and its meanings lost to
those of Shakespeare.
22

The buildup to the violence of intertextuality, to a display of dominance, moves forward
as the challenges of setting the beta-text/father/Larry/Shakespeare at an optimum distance
become concerns about pushing him back to a safe distance. The shift between the two mirrors
the difference in approach between an intertextual relationship in which a nu-text plays off of or
plays with the canon and one in which a nu-text re-works the canon to interrogate it and say
something new. As Ginny says, it is one thing for her, her sister, and their husbands “to sit
around and laugh at or deplore some of the things that [their father] did or said. It was another to
confront the monolith that he seemed to be” (115). A confrontation is not easy, and it is not the
same thing as a conversation. As the opening of this chapter explored, the assumption has been
that Shakespeare presents no threat, meaning his texts are completely available to us to re-view
and re-shape, suggesting intertexuality as mere dialogue between nu-text and capitulating beta-
text. “[H]is problems seemed only his [. . .] and the consequences of ‘managing’ him in a new
way seemed easily borne” (118), Ginny feels Rose naively believes. The naiveté is in thinking
that entering into dialogue with Shakespeare and trying to make/score a point will not end in
confrontation.
The novel demonstrates what an attempt at dialogue can look like in a conversation
between Ginny and Larry in which she tries to assert herself while trying to remain calm. In my
abbreviated version, Larry begins, “You shouldn’t talk to me like you do. I’m your father.” “I try
to show respect, Daddy,” replies Ginny. “You don’t try hard enough. You think because I gave

22
Expressing a similar concern, Ginny explains that “When my father asserted his point of view,
mine vanished. Not even I could remember it” (176).

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you girls the farm, you don’t have to make up to me any more.” “That’s not true, Daddy,” Ginny
says, “We do our best. You’re not the easiest person to get along with, you know.” She
continues, “Anyway, I don’t think you show us any respect, Daddy. I don’t think you ever think
about anything from our point of view.” Larry angers, “You don’t, huh? I bust my butt working
my whole life and I make a good place for you [. . .], hard times and good times, and you think I
should be stopping all the time and wondering about your [. . .] ‘point of view’?” Ginny then
starts to get angry but tries to mollify him: “I just want to get along, Daddy. I don’t want to fight.
Don’t fight with me?” Larry tries to get the last word, scolding her, “You know, my girl, I never
talked to my father like this. It wasn’t up to me to judge him, or criticize his ways” (174–75).
There is a lot that can be unpacked in Ginny and Larry’s back and forth, but to put it
simply, this is a small window into an escalation from conversation to confrontation, the two
sides or the two texts making their opening arguments with the point of contention pivoting on
respect. From Larry we hear what we expect from the stand-in for Shakespeare, mostly an
expectation of respect because he came before, achieved success, endured, and creates a space
for and produces descendants, a sequence comparable to canonization. Larry demands respect
because he turned over the farm he owned to Ginny and her sisters. He worked and persevered to
make her a “good place,” and thus her “point of view” is inconsequential, at least relative to his,
he implies. Note how the debate about owing becomes intertwined with concepts of owning. He
has earned the right to have a point of view, while she has not. Nor does she have a right to
“judge” or “criticize.” In response, from Ginny we hear the controlled complaint as she insists
there should be mutual respect, despite the fact that Larry is not “the easiest person to get along
with.” To her, mutual respect means acknowledgment that she has a right to a point of view and
to a complaint. The complaint of the nu-text does not stem from a desire to surpass the beta-text.

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The list of Shakespeare’s rivals (to many) would be rather short after all. But, the nu-text does
want to be acknowledged even as reverence seems demanded of it. In other words, it wants to
assert its independence.
The exchange helps establish Larry’s character further, and thus helps shape the novel’s
construction of its relationship to the possessive beta-text Shakespeare. Ginny’s protest is
significant, though mild in its apparent reasonability, while Larry’s stubborn refusal barely
verges on demonstrative danger despite Ginny’s claim to her own independence. Still, she
submits, as she backs away from challenging him – “I don’t want to fight” – and pleads to deter
his aggression – “Don’t fight with me?” What would Larry do if she had not yielded?
A partial answer lies in a vision Ginny offers of an offended Larry that simmers with
intimidation:

Here was Daddy, balked, not by a machine (he had talent and patience for
machines), but by one of us, or by some trivial circumstance. The flesh of his
lower jaw tightens as he grits his teeth. He blows out a sharp, impatient breath.
His face reddens, his eyes seek yours. He says, “You look me in the eye, girly.”
He says, “I’m not going to stand for it.” His voice rises. He says, “I’ve heard
enough of this.” His fists clench. He says, “I’m not going to be your fool.” His
forearms and biceps buckle into deeply defined and powerful cords. He says, “I
say what goes around here.” He says, “I don’t care if – I’m telling you – I mean
it.” He shouts, “I – I – I –” roaring and glorying in his self-definition. I did this
and I did that and don’t think you can tell me this and you haven’t the foggiest
idea about that, and then he impresses us by blows with the weight of his “I” and

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the feathery nonexistence of ourselves, our questions, our doubts, our differences
of opinion. That was Daddy. (306)

The passage presents a distilled portrayal of Larry that I think is important to consider as one
more piece of context, one more impression of him, before attending to the reveal that he raped
his daughters Rose and Ginny when they were children. For one, Ginny assembles this image of
Larry after she remembers her rape, which lends the description significance as intentionally
figurative, thus inviting interpretation. Also, the final sentence – “That was Daddy” – suggests a
definitiveness we should bear in mind to better understand what this rapist and his upsetting
action may represent. To begin, “balked” suggests more than a complaint against Larry. Perhaps
a refusal? Something happens that causes Larry to momentarily pull back and, based on the
earlier conversation between Ginny and Larry, likely it relates to “respect.” The tightened jaw,
the “impatient breath,” his demand to be looked in the eye, and his threat that he is “not going to
stand for it,” add up to the response of a father whose child has refused to do what he asks and
has not shown him the respect he thinks he deserves. Turning to intertextual possession, refusal
reminds us that the specific type of nu-text this project examines can be identified by its
confrontation with its beta-text and, central to this chapter, a nu-text that works through the
possibility of its own silencing.
23
In order to speak to its own intertextual struggle with
Shakespeare, A Thousand Acres must attempt to push back, must refuse to be overtaken by

23
Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins write that “[c]anonical counter-discourse is one method by
which colonised cultures can refuse the seamless contiguity between a classical past and a post-
colonial present that the empire strives to preserve” (my emphasis qtd. in Kidnie 69). Possession
might be thought of as a kind of colonization, an alternate metaphor with a whole other bevy of
implications. A possessed text could also be conceived of as a colonized text.

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Lear.
24
“I’m not going to be your fool,” strikes me as an explicit call out to Lear and stands as
another demand for respect couched as Larry’s/Lear’s/Lear’s own refusal to be used as fodder
for parody or mockery.
The other half of the passage focuses on the singular power of the father in relation to his
children. The flexing of “deeply defined and powerful” muscles intimidate. Located as expressly
bicep and forearm muscles, an impending hit or punch is implied, a threat of violence backed up
by “I mean it.” “I don’t care if,” “I’m telling you,” and the repetition of “I” feed into the concept
of “self-definition,” a distinction of the canonical beta-text. That is, the nu-text by its nature
depends on the beta-text; it is a text that speaks through or makes meanings through its
intertextual relationship with another text. The beta-text enjoys the glory of independence and
roars with its own voice. The beta-text tells what it is (“I’m telling you”). The nu-text, especially
if possessed, is told what it is.
25
At the end of the passage, Ginny puts the two parts together: the
threat of “blows,” the “weight of his ‘I,’” and the relative “feathery nonexistence of ourselves.”
Her words suggest forceful possession, as Shakespeare “outweighs” his re-workings and thus can
render their questions, doubts, and differences of opinion virtually non-existent.
Even more troubling, the possibility that the weight of Shakespeare can render non-
existent, can suppress, a nu-text’s questions and doubts about and differences of opinion from its
own beta-text amounts to a traumatic silencing, which A Thousand Acres strives to bring into
view. Importantly, the novel has to significantly break from mapping itself onto Lear, has to
introduce original content, to address this dark perspective of intertextuality. The image of Larry

24
In contrast, characterizing a nu-text as a “machine,” for which Larry/the beta-text can afford
“patience,” implies a mechanistic reproduction of the beta-text, meaning a nu-text that represents
no challenge nor complication.
25
Certainly, I am arguing these points as separate from the meaning-making accomplished in the
interpretative process.

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I assemble bristles with the potential brutality of his overwhelming weight, a portrayal that fairly
closely parallels the character of Lear Shakespeare presents. The reveal of Larry’s physical abuse
and repeated rape of his daughters Rose and Ginny (188), as material coming from outside
Shakespeare, forces a reconsideration of Larry/Lear/Lear in light of new evidence.
Physical violence couched as punishment represents an escalation from mere
intimidation. Ginny remembers that physical abuse was used when she “had to learn,” in
response to being “naughty,” which meant being “disobedient, careless, destructive, disorderly,
hurtful to others, defiant” (278). The specific words she uses appropriately relate back to the
notion of respect, meaning we can tie them back the expectation of the canonical beta-text of
Shakespeare, especially in its relation to nu-text. If an adaptation strays too far from its basis, is it
being “disobedient”? If the nu-text plays too much with Shakespeare, is it being “careless,” or,
depending on the extent of a mockery, “disorderly”? The possibility that we can reverse the
accepted belief that a nu-text can be “destructive” to a work like Shakespeare is the subject of
this whole project’s argument. “Hurtful to others” is a complex of physical and emotional injury
that may have several implications, but it provokes questions about the intertextual web and the
impact one nu-text might have on another. Finally, “defiant” stands as the most serious offense:
A Thousand Acres inscribes into its narrative the concern of a nu-text’s possession and its
struggle to defy. All these behaviors could be described as the child/nu-text needing “to learn”
respect. The responsive force used to impress respect is a kind of “putting in one’s place” by re-
establishing the authority of the father/beta-text that we might see in action textually as a
manifest dependence on the beta-text, evidenced by easy predictability based on foreknowledge
of the beta-text and/or an inability to suggest meanings other than those of the beta-text.

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In a highly simplified sense, intertextuality, like sexual intercourse, is about an exchange
that may be generative. Relationships between texts, much like relationships between bodies, can
be differentiated along various spectra, from mutual to one-sided, serious to fleeting, pleasurable
to painful, and certainly can be fraught with complications. Shifting the metaphor to incestuous
rape – not just sexual violence but specifically sexual violence that occurs between generations
in the same family – radically reshapes our perception of textual relationships. To help think
through the ramifications, I have been using the word “weight” in relation to Larry and
Shakespeare for its multiple meanings that now come to bear within the context of sexual
violence. When the novel uses “weight,” we are struck by the disparity between the bodies of
Larry, a farmer-strong adult male, and Ginny, a teenage girl at the time of the assaults:

And so my father came to me and had intercourse with me in the middle of the
night. I could remember pretending to be asleep, but knowing he was in the
doorway and moving closer. I could remember him saying, “Quiet, now, girl. You
don’t need to fight me.” I didn’t remember fighting him, ever, but in all
circumstances he was ready to detect resistance, anyway. I remembered his
weight, the feeling of his knee pressing between my legs, while I tried to make
my legs heavy without seeming to defy him. (280)

Notably, Ginny does not use the word “rape.” The referral to the sex act itself as “intercourse,” a
coldly clinical term, is almost jarring in its alienating of the act from the circumstances under
which it occurs. The emphasis falls then on the power dynamic of rape rather than intercourse,
and the power differential hinges on weight. His heavy weight, his too heavy weight, denies her

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agency and allows him to possess her. She cannot remember trying to fight against him – could
she even, given her weight? – yet Larry’s commands for Ginny to keep quiet and not to fight, his
tuned sensitivity to resistance, and the pressure from his body he uses to hold her body in a
manageable and receptive position indicate an expectation of her attempt to get out from under
his heavy weight. He is always at the ready to suppress. We cannot imagine the effort Ginny
must employ to keep her “legs heavy,” to keep her body weight limp “without seeming to defy,”
as in the moment she struggles with refusing him or risking herself.
Ginny’s determination to not seem to defy her father complicates how we think about
violence, rape, and resistance in the transposition from bodily weight to textual weight. To
identify intertextuality as violent and traumatic does not define an act; it calls out a certain
perception and reception of an intertextual work that mark it as possessed. My claim is not that A
Thousand Acres has been “raped” by Shakespeare, but that the novel uses intertextuality as a
mode of equivocation – rather than outright refusal – to achieve what Ginny describes herself
doing: “resist without seeming to resist, to absent yourself while seeming respectful and
attentive” (370).
Speaking to an audience in Los Angeles about her writing of A Thousand Acres, Jane
Smiley explained that “traditional interpretations” of Regan and Goneril “offended” her: “They
were women,” she said, “and the play seemed to be condemning them morally for the exact ways
in which they expressed womanhood that I recognized” (qtd. in Cakebread 90). Why choose to
re-work King Lear then? Re-tellings certainly have the potential to offend as well, especially if
they adhere closely to the patterns of the play. Marowitz asks a similar question: “if you wish
these plays to say things they never intended, why don’t you leave Shakespeare alone and write
your own plays?” In attempting an answer, he first acknowledges that “the assumption behind

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that question is that there is a clear-cut meaning to the works in question and that I [the author of
a nu-text], for whatever reasons, am ignoring or distorting it.” Marowitz calls this assumption
“false,” similar to my argument early in this chapter. He proposes, then, that “[n]o play possesses
exclusivity of meaning; the greater the play, the more meanings it is able to engender” (26). I
cannot say Marowitz’s conclusion is wrong, in part because the first half can be difficult to parse
out. Does he mean no play has only one meaning? Or, no play has a power of exclusion that
inhibits its nu-texts from creating new meanings? Regardless, I take issue with what sounds like
an affirmation in the second phrase that meanings, even when various, originate from
Shakespeare. Marowitz means well, but it may be more accurate to acknowledge that literary
history shows that the plays we consider “great” are most likely to be retold and thus offer the
possibility for multiple meanings.
Marowitz leaves yawning his own critical question: why use Shakespeare’s plays to “say
things they never intended”? One of the ambitions of my project, and this chapter in particular,
has been to help us think about intertextuality as, to borrow from Ginny, a “loop of poison” from
which we drink. The idea of intertextual possession draws attention to how telling the same
stories again and again means there are stories we are not telling and draws attention to how the
repetition of certain stories propagates certain meanings, some of which may be deemed
problematic and/or drown out alternative possibilities. Ginny reflects these concerns as she
angrily separates history from the notion of “progress”: “You see grand history, but I see blows.
[. . .] Do I think Daddy came up with beating and fucking us on his own? [. . .] No. I think he
had lessons, and those lessons were part of the package, along with the land and [. . .] poisoning
the water and destroying the topsoil” (342–43). She reconceptualizes history as a series of
violent acts. Such sustained violence results in a trauma described as “lessons” in violence

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inherited from one generation to the next, continuing a cycle in which the prior generation
“poisons” its successors. A Thousand Acres, as Smiley’s response to feeling offended by
Shakespeare’s treatment of women in Lear, attempts to interrupt the cycle she sees to speak to it.
In doing so, the novel answers Marowitz’s question, at least in part. Why recycle Shakespeare?
In this case, it is hard to talk about Shakespeare – or Shakespearean intertextuality – without
Shakespeare.
The question of whether A Thousand Acres “successfully” resists Shakespearean
possession does not have a simple answer. The novel does not throw off Shakespeare – it is
clearly an adaptation of Lear after all – and I do not think it is meant to do so. However, it does
find a way to “absent” itself from the play, not by allowing Lear to overwhelm, but by stepping
outside the beta-text by interspersing significant new content.
26
A Thousand Acres thus resists
without seeming to resist; it disrupts possession when it surprises us rather than sustains
predictability. Unambiguously, it strives to create an opportunity to hear and interpret the voice
of a woman speaking (screaming) to her experience of being silenced by her father/text.
Additionally, the novel extends its notion of silencing beyond its concerns about the state of the
nu-text in its own creative moment, to include the issue of unheard beta-texts. Ginny’s
realization that “Daddy’s departure had opened the possibility of finding my mother” (225)
advocates for a search to find canonical beta-texts written by women. While the claim that King
Lear itself has latent feminist content lies outside my project, Smiley’s inclination to write a
corrective to the play by retelling it complicates any immediate argument that there is none to be

26
Ginny can only push past silence when her father departs the family house and she has it to
herself: “So I screamed. I screamed in a way that I had never screamed before, full out, throat-
wrenching, unafraid-of-making-a-fuss-and-drawing-attention-to-myself sorts of screams that I
made myself concentrate on, becoming all mouth, all tongue, all vibration” (229).

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found. The novel sustains an awareness of its inheritance from Shakespeare, but to say that A
Thousand Acres derives its politics from Lear echoes the anticipatory views of Bloom and
Garber of a timeless Shakespeare that do not ring true. Rather, the novel’s processing traumatic
intertextuality becomes a project of repossession, of pushing back and taking back, to hear from
Ginny one last time, “the power of telling rather than being told” (173). In the spaces in which
the novel refuses to conform to Lear, especially the layered metaphors of landscape and poison,
body and rape, A Thousand Acres strives to tell a perspective of womanhood instead of being
told one by Shakespeare’s play and its history of interpretations and meanings.

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Chapter Three
Exorcism

When I look at Japanese history – or the history of the world for that matter –
what I see is how man repeats himself over and over again.
Akira Kurosawa (qtd. in Richie 115)

Within the context of a project on intertextuality, these words from director Akira
Kurosawa reflect not just a worldview, but a creative impetus and a through-line for a cinematic
oeuvre. Intertextuality, in its all its variations, demonstrates how we repeat ourselves over and
over again. Kurosawa adapted many of his scripts from pre-existing texts – for example, Ran
(King Lear), The Bad Sleep Well (Hamlet), The Lower Depths (based on Maxim Gorky’s play),
and The Idiot (based on Dostoevsky’s novel) – finding in other authors’ stories his themes and
translating them into films that gained him recognition as an auteur himself. Stephen Prince, a
critic and friend of the director, writes that Kurosawa “once remarked that, in depicting an age
when the strong preyed on the weak, Macbeth had a focus in common with all of his films”
(“Shakespeare Transposed”), no doubt a significant reason for why it was his favorite of
Shakespeare’s plays (Richie 115). These perspectives from Kurosawa – inevitable repetition and
ways the strong prey on the weak – echo the arguments of the previous chapters of my project.
Chapter One lays out an understanding of the intertextual relationship between beta-text and nu-
text through the metaphor of haunting. Recognition of the beta-text interrupts our experience of
the nu-text and results in interventions that threaten to bend the narrative and the meanings of the
nu-text toward those of the beta-text. Further, the case study of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead implicates us, the community of readers, as complicit in summoning the
ghost of the beta-text. We develop a set of expectations for the nu-text not because (or not just

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because) we prefer an older, genius work of art that outshines a newer work, but because we are
part of an ongoing cultural, political, social, and educational process that authorizes and
empowers certain works over others. Chapter Two picks up the proposed power differential
between beta-text and nu-text and suggests that it results in kind of possession, in which the beta-
text, a ghost we cannot ban, takes ownership of the nu-text and represses it. Jane Smiley’s A
Thousand Acres struggles with its possession by Shakespeare and calls for a resistance against
both creative and critical approaches to intertextuality that dismissively and inadvertently silence
voices alternative to a paternalistic canon.
Chapter Three seeks, in a way, to address a key concept Smiley puts forward – how
might one resist without seeming to resist – through the idea of exorcism: an attempt to push off,
push through, or push beyond intertextual haunting. Similar to the previous chapters, this one
takes on a case study – here Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood – that considers its own haunting.
Macbeth’s story of an upstart who kills his king, takes over, only to be overthrown himself and
have “order” restored offers rich material for adaptation. More important to my purposes, it
structures a cycle of power in intertextual relationships. The results of exorcism tend toward an
absence, the ghost banished; however, it is impossible to purge an intertextual relationship and
claim that a nu-text is not a nu-text. On the critical side, it is hard to describe an absence. Not
much can be gained from pointing to a nu-text and stating that no trace of the beta-text can be
found. Kurosawa’s film valuably points away from a rejection of Macbeth toward a layering of
traditions other than Shakespeare, in particular non-Western traditions that disrupt the unilateral
power of the Western canonical beta-text. Further, haunting is meant to speak to a perceived
presence, so rather than describing what is not present, exorcism will be used as an entry point to
explore how Throne of Blood constructs an alternative presence – a haunted ambient – that

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produces effects and related meanings that allow the film to deviate from Macbeth. The ambient
of a text is often taken for granted. It suggests the world we are in as we sense it, but we do not
encounter it: it is there and not there. The haunted ambient thrusts the absent viscerally into the
immediate. It represents an unsettling experience of sounds and images that, in Throne of Blood,
dissolves boundaries between the unknown and re-known, the remembered and the forgotten,
and the received and the lost.

Modes and Motives

Intertextual exorcism cannot be thought of in opposition to intertextuality, as a process
meant to retract that which, as a creative act, has already been done. This is especially true in the
case of adaptation, which by my definition describes a nu-text that is recognizable as a
transposition of a beta-text into an alternate cultural, historical, geographical, racial, or economic
setting with associated or surprising variations. Rather than conceiving of repetition as a sin to be
avoided, intertextual exorcism attempts to reconcile intertextuality as a persistent cross-cultural
phenomenon with its association with cultural hierarchies and abusive systems of power by
offering interpretations of the practices that complicate it and by avoiding the retreat into
comparative analysis that measures fidelity. The need to pursue reconciliation instead of denial is
in response to an indisputable view of intertextuality and adaptation as a historical reality.
Marvin Carlson generalizes that “every one of the world’s great dramatic traditions has stressed
from the outset the importance not of telling stories on stage but of retelling stories that are
already known to their public” (18). As an example from the non-Western perspective, Carlson
explains that the treatises of Zeami, the most influential writer on the principles of Japanese Noh

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theater in the late 1300s to mid-1400s, “consider the superior and more significant drama to be
that in which the material is already familiar to the audience, drawn from a shared body of
historic, legendary, and mythic material treating heroes, kings, and gods” (18). In his
autobiography, Kurosawa himself states the importance to the creative process of familiarity
with canonical works:

In order to write scripts, you must first study the great novels and dramas of the
world. You must consider why they are great. Where does the emotion come from
that you feel as you read them? What degree of passion did the author have to
have, what level of meticulousness did he have to command, in order to portray
the characters and events he did? You must read thoroughly, to the point where
you can grasp all these things. (Something Like an Autobiography 193)

The director insists on study akin to close reading or deconstruction in order to understand how
effects are produced. He intimates that once “you can grasp all these things,” you may be able to
replicate them. His lack of specificity regarding texts other than the “great” works of the world
corresponds with Julie Sanders’ broad sense of texts that have “cross-cultural, often cross-
historical, readerships; they are stories and tales which appear across the boundaries of cultural
difference and which are handed on, albeit in transmuted and translated forms, through the
generations.” Stating explicitly what Kurosawa insinuates, she explains that “[i]n this sense they
participate in a very active way in a shared community of knowledge, and they have therefore
proved particularly rich sources for adaptation and appropriation” (Sanders 45). The “shared

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community of knowledge” encompasses both artists and readers, meaning the active
participation that marks intertextuality influences both productive and interpretative strategies.
Speaking of Throne of Blood specifically, Stephen Prince identifies a “brilliant synthesis
of diverse cultural, aesthetic, and historical sources, only one skein of which derives from
Shakespeare” (“Shakespeare Transposed”). Despite Prince’s recognition of the vastness of
signifiers in addition to Shakespeare, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto regrets that “[t]he popularity of
Throne of Blood as an object of critical analysis is inseparable from the fact that it is an
adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and it is precisely this relation that has gotten the most
attention” (250). By this, Yoshimoto suggests that too often nu-texts, like Throne of Blood, are
attended to in intertextual studies based on their similarities and divergences from the beta-text.
There may be appropriate spaces for such an analysis, but it “becomes problematic when it is
used as a means of establishing or reinforcing a hierarchical relation between the original and the
adaptation regardless of the specific value accorded to each term of hierarchical dichotomy”
(251–52). When considering canonical texts, though, a value is already accorded to one term –
the beta-text – and the comparative analysis of the nu-text tends to uncover the expected: as
noted by Charles Marowitz, “it is the interpreter’s vision which is rejected and the masterwork,
in all its traditional greatness, which is confirmed” (8).
Entering into the discourse surrounding intertextuality and the repetition of known
stories, then, requires an acknowledgment of the power differential between beta- and nu-text
and of the potential motivations behind attempts to disrupt it. Without wandering too far into
questions of authorial intent, I want to identify pervasive rationales and approaches relevant to
intertextual exorcism, in particular those that resonate with Throne of Blood. Using Kurosawa’s
film as an initiating touchstone, Asaji, the Lady Macbeth analogue in Throne of Blood who is

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thus associated with drive, goads her husband to murder: “You who would rule a kingdom are
yet afraid of a ghost” (Kurosawa, Throne of Blood).
27
She gestures toward the competitive
reading of intertextuality – something like a coup attempt – we find paralleled in Harold Bloom’s
assertion that “[t]o unname the precursor while earning one’s own name is the quest of strong or
severe poets” (The Anatomy of Influence 10). Similarly, C. R. Post, writing about the “ideal” in
Greek tradition as a repetition of “the same subject until it has achieved perfect expression,”
describes how “the tragic poet utilizes the well-worn myths, the comic writer the familiar
intrigues, each impressing upon the old master his own individuality in the hope that his
interpretation may prove the ultimate” (qtd. in Carlson 25). Yet, the upward mobility of the nu-
text seems to rest precisely on the value of the beta-text, which, in turn, feeds back into the
maintenance of the beta-text’s position. Yoshimoto notes that in critical writings that seek to
praise Kurosawa’s film as a successful adaptation, “Throne of Blood [. . .] is recognized as
cultural capital only to the extent that it contributes to the self-reproduction of Shakespeare’s
play as a great canonical work.” Thus, he concludes that the “value of the adaptation here can
never be independent of the original, and the quantity of cultural capital objectified in the
adaptation never exceeds that of the cultural capital objectified in the original” (261). This is
precisely the power dynamic intertextual exorcism intends to suspend by disentangling the nu-
text from the beta-text.
At times, we may find an unconscious bias reinforcing such a hierarchy, even in critics
that try to stay open to the value of intertextual works. Margaret Jane Kidnie, for instance,

27
I occasionally refer to characters in Throne of Blood in conjunction with their analogue in
Macbeth. My goal is to provide my reader, who I imagine is more familiar with Shakespeare’s
text than Kurosawa’s, with context and the opportunity for comparison. I ask that my reader
resist conceiving of the beta-text character as the original or source; doing so will allow for a
more open mind regarding intertextual exorcism and stave off possession.

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discusses how the BBC’s ShakespeaRe-Told series reworks plays, “reconceiving setting,
language, and action,” to make them “more accessible to twenty-first century British television
audiences.” “Accessible,” unfortunately, tends to be more a red flag for bias than an indicator of
a worthwhile endeavor. It implies a “dumbing down” or simplifying for those who either are
uneducated, uninterested, or unappreciative of the original “masterwork.” Kidnie continues to
ask of these Shakespearean nu-texts, “can one still claim them as genuine instances of
Shakespeare’s works? Or have the works been so altered in production that one must regard the
programmes as adaptations – as not ‘fully’ Shakespeare’s works – or else as new works authored
by someone or something else [. . .] ?” (112). Why are we concerned about “genuine instances”?
What constitutes “genuine”? “Adaptation” is wielded to indicate a text in opposition to the
“genuine” work rather than as a term for a genre of intertextuality or a descriptor of an authorial
strategy. The differentiation between works that are “‘fully’ Shakespeare’s” versus those
“authored by someone or something else” seems to inherently value the first, especially as the
authorship of the latter is, almost pejoratively, left open to a mysterious “someone” or some
larger entity (a public broadcaster, a corporation, would-be educators) rather than another artist.
Indeed, we should wonder at the possession Shakespeare is oddly granted – note the phrase
“‘fully’ Shakespeare’s”– over twenty-first century television programs.
The seeming embeddedness of the hierarchal dichotomy casts doubts on our ability to
reverse it or, instead, dismiss it altogether. Writing about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are
Dead, Heebon Park-Finch argues that the “horizontal interweaving or transference of
Shakespearean rhetoric and metatheatrical devices add intertextual depth and versatility to the
fabric and texture of the completed literary carpet, but they do not drown out Stoppard’s own
voice, which emerges from and goes beyond the Shakespearean model” (186). Chapter One of

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my project suggests that Hamlet does, in fact, become a “Shakespearean model” for Stoppard’s
play, creating a set of expectations that drives the nu-text’s characters toward the beta-text’s end.
Arguably, “Stoppard’s own voice” is frequently “drown[ed] out” by Shakespeare’s. As an
alternative process, intertextual exorcism opens up possibilities for going beyond the given
model, considers how a nu-text might drown out its beta-text’s voice, or, most importantly,
renders the dichotomy less interesting than attending to the nu-text on its own terms.
Throne of Blood suggests a consideration of Shakespeare’s globalization, more accurately
termed indigenization (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 158; Lanier 1266), as an exorcising strategy that
to some extent sidesteps cultural hierarchies. Douglas Lanier defines indigenization as “the
assimilation of Shakespeare to local popular cultures across the world” (1266), while Julie
Sanders describes the motive: “the ‘movement of proximation’ brings it closer to the audience’s
frame of reference in temporal, geographic, or social terms” (21). Providing background, Lanier
concisely outlines the history of Shakespeare’s global adoption. Starting in the nineteenth
century, “much of Shakespeare’s reception outside the West took place in the context of
Shakespeare’s association with British colonialism,” especially the “teaching and performance of
Shakespeare” that was “aimed at creating properly civilized (read British) subjects from
subaltern peoples and displacing their native cultures.” It comes as no surprise, then, that within
“postcolonial contexts, the juxtaposition of native cultures with Shakespeare has often signaled
popular resistance to the subordinating effects of imperial high culture.” The “phenomenon of
‘indigenization,’” Lanier argues, emerges in the last couple decades as “some of Shakespeare’s
association with the colonial past seems to have dissipated” (1266). And yet Marjorie Garber,
though not speaking about globalization explicitly, identifies “an impulse to reverse colonization,
a desire to recapture ‘Shakespeare’ and make him new” (Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers 11). If we

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rewind her thought to its potential impetus, her choice of words combined with her bracketing of
Shakespeare in quotation marks suggest that Shakespeare as a loosed, wider concept – akin to
my ghost – still “colonizes” us both as readers or artists in various countries and contexts in the
world. The impulse and the echoes of language of domination and subjection in her description
of it signal the desire to resist “the subordinating effects” of Shakespeare through reclaiming and
renewing, all concepts that point back to the metaphor of possession from the previous chapter.
As much as Lanier may feel that “Shakespeare’s association with the colonial past seems to have
dissipated,” Shakespeare’s colonization of culture, his possession of texts, readers, and critics, is
still quite pervasive, and so we need to take care with how we talk about Shakespeare’s
movement into alternative geographic, ethnic, racial, political, or cultural contexts.
As a nota bene, I share a portion of Stephen Greenblatt’s essay, “How Shakespeare Lives
Now,” in which he relates the story of a young Afghan’s writer’s production of Love’s Labour’s
Lost intended to jumpstart a “vigorous cultural renaissance”:

[Qais Akbar] Omar thought that the time was ripe to mark the restoration of civil
society and repair some of the cultural damage. He wanted to stage a play with
both men and women actors performing in public in an old garden in Kabul. He
chose a Shakespeare play. No doubt the choice had something to do with the old
imperial presence of the British in Afghanistan, but it was not only this particular
history that was at work. Shakespeare is the embodiment worldwide of a creative
achievement that does not remain within narrow boundaries of the nation-state or
lend itself to the secure possession of a particular faction or speak only for this or
that chosen group. He is the antithesis of intolerant provinciality and fanaticism.

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Granted an essay published to mark the 400
th
anniversary of Shakespeare’s death will have the
broadly positive and generalizing language of a eulogy, and Greenblatt can be hyperbolic when
writing about Shakespeare. Yet, Greenblatt is smart and conscientious enough to point to the
potential post-colonial motivation for choosing a Shakespeare play in Afghanistan. He also later
explains that there were consequences for this production – including retaliatory murder and
exile by the Taliban – that temper his aggrandizement of Shakespeare and gesture toward a
greater complexity at work. The only sign we have that the production underwent a
transformational process of indigenization comes from Greenblatt’s assertion that, “[a]s a writer,
Omar was charmed by the play’s gorgeous language, language that he felt could be rendered
successfully in Dari.” The story and Greenblatt’s response to it demonstrate what seem like
opposing attitudes, but really are part of the same system. The tragic story of this deflating
“vigorous cultural renaissance” demonstrates how Shakespeare’s works, despite Greenblatt’s
deep appreciation, can just as readily be seen as signposts of intolerance or Western colonialism
and greeted with anger. Greenblatt cannot seem to imagine this reality, insisting on Shakespeare
as “the embodiment worldwide of a creative achievement.” Sadly, Greenblatt contributes to the
problem and the perpetuation of an authorizing system: the British, the West more generally-
speaking, have held up Shakespeare as the height of “creative achievement” and insisted that his
value “does not remain within narrow boundaries of the nation-state,” resulting in his works
coming to signify a “particular faction” or “chosen group” against which other, subordinated
factions and groups push back. These perspectives – represented here by Greenblatt, Omar, and
the Taliban – make evident the hold Shakespeare has on certain kinds of meanings. Shakespeare

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performs esoteric colonizations that influence how different cultures receive his works and
influence how we, in turn, interpret different cultures’ receptions.
Throne of Blood, as a Japanese nu-text based on a Shakespearean beta-text, bridges the
complications to understanding intertextual exorcism presented by cultural hierarchy and
indigenization. Yoshimoto reminds us that critical writings about Kurosawa’s film are shaped,
even if unconsciously, by the beta-text “not only perceived as a great work of art but also
categorized as a Western text,” meaning we should be wary about reading intertextual processes
in Throne of Blood not just in terms of “how Shakespeare’s text can be transposed into another
aesthetic medium, film, but also how a Western artwork can be translated into a non-Western
text” (260–61). One further complication that hides in Yoshimoto’s language – “how [an]
artwork can be translated into a [. . .] text” – asks us to consider how questions of value and
questions of indigenization intersect with those of artistic autonomy. Returning to Kidnie’s
reading of the BBC’s Shakespeare television series, she argues that,

The more closely [the BBC’s version of] Macbeth approaches a poetic style that
might be (mis)recognized as Shakespeare – or rather, as it approaches what
sounds within the specific context of the broadcast medium “Shakespearean” –
the more the art of the television scriptwriter challenges implicitly the boundaries
of what can be recognized as an instance of the authentic work. They are not
Shakespeare’s words, but this programme might yet be Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
(119)

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The television program bills itself as an iteration of Macbeth, so Kidnie’s claim that it might still
be that play is intended to be a compliment of sorts. Yet, why is the implication that the
scriptwriter’s “poetic style” only has value insofar as it approaches “Shakespearean” sounds?
The scriptwriter has his own “poetic style” and Kidnie volunteers that he “challenges [. . .] the
boundaries of what can be recognized as an instance of the authentic work,” so what if it no
longer is Shakespeare’s Macbeth? At what point do we let go of the idea of a contemporary
reworking being Shakespeare’s text? Marowitz similarly asks, “Can Kurosawa’s Ran really be
considered a version of King Lear, given the fact that it veers away so radically from the original
work? At what point does an extrapolation of a Shakespearian work [. . .] become an
independent work of art with no debt at all the original?” (108). Yoshimoto, too, worries that,
“[e]ven when Kurosawa’s adaptation [Throne of Blood] is granted much greater sense of
autonomy, frequently it is still subordinated to the original’s ‘essence’” (252), the value of which
rests in the original’s “uniqueness [that] can only perpetuate the reproduction of itself” (261).
Intertextual exorcism does not seek to devalue Shakespeare or question his uniqueness. But, it
does seek to upset arguments that only see nu-texts as reproductions of beta-texts. Picking up
Yoshimoto’s concern and Marowitz’s question, what processes of exorcism would render Throne
of Blood Kurosawa’s Macbeth, rather than Shakespeare’s? Or, might exorcism render an
altogether autonomous and alternative text, Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood?

’Tis Gone

Purposefully, the explorations above have consisted of many blind alleys; in thinking
through exorcism, we often find ourselves turned around or faced with walls we have built in

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front of ourselves. The question of what exorcism is may be better explored through a
consideration of its effects. Exorcism points us in a direction also suggested by, of all things, a
line from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country: “You’ve not experienced Shakespeare until
you have read him in the original Klingon.” The line suggests a profound re-wiring of our
understanding of an origin or an original. Kay Smith writes that this Klingon line “makes a
cultural claim that causes us to smile, then to feel a bit uncomfortable as we realize how
proprietary we in the ‘English-speaking world’ are about the works of the Bard” (140). Further,
the line makes us feel uncomfortable by casting doubt on the certainty and stability of
knowledge. We are asked to rewind, replace, and return to a transformed present. The line forces
us to pause and reconsider how tied we are to the concept of a source, which may prove to be
just as invented as Klingon. Intertextual exorcism does not seek to erase an origin, but it does
affect destabilization. Exorcism subverts the value we place on an origin and unravels the
expectations an origin provokes. As we might expect, exorcism challenges the ghost. Marjorie
Garber provides a framework for reassessment: “The Ghost himself is under erasure – ‘’tis here,
’tis here, ’tis gone’ – visible and invisible, potent and impotent. But all ghosts are under erasure;
that is their status” (Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers 25). “Under erasure,” she notes, comes from
Heidegger and later Derrida, and refers to a “signifying practice” that puts a concept “under
critique.” The word that is under erasure is deleted and still printed: “[s]ince the word is
inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary, it remains legible” (Shakespeare’s Ghost
Writers 277). To say that a ghost is under erasure reminds us that it is a placeholder, a mark of
the “absence of a presence,” similar to Derrida’s “trace” (Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers 278). The
word “ghost” is “inaccurate” in that it refers to something no longer there; it is “necessary”
because it allows us to speak of non-being and the experience of an unpresence. In the context of

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intertextual haunting, the notion of the ghost under erasure emphasizes that the perception of the
beta-text within the nu-text is, to borrow from Avery Gordon, a “[reminder] of lingering trouble”
(xix). In a simplified sense, the ghost of the beta-text is an impression of something that is and is
not there, which means the power and value we attribute to the beta-text as an origin or an
original may be perceived of as unsettled.
28
As we shift our attention more to the ghost’s absence
than its presence through the idea of exorcism, the status of “under erasure” allows us to “lose”
the beta-text as the monolithic voice under and over the nu-text.
As intertextual exorcism “downplays” the focus on the beta-text, the nu-text can be more
readily perceived as a polyphonic construction. Polyphony, as put forward by Bakhtin, refers to
novels that do not have one “objective, authorial voice.” Instead, Graham Allen explains,
multiple characters, including the narrator, are “possessed of their own discursive consciousness”
and, in combination, explain the narrative world (22–23). Allen concludes that, “[l]ike the
tradition of the carnival, the polyphonic novel fights against any view of the world which would
valorize one ‘official’ point-of-view, one ideological position, and thus one discourse, above all
others” (24). In intertextual terms, a haunted nu-text reconsidered as polyphonic pushes back
against the concept of an original, the beta-text as the dominant discourse, and the power
dichotomy between beta- and nu-text. We hear and perceive multiple voices, multiple points of
inspiration and influence, as well as our own contributions to the production of meanings that are
additional to or alternative to those determined by previous knowledge of a beta-text. Polyphony
can therefore serve as a corrective to an indigenization that centers on a translation of a beta-text
– a shift of the beta-text that does not compromise it – toward a more significant transformation

28
Possibly, the ghost of the beta-text could be expressed in a Derridean sense as the “beta-text,”
which could make for its own rich study. For this project, I will stick to “ghost” as sufficient for
establishing the status of the beta-text within the metaphor of intellectual haunting.

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that threatens the integrity of the beta-text. To this end, Linda Hutcheon and Siobhan O’Flynn
value an approach to an indigenizing mode of adaptation that “implies agency: people pick and
choose what they want to transplant to their own soil. Adapters of traveling stories exert power
over what they adapt” (150). Exorcism implies a heretofore unrealized agency by suggesting that
we can expand our understanding of indigenization beyond geographic or cultural border
crossings to potentially include all intertextual acts, if we view all beta-texts as “traveling
stories” and if we grant that within the polyphony of a nu-text, we – as creators and readers – can
“pick and choose” what we put in, what we leave out, what we take away, and what we leave
behind. The choices – even the very idea of choice – listed above may seem to contradict this
project’s assertion of a haunted intertextuality, that is, the state produced by the weight of a
canonical beta-text that shapes interventions into the nu-text and may come to possess it. Indeed,
exorcism should be thought of as an exceptional process: one that meets with friction, false
starts, setbacks, and dead ends.
Strategies that attempt to sidestep the ghost may look like intertextual exorcism, but
circle back to haunting as a status quo. Such tactics often appear simple and may consist of
actions on both the creation and reception sides of intertextuality. Zeami, the Noh playwright
who pushes for the repetition of known stories, suggests that in a nu-text, “there should be a
place where the original source is pointed out. If it is a famous place or a historical site, then you
should take lines from well-known poems about the place. [. . .] you should work distinguished
sayings and well-known expressions into the [characters’] language” (qtd. in Carlson 19). Many
Noh dramas are structured around a ghost that remembers past struggles, which take the form of
seemingly simple plots. But, performances are produced with an unsettling deliberateness meant
to press the reader’s imagination to make sense of the conventionalized acting, dance, music,

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masks, and chants, all composed together to overwhelm with significances. The mode of
intertextuality Zeami describes deliberately invokes the presence of the beta-text: an anchor of
sorts, stable, determined, and foundational for an otherwise loosened construction of meanings.
However, can we cut loose from anchors as well? That is, can a nu-text avoid acknowledging its
beta-text? What does it take to obfuscate the ghost? If we strip out Shakespearean language, if
we give characters different names, if we twist the plot, if we change the locale, if we make it
bawdy, if we use animated lions that sing and dance . . . what radical steps can we imagine?
Would they be enough, though, to thwart recognition? Alternatively, Shakespeare in particular
may allow for a kind of avoidance given his cultural pervasiveness: Garber explains,
“Shakespeare sampled, Shakespeare quoted without quotation marks, has become a lingua franca
of modern cultural exchange” (Shakespeare and Modern Culture xviii). Removing the
“quotation marks” does not mean the beta-text does not exist, but that the intertextual act goes
unattributed. However, the problem with Shakespeare, Garber suggests, is that he does not
always require attribution. Even unacknowledged, Shakespeare, a “lingua franca,” haunts.
Garber’s “Shakespeare quoted without quotation marks” also posits the chance that the
reader may encounter Shakespeare, but not recognize him. No attribution combined with no
knowledge makes for an unseen ghost. But then the reader does not experience the nu-text as a
nu-text. Julie Sanders speaks to the difficulties of describing the experience of reading a nu-text
without being aware that the beta-text exists: “While it may enrich and deepen our understanding
of the new cultural product to be aware of its shaping intertext [an analogue term for beta-text], it
may not be entirely necessary to enjoy the work independently” (22). Many Shakespearean nu-
texts can be enjoyed, even interpreted, without attending to their beta-texts: for example, Ten
Things I Hate About You, The Lion King, even A Thousand Acres and Throne of Blood. Does the

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unknowing reader perform a version of intertextual exorcism? Michael Riffaterre “defines
intertextuality as the reader’s perception of the relations between a text and all the other texts that
have preceded or followed it” (Stam et al. 204). If there is no “perception of relations,” the
process of intertextuality stalls, and exorcism as a process is moot. The experience of exorcism
may in fact align more closely with an almost Derridean, and paradoxical, concept of a perceived
absence of a beta-text.

Exorcism and Tradition

While the previous methods of not quite exorcism might be characterized as situations in
which intertextual haunting is avoided by activing or passively denying the existence of the
ghost, they cannot be understood as strategies that deny the ghost purchase on the nu-text.
Throne of Blood suggests a perhaps counterintuitive intertextual exorcism: overwrite one
tradition with another. Different from, though associated with, polyphony, this approach echoes
Heebon Park-Finch’s observation that the beta-text may not always “drown out” the voice of the
nu-text, which in turn “emerges from and goes beyond the Shakespearean model.” The twist,
though, is that rather than the nu-text’s voice coming through in addition to, or potentially even
over, the beta-text’s, this kind of intertextual exorcism suggests the voice of an alternate tradition
drowns out the beta-text’s and may make space for the voice of the nu-text, as the alternate
tradition is something distinct from a beta-text. I want to maintain a wide understanding of
“alternate tradition” to keep open various possibilities. Like the ghost of the beta-text, an
alternate tradition is perceived through its effects we may read within the text and within our
reception of the text. An alternate tradition must have the capacity to match the volume of a

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“primary” beta-text, meaning it too might be thought of as a source, as influence, or, more
generally, as a shaper of the nu-text. Thus, it too may produce the concerns of haunting, such as
inevitability. In fact, the alternate tradition competes with the beta-text through its own layering
of haunting effects.
I am resisting referring to this other presence as an alternate beta-text, at least within this
chapter’s context, to differentiate the perception of the alternate tradition from the ghost of the
beta-text. To explain the distinction, the ghost of the beta-text is that which we seek to exorcise,
and the alternate tradition is that which comes into focus as simultaneously part of and the result
of the intertextual exorcism process. “Simultaneously” because this alternate tradition is not
retroactively experienced as it is uncovered, though its effects may need to be interpreted as part
of a tracing back practice. The word “tradition” is meant to suggest antecedence (not necessarily
priority) and familiarity. Thomas Greene gestures toward a better understanding of the concept
through what he calls the “unconfessed genealogical line,” which, he offers, “may prove to be as
nourishing as the visible, once revealed by a deconstructing analysis.” He continues: “All major
works grow from a complex set of origins. But this proliferation must not obscure the special
status of that root the work privileges by its self-constructed myth of origins” (19).
“Unconfessed,” as opposed to “visible,” suggests source material the nu-text does not explicitly
acknowledge, but might be a foundation waiting to be excavated. By qualifying that such source
material can only be “revealed by a deconstructing analysis,” Greene limits our perception of
effects in such a way that even if his unconfessed source has conceptual overlap with my
“alternate tradition,” the two ideas are different. But, his qualifier does inversely affirm for us
that the alternate tradition should be conceived of as a construction.

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Greene’s “complex set of origins” corresponds to the polyphonic nature of the nu-text,
though his description maintains that “the work privileges” certain voices over others. While
intertextual haunting implies that multiple factors secure the privileged position of the beta-text,
the alternate tradition secures a “special status” not necessarily as a “self-constructed myth of
origins,” but as a countermyth of origins. Conceptually, the countermyth draws on Avery
Gordon’s sociological study Ghostly Matters as it provides a framework for the relationship
between intertextual exorcism and the alternate tradition:

[Following ghosts] is about putting life back in where only a vague memory or a
bare trace was visible to those who bothered to look. It is sometimes about writing
ghost stories, stories that not only repair representational mistakes, but also strive
to understand the conditions under which a memory was produced in the first
place, toward a countermemory, for the future. (22)

If exorcism puts the beta-text under erasure, under critique, it ironically requires we follow
ghosts and not insist on outright erasure. Instead of searching for the absent, searching for the
alternate tradition means “putting life back in where only a vague memory or a bare trace was
visible to those who bothered to look.” Rather than approaching exorcism as a refusal to
acknowledge the beta-text or an attempt to overthrow the beta-text, we can think about exorcism
as a process that strives to “repair representational mistakes,” and/or strives to understand the
conditions under which a nu-text was produced in the first place. Regarding representational
repairs and the advancement toward countermemory, Djanet Sears, the playwright of the 1997
play Harlem Duet, explains in familiar language her motives for re-working Othello:

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As a veteran theatre practitioner of African Descent, Shakespeare’s Othello had
haunted me since I first was introduced to him. Sir Laurence Olivier in black-face.
Othello is the first African portrayed in the annals of western dramatic literature.
In an effort to exorcise this ghost, I have written Harlem Duet. (qtd. in Kidnie 71)

Harlem Duet re-centers Othello on the character’s “forgotten” first wife. As an attempt at
exorcism, this nu-text, according to Jane Kidnie, “breaks with a particular cycle of racial and
sexual prejudice, destabilizing the action of Shakespeare’s work” and “marks an oblique
intervention that seeks to drive out – or ritually write over – a theatrical ‘ghost,’ simultaneously
identified with both a canonical work and its (blackface) legacy of performance” (71). Harlem
Duet follows its ghost, Othello, and develops a countermyth charged by alternate traditions of
African culture and the history of race relations in the United States, culminating with the
performance tradition of blackface. The haunting beta-text loses its privilege within the nu-text
as its privileging of a white, Western theatrical legacy comes under critique. For our purposes,
this reading of Harlem Duet demonstrates Gordon’s final push for countermemory to be
forward-looking. So too intertextual exorcism, despite its focus on alternate traditions, tends
toward a progressive politics that seeks out alternative or otherwise silenced voices and leads to
what might be more aggressively termed countermyth.

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Traditions in Throne of Blood

Throne of Blood presents a case study for intertextual exorcism by layering over and
filling in its (assumed) Shakespearean framework with an alternate tradition that emerges from
Japan’s theatrical history. One of the most noted moves away from the beta-text, and thus toward
the construction of a countermyth, is how Kurosawa’s film does not make use of the poetic
language that marks Shakespeare as Shakespeare. Stephen Prince laments, “[a]ll that beautiful
dialogue is gone. That surely makes it an odd adaptation” (“Shakespeare Transposed”).
Certainly, other Shakespearean adaptations similarly opt not to recycle Shakespeare’s words,
which makes it all the easier for the beta-text to be exorcised. Recall the declaration from Sir
Trevor Nunn, former Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National
Theatre – “no language, no Shakespeare” (qtd. in Kidnie 114) – that likely has a derogatory
intent, but here suggests part of a process. Though language is just a part. Prince continues that
“Kurosawa has transposed not only history but theatre as well. There is plenty of theatre in this
film, but not the sort the King’s Men would have staged” (“Shakespeare Transposed”). Indeed, if
we “lose” Macbeth, Throne of Blood seems to reappear as a filmic adaptation of a traditional
Japanese text with elements (for example, film techniques, set design, and makeup design) and
effects (for example, atmospheric sounds, stillness, and claustrophobia) that seem translated from
older stage conventions.
We must attend to the historical roots of the alternate tradition if we are to establish it as
undergirding Throne of Blood. We similarly attend to the historical roots of Shakespeare when
thinking of him as representative of a tradition, though his prevalence in culture and education
makes this an often unconscious process brought about by the significant connotations and

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assumptions Shakespeare carries. Even those who do not know deep facts about him or his works
may associate a perception – such as, old, important, high class, profound, or difficult – that
ensures his appearance in the nu-text represents the use of a tradition. Japanese readers who have
a better grip on their own history and cultural legacy may similarly undergo an unconscious
processing of the historical roots of Throne of Blood, a recognition of non-Shakespearean
traditions in the nu-text. However, I cannot speak to what I am incapable of experiencing. For
those of us not “in the know,” then, the task of this section is to uncover key aspects, some of
which are historical, others more creative, that come together to form the sense of a tradition that
stands as distinct from Shakespeare, even in moments when it intersects with him.
As an initial rough sketch for what follows, Throne of Blood demonstrates that
identifying parallel traditions makes for effective alternate traditions. This is part of why
Kurosawa’s film serves as a more readily deconstructable case study. For instance, the film takes
place during a period in Japanese history, approximately 1467-77, that corresponds with the
supposed historical context of Macbeth. Known as the Sengoku Jidai (the Age of the Country at
War), we find correspondences to the world we see in Shakespeare’s play: Prince describes the
Sengoku Jidai as a period of “internecine conflicts among rival clans, the absence of a central
political power,” and when, “[w]arlords violently seized domains, murdered trusted associates,
and were killed in turn by their vassals” (“Shakespeare Transposed”). Setting Throne of Blood
during such a time does not create a semblance of it as historically accurate – much of the film,
from the witch to the stylization, would not allow for that – but it does create a sense of the film
itself as emerging from and putting us in touch with a world and cultural practices from the past,
similar to how a contemporary production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth allows for a perception of
momentary time travel.

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In part, such an experience of a Shakespeare play stems from the fact that we are
watching not just a play set in an earlier time, but a theatrical tradition from an earlier time that
we now find to be highly stylized, highly formalized, a little bit challenging, and a little bit alien.
Shakespeare feels distant from us. Throne of Blood makes use of a similarly older Japanese
tradition that is, in fact, “contemporaneous with the age Kurosawa depicts” (Prince,
“Shakespeare Transposed”): the Noh. As a fourteenth century art form, the Noh is highly
stylized, highly formalized, a little bit challenging, and a little bit alien. The Noh provides an
impression of “distant from us” to the alternate tradition. Further, Donald Richie describes it as
“ritual drama,” “prescribed” and “conventionalized.” Much like how Shakespeare may appear to
us, Richie claims the “world of the Noh is both closed and artificial” (117). I will dive further
into the specific effects of the Noh in Throne of Blood later in this chapter, but here it is meant as
an example of how a parallel tradition can come into view as an alternative to the beta-text
during intertextual exorcism: it is one way that Kurosawa’s film, as some critics argue,
“successfully Japanizes Shakespeare” (Yoshimoto 252).
Continuing this rough sketch, it is important to note that Throne of Blood is not unique in
its use of a Western beta-text – or even Shakespeare, in particular – nor in its transformations of
such a text into a Japanese cultural context. To be clear, transformations need to be significant as
Japanese film tradition and the theatrical traditions from which it develops have essential
differences from Western traditions: J. L. Anderson explains that “concepts based on Aristotle of
the Poetics [are] almost useless because the historic European concepts of drama are inapplicable
to Noh, Kabuki, and other indigenous theatrical forms.” Anderson argues that the main difference
is that “Japanese traditional theater is fundamentally a visual expansion of storytelling” and he
delineates three distinctions of “traditionally based Japanese drama” that determine a move

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toward visual representation: “(1) actors do not autonomously enact events for spectators; (2)
dialogue spoken by actors is not the primary speech modality; and (3) basic plot structure is not
based on conflict, crisis, climax, resolution, and dramatic unity” (285). All three of these stand in
clear contradiction to the Shakespearean tradition: (1) at a performance of a Shakespeare play,
spectators view actors enacting events rather than having the events of the drama narrated to
them or figuratively suggested to them through dance and/or music; (2) Shakespeare’s dialogue,
his language if we include soliloquies, is both primary and his hallmark; (3) “conflict, crisis,
climax, resolution, and dramatic unity” masterfully structure Shakespeare’s works.
To surmount the apparent challenge of reshaping Shakespeare’s texts to work within a
Japanese framework, we might say that an approach to indigenization emerges that aims at
reconciling or ignoring these fundamental disparities by drawing on conventions of Japanese
theater, visual arts, and cinema. This kind of approach becomes another contributing factor to the
perception that the alternate tradition is overwriting the beta-text. As a simple example, when
Shakespeare’s texts first made their way to Japan in the nineteenth century, Tsubouchi Shōyō,
the translator, “recast” characters with Japanese historical figures in a way that maintained
conventions of Kabuki theater. Ana Laura Zambrano writes that Throne of Blood continues this
model by “render[ing] Shakespeare not in Western terms, but rather in the style of the Japanese
battle literature and art of the middle Ages” (262). Yoshimoto warns, however, that the
movement of Shakespeare into Japanese culture through the use of Japanese tradition is not
always intended to “Japanize” Shakespeare to the extent that he is erased. Historically, John
Collick explains, Shakespeare was a sign of European “cultural development,” and thus became
“emblematic for many Japanese who sought to create a parallel renaissance in their own
country.” As a disruption to the older model of Confucian learning, Shakespeare’s “emphasis on

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individualism and sentiment in the writings of contemporary Western critics made the plays
appear especially pertinent to those Japanese scholars trying to locate their own identities in a
rapidly changing world.” The result of such a perspective is a critical effort that insists
Shakespeare lingered as a “patriotic activity,” in effect empowering the ghost of the beta-text as
opposed to exorcising it. Collick concludes that, if we are to study Kurosawa’s Shakespearean
nu-text, we should consider that “Shakespeare in Japan is, and always has been, an essentially
Japanese tradition” (161)
29
. Yet, rather than disqualifying the exploration into intertextual
exorcism through Throne of Blood, we can take Collick’s conclusion as a challenge to seek out
and interpret exactly those spaces where we might find dissidence and lose Shakespeare to
alternate Japanese traditions.
Echoing my earlier observation, but with an emphasis on intermediation, Guy Crucianelli
notes that “[a]t times Throne of Blood feels like it could be performed identically on stage, yet
despite its many theatrical aspects, Kurosawa remains extremely cinema-conscious.” Though I
want to address the Noh elements of Kurosawa’s film in greater detail, before pointing out the
specifics of one genre, it is important to establish the exchange, more broadly, of Japanese

29
Yoshimoto responds: “What exactly does it mean to say that Shakespeare was firmly
established as a Japanese tradition? Does it mean that Japanese so thoroughly digested
Shakespeare’s work that they were able to use this alien form to express the specific problems of
Japanese modernity? Or does it suggest that the use of the conventions of traditional Japanese
theatres successfully Japanized Shakespeare? Second, the assertion that Shakespeare was read by
Japanese ‘with little interference from colonial ideology’ is highly questionable. One of the
earliest examples of Japanese translations and adaptations of Shakespeare’s work is Sakuradoki
zeni no yononaka (1885), based on The Merchant of Venice. In the published version of the play,
the play proper is preceded by a discussion of Western and Japanese literature among the three
fictional characters, each of whom represents a different ideological position. One of them,
Wada, promotes and celebrates the Westernization of Japan; Nakamura opposes Westernization;
and Toriyama pursues a hybrid combination of West and Japan. In their fictional conversation,
Japan’s inferior position vis-à-vis Western imperial powers is clearly registered (e.g., Wada
refers to Japan as a ‘half-civilized’ country), and three characters represent different reactions to
Japan’s geopolitical position in the age of imperialism and colonialism.” (256–57)

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theatrical into Japanese cinematic traditions. It is also crucial here to pause to provide a
disclaimer of sorts regarding the seminal film theorist Noël Burch’s To the Distant Observer:
Form and Meaning in Japanese Cinema, which I draw on several times in the following
paragraphs. Ordinarily, this kind of an explanation would be better suited to a footnote, however
the concerns that have been raised about his research and arguments are directly relevant to
concerns I raise in this chapter. Since its publication, Burch’s work has been reconsidered as
putting forward a construction of Japanese cinema that “has meaning only to the extent that it
functions as a model of a new cinema that critiques the bourgeois ideological assumptions of the
dominant Western cinema” (Yoshimoto 20). The reevaluation of the work and the author as
Orientalist and Marxist has unfortunately led many, ranging from Yoshimoto to Dana Polan (64–
66) to Wikipedia, to doubt the historical veracity of some of his assertions as he seems to shape
facts to fit his political agenda. Burch’s work, in a manner of speaking, may be haunted by its
particular ghosts. It may be better to describe some of his arguments as observations and
interpretations rather than history or, certainly, truth. My hope is that similar unconscious biases
do not manifest in my own work, and indeed, in the section after this, I address this very concern.
I do not wish to reclaim Burch here; however, I have carefully curated concepts from his work
that are relevant to mine and that seem to be on less shaky ground relative to other claims critics
have pointed to as problematic. I will address any statements I quote that invite controversy. The
following brief framing is meant to provide a context, so when we recognize the Noh in Throne
of Blood, we experience not just elements of Japanese theatrical tradition, but a tradition of such
elements becoming integrated into film.
From the start of the Japanese film industry, Burch explains, filmmakers “drew their
substance from the kabuki repertoire” (38). Anderson concurs that in the 1900s and 1910s,

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“Japanese story films were not autonomous. They were created and viewed as imitations of live
theater with extensive dialogue and narrated passages” (270). In other words, these early films
were transmediated nu-texts, explicitly repeating their beta-texts and, as “not autonomous,” they
represent more a continuation of a tradition than a break. As further evidence, Japanese theatrical
tradition also manifested in the formal design of early films, such as the “visual traits of kabuki”
(Burch 38) that shaped set and costume design. While the borrowing of theatrical stories and
formal techniques in early films parallels the development of cinema in the West, use of
Japanese theatrical traditions begins to emerge as a key point of divergence, furthering the
perception of an alternate tradition at work within certain nu-texts such as Throne of Blood.
Burch points to some specific borrowings, including traditional make-up. The use of “make-up
in Western film,” Burch claims, is “designed to heighten the expressiveness of the face” (39). In
addition, make-up in the West helps define individual characters through visual difference.
Burch argues that in kabuki and its migration into Japanese film, make-up was intended to have
the opposite effect: “it reduces the face’s expressiveness as well as its singularity” (39). Early
Japanese film also borrows kabuki’s oyama, a male actor playing a female role (39). While the
theatrical tradition of Shakespeare’s time also required male actors to play female characters,
when Western cinema took Shakespearean plays as its creative material, the early modern
practice did not return. In D.W. Griffith’s 1908 silent adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, for
instance, Florence Lawrence – noteworthy as the first movie star – played Katherina.
The structuring of the mise-en-scène Burch observes in Japanese films, what he refers to
as a “flatness,” should be flagged as a perception more than fact, however it marks the adherence
to a particular formalist mode that contrasts with the West’s evolution of more realist practices.
These practices I will address through my own perceptions of Western films of the same period

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to offer contrast with Burch. He writes that the “persistence of primitive flatness in so many
Japanese films during the 1920s is to some extent ‘accidental’” (42). “Primitive” is an
unfortunate word choice; we cannot ignore how loaded such a word is, but to give him the
benefit of the doubt, he may be referring to the early days of a developing cinematic technique
and language rather than making a judgement or a concealed racist remark. Burch offers as an
example that, even in the 1910s, while Griffith was developing a structure of cuts and edits,
Japanese filmmakers still let the camera run and shot from a front-on angle, constructing the
audience’s perspective to be that of a “spectator at a stage-play” (37). His point regarding
flatness is that cinematic technology and language had developed by the 1920s toward allowing
for deeper space and greater depth of field with sets and framing to match. “Flatness” would
hardly be the first word that comes to mind with films like 1923’s Safety Last, in which Harold
Lloyd iconically hangs from the giant clock of a New York City skyscraper. The sense of danger
is created with camera work and a set design that contribute to the feeling that Lloyd dangles
with streets both far below and going far into the distance. Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship
Potemkin from 1925 makes great use of depth of field, deep space, and camera angle during its
iconic massacre on the Odessa Steps in which Cossack soldiers standing at the top shoot down
on the crowd of civilians. Even in Western formalist experiments like The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari, the 1920 German Expressionist horror film, the memorably theatrical look of the film
would appear flat if it were not for the brash set design. It strives for intense perspective and
depth through the interplay of black and white as well as sharp angles that seem to tilt into the
background and extend out toward the audience: a two-dimensional painting seemingly rendered
through cinema into three dimensions. Yet, the Japanese films of the time that Burch examines
do not demonstrate the use of these cinematographic possibilities or design choices. He implies

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that potentially this may be because of technologies not reaching Japanese filmmakers, hence the
“primitive flatness” can be deemed “accidental.” Burch suggests, on the other hand, that
“flatness” may also be “overdetermined by the general ‘surface orientation’ of the arts of Japan,
especially by her architecture.” Such an overdetermination means that the persistence of flatness
may be “no accident at all” (Burch 42): more a vestigial effect maintained from a theatrical
tradition than evidence of a lack of technology, of learned skill, or of a developing sophistication
of film language.
Burch notes that “one might observe that the flatness derived from the kabuki and doll-
theatre stages [. . .] is a trait which lasted late into the twenties, and left an indelible mark on the
films of some of the masters of the next decade” (41). My emphasis above on the iconicity of the
Western films used as examples is meant to demonstrate how central depth, as opposed to
flatness, seems to be to a Western cinematic tradition. To be clear, Burch’s observation of
flatness is by no means a fact of Japanese films, but a perceived tendency. Minoru Murata’s
Souls on the Road, from 1921, for instance makes great use of depth to give a sense of the titular
road as long and arduous. However, the film is also considered to be quite modern and a “direct
imitation of Hollywood” (Wada-Marciano 82), so its use of depth may be better considered a
reflection of Western film technique than a disproving example that negates the sensed presence
of a Japanese theatrical tradition in other Japanese films. As he moves forward through another
decade of filmmaking, Burch still observes an influence from traditional theater, prompting his
claim that the “flattening of the image in the work of, say, Ozu after 1933, may legitimately be
regarded as a deliberate ‘throw-back’” (Burch 42). The “throw-back,” importantly, is not just to
older film styles, but to the traditions that pre-date cinema.

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Transitioning to Throne of Blood, when we observe flatness in the 1957 film we are
seeing a similar deliberate throwback. To be sure, Kurosawa is capable of extremely
sophisticated camera work and played with depth in many of his films. In Red Beard, for
instance, a traumatized patient – a young woman rescued from a brothel – surprises the
protagonist – an intern working at a country medical clinic – in his room. David Bordwell and
Kristin Thomas use the scene as their literal textbook example of how lenses shape space and
describe how “a long-focal-length lens filming from behind [the intern] initially makes [the
young woman] seem to be quite close to him. But a cut to a perpendicular angle shows that the
patient and the intern are actually several feet apart, and that he is not yet in danger” (218). The
sudden shift in perceived distance brought on by focal length, camera angle, and editing is
suspenseful and masterful. For Throne of Blood, however, Kurosawa actually pursues a “flat
look,” inspired by two-dimensional Japanese warrior art from the seventeenth to nineteenth
centuries. Donald Richie explains that, once Kurosawa knew he was going forward with making
the film, he “[began] a study of traditional Japanese musha-e – those early picture scrolls of
battle scenes. At the same time he asked Kohei Esaki – famous for continuing this genre – to be
the art consultant” (122). Kurosawa’s use of early picture scrolls as inspiration and the basis for
the art design of Throne of Blood would seem to support Burch’s assertion regarding the
continuing presence of flatness in Japanese cinema: “This resistance to a key element of Western
illusionism suggests something other than a passive traditionalism; rather, it corresponds to an
essential, active component of the Japanese attitude towards representation” (43). As an active
component, the presence of “traditionalism” may be said to have been summoned into the nu-
text in a similar fashion to the ghost of the beta-text. Further, the active nature of this alternate,
lingering tradition competes with the ghost as a countermyth develops. Burch has a sense of a

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countermyth as he explains that it is not that “Japanese directors paid no attention to these
innovations from abroad and in consequence did not know how to use them” (37) as “the
Western codes had impinged upon Japanese perception.” Rather, “the Japanese were simply not
interested in them as a system” (38). The insinuation is that Japanese filmmakers embrace an
alternate system, shaped by Japanese cultural traditions and marked by perceived “throwbacks” –
a countermyth of origins – instead of borrowing from Western creative developments and/or
Western beta-texts.
The presence of elements and effects of the Noh needs to be addressed as the most visible
and remarked on Japanese tradition at work in Throne of Blood. Marvin Carlson argues, “the
Japanese Noh drama is doubly haunted, since the preexisting story is known not only to the
audience but also the central figure of the play, who now looks back upon it as a spirit” (20).
Though Carlson does not use the concept of the beta-text ghost in his work, nor the developed
metaphor of intertextual haunting, his claim regarding the Noh echoes the idea of the audience
summoning the ghost through knowledge of the preexisting story. His additional layer of “the
central figure of the play” sharing in the audience’s knowledge suggests the Noh drama presents
as “doubly haunted” – somehow beta-text and nu-text in one, within my understanding of
haunting – which suggests a significant complication to the nu-text that would draw on the Noh
as an alternate tradition. In a way, the idea of a double haunting recalls the mousetrap scene of
Hamlet: a play that repeats the play it is in and a character, Hamlet in this case, who seems to
have preexisting knowledge of the play he is in. The difference is that in Noh drama, the ghost
looks back: the play that unfolds for the audience is a memory for them and for the ghost. In
Hamlet, the mousetrap play repeats a memory, but can suggest nothing of what will become of
Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play. He must await his fate as he awaits Claudius’s reaction to the trap,

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as we also must await since Hamlet is not structured around our knowledge of Hamlet. In Throne
of Blood, then, we find a tradition stemming from the Noh that suggests we are expected to enter
knowing the beta-text and suggests that a ghost, appropriately an analogue to Macbeth’s
prophetic witches, will presage and confirm for us what will happen. In this way, the alternate
tradition drives our attention to the beta-text, not to create the haunting effect of inevitability, but
to double, to overdetermine, inevitability.
For the purposes of this chapter’s argument regarding an alternate tradition that threatens
to overtake the beta-text, the Noh initially challenges Shakespeare as not just a stylistic choice; it
also shapes how the beta-text is transformed in the nu-text to the extent that it defines and limits
Macbeth’s intertextual haunting of Throne of Blood. Kurosawa argues that in the Noh, “style and
story are one. In this film the problem was how to adapt the story to Japanese thinking. The story
is understandable enough but the Japanese tend to think differently about such things as witches
and ghosts” (qtd. in Richie 117). By uniting style and story, Kurosawa introduces a dilemma for
us to unpack: if the style – or better, styling, as a reminder of process – is recognized as Japanese,
is the story rendered Japanese? The concept of intertextual exorcism, the act of putting the ghost
of the beta-text under erasure and the recognition of an alternate tradition, similarly blurs the
distinction between the processes of content and form. A successful countermyth must consist of
both processes, at least as modeled in Throne of Blood. The Noh itself even asks for us to locate
the beta-text as, Carlson writes, it “is surely the most intensely haunted of any of the world’s
classic drama forms, since its central figure is often literally a ghost, who in the course of the
play remembers and to some extent relives his story” (20). The ghost at the center who
“remembers” and “relives his story” as the action of the play represents a pivot point between

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beta- and nu-text, perhaps a lingering marker of the undistinguishable seam between past and
present.
Kurosawa makes a point of highlighting his attraction to the Noh: “Essentially [. . .] I am
very Japanese. I like Japanese ceramics, Japanese painting – but I like the Noh best of all. It’s
funny though. If you really like something like this, you don’t often use it in your films.” His last
point is especially interesting given the prevalence of the Noh in Throne of Blood and suggests
that we consider carefully his apparently counterintuitive choice to integrate it. Kurosawa offers
that he particularly favors the Noh because of its strong to ties to Japan’s cultural legacy,
“because it is the real heart, the core of all Japanese drama. Its degree of compression is extreme,
and it is full of symbols, full of subtlety. It is as though the actors and the audience are engaged
in a kind of contest and as though this contest involves the entire Japanese cultural heritage”
(qtd. in Richie 117). In part, the “contest” about Japanese cultural heritage to which Kurosawa
refers may be one of traditional, and thus high, art (the Noh) versus contemporary, and thus low,
art (films). Yoshimoto offers, “Noh has been used as a device of legitimating popular culture as a
type of serious art in the modern cultural history of Japan. Throne of Blood can be seen as
Kurosawa’s conscious attempt to create ‘art cinema’ within the Japanese studio system” (267).
The same argument is often used when discussing Shakespearean nu-texts, an echo of the
cultural capital-focused consumption metaphor explored in my project’s first chapter.
The ghost as analogue gestures toward the indigenization process of Throne of Blood
that, to various extents, makes use of Shakespeare’s characters and plot and little else. In other
words, the basics of the story are taken and constitute the readily perceived aspects of the beta-
text. The overdetermination of the beta-text means that the nu-text is self-aware of its trajectory
and functions with the assumption that audience is aware of its trajectory, pushing attention to

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those aspects of the beta-text that are potentially incompatible with Japanese culture and must be
reconciled through the Noh. In a simpler sense, we stop reading Throne of Blood for Macbeth
and instead read for what makes the film a uniquely Japanese Macbeth, for the styling. To a
certain extent, this perspective represents that of a firmly Western reader, and a potentially
Orientalist reading that I will return to later. I can only imagine the experience for a Japanese
reader: the Shakespearean beta-text would still be recognized as would aspects of Japanese
cultural heritage, which also results, likely, in a reading of a Japanese Macbeth. Recall
Kurosawa’s assessment: “In the Noh, style and story are one. In this film the problem was how to
adapt the story to Japanese thinking.” According to the film’s script supervisor, Nogami Teruyo,
Kurosawa, in fact, “never consulted [Macbeth] while shaping his adaptation to the conventions
of Noh drama”; the director preferred the story develop organically within the Japanese tradition
(Hoaglund). If “style and story are one,” adapting the story of Macbeth involves moving it
toward a Japanese style, bridging content to form. For instance, Richie, like Kurosawa, notes that
the “idea of a trio of malevolent witches is far from the Japanese imagination.” Such characters
find their equivalent in the “Japanese imagination” through the Noh tradition as “priests,
embodiments of a nature which is neither good nor evil. They are diviners and fortune tellers
who attempt to pierce the future but the gratuitous evil of Shakespeare’s witches is impossible”
(117). Richie demonstrates an indigenization process via an alternate tradition, but he also points
to the inconsistencies and instabilities encountered. There are no one-to-one equivalencies in
Throne of Blood, meaning Shakespeare’s voice comes through neither loud nor clear but in fits
and starts.
The countermyth of Kurosawa’s film finds its voice through such inconsistencies and
instabilities, especially those identified as originating completely from Noh aesthetics, unable to

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be harmonized with the Shakespearean beta-text. As these elements are recognized and
catalogued, we begin to see how style becomes one with story in the formation of a countermyth.
An exhaustive list of appearances or perceptions of the Noh in Kurosawa’s film would be
valuable, but focusing on some of the most striking examples, in this project, is more suggestive
and appropriate to its goals. Derived from the Noh, the chorus that bookends the film Richie
finds “understandable enough in a film version of [a Noh play], but rather surprising in Macbeth”
(117). At the beginning, the chorus sings of the story to come, looking back on the actions we are
about to watch:

Look upon the ruins
Of the castle of delusion
Haunted only now
By the spirits of those who perished
A scene of carnage
Born of consuming desire
Never changing
Now and throughout eternity.
30

30
This translation comes from Linda Hoaglund – one of two translators of Kurosawa’s film the
Criterion Collection hired for an attempt at a definitive release. Donald Richie provides the other
translation. His translation’s differences from Hoaglund’s are not significant for this project as it
does not seek to close read dialogue nor pursue a translation study. What variations do exist
reflect attempts by both translators to capture in English the poetic rhythms and language of the
Noh-style chant. As an example of the negligible discrepancies, his take on the chorus chant is
relatively similar to Hoaglund’s:

Behold, within this place
Now desolated, stood
Once a mighty fortress

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As the camera sweeps over the site, we only see empty haunting space; what the chorus
describes is long in the past. The same lines are repeated at the end of the film while the camera
holds on the castle as it disappears into the fog, transforming present into past, and returning us
to the film’s beginning. By previewing and then reviewing the story – acts that are disinterested
in the reader’s familiarity with the beta-text – the chorus frames the film as it indicates the
cycling of violence, of stories, and of traditions. Even without the beta-text, then, the cycle of
inevitability haunts the film as the driving force of its countermyth. Aside from an interpretation
of its words and positioning, the chorus further contributes to the countermyth as a component of
an alternate tradition; it hearkens back simply as a presence of an older convention within
Throne of Blood.
As an opening device, the chorus prompts us for the story and for experiences
“understandable enough in a film version of [a Noh play], but rather surprising in Macbeth.”
Prince also notes the dissonance between the alternate tradition and the beta-text: “Noh
performing style, with its blend of dance, song, poetry, and mime, is antithetical to the realism
and naturalism that invests acting in the West. It counters the meaning of Shakespeare’s famous
lines in Act 3, Scene 2 of Hamlet about the actor holding the mirror up to nature” (“Shakespeare
Transposed”). While there is a degree of paralleling between Shakespeare’s characters and
Kurosawa’s – Macbeth becomes Washizu, Lady Macbeth becomes Asaji, and so on – the
influence of the Noh results in a sense that something more than transformation or indigenization

Lived a proud warrior
Murdered by ambition
His spirit walking still
Vain pride, then as now, will,
Lead ambition to the kill

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has taken place. The beta-text does not seem to have undergone an adaptive process nor has been
rejected; it has been lost, and the characters, and the performances through which we encounter
them, recover the Noh, not Macbeth.
The “realism and naturalism that invests acting in the West” Prince describes result from
an investment in character psychology. As we hear in parodies of actors, the determining
question for performance is “What’s my motivation?” We seldom associate the question with a
distinctly Western attitude toward what creates a performance and, in the moment, think about
alternate approaches from other cultures or even moments in history. The manifestation of a
multi-dimensional psychology in his characters has often been touted as the mark of
Shakespeare’s genius. So much so that, as explored in this project’s first chapter, characters like
Hamlet become recognized as people, sharing secret feelings and plans with us in soliloquies and
preparing to leap off the page or stage and into our world. Macbeth in particular has moments of
psychological revelation that constitute the most well-known moments of the play that have
penetrated culture and our memories from the first time we were taught the play: for instance, “Is
this a dagger which I see before me? [. . .] A dagger of the mind” (2.1.33, 38) or “Out, damned
spot” (5.1.30).
The Noh functions differently from how in the West, Kurosawa finds, “[d]rama [. . .]
takes its character from the psychology of men or circumstances.” In the Noh, performance is
dictated by types and those type are embodied in recognizable masks the actors wear. Kurosawa
explains that “the Noh has the mask, and while staring at it, the actor becomes the man whom the
mask represents. The performance also has a defined style, and in devoting himself to it
faithfully, the actor becomes possessed” (qtd. in The Warrior’s Camera 145). While we
colloquially speak of performance as the actor becoming the character, Kurosawa’s claim that

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the mask with its set character possesses the actor interestingly allows the alternate tradition
within the nu-text, rather than the material of the beta-text, to lay claim to performance. Instead
of asking the actors to read Macbeth or even the film’s script to develop their characters,
Kurosawa shaped performance by showing each actor “a photograph of the mask of the Noh
which came closest to the respective role” and, he says, “I told him that the mask was his own
part” (qtd. in Prince, The Warrior’s Camera 145–46). He provides an example: “To Isuzu
Yamada who acted the role of Asaji I showed the mask named Shakumi. This was the mask of a
beauty no longer young, and represented the image of a woman about to go mad” (qtd. in Prince,
The Warrior’s Camera 146). While his last phrase speaks to a question of sanity, which implies
psychology, in the Noh the idea is “to create an atmosphere pervaded by these emotions instead
of localizing them as the expressions of specific characters” (Prince, The Warrior’s Camera
145). From a perspective rooted in Western theatrical conventions, it might seem like the use of
masks limits or even empties out the complexities of performance. But in the Noh, complexity
emerges as emotions create a stimulating field of tones, an ambiance.
Throne of Blood further draws on the physicality of Noh performance, which similarly
counters the realism and naturalism of Western acting. To a viewer unfamiliar with Japanese
theater, the movement of actors in Kurosawa’s film is disorienting in its deliberateness, even
when the performers are still. To be clear, what we see is not alien in its foreignness, but in its
conspicuousness as performance. Richie articulates how, in the Noh, the “way the actor moves,
the way he uses his body, is prescribed, conventionalized” (117). When Washizu returns to his
wife, Asaji, he shares with her the prophecy from the witch/priest. While he paces, she seems
frozen, eyes blankly staring into nothingness. Her only movement is her lips when she speaks.
Throughout the film, her movement or lack thereof feels eerily unnatural. When she walks, her

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body and head stay incredibly still and her feet, Richie illustrates, move “heel to toe, as does the
Noh actor,” making her appear to glide. Richie describes her as “the most limited, the most
confined, the most driven, the most evil” (117).
31
If an actress portraying Lady Macbeth made the
acting choice to stay calm, still, monotone, and measured, we might read her as calculating, but
never “confined.” Shakespeare’s words would barely allow such a performance. In Act 1, Scene
7, for instance, we find an aggressive, goading woman: “But screw your courage to the sticking-
place” (1.7.60), she pressures. Lady Macbeth’s handwashing scene may be the most
psychologically intense moment of Shakespeare’s play, yet in Throne of Blood, Richie loses the
original and perceives its analogue as “pure Noh drama” (117). Both women are “driven,” but
Asaji appears as more a product of extracinematic codes than an ambitious psyche. If anything,
her stillness, her stiffness, and her confinement render her more an object, or something else
definitive brought on by her Noh mask make-up: she does not “look” to be motivated by
ambition, she may be ambition.
The prescribed qualities of the Noh, the sense of ritual drama, felt through performances
like Asaji’s, impact the cinematic technique on display in Throne of Blood. Returning briefly to
Burch, his observation – “the general lack of concern with visual depth in the arts of the East and
particularly those of Japan [. . .] were preserved in cinema long after the ‘laws’ of depth-
representation by the camera were established in the West” (42) – we might attribute in
Kurosawa’s film to the influence of the Noh. The restrained camerawork in certain scenes,

31
Both Richie and Prince choose to view Lady Asaji as “evil,” reflecting one interpretation of the
character that parallels how some critics have chosen to describe Lady Macbeth. Reinforced by
the actress’s movement, makeup, and voice, Asaji seems to have a singular focus and creates a
feeling of intensity unsettlingly paired with extreme constraint. The effect Kurosawa creates with
regard to Asaji – whether we see it as “confined,” “driven,” or “distilled” – does not necessarily
insinuate “evil.”

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sharply juxtaposed with the frenetic action of others, creates rigid moments where it seems we
are at a distance, watching an unfolding stage play, rather than experiencing the dynamism of a
master filmmaker. Richie notes how “[t]here are [. . .] almost no close-ups. Kurosawa has said
that this was because of the Noh influence, where, naturally, everything is seen full” (Richie
120–21). That is, an audience watching a theatrical performance does not experience close-ups,
zoom ins, or zoom outs; generally speaking, the theater presents a sustained full, wide-angle
view. Kurosawa recalls, “I tried to do everything using full-shots. Japanese almost never make
films this way and I remember I confused my staff thoroughly with my instructions. They were
so used to moving up for moments of emotion and I kept telling them to move back” (qtd. in
Richie 121). His indication of typical film technique, “moving up for moments of emotion,” and
his resistance to it, even to the surprise of his crew, correspond to Noh performances that restrain
emotion. Hutcheon and O’Flynn recognize that “[t]he power of the close-up” is its ability to
“create psychological intimacy” (58). The film’s use of full-shots, then, holds off “psychological
intimacy,” and so the choice does more than replicate the sense of a dramatic performance, it
contributes to the effects produced by the alternate tradition of the Noh. When Washizu finally
dies at the end of the film, the evil vanquished, rather than giving us the gratification of a close-
up that would confirm his death and the restoration of order, the camera stays back. We see his
body fall as mist surrounds it, hundreds of men from the opposing army watching, with us, from
a distance. Even in his final steps, Washizu is framed from the knees up, his face frozen in a
horrifying grimace like a Noh mask. We are denied the satisfaction of seeing the pain or regret
we could take as retribution or justice, which could have been conveyed if not through
performance, then a tight shot of his wide eyes, wrenched lips, or even wounds. As with Asaji,
the confinement to a singular mode, here brought on by camera technique, turns Washizu’s death

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into a symbol or sign, possibly of the film coming around toward full circle, rather than the end
of an individual’s life.
To make clear that Burch’s observations do not universally apply to all Japanese film, it
is important to note that other critics like Yoshimoto insist that “Kurosawa’s use of Noh can be
regarded as an act of experiment.” The Noh, as an alternate tradition, is put in conversation with
the tradition represented by the beta-text Macbeth; the potential for intellectual exorcism I find in
the film is due to a complex interaction between the two. In addition to the clash of traditions I
see, Yoshimoto claims there is “also a contestation of the dominant conventions of jidaigeki,
which is [. . .] much influenced by Kabuki” (267). Jidaigeki is the genre of Japanese cinema
within which Throne of Blood falls, meaning a period film that typically takes place during the
Edo period (approximately 1603 to 1868). Yoshimoto’s point is that most jidaigeki films make
use of theatrical conventions from kabuki theater, meaning that, by turning to the Noh, Throne of
Blood does not follow the standard model of Japanese film traditions that develop from theatrical
traditions. Kurosawa’s nu-text goes further back to an even earlier theatrical style to find its
alternate tradition. An equivalent might be if a Western film adaptation of Macbeth had its actors
perform using early modern acting conventions, a vision that would indeed seem an artificial
throwback. Kurosawa, however, is not a static director and his film is absolutely not a mere
recording of a stage play. Rather, Throne of Blood is at times frenetic, at times studied; it
processes, then loses Macbeth as it adapts the Noh to cinematic expression.

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Warning Signs

I suggest earlier in this chapter that, as the process of intertextual exorcism is explored,
we must take care with how we think through the alternate tradition in non-Western films like
Throne of Blood and take care how we recognize or define a countermyth. The movement of a
Western beta-text into a non-Western nu-text, whether we call it something as simple as
translation or more sensitively as indigenization, does not signify exorcism. To suggest otherwise
wanders into the territory of conflating intertextual processes with identifying a text as “other.”
Charles Marowitz argues that “[t[he farther the ‘other’ setting in Shakespeare’s dramas is from
Elizabethan England, the less likely it is that the image will match the text. It stops being an
illustration and becomes its essence and sign” (6). We can note this perspective as a warning: in
the context of intertextual exorcism, it is important to avoid reducing or essentializing the nu-text
to a sign of otherness, the non-Western (worse, the “Oriental"), the alien, or the exotic. My goal
in this chapter is to move away from the argument that Throne of Blood “Japanizes” Macbeth via
the Noh and instead assert that the use of Noh conventions produces effects and meanings that
speak to a countermyth, which may in turn supersede the beta-text. To a large extent, the work of
Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto – that I find convincingly challenges some of my own initial readings of
the film’s relationship to its beta-text and to alternate traditions – drives this shift in perspective:
he astutely cautions, “what appears to be the most specifically Japanese features of the film does
not guarantee its Japaneseness” (266). Yoshimoto reminds us that historically Japanese
indigenization efforts that took on Western texts like Shakespeare were not necessarily intended
to make the works more accessible to a Japanese audience. Often, the move toward a
“Japaneseness [. . .] was in the end constructed in the nineteenth century by the dynamic of the

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international art market and the desires of Western consumers” (265). In other words, it may be
that what we see as the effects of indigenization were purposefully created for orientalist
Western readers; what we take as Japanese cultural heritage may be a construction that responds
to our expectations for a tradition prefigured as alternate.
In response, it is important to acknowledge that many techniques and effects in Throne of
Blood cannot be explained through throwbacks to Japanese theatrical traditions nor through the
beta-text. For instance, the highly developed visual structure of the film, often poetic and able to
“say” as much as words, cannot be explained by traditional arts like the musha-e battle scrolls
alone. Stephen Prince relates that “Kurosawa trained as a painter [. . .] This, perhaps, is one of
the reasons for Kurosawa’s fondness for the silent cinema: its exclusive reliance on imagery”
(“Shakespeare Transposed” 32). Prince’s connection between Kurosawa’s education and his
penchant for silent films suggests a personal history to which we can attribute the extraordinary
visual styling of Throne of Blood. While the prophetic witch/priest resembles the Noh “mountain
crone” Yamamba, the character’s traditional mask in particular (Kurosawa qtd. in Prince, The
Warrior’s Camera 146), and her “reed hut closely resembles a Noh property” (Richie 117), the
ghost of Miki (the Banquo analogue) “is not seen in the Noh style. Rather he is suddenly there –
in the manner of film ghosts” (118). That is, the nu-text owes the style of the ghost to a cinematic
rather than a theatrical tradition; it takes advantage of the editing and framing possibilities of
cinema impossible in the Noh. Even aspects that seem to be derived from the Noh or other
Japanese traditions may be interrogated. Crucianelli, like many other critics, points to how the
“Noh elements extend throughout the mise-en-scene, which is graphic as much as visual; the
décor, the sets, the blocking of actors, all have a spare symmetry and asymmetry, with clean lines
and pure visual patterns and rhythms.” In addition, he notes that “rooms are walled with screens

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printed with fluid abstract designs, integrating the figures into the overall compositions like
classical Japanese prints.” Yoshimoto cautions that what might be taken as the influences of
tradition and culture may in fact be a “hodgepodge of alleged historical allusions” (253) intended
to give “a seal of approval to the film’s authentic Japaneseness even though it is an adaptation of
a Western play” (254). I do not think Yoshimoto wants to suggest that what Crucianelli, Prince,
Richie, or other critics and viewers may perceive in Throne of Blood is somehow wrong, or even
racist. He is pointing to how elements are often catalogued and attributed, but not interpreted.
My understanding of the alternate tradition does not require specific attribution, though I
have tried to delve into some details of certain indigenous art forms like the Noh to argue for the
concept of an alternate tradition as part of a theory. In practice, the value of the alternate tradition
is to establish that the beta-text can be lost, and the nu-text can still be felt to have determining
antecedents that provoke effects and meanings. Rather than an accurate tracing of references, all
that is necessary is to perceive those effects and attend to those meanings as produced by
convention or ritual in general. None of this has relevance, though, unless that alternative
produces a countermyth, brought about by reading and interpreting. Yoshimoto worries that
“[w]hether it is a classical theatre, historical anecdote, pictorial motif, or religious belief, the
search for the film’s sources in Japanese traditions as an explanation for formal or thematic
aspects of the film often ends up merely asserting the film’s alleged Japaneseness” (262).
“Japaneseness” is neither a legitimate experience nor a countermyth of meanings that rival those
of Macbeth. In Throne of Blood, for instance, much is made of the painterly compositions.
Richie describes how, “[t]he castle set, with its black walls constructed on the black volcanic soil
of Mt. Fuji, contrasts sharply with the mists and fog that surround it” (123). Prince adds that
“[t]he striking emptiness of the spaces in the film – the skies, the dense, roiling fog that obscures

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mountains and plains – is a cinematic rendition of sumi-e composition” (“Shakespeare
Transposed”). Prince compliments Richie’s observation with an attributing image of traditional
Japanese painting, but together they provide a verbal description of a cinematic vision via a
painting style, not a reading. In fact, they see the effect set designer Yoshiro Muraki set out to
create:

We [Muraki and Kurosawa] studied old castle layouts, the really old ones, not
those white castles we still have around. And we decided to use black and
armored walls since they would go well with the suiboku-ga [sumi-e] (ink-
painting) effect we planned with lots of mist and fog. That also is the reason we
decided that the locations should be high on Mount Fuji, because of the fog and
the black volcanic soil. (qtd. in Richie 122–23)

We have effects and we have historical facts to explain where those effects originated: evidence
in support of a perceived alternative tradition. It looks like a painting because it is meant to look
like a painting. What does it do for or to us? Yoshimoto rightly suggests that “[w]oodblock
prints, traditional music, or classical theatres do not have any fixed meanings when they are
appropriated or quoted in films. Their significance and function can be determined only by
examining how they are specifically used in a particular film” (266). How does the impression of
sumi-e, or the Noh for that matter, contribute to the meanings the film makes and the meanings
we make reading Throne of Blood?
Not to suggest otherwise, critics like Richie and Prince do significant interpretative work
in their studies of Kurosawa. Prince, for instance, speaks to the themes of Throne of Blood

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manifested through “metaphors Kurosawa develops”: “the labyrinthine forest in which Washizu
becomes lost, the fog through which the warriors aimlessly ride, the horse that circles behind
Washizu as Asaji plots the death of the lord – embody as patterns of movement these ideas of
temporal circularity and the fatedness of violence and evil” (The Warrior’s Camera 144). To
differentiate my interpretative goals, rather than themes of Kurosawa’s film, I am seeking how
the film relates to its own intertextuality and intertextual exorcism through a reading for effects
in the nu-text that reflect an absence of the beta-text. To that end, I want to bridge intertextual
exorcism with the significances brought about by the shift from dramatic text to film. To an
extent, attending to the effects brought on by the change in media type requires a comparison
through medium specificity, but I will hold off from approaching such a study from the
perspective of a compare/contrast breakdown. Rather, given the emphasis on words – the poetry,
rhythms, meditation, and wit of verbal and written language – as the marker of Shakespeare’s
works as distinctly Shakespearean, I want to focus on the images and sounds produced in Throne
of Blood as emerging from complex intermediations.
Intertextual exorcism highlights the challenge of describing Shakespearean
intermediations, revealing the extent to which we are haunted by his words; analyses tend toward
how his language is transformed into cinematic substitutes rather than reading images and
sounds as either products of an alternate tradition, of an alternate semiotic system, or of an
alternative that seems completely untraceable. Daniel Fischlin frames an understanding of
intermediality through “the notion of traveling – or, in some instances, dissonantly colliding –
across mediatized boundaries.” The possibility for “[dissonant] colliding” makes intermediality a
more complex appreciation of an unstable process relative to terms like “translation” or
“adaptation.” All these terms are variable in their meanings and usages, however intermediality

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uniquely gestures toward a displacement of the beta-text from the center of the process. It
actively avoids implying the movement of a text as an inert, cohesive, or independent object
from one medium to another and focuses “the rearticulations that are produced by processes in
which one medium supplants or is intermixed with another” as well as how “the social, political,
and historical contexts out of which intermedial forms arise, the specific sites in which processes
of adaptation occur, also contribute to the choices that produce intermedial effects” (Fischlin et
al. 156). The attention given to processes, effects, and social, political, and historical contexts
matches well with the arguments I put forward regarding haunting, possession, and exorcism.
The inclusion of “rearticulation” in Fischlin’s definition implies an aspect of repetition. If
Throne of Blood is conceived of as an intermediating nu-text, this may be seen as compromising
its use as a case study that loses the haunting beta-text. Therefore, we need to look at the film as
an intermediating and exorcising nu-text, the combination intended as a construct that stresses a
concept Yoshimoto – following arguments by film theorist André Bazin – also articulates: “the
cross-media translation or adaptation is always a transformative process, in which there is no
place for the fetishistic attempt to reproduce the original’s formal features (e.g., Shakespeare’s
text)” (286). When intermediation falls back onto repetition, even as a means of creating
dissonance between beta- and nu-text, arguments turn toward additions and subtractions from
one to the other brought about by medium specificity. For instance, Prince, despite having
Kurosawa as his subject, finds that “[b]y eliminating Lady Macbeth’s speech in which she calls
on the spirits to unsex her and to fill her with the direst cruelty, Kurosawa transforms Asaji into a
figure of unmitigated evil, lacking the human dimension of Shakespeare’s character.” The
“highly stylized mime” of Asaji’s Noh-styled handwashing scene, he reflects, “lacks the verbal
expressions of anguish Shakespeare permitted her character.” Finally, he ascertains, “[a]ll that

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remains of Macbeth’s ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow’ speech is a brief scene in
which Washizu, with barely repressed verbal violence, bitterly calls himself a fool” (The
Warrior’s Camera 143). Prince valuably considers the effects of the subtractions he notes, yet he
demonstrates a bias toward the beta-text and a bias toward the word, specifically literature as the
more sophisticated and complex medium.
Unfortunately, the predisposition to literature belies a subtle value judgement that shuts
down the capacity to see what film is doing, what its effects might be and signify. In delineating
their modes of adaptation, Hutcheon and O’Flynn demonstrate how easy it might be to slip into
such judgements. Even as they try to widen the categories of media to modes, they fall back onto
an inhibiting understanding of medium specificity and walking through their “telling” and
“showing/performance mode” can show how such a perspective can bring us back around to the
beta-text and the power differential exorcism is meant to vex. They begin with narrative
literature, the “telling mode,” in which “our engagement begins in the realm of imagination,
which is simultaneously controlled by the selected, directing words of the text and liberated –
that is, unconstrained by the limits of the visual and aural.” Are the visual and aural so incapable
of liberating imagination? In part, the liberation of which they speak stems from the materiality
of the book: “We can stop reading at any point; we can re-read or skip ahead; we hold the book
in our hands and feel, as well as see, how much of the story remains to be read.” Unlike with
books, they say, the “mode of showing, as in film and stage adaptations” seizes us “in an
unrelenting, forward-driving story.” Recordable media aside, the assertion that films or other
showing mode media are linear, while books are not, gestures toward a slippage between
materiality and narrative structure. True, we can skip ahead in a book and re-read portions, but
generally speaking the narrative of a book is “unrelenting, forward-driving.” Skipping ahead

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often disrupts the reader’s ability to make sense of the plot. In Hutcheon and O’Flynn’s showing
mode, “we have moved from the imagination to the realm of direct perception,” in which,
“language is not the only way to express meaning or to relate stories.” “Direct perception,” in
opposition to “imagination,” seems meant to indicate that the reader loses some meaning-making
agency in the showing mode. They allow that “[v]isual and gestural representations are rich in
complex associations,” “music offers aural ‘equivalents’ for characters’ emotions” and “sound
[. . .] can enhance, reinforce, or even contradict the visual and verbal aspects,” but ultimately
literature is held up: “a shown dramatization cannot approximate the complicated verbal play of
told poetry or the interlinking of description, narration, and explanation that is so easy for prose
narrative to accomplish” (23).
To a degree, this conclusion can be accepted as a final delineation. But, what about
complicated visual play, as in the frenetic forest scene of Throne of Blood, in which Washizu and
Miki charge their horses at sharp angles through trees, lost and trapped by the branches that are
rapidly intercut? In describing the “move from telling to showing” as a move “from a long and
complex novel to any form of performance,” they elide the complexity of films or theater. Even
in its intermediation from telling to showing, they write, “a novel [. . .] has to be distilled,
reduced in size, and thus, inevitably, complexity” (36). But, Shakespeare is certainly long and
complex. He, in particular, draws our attention to the bias because we so often think of his works
as written texts, books, instead of scripts for a performance. Shakespeare makes the boundaries
unclear. Does he fall within the “showing mode” even if we, as students of literature, tend to
handle him in the materiality of the “telling mode”? The notion of adaptation as distillation or
reduction points to the value in the concept of intermediation. So as not to single out Hutcheon
and O’Flynn, John O’Connor may not speak in modes, but he too writes, “I have to admit to

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being no great fan of TV Shakespeare. For me, it too often closes down and restricts, where the
cinema has the potential to expand and explore” (207), showing a preference not for a mode per
se, but for one medium at the expense of another. Interestingly, he relies on similar language of
limitation versus elaboration. Usefully, intermediality reclaims the possibility for expansion and
complexity as well as nuance and new effects and meanings, thus softening boundaries and
rejecting biases and binaries.
Returning to Throne of Blood specifically, intermediality opens up possibilities of
integrating the alternate tradition of a culture with the alternate tradition of a medium, a critical
affordance as I move toward a more pointed exploration of the film. The refrain I want to unpack
is most succinctly phrased by Yoshimoto: “One of the striking aspects of Throne of Blood is that
unlike Macbeth it is far less dependent on language” (267–68). In a related observation,
Crucianelli speaks to his viewing experience of “ignoring the subtitles and just watching the
images unfold – coherently.” The Kurosawa scholars I quote reveal a tension in trying to address
the ways the film, in a way, puts language under erasure through an intermix of intermedial
processes. Prince stresses that “the shift in the mode of signification – from words to images –
also involves, and is motivated by, an act of cultural perception” (The Warrior’s Camera 142).
He determines that “the images that [Kurosawa] has created are not cinematic equivalents for the
play. They go beyond the source to render the thematic and emotional world of Macbeth through
indigenous aesthetic modes” (The Warrior’s Camera 142–43). Yoshimoto tempers this
perspective: “Critics almost unanimously agree that Shakespeare’s poetry is replaced by visual
imagery in Throne of Blood. What is crucial here is that the replacement of Shakespeare’s poetry
with visual image has little to do with the film’s ‘Japaneseness’” (268). By this, Yoshimoto
walks a fine line: he wants to suggest that the use of Noh conventions elegantly translates

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Shakespeare’s verbal poetry to Kurosawa’s visual poetry, which is different from saying that the
visual “replacement” process signifies that Kurosawa’s “Japanizes” Macbeth.
Both perspectives, however, neglect to account for us, the readers, and the effects
produced by the nu-text we experience. Conceiving of intermediation only through “shifts” or
“replacements” assumes that we can only read the nu-text through the beta-text; that is, an idea
that intermediation, by default, results in intertextual haunting. However, if we go back to
Kristeva’s theories of intertextuality, we can draw on her definition of the text itself as “a
production involving both producer and reader/spectator, often taking the form of the
deconstruction of systematicity and of communicative functions” (Stam et al. 203) in order to
recover a destabilizing, rather than a repeating and reinforcing, model of intermediality in
Throne of Blood. How does the film as a nu-text contribute to a “deconstruction of systematicity
and of communicative functions”? In holding to this chapter’s pursuit of alternate traditions, the
kastuben provides an entry point into the deconstructive potential of the tension between word
and image.
In the earliest days of the Japanese film industry, the silent era, the katsuben, or benshi,
stood next to the screen and “explained” the film as it was screened.
32
The explanations of the
kastuben, Anderson writes, ranged from “dialogue, narration, an interpretation of content, and
incidental comments” (260). The katsuben is not introduced here to add another aspect of
“Japaneseness”; the tradition draws attention to how, historically, different relationships to

32
Anderson explains the variations in terminology: “Most other foreign-language discussions call
a katsuben a benshi, which is a vague term meaning speaker or orator. Kastuben clearly denotes
the person who performed with motion pictures. It is a portmanteau word which telescopes
katsudô shashin (moving pictures, literally “moving photographs”) and benshi” (260). The
activity of kastuben was called eiga setsumei, literally translated as “film explanation” (261).

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cinema, different complexities of readerships, have emerged in different cultures.
33
This
relationship, in particular, is not a curiosity, but an opportunity to think about a correlation (or a
lack of one) between visual and verbal language that does not retreat to the visual as substitution
for a Shakespearean beta-text nor the visual as an evolution of a theatrical tradition. Though, it is
important to note that the katsuben himself is a product of Japanese theatrical heritage,
specifically kabuki. As such, the role draws attention to a “Japanese indigenous dramaturgy in
which the primary structural base is a tension between the teller of a story and the story rather
than conflict between protagonist and antagonist within a story” (Anderson 259). Further, like
the theatrical tradition from which the practice emerges, the katsuben creates “a continuing
tension between creating and eliminating the distance between the work/performer and the
audience” (Anderson 288).
The first of these tensions – that between story and storyteller – resonates with the
tensions between beta-text and nu-text and between content and form. The katsuben, as a
storyteller who literally stands next to the unfolding story – not telling from within or behind the
unfolding story, a merged storyteller and story, as we tend to encounter – widens the gap
between the story and how it is told. The word exists adjacent to the image, experienced as
fluctuating between association and disassociation. Burch explains that in the silent era of “the
dominant Western cinema, the dialogue titles always made it clear that Speech, the Word, was an
intangible, ineradicable presence inside the diagesis.” The katsuben rendered speech “explicitly

33
It should also be noted that Kurosawa’s older brother was a katsuben. To be clear, being a
katsuben was a legitimate career, not a minor or ceremonial function. Anderson points out that
“They often got billing larger than the stars of the movie. Indeed, katsuben were the show for
many people” (261). As talking films took over from silent, the katsuben ceased to be necessary.
Kurosawa’s brother, unable to find an alternative professional path as his became phased out,
committed suicide (Anderson 291). I imagine this fact would cement in Kurosawa a unique
perspective on the role of katsuben as a mediator between word and image.

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absent, since it was removed, put to one side. The Voice was there, but detached from the film
itself” (35). The katsuben, as it relates to the intermediated nu-text, echoes the model of
intertextual exorcism in Throne of Blood through this removal of speech that coincides with the
development of visual language. More importantly, the detachment of “The Voice” has
resonances with the exorcism of Shakespeare as the determining voice in the nu-text, but thought
of as a “putting to one side” rather than a rejection.
The katsuben, as a reader who literally stands next to the unfolding story, repeats the
story as he remediates it for a community of readers. Burch considers “the entire benshi’s
discourse as a kind of reading of the images. It was the diagesis which was being ‘read,’ and it
was designated as diagesis, thereby ceasing to function as diagesis (‘imaginary referent’), and
instead becoming what it had in fact never ceased to be: a field of signs” (Burch 36). The
katsuben, in the act of explaining the story, indicates it as a story, meaning, rather than as a
stable foundation for the production of images and effects, the story is revealed to be itself an
effect. As a suggestive metaphor, the katsuben draws attention to how intertextual exorcism can
re-shape our perception of the beta-text as a valent “field of signs” that becomes intermediated,
instead of a cohesive and known original. Further, the intermedial process of the nu-text can be
considered as a kind of reading of the beta-text.
Considering Throne of Blood through the conceptions of intertextual exorcism suggested
by the katsuben opens up possibilities to explore the film and speak to its integrity as a nu-text,
meaning attending to its voice and not just its correspondences with the beta-text. The following
section is intended as a consideration of Kurosawa’s film as an intermediating nu-text in which
the tensions between containment and expression and the absent and the present manifest and
sometimes erupt. My inquiry remains respectful of the Shakespearean beta-text – it

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acknowledges both its existence and its value – but eventually seeks to lose Macbeth as it
addresses a phenomenological experience of the film’s ambient: a sense brought about by the
effects I initially trace to the intertwined alternate traditions of Japanese theater and cinematic
affordances. The ambient is not necessarily a stand-in for the beta- or nu-text; it represents the
heard and unheard voice; its study redefines the relationship between presence and absence. As a
prototypical exercise, the following likely has its flaws. The value, however, is in the attempt to
demonstrate intertextual exorcism as an attitude or tool that opens up questions and encourages
uncertainty, as opposed to intertextual possession, which limits answers and fixes meanings.

The Haunted Ambient

In their introduction to Macbeth, the editors of The Norton Shakespeare describe the play
as “a tragedy of meltings, vanishing boundaries, and liminal states” (2574). This fringe space
that Macbeth operates at, what they refer to as “a sickening betwixt and between” (2574), feels
as it functions: it is unsettling. That is, through sense, through the unsettling experience of a play
in which “murdered men walk and blood cannot be washed off” (2574), we perceive the un-
settled state, the neither here nor there, of Macbeth. It should be no surprise, then, that so many
consider the play by turning to its effects. Pursuing the theme of “borders,” the Norton editors
aptly characterize these effects as “uncanny,” a term with which they invoke the play’s witches
only to turn down the possibility of such creatures as a source: “If these effects could be
unequivocally attributed to the agency of the witches, the audience would at least have the
security of a defined focused fear.” “Alternatively,” the editors explain, “if the witches could be
definitively dismissed as fantasy or fraud, the audience would at least have the clear-eyed

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certainty of witnessing human causes in an altogether secular world.” The claim becomes that
rather than a definitive either/or, “Shakespeare achieves the remarkable effect of a nebulous
infection, a bleeding of the demonic into the secular and the secular into the demonic” (2574).
The sense of “a bleeding [between]” pervades Macbeth, affecting “concepts of gender and
authority and social order” through to the particularities of Shakespeare’s language, described as
“a boundary stalker, neither a trustworthy guide nor a manifest solution” (2576). Even the
characters note uncanny effects, though “no one else [but Macbeth] imagines so vividly the
forces that lie beyond the ordinary and familiar horizon of human experience” (2571). Macbeth’s
experience of the extra-ordinary is often taken inward, a critical move toward the psychological:
“If the mind is subject to ‘supernatural soliciting’ (1.3.129) from some bizarre place, it is gripped
still more terribly and irresistibly by ‘horrible imaginings’ (1.3.137) from within” (Greenblatt et
al. 2576). However, Macbeth’s effects are felt by the audience, too, as we are subjected to a
“bizarre place”: the world of the play itself, and thus are gripped by “horrible imaginings” from
without.
This “without” is the ambient of Macbeth that confronts us, demanding our attention,
hailing us right from the opening direction for “Thunder and lightning” (S.D. 1.1.1). The
atmosphere is continually manifesting through such directions, and more often through dialogue:
we hear it in the witches’ chant – “Fair is foul, and foul is fair, / Hover through the fog and filthy
air” (1.1.10-11) – or Macbeth’s reiteration – “So foul and fair a day I have not seen” (1.3.36).
Such lines need not translate to practical effects on stage as the language itself implies an
environment, notably one that exists in a liminal state, somehow “foul” and “fair.” Likewise, the
ambient itself exists in a liminal state, fading in and out, similar to the witches who vanish “Into
the air, and what seemed corporal / Melted as breath into the wind” (1.3.79-80).

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The environment can also come very much to the fore when it transcends practical effects
and effectual language to become active and animated. Malcolm, for instance, sees the suffering
under King Macbeth and translates it metaphorically onto the environment: “I think our country
sinks beneath the yoke. / It weeps, it bleeds, and each new day a gash / Is added to her wounds”
(4.3.40-42). Even more interesting is the suggestion of the world as actor. Macbeth fears an
environment that knows and testifies against the guilty:

It will have blood, they say. Blood will have blood.
Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak,
Augurs and understood relations have
By maggot-pies and coughs and rooks brought forth
The secret’st man of blood. (3.4.121-125)

The above two examples, however, are merely anthropomorphisms: an active environment –
“stones move” and “trees speak” – embedded in language. Though, the play does suggest that the
environment physically, not just rhetorically, can act and even respond. For instance, Duncan’s
killing is noted by Lennox as marking the natural world:

The night has been unruly. Where we lay
Our chimneys were blown down, and, as they say,
Lamentings heard i’th’ air, strange screams of death,
And prophesying with accents terrible
Of dire combustion and confused events

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New-hatched to th’ woeful time. The obscure bird
Clamoured the livelong night. Some say the earth
Was feverous and did shake. (2.3.50-57)

The audience does not experience any of these sights, sounds, and sensations of the environment,
metaphoric or actual, nor do we have to; what we experience is an awareness that the
environment in Macbeth imposes beyond its liminal state as it shifts the ambient into the
immediate.
To investigate how we attain an awareness of the ambient in Macbeth, the play itself
suggests a phenomenological approach. Macbeth speaks to his experience of the uncanny,
amazed at his embodied response to “what is not”:

Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs
Against the use of nature? Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings.
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not. (1.3.134-141)

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Lady Macbeth offers the counterargument that such claims are absurd – “’Tis the eye of
childhood / That fears a painted devil” (2.2.52-53) – and we should be able to distinguish
between the fantastic and the real. The Norton editors, however, note that “This reassurance [. . .]
is hopelessly shallow”:

As the spectral dagger, the ghost sitting in Macbeth’s chair, and the indelible
bloodstains on Lady Macbeth’s hands all chillingly demonstrate, the secure
distinction between representation and reality, the dead and the living, repeatedly
breaks down, not simply for the characters but for the spectators as well. In most
productions, the dagger and the blood are visible only to the diseased minds of the
murderers, but Banquo’s ghost is almost always palpably present onstage, visible
to the audience as well as to the unhinged Macbeth, though invisible to everyone
around him. (2572)

The tendency is to think through uncanny effects as products of “diseased minds,” but
psychological approaches are another way of maintaining the “secure distinction between
representation and reality.” By attributing how the distinction “repeatedly breaks down” to a
mental breakdown, similar to Lady Macbeth’s dismissal – “This is the very painting of your
fear” (3.4.60) – palpable horror is recast as mere representations of the unconscious. Yet, this
reassurance also proves hopelessly shallow in response to an experience as Macbeth is a play of
manifestation. Distinctions become unsettled through an experience of vacillating presence and
absence:

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I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation
Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain? (2.1.35-39)

Macbeth reaches for the psychological rationale, but still something “sensible to feeling as to
sight” holds out. While the audience may agree with Macbeth when he dismays “Mine eyes are
made the fools o’ th’ other senses” (2.1.44) since we cannot see his “dagger of the mind,” we are
unsettled with him when we share moments of the “palpably present” such as the appearance of
Banquo’s ghost. The wavering “I have thee not, and yet I see thee still” is key: we are not
suffering from a mental collapse brought on by our guilt or our violence, and yet, we still witness
effects or manifestations that demand our attention and render present what was thought to be
absent. The ambient – paradoxically, an absent presence and a present absence – gives us a sense
of a world; when the ambient confronts our senses, it challenges us to reckon with a world.
The above introduction is meant to prime us for reading Throne of Blood through the
“betwixt and between” posited by Macbeth and experienced in its intermediating nu-text. If we
are to attend to the liminal ambient in Kurosawa’s film, we must begin to exorcise, to lose the
beta-text, meaning the effects of Throne of Blood cannot be read in correspondence with
Shakespeare, or else lose their meanings to his. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto warns that “[c]omparison
becomes problematic when it is used as a means of establishing or reinforcing a hierarchical
relation between the original and the adaptation regardless of the specific value accorded to each
term of hierarchical dichotomy” (251–52). Critics of the film again and again feel the need to

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reinforce this message. Erin Suzuki, for instance, repeats critic Jerry Blumenthal’s argument that
“Kurosawa’s powerful manipulation of visual cues proved that Throne of Blood [is] no pale
imitation of the Shakespearean tragedy but instead a serious, dynamic, and most of all an
‘autonomous work of art’” (93). To achieve an “autonomous” state, especially autonomy from
Shakespeare, Macbeth must be put to the side, despite the insights it offers. Yoshimoto similarly
insists on a reading of the film separate from Macbeth because too often “Throne of Blood,
regardless of the degree of its success or failure answered by a particular critic, is recognized as
cultural capital only to the extent that it contributes to the self-reproduction of Shakespeare’s
play as a great canonical work” (261). Indeed, the bias toward Macbeth as the greater work can
subtly color an inquiry into Kurosawa’s film. Even the most well-meaning compliment may
betray such a bias: Peter Brook writes of Throne of Blood as “a great masterpiece, perhaps the
only true masterpiece inspired by Shakespeare,” yet maintains “it cannot properly be considered
Shakespeare because it doesn’t use the text” (qtd. in Kinder 339). Of course Throne of Blood is
not Shakespeare. It is Throne of Blood, an intermediating and exorcising nu-text. As such,
Yoshimoto notes, “there is no place for the fetishistic attempt to reproduce the original’s formal
features (e.g., Shakespeare’s text)” (268). Donald Richie describes the film as “exclusively
concerned with limitation, negation, death”; he believes that these themes shape Throne of Blood
into “a formal film” (115), but one that disconnects verbal language – text – from the visual and
aural. Indeed, the process of intermediation of Macbeth into Throne of Blood may be described
as one of exorcism through elimination and restriction, including the stripping out of
Shakespeare’s language and the stripping down of his characters. Our attention is drawn to
absence and then struck by an alternative presence.

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Shakespeare’s language is distinct; he works in poetry and metaphor, often marked by
introspection. As a formal film, “Throne of Blood dispenses with Shakespearean dialogue.
Instead of trying to translate this poetry into Japanese, Kurosawa renders it as imagery” (Prince,
The Warrior’s Camera 142). We may find a precedent for imagery in the beta-text: Crucianelli
claims that, “Shakespeare’s Macbeth is as solid as it gets, structurally, dramatically, even
visually.” As we read the play’s lines, “it is easy to forget they are only words, a verbal conjuring
stores up in our collective memory. Yet from the telling alone we see these things vividly”
(Crucianelli). Linda Hutcheon and Siobahn O’Flynn speak of how Dickens’ novels’ “strongly
pictorial descriptions and potential for scenes of spectacle also make them readily adaptable.”
Perhaps Shakespeare’s plays might similarly be thought of as, to use their word, “adaptogenic”
(15). Beginning the move away from the beta-text, Stephen Prince senses that by eliminating
Shakespeare’s text, “the signifiers of word and image are no longer interchangeable, and the
verbal texture of the play is transformed into a dense, elaborate patterning of image and sound”
(The Warrior’s Camera 142). His observation stirs up a dilemma as we try to lose the beta-text.
We have critical frameworks for analyzing Shakespeare’s verbal texture and considering its
imagery. But how do we approach a “dense, elaborate patterning of image and sound”? The
linguistic turn in film theory may address it, but only if we conceive of patterning as language,
and that would seem to run counter to the notion that “the signifiers of word and image are no
longer interchangeable.” Intermedial transformation is not the same thing as translation. The
psychoanalytic turn in film theory may prove just as unsatisfactory as it was with Macbeth: it
subordinates “how” in favor of “why.” Both conceptual frameworks are ultimately inadequate to
the task of this project, as will become evident as this chapter progresses.

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Parallel to language to an extent, characters in Throne of Blood seem restricted, even
reduced at times to effects rather than characters. The “brutality and ambition” Prince notes in
Washizu and Lady Asaji seem, in a phrase he borrows from Blumenthal, “distilled to almost pure
materiality” (The Warrior’s Camera 143). The characters’ characteristics have a material quality
more apparent, more present, than the characters themselves. Suzuki sees that the “furious
impotence that [Washizu] exhibits as he falls into the role of a mere functionary character in the
drama highlights the overdetermined theatricality” of the film (96). Asaji, in particular, evokes
the sense of theatricality as an epitome of distillation. More than Washizu, she appears
remarkably stark even for a black and white film, a presence constructed of absences: a still
expression, a pure white face framed by deep black hair, a chilling sound for a voice, and
unperceivable movement even in the rare moments she actually moves. Her theatricality is
rightly described as “overdetermined” as Lady Asaji draws on conventions and properties of Noh
theater. Kurosawa remarks that his fondness for the Noh stems from how its “degree of
compression is extreme, and it is full of symbols, full of subtlety” (qtd. in Richie 117). Richie
confirms that the “world of the Noh is both closed and artificial. It is the limitations of character
which interested Kurosawa in this picture; the Noh offered the clearest visual indications of these
limitations” (117). In its use of the Noh, the nu-text achieves an effect of restriction. Kurosawa
explains that, “[d]rama in the West takes its character from the psychology of men or
circumstances”; however Noh drama takes its character and it thus restricted to, the mask. Recall
that for Throne of Blood, Kurosawa showed each actor a photo of the mask that most closely
matched their character and told them their character was that mask (qtd. in Richie 145–46). By
insisting on the mask as a determinant in Throne of Blood, Kurosawa indicates an active
rejection of Western drama, which Richie interprets as a rejection of “Western codes of realism

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and psychology” (147). Donald Keene, a scholar of Japanese literature and culture, explains
further that “the emotional qualities of the [Noh] plays are embodied by the characters as
absolutes, rather than as strict attributes of their personalities, and the plays aim to create an
atmosphere pervaded by these emotions instead of localizing them as the expressions of specific
characters” (qtd. in Richie 145). In line with the Noh tradition as Keene describes it, Richie
claims that Kurosawa’s film similarly “detaches emotions from the psyche, studies them as
absolute forms, and permits their mediation and revelation by the landscape and the
environment” (147). Rather than a psychological study localized in character, the film creates a
charged atmosphere experienced by the audience.
The consideration of the audience’s experience of a film is unusually outside the realm of
most film theory; that is, there is a significant lack of phenomenological methodology in film
criticism, especially in response to the atmosphere a given work may create. Some scholars may
deem the experience of the film as far too external to the work itself, holding to a notion that, as
Alice Rayner claims, “[t]he film is supposed to be complete and therefore to ‘know’ what it is
doing, what it means” (Rayner 163). This kind of pre-determination of the production of
meaning is implicit in criticisms, as is John Gerlach’s analysis of Throne of Blood. He starts one
argument by observing “another scene which seems to go on far longer than necessary” (353).
How can a scene “go on far longer than necessary”? What does “necessary” mean? Other film
critics have deemed Gerlach’s essay, Marsha Kinder explains, “unconvincing because it treats
the visuals so sketchily and reveals so little understanding of the power of the film” (339), and
yet, even other attempts that supposedly succeed as recognizing the “power of film” disregard
the experience. They do not investigate, for example, a scene that “seems to go on far longer than
necessary.” How? Why? Dudley Andrew remarks:

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The fact that no phenomenological film theory ever self-consciously developed is
a matter for regret only insofar as this lack of an opposing tradition locks us
within a structuralist project and vocabulary. We can speak of codes and textual
systems which are the results of signifying processes, yet we seem unable to
discuss that mode of experience we call signification. More precisely,
structuralism and academic film theory in general have been disinclined to deal
with the “other-side” of signification, those realms of preformulation where
sensory data congeal into “something that matters” and those realms of post-
formulation where that “something” is experienced as mattering. Structuralism,
even in its post-structural reach toward psychoanalysis and intertextuality,
concerns itself only with that something and not with the process of its congealing
nor with the event of its mattering. (627)

The lack of an adequate phenomenological film theory presents a challenge if we are to read for
the ambient in Throne of Blood. Andrew expands on his call to process how “sensory data
congeal[s] into ‘something that matters’” when he asks, “What exists beyond the text and what
kind of description can be adequate to it?” He suggests that “[h]ere we encounter the exciting
and dangerous term ‘world.’ A film elaborates a world which it is the critic’s job to flesh out or
respond to” (630). Some studies of Throne of Blood have gestured toward the need to respond to
its perceived world: Yoshimoto comments that “it is hardly enough to point out how Kurosawa
uses a particular Noh mask as a model for the face of a particular character in the film, for it does
not really say anything specific about the film itself” (253). While the film’s alternate tradition

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may be described as emerging from Japanese cultural heritage, recall how Yoshimoto reminds us
that “[w]oodblock prints, traditional music, or classical theaters do not have any fixed meanings
when they are appropriated or quoted in films. Their significance and function can be determined
only by examining how they are specifically used in a particular film” (266). However, his
perspective gestures toward an assumption that conclusions drawn about the significance and
function of these appropriations remain bound to their use in the internal structure of the film,
how they contribute to its internal production of meaning, rather than including a reading of their
affectual presence before an audience, the event of encountering alternate traditions in an
intermediated state.
Moving forward, let us consider Throne of Blood as such an event, sensitive to the
unsettling world the film elaborates. Like Macbeth, the world of the film seems to exist at a
liminal state, though instead of through a synesthetic reading of verbal language, this sense
comes to us through the experience of an environment. How does it appear to us? Kurosawa’s
limitation that was noted with character extends into the mise-en-scene, what David Bordwell
and Kristin Thompson recognize as his tight “control over what appears in the film frame” (169).
Kurosawa’s controlled containment is apparent, as Richie discerns:

Visually, this film is a marvel because it is made of so little: fog, wind, trees, mist
– the forest and the castle. There has rarely been a blacker or whiter black and
white film. He purposely restricts himself. The only punctuation he allows is the
simple cut and the simple wipe. There are no fades, no dissolves, nothing soft,
nothing flowing, nothing amorphous. Everything is rigidly either/or. (120)

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He similarly perceives the “either/or” in the castle set, with its black walls constructed on the
black volcanic soil of Mt. Fuji, which contrasts sharply with the mists and fog that surround it
(123). Set interiors are “wide with low ceilings and squat pillars,” clearly delineated from an
open, outdoor space (Richie 123). These choices, set designer Yoshiro Muraki explains, were
made to, “create the effect of oppression” (qtd. in Richie 123). Kurosawa’s technique – his
minimal use of close-ups in favor of full-shots (Richie 121) – reflects restriction as it denies
intimacy; we experience alienation rather than intimate emotion. Just how far back are we
pushed? Consider Kurosawa’s reliance on long lenses, which, Bordwell and Thompson explain,
“flatten the spaces along the camera axis. Cues for depth and volume are reduced. The planes
seem squashed together, much as when you look through a telescope or binoculars” (217).
Kurosawa’s desire to restrict, in this case to flatten space or squash planes together, leads to a
reduction in cues, a dissolving of the firm distinction between this and that. Like the restrictions
of the Noh, the move to affect oppression and impress a rigid either/or has a countering effect for
the audience: we begin to note that which seems out of control, that which seems to be
unfocusing from resolved to suggestive or mysterious, and that which seems to be slipping
betwixt and between.
Throne of Blood displays a palpable tension brought about by juxtaposition, an effect
perhaps inherited from the Noh. Prince writes, “[Noh actor and playwright] Zeami noted that
frequently the most compelling moments of the Noh were those in which a performer stood
quietly, doing nothing. But the apparent stasis was deceiving, for it contained a dynamic ‘inner
tension’” (The Warrior’s Camera 48). Prince finds a demonstration of this effect in the film:
“when Washizu sits in an empty room to vent his despair over the foolishness of his acts, his
voice resounds with fury, but the rigidity of his body contains the emotion, barely letting it

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escape” (The Warrior’s Camera 146). But, his emotion does escape enough to be perceptible and
creates an experience of dynamic inner tension that puts under pressure an otherwise determining
view of Japanese tradition, expressed by Ana Laura Zambrano, as: “foster[ing] a sense of
harmony between man, nature, and the spiritual in its philosophy and art, stressing peaceful
resolution rather than a sense of tragedy” (269). We are faced precisely with tragedy, which
Zambrano contrasts with traditional Japanese culture in that “[t]ragedy implies loss, a break with
the natural order, and conflict, both external and internal” (269). We experience the breakdown
of a “sense of harmony” and the denial of “peaceful resolution” in Throne of Blood, which
gestures away from a “Japaneseness” in the film toward a unique world. Our experience of this
other world the film manifests what Akira Iwasaki describes as perceived through the senses: the
“very air is denser, the air pressure greater than in the atmosphere we normally breathe, sounds
fall on the ear an octave higher than their usual pitch, and physical movements are speeded up or
slowed down abnormally” (qtd. in Prince, The Warrior’s Camera 11). In other words, we are
confronted by an unsettling ambient.
We become aware of the ambient in Throne of Blood as it slips into immediacy. As
Washizu and Miki ride through Spider’s Web Forest, Kinder feels accosted by “the twisting
branches in the foreground, the rolling mist, the stroboscopic lightning, and the distorted sound
of laughter [that] intensif[ies] the sudden rush of motion” (342). But, truly disorienting is the
visceral quality of the ambient: that which is typically background – tree branches, weather,
sound – has become foreground. We experience this sequence through the ambient. When the
two warriors draw their weapons to strike at nothing, the scene feels doubly odd as we cannot be
sure that there is no thing for them to attack. Miki’s spear and Washizu’s arrows make no
apparent contact, and yet the all too present ambient seems there to take the impact. The

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alarmingly abrupt end to the foreground branches, the rain, and almost all sound as the attack
sequence ends and the witch’s hut is approached by the pair substantiates the ambient at its seam,
as if the ambient has fallen victim to their weapons.
The scene makes us questions whether the ambient by definition must always be
background. The ambient is always present to our senses and yet it “sinks” behind. Still, it
challenges Hutcheon and O’Flynn’s specificity arguments and represents an unconstrained and
unconstraining visual and aural. In terms of approaches to the ambient, Rayner defines
phenomenology as a methodology that “seeks to identify the moment of emergence in which the
world is generated by its perception and at the same time has preceded perception, giving one the
sense of both remembering and creating in the same moment” (xix). In most films, the ambient
precedes our perception, as the goal of its design is to fade into the background, to generate a
world that we accept as we suspend our reality. Through an experience of that alternate world,
we become absorbed into the film’s alternate reality. However, our perception of an emergent
ambient in Throne of Blood in this moment more closely resembles what Rayner calls “an event
of consciousness generated by repetition” (xvii) – constant rain, fog, trees, distorted laughter, for
instance – that situates us at an uneasy but fortuitous position at the borders of the filmic world
from which we can consider perceptions of the ambient.
Borrowing liberally from Rayner’s phenomenological work on ghosts and the theater, I
want to suggest that the ambient functions much like a ghost and produces a sense of haunting
that is far more immediate to our senses than intertextual haunting. Particularly in Throne of
Blood, the ambient is uncanny and unsettlingly present. Herbert Blau describes the feeling of the
uncanny as that sense that “in some inexplicable way [. . .] we are seeing what we saw before”
(qtd. in Rayner xviii), the same kind of experience we might have with a ghost as a presence of

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something we had imagined was absent. To be clear, Throne of Blood does not contain
something called “the ambient” that no other film shares; every film to some extent has its
“surrounds.” Rayner explains that “‘Seeing what we saw before’ implies recognition in the root
sense of the word, a reknowing, and thus is related to the idea of unforgetting. A
phenomenological ground for such recognition suggests the moment when one perceives that one
is perceiving what has been there all along” (xviii–xix). Further, she argues:

This is quite different from the more obvious commonsense idea of seeing what
we saw before, like a television rerun or a favorite movie from one’s youth
revisited years later. Recognition or reknowing or unforgetting is, rather, a
particular kind of perception; it is a sensation of seeing for the first time what one
has seen many times before. (xix)

From this perspective, the ambient emerges as an alternate experience to intertextuality that
parallels some of the perceptions of a present beta-text, while firmly maintaining the experience
as produced by the nu-text regardless of the beta-text. When we perceive the ambient in Throne
of Blood, we are “reknowing” or “unforgetting” an aspect of world creation we have experienced
many times before though one to which we so rarely give attention. In this way, the ambient
recalls Macbeth’s famous line, “It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying
nothing” (5.5.25-27): the ambient tells a tale of sound and fury, yet, by signifying no thing, it
often operates beyond perception. Reconceiving the ambient as similar to ghosting provides us
with what Rayner illustrates as “a kind of stereoptic double vision that sees thing and no-thing at
once” (xxiv), allowing us to “reknow” or “unforget” the uncanny tale the ambient tells.

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In part, the “no-thing” signified by the ambient is an attempt to purposefully erase signs
of its presence, to generate a compelling alternate world. Rayner writes that “[r]ealism often tries
to obscure the uncanny” (xxi) and the more obscured the ambient, the more realistic the
experience may seem. So, for Rayner, “the history of attempts to dematerialize the physical
realities of the stage is one story of ghosts” (xi). Rayner finds her keyword “ghost” in the work
of Herbert Blau, who writes of “ghosting” as an “uncentering dilemma”: “The missing person is
recurrently there insisting that his story be told” (qtd. in Rayner xv). With regard to film, the
history of attempts to dematerialize the realities of the means of production is one story of the
ambient. Our perception of the ambient seems to be another “uncentering” dilemma, a sense of
something missing that is recurrently there. In theater, Rayner argues, “the practice of ghosting
suggests that the actors are in some sense unconcealing and making visible what otherwise is
invisible. They are unforgetting the presence of something absent” (xvi). In Throne of Blood –
heightened, stylized, formalist – a refusal of realism “unconceals” in order to “unforget” the
presence of the ambient.
We are accustomed to a film opening with some sense of the ambient that “sets the stage”
for what will follow. The ambient helps us to “locate ourselves” and “situate ourselves” hence
the term “establishing shot.” How conscious are we of this process? “The ghost,” and, in this
argument, the ambient, following Rayner’s model, “is known only by its affective presence,
when one asks from a state of wonder, What am I seeing, how does this happen, where is this
coming from, this ‘thing happening before my eyes?’” (xxiii). Once clear answers to these
questions are revealed or established, the ambient is concealed. The opening of Throne of Blood
is suffused with an ambient that sustains these questions as it “dis-orients” us with its sustained
affective presence. Under, or, more appropriate to the experience, over the opening credits we

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hear music, a not unusual ambient device that “sets the tone.” Here, however, the flute assaults
our ears, odd in its sound, not due to a “Japanese-ness” foreign to Western listeners, but because
it pushes the tolerance of hearing with long piercingly high pitches that seem to anxiously break
at times. What are we hearing? The first images are of flattened planes of mountains in the
distance, drifting fog, and the sound of wind blowing through an empty space. Where are we?
Then, the chorus – identified by Richie as “one of the elements of the Noh” (117) – chants, the
voices deep and filling, and introduces Spider’s Web Castle, “the castle of delusion.” Who is
singing? Where are these voices coming from? Finally, the castle materializes through the fog.
When did that get there? Importantly, the experience of the ambient, its event, does not prompt
questions like Why is this happening? What does this mean? Rayner observes “the ghosts of
theatre are perceptions without content” (xxvi). Likewise, we are so used to the ambient being a
no-thing that such questions that interrogate content – why? – can only follow questions of
perception – what? where? who? when? how?
Throughout Throne of Blood, the ambient threatens at the threshold of the immediate, it
haunts our experience. Sounds have a visceral quality, as catalogued by Richie: “[the witch’s]
prophecies are voiced in the husky and unintonated voice of the Noh actor, [. . . ] the squeak of
Asaji’s tabi, the sound of her kimono dragging, the slight clatter of the witch’s spinning-wheel,
her rustlings in her reed hut” (118). The cawing of birds, the disturbing nays and frenetic steps of
horses, the clatter of armor and weapons, and the echoing laughter of the forest create an
overwhelming soundscape that contrasts sharply with moments of equally overwhelming silence
in tense interiors. The natural world is more than the backdrop for action. We are continually
aware of the atmosphere through fog, tree branches, rain, lightning, and howling wind. The sense
of an encroaching ambient is visualized in the film itself, as Washizu and Lady Asaji are re-

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located to the room where the previous lord killed himself. As Washizu’s men enter the room to
air it out, they look in horror off-screen, terrified by what lays beyond it. The ambient? Blood
stains the wood of the walls and floor of the room and Washizu sits with a slatted divider
constructed of arrows that seems meant to separate him from his unsettling surroundings that
remains visible through the fractured divider. Washizu sits still but is clearly disturbed. He
suspiciously glances over his shoulder toward the blood stains as their presence renders them
indelible to his sense of space. The scene is one of haunting.
Throne of Blood establishes an experience of a haunted ambient, the melting of the
dialectic of the ambient as its supposed absence becomes its immediate presence. Rayner argues
that “ghosts represent an epistemological or methodological corrective to forms of thought that
reduce the world to a series of oppositions in order to clarify and control” (xxvi). The haunted
ambient is a corrective that denies clear and controlled opposition between “no-thing” and
“thing” or between “background” and “foreground” or even between “environment” and “self.”
Like a ghost, the haunted ambient unsettles the distinction of Rayner’s “there/not there” (xvii)
and echoes the Derridean concept of “under erasure.” Usually, the ambient appears like a ghost,
that is “only from an oblique perspective and emerges only from the sideways glance at the void
of death or the blanks in memory” (Rayner xxii). The haunted ambient emerges more fully into
our range of perception, a metaphor for the ambient/immediate distinction through which “we
see what is missing” (Rayner xiii) or, rather, what we may have thought was missing but has
always been there.
This is not the same thing as meta, that is, the film is not revealing the means of its
production. The haunted ambient is a call to consciousness in our experience of an event. Rayner
supposes, “[i]t is though what we most need to see [. . .] are the blank spaces on our field of

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vision, in our thoughts and experiences. Becoming conscious of our own habits of
misrecognition is a productive movement of thought by which we return to ourselves” (158).
Throne of Blood ends with the ramifications of misrecognition, its haunted ambient challenging
Rayner’s medium-specific claim that “it is difficult to be surprised or to experience the uncanny
aspect that film entails” (157). The ambient in Kurosawa’s film seems to rampage. The forces
opposed to Washizu chop the branches of the forest to hide themselves, however before that we
have already seen the soldiers, as has Washizu, so really there is no need to later hide their
numbers; the appropriation from Macbeth seems unmotivated. Instead, when we witness
Spider’s Web Forest on the move, we do not see soldiers holding branches, but the whole forest
attacking. No humans appear. The ambient seems to not just come into view, it assails. While the
sound of birds is a fairly common component of the ambient, the sandpapery squawk of a
particular bird in Throne of Blood that repeats several times structures the haunted ambient. Fully
developed by the end of the film, the rush of birds into the screen space with deafening cries fill
Washizu’s room to terrify us as the off-screen ambient becomes shockingly present. The moment
represents an ambient that overcomes, as it does at Washizu’s death: a frantic scene of arrows
coming from off-screen, from the no-where of the haunted ambient insisting violently on its
presence and demanding our attendance.
The haunted ambient might be read as a dynamic metaphor for intertextuality, suggesting
an approach to the haunting beta-text as an environment, a developed but off-screen world, in
which the nu-text unfolds: Shakespeare as “background noise” for intermediating and exorcising
works like Throne of Blood. Linda Hutcheon and Siobhan O’Flynn offer that “[w]hen what we
hear does not match what we see, the resulting suggestiveness can be more potent than the actual
appearance of the ghosts” (69). When the beta-text background noise we hear does not match the

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nu-text we see, the resulting suggestiveness can be more potent than the actual appearance of the
beta-text. In the context of intertextuality, this perspective is counter-intuitive: it may be that the
less we experience the presence of the beta-text, but know it’s there somewhere, the more power
it may have over the nu-text. Perhaps we are yearning to remember, just as we obsessively rack
our brains when we see a familiar face but cannot think of a name. Alternatively, the
present/absent ambient in Throne of Blood indicates an intertextual process imagined as a
swirling process of reknowing and unforgetting a world we are experiencing and have
experienced before. Kurosawa writes, “I’ve forgotten who it was that said creation is memory.
My own experiences and various things I have read remain in my memory and become the basis
upon which I create something new. I couldn’t do it out of nothing” (Something Like an
Autobiography 194). Thinking through intertextual exorcism in ambient terms points us to the
liminality between creation and memory and within that contested space, the recovery of an
emergent countermyth that suggests Throne of Blood is not about Macbeth and is not about what
Macbeth is about. Despite Kurosawa’s words, an intertextual ambient might make us wonder to
what extent something new can develop from not just the thing – what exists – but the no-thing –
what might exist.

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Conclusion
Giving Up the Ghost

Let us say that each vanished person left me something, and that I feel my
inheritance when I am reminded of one of them.
Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres (370)

In A Thousand Acres, Ginny Cook expresses the above sentiment well after her sister and
father have died, her nieces have come to live with her, and her family farm has been sold away.
If anyone else had voiced it, we would take it as wistful, comforting, even loving. When Ginny
looks back on the vanished, she remembers anger and abuse. When she speaks to her inheritance,
she evokes the horrors of poison and rape. The counterintuitive perspective on memory and
legacy Ginny displays succinctly demonstrates the critical position my project takes regarding
intertextuality. Avery Gordon argues for haunting as an approach that describes “a paradigmatic
way in which life is more complicated than those of us who study it have usually granted” (7).
Haunting, in my project, is used as a paradigm that informs us that intertextuality is more
complicated than scholars have granted. The metaphor of haunting, expanded into the directions
of possession and exorcism, serves to help the reading of texts for anxieties brought on by
intertextual relationships with other texts. Haunting widens the ways we can read nu-texts that
struggle under the weight of their beta-texts and, by invoking the possibility for exorcism, seeks
out nu-texts that resist, successfully or not, the threat of possession posed by canonical beta-
texts. Diffusing Shakespeare into the ghostly presence of intertextual haunting takes advantage
of what Marjorie Garber identifies as a “peculiar characteristic”: “the ghost is a copy, somehow
both nominally identical to and numinously different from a vanished or unavailable original.”
This characteristic parallels my understanding of the presence of the beta-text within the nu-text,

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as does Garber’s assertion that the ghost “has special ramifications for art forms which [. . .] are
regarded by their contemporary cultures as marginal, popular, or contestatory” (Shakespeare’s
Ghost Writers 21). While my case studies draw on nu-texts that are canonical themselves,
intertextual haunting as a model for analysis has value when the objects of study are
Shakespearean nu-texts deemed marginal or popular, designations that are often assigned relative
to those given by a cultural hierarchy to beta-texts by Shakespeare. Intertextual exorcism strives
to create opportunities to consider such nu-texts perhaps not always independent of Shakespeare,
but independent of the value judgements implicit in descriptors like “marginal” or “popular.”
More importantly, intertextual haunting draws attention to the last category Garber posts –
“contestatory” – as a reading that searches for voices otherwise silenced by Shakespeare’s ghost.
Exorcism, in the case of contestatory texts, becomes the pathway that Ginny longs for: the way
we can move forward, “ducking forever a destiny that we never asked for” (Smiley, A Thousand
Acres 220).
This project grew from critical questions: What is our relationship to what has come
before? Can we have a healthy relationship with the past? If not, why do we return to it again and
again? Why do certain memories survive, and can we survive these memories? While exorcism
gestures toward a direction, the lingering question might be: How do we heal? My work
represents a start of an investigation that, for me, provokes more haunting questions than
provides solid answers. Haunting has significant implications for canon formation and for
high/low culture debates. What goes into a canon? What gets left out? Who chooses? Possession
draws our attention to voices that get drowned out when we insist on repeating the same stories,
but where might we find new stories and new voices? How can alternatives come to be
appreciated as alternatives, but not as secondary? Exorcism may be useful in studies of a popular

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culture that draws on the canon for reasons other than establishing its own value. How can we
read artifacts of popular culture as just artifacts of culture? Ghosts, haunting, and the associated
metaphors I have called on frame a critical methodology for reading intertextuality that resists
the deification of beta-text and, in turn, opens opportunities for approaching nu-texts from a
“healthier” perspective. An extended version of this project would pursue additional nu-texts as
codas that might progress each chapter’s theme – haunting, possession, and exorcism – a little
further to demonstrate the possibilities. Ideally, the addition of these texts might coincide with an
intermediation of the whole project to include photos, illustrations, theatrical scenes, film clips,
and sounds. Haunting is better understood through the experience. Lee Blessing’s play
Fortinbras, a sequel of sorts to Hamlet, surrounds the new king of Denmark with ghosts.
Polonius has decided it is best not to talk any more. Gertrude and Claudius insistently pray in
order to keep their hands off each other. Ophelia longs for sex above all else. Hamlet exists
trapped as a giant eye on a television screen – a ghost himself, but an intermediated one – that
can be turned off with a click: one solution to haunting. Salman Rushdie’s short story “Yorick”
demonstrates outright defiance as it denies Shakespeare – and to an extent, the reader – purchase
on (possession of) the text in large part through humor. “Yorick” refuses a ventriloquistic
intertextual mode through a self-referential re-telling of Hamlet that responds to the haunting of a
misremembered past. Ventriloquism suggests that the nu-text does not speak with its own voice
but re-tells or re-speaks the beta-text. Rushdie’s story explicitly addresses its own intertextual
relationship with Shakespeare couched as a corrective to the play and to our apparent misreading
of it. In the words of the narrator, who may be speaking of the “strong vellum” onto which
stories are written, but could be speaking of Shakespeare, “this noble stuff endures – if not for
ever, then at least till men consciously destroy it” (63). The phrase stirs up familiar concerns of

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an affective directionality that has the potential to damage the beta-text, but “Yorick” side-steps
this concern by immediately interfering with it through a list of literal destructive methods
ranging from scissors to fire to using the “noble” text as toilet paper. The comic book series Kill
Shakespeare ties haunting to questions of taste as its intermediated familiar characters find
themselves fighting a war with each other as they seek their creator and his quill, a weapon of
mass construction/destruction. The alternate tradition here springs from the culture of comic
book tropes – heroes and villains, magic spells and secret plots, twists of fate and reversals of
characters – not that unlike Shakespeare’s plays. Is there a point, though, that these characters
cease being Shakespeare’s and evolve or devolve into their new context disengaged from him?
Helen M. Whall asks: “What responsibility should the masters of modern media – comic
book author, movie producer, web master or source-book editor – assume when appropriating
Shakespeare” (293)? The question puts the onus back onto the nu-text; it assumes an affective
directionality that gestures toward the ways we might harm Shakespeare. Why should there be
any responsibility? What power do we turn over to Shakespeare by asking about responsibility?
This project’s question might be figured as: What risks do the “masters of modern media”
assume when appropriating Shakespeare? Gordon explains that “[t]o write stories concerning
exclusions and invisibilities is to write ghost stories” (17). Asking about the responsibility we
should assume when creatively engaging with Shakespeare – when writing “ghost stories” –
corresponds with a concern for “exclusions and invisibilities” brought on by exploitative
appropriations, mockeries, or various modes of debasement and effacement of Shakespeare.
Intertextual haunting, possession in particular, points to the “exclusions and invisibilities”
brought on by Shakespeare within ghost stories. Intertextual exorcism seeks to reclaim what has

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been excluded or rendered invisible and questions what responsibility we have to initiate such a
search.
Intertextual exorcism, at least the way I model it in Chapter Three, is a far more sensitive
and diplomatic process than the word “exorcism” might imply. What might a more radical
approach to exorcism entail? If possession represents an intertextual haunting that verges on
violence, what would constitute an intertextual exorcism that similarly might be characterized as
passionate and violent? The high esteem with which Shakespeare has been held for centuries has
produced all manner of extreme behavior. Lawrence Levine indicates that “[b]y the turn of the
century Shakespeare had been converted from a popular playwright whose dramas were the
property of those who flocked to see them, into a sacred author who had to be protected from
ignorant audiences and overbearing actors threatening the integrity of his creations” (72). The
protection of the “sacred author” has even taken violent turns, as in the April 23, 1879
production of Richard II, during which an audience member Mark Gray followed the text of the
play as he watched. “By Act 5, apparently infuriated at the alterations [actor Edwin] Booth was
introducing, Gray drew his pistol and fired two shots at Booth in an attempt, as one eye witness
put it, ‘to kill the man that could, as he thought, so murder Shakespeare’” (Levine 72). The
violent act intended to resolve a violent act represents the height of radical responses, and, as a
pattern of murderous revenge, brings us back to Hamlet. Reading for the pattern as we return to
the play as a model for intertextuality, we find it charged with an uncompromising determination
toward violence that outweighs any momentary equivocations. Margreta De Grazia describes
Hamlet with an eye toward intertextuality: “The father’s ‘will’ makes itself known through a
lethal imperative (one that requires the son’s sacrifice) rather than a sustaining and perpetuating
legacy (qtd. in Schwarz 177). The implications of sacrifice and a lethal imperative for

197
intertextual haunting draw attention to Shakespeare’s tyrannical insistence that the nu-text not
just give itself over completely to the ghost, but that it seek out and kill any “pretenders to the
throne,” any alternatives, and kill itself in the process. This is a tragic tale of intertextuality, full
of sound and fury, signifying systematic abuse and repression.
Alan Sinfield suggests that “Shakespeare does not have to work in a conservative
manner. His plays do not have to signify in the ways they have customarily been made to”
(“Give an Account” 549). As one of the ways he elaborates on his essay’s title – “How
Shakespeare Lives Now” – Stephen Greenblatt writes that Shakespeare has been “[t]ransformed
often out of recognition,” but also whether “feared or attacked or reverenced, these redistributed
parts live on, generating new experiences, triggering inferences, harming or rewarding those they
encounter, arousing love.” Rather than reading Shakespeare in nu-texts as “feared or attacked or
reverenced,” this project has focused on his works “harming those they encounter.” Therefore,
when the possibility of Shakespeare “arousing love” is suggested, it echoes the way Ginny’s
sister Rose recalls their father’s actions in A Thousand Acres: “He didn’t rape me, Ginny. He
seduced me. He said it was okay, that it was good to please him, that he needed it, that I was
special. He said he loved me” (Smiley, A Thousand Acres 190). The claim to love is unsettling to
hear. How do you respond, confront, or resist this kind of a father? Or, for that matter, one that
“makes [himself] known through a lethal imperative”? C. J. Hopkins and Bryan Reynolds point
back at us for answers, as “it is the receiving population, or audience, who determines the author-
function, so too could it be said that authority for a radical reappropriation of a classic text [. . .]
rests with the audience” (284).
In bed dying from cancer brought on by the poisons from the family farm, Rose gestures
toward the passion needed for a radical response: "We're not going to be sad. We're going to be

198
angry until we die. It's the only hope." (A Thousand Acres 354). Anger is important. It
illuminates boundaries, such as those between what we are compelled to accept and what we are
prepared to defy or what we are asked to lay down and what we are willing to sacrifice. By
illuminating where we stand, anger helps us survive. My project ultimately asks: how do we
respond to traditions we sustain that inhibit progress? In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are
Dead, Guildenstern wonders aloud as his death approaches, “Our names shouted in a certain
dawn . . . a message . . . a summons . . . there must have been a moment, at the beginning, where
we could have said—no. But somehow we missed it” (125). Picking up the possibility he
suggests in the intertextual context, Kathryn Schwarz asks her reader: “What would it mean for
‘us,’ with brazen infidelity to that pronoun of survivors, to say ‘no’ to Hamlet: to refuse not just
an inheritance but the very idea of inheritance, to see neither a web nor a line nor a mirror, but a
historical artifact that retains a certain charm?” (176). Like Hopkins and Reynolds, Schwarz
looks to a community of readers for radical action. Her question is hard to answer without
moving in the direction of statements that would amount to variations on a theme about “losing
who we are.” Shakespeare’s possession is that entrenched. Yet, the question need not be a call to
solipsism. Radical exorcism begins with the unsettling sense of slipping boundaries between a
determining, distant past and a present pressing forward toward uncertainty. Where Julie Sanders
suggests we seek “readings which are invested not in proving a text’s closure to alternatives, but
in celebrating its ongoing interaction with other texts and artistic productions” (18), radical
exorcism might mean a text’s refusal to be held accountable to its own references and readings
that are unable to be invested in a text’s capricious interactions with other texts and artistic
productions. Radical intertextual exorcism might then be best described as a posture, motivated
by anger toward an inheritance we never asked for, and just might be better off losing.

199
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract My dissertation reconsiders how contemporary works that engage with Shakespeare have often been read, interpreted, and valued through the occasion of that engagement as opposed to the experience of effects and meanings that are produced by the work itself. This re-viewing allows me to articulate a theory of intertextuality expressed as a haunted relationship between texts. As a paradigm for analysis, intertextual haunting draws our attention to how the triangle of relations between the text, the ""original"" it reworks, and the reader leave little space for alternative voices to be heard over that of Shakespeare. The circulations between the three vertices produce a range of expectations that drive toward a sense of the text inevitably bending toward Shakespeare, affecting plot, characters, conventions, significances, and the reception experience. In representing Shakespeare within textual interactions as a ghost that haunts, this project seeks to address, broadly speaking, questions of cultural inheritance and the maintenance of traditions. What is our relationship to what has come before? Can we have a healthy relationship with the past? If not, why do we return to it again and again? Why do certain memories survive, and can we survive these memories? Tying haunting with concepts suggested by possession widens the ways we can read texts that struggle under the weight of their relationship with Shakespeare. By invoking the possibility for exorcism, we can investigate texts that might resist, successfully or not, the threat of possession he poses. Through three main case studies—Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, and Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood—the critical themes of haunting, possession, and exorcism are explored both in theory and in practice.

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Creator Edinger, Richard A. (author)

Core Title Exorcising Shakespeare: intertextual hauntings, lethal inheritance, and lost traditions

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 02/07/2019

Defense Date 01/17/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag A Thousand Acres,adaptation,Akira Kurosawa,haunting,intertextuality,Jane Smiley,OAI-PMH Harvest,Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,Shakespeare,Throne of Blood,Tom Stoppard

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Smith, Bruce (committee chair), Kuhn, Virginia (committee member), Lemon, Rebecca (committee member)

Creator Email brazilianrich@gmail.com,redinger@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-468852

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Document Type Dissertation

Rights Edinger, Richard A.

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