Shakespeare’s Dancing Bodies

Romeo’s well-known excuse that he cannot dance because he has soles of lead is demonstrative of the autonomous volitional quality Shakespeare ascribes to body parts, his utilization of humoral somatic psychology, and the horizontally divided body according to early modern dance practice and theory. This chapter considers the autonomy of and disagreement between the body parts and the unruliness of the humors within Shakespeare’s dramas, particularly Romeo and Juliet. An understanding of the body as a house of conflicting parts can be applied to the feet of the dancing body in early modern times, as is evinced not only by literary texts, but dance manuals as well. The visuality dominating the dance floor provided opportunity for social advancement as well as ridicule, as contemporary sources document. Dance practice is compared with early modern swordplay in their shared approaches to the training and social significance of bodily proportion and rhythm.

The Merchant of Venice’s Missing Masque

In Act II, Scene V, of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Bassanio, a Venetian lord, prepares to host a masque, but the trade winds change unexpectedly and Bassanio’s ship sets sail that very evening, cancelling the masked ball. Although this masqued scene is never realized, written, or staged, its mention is enough reason to interrogate its possibility. Through a Derridean decentering of presence, bringing together the extensive literature on Elizabethan masques, early modern understandings of touch and dance, and a deep interrogation of religious tensions, as played out throughout The Merchant of Venice, the masque’s textual absence is at once made an important, albeit impossible, presence. These intersecting texts create a web of social ideologies that describe the early modern moment from which this play emerges. What is unwritten proves powerfully choreographic, the absence itself working to organize bodies in space, separated by religious and gendered difference.

Introduction to Part II

This introduction to Part II of The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance—“Shakespeare as Dance”—considers the translation of Shakespeare’s plays and poems into dance and the effects that movement has on the meaning of those works. In doing so, it charts the tension between language, movement, and “legitimacy” in danced versions of Shakespeare and asks whether the term “adaptation” is adequate in describing dance works that may be said to capture, rather than simply modify, their literary sources. The chapters in Part II of the Handbook interrogate these issues and introduce readers to the surprising variety of danced Shakespeare; they represent vital projects of recovery and analysis.

Hamlet, The Ballet

Through the themes of literacy and polysemanticism, materiality and signification, this chapter investigates the creative and rehearsal processes of the choreography for David Nixon’s ballet Hamlet (2008) for Northern Ballet, United Kingdom. The chapter investigates the planning process, research and development sessions, choreographic approaches, dramaturgical guidance, and scenographic choices in this work. Questions are raised about the semiotic, aesthetic, and creative approaches of the choreographer and devising team. In Hamlet the ballet, the sociology of the original play and change of location—i.e. dominance of Nazism, ideology, historical conflict—influenced the creative process and the spectator’s reception of the work. But in what other ways can a non-text-based medium communicate the essence of the play?

Decoding Dance in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing and Twelfth Night

Many of Shakespeare’s plays contain verbal references to specific dances. Knowledge of early modern dance conventions can be of tremendous value in reading (and staging) these plays: “decoding” the dance references unveils layers of subtext that are relevant to an understanding of thematic issues and of the psychological makeup of characters, and it suggests visual ways in which scenes can be staged. This chapter examines dance references in Much Ado about Nothing and Twelfth Night, focusing on the following dances: measure, cinquepace, galliard, coranto, and passy-measures pavan. Each dance is introduced through a brief review of extant choreographic sources, after which the references are examined in the context of the scene and dramatic situation in which they occur. Finally, approaches to staging the scene are considered, with the aim of making the dance references meaningful to audiences today.

Dancing with the Archive

Historically the appearance of twelve men dressed as satyrs, who are introduced as “having danced before the king” in The Winter’s Tale, have assisted with dating Shakespeare’s play in the same year as Ben Jonson’s masque, Oberon, The Fairy Prince (1611). Stone No More, a devised performance created by the author for the Exeter Northcott Theatre, United Kingdom, took this moment of intertextuality as its inspiration, and, working with what is known of the dances, music, and written texts for the two sources, set out to reimagine the progression from chaos to harmony in both works, considering tensions at the boundaries of reconstruction and adaptation. While an emphasis on historical reconstruction in early dance practice can be read alongside narratives of “authenticity” or “original” practices in Shakespeare, the chapter argues that implementing early dance can invigorate Shakespearean adaptations in an alternative context by refiguring fragments and dancing with the archive.

Haunted by Hamlet

Choreographer William Forsythe did not set out to engage with Hamlet when creating the 2011 work Sider. Instead, Hamlet’s textual rhythms and dramaturgy were first found to be in uncanny resonance with the ensemble’s choreographic research, then elaborated into a robust, multifaceted, yet obscure dramaturgical underpinning. Drawing on the author’s experience as dramaturg to The Forsythe Company, this article discusses Sider’s devising process, danced dramaturgies, and linkages to Shakespeare’s work, showing how Sider’s choreography, mise en scène, and production mode of live direction extend Hamlet’s dramaturgy to its dancers, audience, and director alike. In doing so, the chapter offers both a close look inside the choreographic craft of Forsythe and his ensemble and a striking example of postdramatic engagement with a classic text.

“A Delightful Measure or a Dance”

This chapter considers work created by the Synetic Theater Company in the Washington, DC, area. Since its inception in 2002, Synetic has produced an award-winning series of “physical theater.” Under the co-direction of Paata and Irina Tsikurishvili, both of whom were trained professionally in the Republic of Georgia, Synetic has created over a dozen “wordless” Shakespeare performances that have received numerous awards. They recently remounted their original production, Hamlet: The Rest Is Silence, although they have offered a wide range of successful, though surprisingly diverse, Shakespearean adaptations, including Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, King Lear, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Taming of the Shrew, and Much Ado about Nothing. According to their website, “Synetic” reflects the company’s artistic goal of combining “synthesis,” or the “coming together of distinct elements to form a whole,” and “Kinetic: pertaining to or imparting motion, active, dynamic” to create Synetic: a dynamic synthesis of the arts.” They state their ambition to become “the premier American physical theater . . . fusing dynamic art forms—such as text, drama, movement, acrobatics, dance, and music.” Synetic labels itself as “physical theater,” not as dance, but dance theory provides a relevant framework through which to discuss their creations. This chapter discusses the theoretical and practical implications of presenting Shakespeare through movement and music rather than spoken language.

“The Heaven’s True Figure” or an “Introit to All Kind of Lewdness”?

There are no extant English dancing manuals from the Shakespearean period, but there are abundant printed and manuscript sources that mention dancing. However, these sources convey mixed messages. The theoretical conceptions articulated by dance’s opponents and proponents in the “debate on dance” do not always correspond well with the evidence of customary practices. While early modern religious treatises decry dancing for encouraging illicit sexual liaisons, court records reveal a greater concern with irreverence and disorder than with wantonness. This chapter utilizes both qualitative and quantitative methods to examine a variety of primary sources—from conduct manuals and anti-dance treatises to consistory court depositions. Aggregating archival evidence elucidates general trends that can help scholars assess and contextualize isolated dance references, specific moments of dancing, and the dance scenes and stage directions of Shakespeare’s plays and those of his contemporaries.

“Hildings and Harlots”

On February 9, 1965, the premiere of Kenneth MacMillan’s full-length dance adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to a score by Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev took place at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. This chapter uses the figures of the three harlots in MacMillan’s ballet—characters that do not appear in Shakespeare’s play—to explore the real, practical, and pragmatic business of adaptation. The harlots, typically represented by soloists or first soloists within the ballet companies, appear prominently in the work’s ensemble scenes. As non-Shakespearean characters, they embody the gap between the source-text and MacMillan’s translation. This is a gap worth examining, offering an insight into the creative afterlife of a Shakespearean text and the infidelities that arguably constitute the success of any adaptation.