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 adaptation in
theatre and
performance

elizabethan
and jacobean
reappropriation
in contemporary
british drama
‘upstart crows’
GRAHAM SAUNDERS
Adaptation in Theatre and Performance

Series editors
Vicky Angelaki
Department of Film, Theatre & Television
University of Reading
Reading, UK

Kara Reilly
Department of Drama
University of Exeter
Exeter, UK
The series addresses the various ways in which adaptation boldly takes on
the contemporary context, working to rationalise it in dialogue with the
past and involving the audience in a shared discourse with narratives that
form part of our artistic and literary but also social and historical consti-
tution. We approach this form of representation as a way of responding
and adapting to the conditions, challenges, aspirations and points of ref-
erence at a particular historical moment, fostering a bond between theatre
and society.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14373
 Graham Saunders

Elizabethan
and Jacobean
Reappropriation in
Contemporary British
Drama
‘Upstart Crows’
Graham Saunders
University of Birmingham
Birmingham, UK

Adaptation in Theatre and Performance

ISBN 978-1-137-44452-3 ISBN 978-1-137-44453-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-44453-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940197

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 Preface

A long and venerable tradition has existed in British theatre by which

successive generations of playwrights have come to Shakespeare’s body of
dramatic work with the intention of reclaiming it for their own purposes.
Even before the fiftieth anniversary of the playwright’s death William
D’Avenant, perhaps bolstered by rumours pertaining to his direct blood
lineage, put on early Restoration productions of Hamlet (1661), Macbeth
(1664) and The Tempest (1667) that included alterations. Many of these
involved the excision of politically sensitive language on the question of
regicide and alterations, whereby depiction of kingship in Shakespeare’s
time accorded more harmoniously to the changed realities of royal
authority after the Restoration. The tradition carried on into the eight-
eenth century, most notably with Nahum Tate’s adaptation of King Lear
(1681), that even managed to usurp the Shakespearian original until
well into the nineteenth century. The twentieth century saw the prac-
tice continue with adaptations such as Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise
of Arturo Ui (1941), that not only based itself around the Hollywood
Gangster genre of the 1930s, but also drew extensively upon Richard III
(1591). Later, Absurdist drama also drew upon Shakespeare in plays such
as Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King (1962) and Macbett (1970), while
the borrowings from Shakespeare in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
(1953) and Endgame (1957) have been well documented (Brown 1963;
Kott 1967, 124; Scott 1982; Wilcher 1979).
This study continues by looking at how the development of this
practice took a radical turn after the end of the 1960s. This began with

v
vi Preface

Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), a play

that now sits quietly on exam board syllabi, but at the time irrevocably
changed the way rewriting Shakespeare was understood as a practice.
Whereas formerly, these works had been considered adaptations, fol-
lowing Stoppard, these encounters with Shakespeare and his contem-
poraries took on autonomy as appropriations rather than the subsidiary
status they held before as adaptations. The group of dramatists who
took over the mantle from Stoppard included Edward Bond, Howard
Brenton and David Edgar who wrote from an avowedly political posi-
tion. Here, events such as the escalation of the Vietnam War and civil
rights activism in America and Northern Ireland brought politics directly
onto the streets in Europe, while in Britain legislation came into being
to decriminalize homosexuality, abortion and the end theatre censor-
ship. Taken together, all these factors helped to produce a very differ-
ent breed of playwright after 1968. Their politics embraced the need to
incorporate radical Socialism into mainstream British politics, and their
drama offered ambitious and often chimerical treatments of a Britain
coming to terms with itself as a declining world power in search of a new
identity. This loose group gained the epithet of ‘The New Jacobeans’,
which itself reflected a shared interest in the relationship they identified
between their own work and the drama of Shakespeare and his contem-
poraries. Like Brecht before them, this interest came from similarities in
approach to acting styles, staging conventions and an inherent sense of
metatheatre.
In turn, attitudes and strategies of appropriation by British drama-
tists have changed, and the book seeks to both chart some of these
changes and offer explanations as to why some of these changes might
have occurred. As mentioned, during the 1970s and 1980s Shakespeare
and his contemporaries became incorporated into a wider political pro-
ject that have given rise to a confrontational approach being taken that
deliberately set out to challenge aspects of Shakespeare’s cultural author-
ity, including attitudes in the plays towards race, gender and even tragic
suffering as a panacea for political stasis.
Such rewritings include Arnold Wesker’s objections to the depiction
of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (c1598) that inform his play Shylock
(1976); Elaine Feinstein (and the Women’s Theatre Group) Lear’s
Daughter’s (1987) and Howard Barker’s Seven Lears (1989), plays that
seek to fill the peculiar absence of the Queen in Shakespeare’s King Lear
 Preface vii

(c.1605): Barker also challenges Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware

Women (c1621) for its pessimism and misogyny by writing an alternative
ending in his 1986 version. Bond’s Lear (1971) is also an active rebuke
to Shakespeare’s ending and its passive acceptance of ‘the gored state’
(V.iii, 296), that Bond interprets as a continuation of ‘the old order
which would…certainly replicate the old errors’ (Roberts 1985, p.25).
Remnants of this attitude can still be discerned in recent work such
as David Greig’s Dunsinane (2010), which amongst several aims, chal-
lenges the ideology of Macbeth (c1606), both as the exemplar of Scottish
literature and the harmonious relationship it promotes between England
and Scotland. However, the book identifies a shift in approach that
takes place in the mid-1990s that changes the relationship between
Shakespeare and the contemporary British dramatist from being one of
confrontation to accommodation. The first major example of this accom-
modative process was Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995), a play that incorpo-
rated dramatic motifs and ideas taken directly from Shakespeare’s King
Lear. Yet, unlike appropriations of the 1970s and 1980s (where the
direct relationship between Shakespeare was often announced from the
title onwards) in Blasted, the relationship remains buried, but silently
does much to produce the play’s deeply unsettling effect. By the time
of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (2009), any Shakespearian traces become,
if anything even harder to discern. Yet, I will argue that the play is itself
a contemporary amalgamation and response to the festive comedies As
You Like It (c.1599), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c.1595) and Twelfth
Night (c.1601) as well as borrowings from the Henriad cycle.
Another major approach taken by the dramatists and identified in this
study has been their desire to speculate upon and investigate certain gaps
and silences that they perceive within the classic text, gaps that are hinted
at or inferred, but never made explicit. Many of the rewritings discussed
fall into this category. Elaine Feinstein’s Lear’s Daughters and Howard
Barker’s Seven Lears both focus on the absent Queen in King Lear;
Barker’s ‘new’ ending to his version of Women Beware Women (1986)
arises out of speculation that Thomas Middleton might have appeased
the authorities of his day by providing a conventional moral ending, and
in Gertrude (2002), Barker takes the marginalized figure of the Queen in
Hamlet (c.1601) in a speculative appropriation that like Seven Lears seeks
to explain the reasons for this exclusion.
Above all else this study wants to make case for the importance
of these appropriations of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as works
viii Preface

that stand in their own right. For far too long they have unfairly been
accorded a secondary place to the original sources, and often dismissed
as parasitic for reasons that may possibly be motivated out of feelings
of inferiority or jealously. This attitude has also been tacitly encour-
aged within the field of Adaptation Studies which has all but completely
ignored this significant practice within British playwriting.
I also wish to argue that incorporating material from Shakespeare
and his contemporaries into new work in British drama took an impor-
tant new turn after 1966, breaking away definitively away from work
that might be termed, and more significantly judged as adaptations,
but can more accurately be described as appropriations. Here, I am
indebted to the work of Julie Sanders, who in her book Adaptation and
Appropriation (2006), not only set out for the first time to differenti-
ate the two processes as separate, but makes a case for appropriation
being a far more transformative and politically disruptive act of writing.
In essence this study contends that these plays become appropriative
acts that break from the conservatism that exists in much adaptation of
classical drama by virtue of it wanting to stay within the boundaries of
the original text, whereas the appropriative text deliberately breaks from
concerns over fidelity by ‘talking back’ and challenging the original text.
In this way, these ‘upstart crows’ become separate and valuable works in
their own right.

Birmingham, UK  Graham Saunders

 Acknowledgements

This book has had a long gestation period and parts of it were origi-
nally published in earlier forms and versions. Sections from parts of
chapter three were originally published in the journal Modern Drama as
‘“Missing Mothers and Absent Fathers”: Howard Barker’s Seven Lears
and Elaine Feinstein’s Lear’s Daughters’, 43 (1999) and New Theatre
Quarterly as ‘Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Shakespeare’s King Lear’, 20:1
(2004). This article has also been subsequently reprinted in Drama
Criticism, 31.3 (2008). Chapter four contains material originally pub-
lished as ‘“Monstrous Assaults’: Howard Barker, Erotics, Death and the
Antique Text”, in Karolina Gritzner (ed.) Eroticism and Death in Theatre
and Performance, Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2010.
Parts of chapter six originally appeared in an article ‘Anyone for Venice?
Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Arnold Wesker’s Shylock’, Coup
de Théâtre: Variations Contemporaines Autor de Shylock, no. 28 (2014).
I would like to thank the department of Film, Theatre and Television
at the University of Reading for providing sabbatical leave. I am also
indebted to Dr. Robert Wilcher from the Department of English at
the University of Birmingham, who was integral in shaping my original
approach and thinking about the appropriation of Shakespeare and his
contemporaries by postwar British dramatists.
A note on the text: All quotations from Shakespeare’s plays come
from Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (eds.) William Shakespeare, the
Complete Works (Oxford: OUP, 1988).

ix
 Contents

1 Introduction: Appropriating the Past 1

2 Why Rewrite Shakespeare and His Contemporaries? 25

3 A Host of Lears: Howard Barker’s Seven Lears, Elaine

Feinstein’s Lear’s Daughters, and Sarah Kane’s Blasted 57

4 ‘Love in the Museum’: Howard Barker, the Erotic

and the Elizabethan/Jacobean Text 85

5 ‘If Power Change Purpose’: Appropriation

and the Shakespearian Despot 105

6 Anyone for Venice? Wesker, Marowitz, and Pascal

Appropriate The Merchant of Venice 127

7 Festive Tragedy: Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (2009) 151

Bibliography 177

Index 181

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Appropriating the Past

London, 1948: in one of those curious moments of fate, two youths—

one from north London, the other from the East End—attended a
production of Macbeth at the Bedford Theatre in Camden, with the
Shakespearian actor-manager Donald Wolfit in the title role. The two,
young theatre-goers were Harold Pinter and Edward Bond. Each was
profoundly affected by this early introduction to Shakespeare. For Pinter,
who had previously been to see Wolfit Shakespeares at the People’s Palace
in East London with his teacher Joseph Brearly, the experience helped
persuade him to pursue a career in the theatre; later, as an actor he even
joined Wolfit’s company (Billington 1996, p. 13). For Bond, four years
younger than Pinter, the excursion to see Macbeth was equally significant:

For the first time in my life- I remember this quite distinctly – I met some-
body who was actually talking about my problems, about the life I’d been
living, the political society around me…I knew all these people, they
were in the street or in the newspapers – this in fact was my world. (Bond
1972a, b, p. 13)

This incident is worth recounting because it serves to illustrate the

importance that Shakespeare and his contemporaries have played in the
development of British playwriting since 1945. In his biography The
Life and Work of Harold Pinter (1996), Michael Billington argues that
encounters with the work of Jacobean dramatist John Webster produced
an ‘influence of…chill compression on Pinter’s language and thought

© The Author(s) 2017 1

G. Saunders, Elizabethan and Jacobean Reappropriation
in Contemporary British Drama, Adaptation in Theatre
and Performance, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-44453-0_1
2 G. Saunders

(Billington 1996, p. 13), while a more detailed assessment of Pinter as

a contemporary Jacobean has been made by Michael Scott in his book
Shakespeare and the Modern Dramatist (1989), one of the few single
studies devoted to the subject. However, within the gamut of Pinter
criticism it has been the influence of modernist writers such as Kafka,
Joyce, Eliot, and Beckett who have been more frequently cited than
Shakespeare.
The goal of this study is not so much concerned with mapping direct
or indirect influences that Elizabethan and Jacobean drama have pro-
duced on British post-war dramatists; it seeks to look beyond work that
contains discernible traces of those texts, and instead looks at those
British dramatists who have actively sought to directly engage, challenge,
and question the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
Edward Bond is a case in point. While associated with original work
such as Saved (1965), The Fool (1975), and Restoration (1981), Bond
has also pursued a lifelong interrogation of Elizabethan and Jacobean
theatre. This has ranged from adaptations such as Thomas Middleton’s
A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1966) and John Webster’s The White
Devil (1976), to work such as Lear (1971) which re-examines one of
Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, and Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death
(1973) that confronts myths regarding the figure of Shakespeare himself.
Bond’s critical writings on theatre as well as his published notebooks, let-
ters, and more recently web-presence, have also been an on-going analy-
sis of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy and how our culture recreates his theatre
today.
Bond’s position toward Shakespeare also informs the attitude held by
many of the dramatists included in this study. While acknowledging the
importance of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama for the questions they
asked of their own societies, Bond argues that todaywe would be naive
to ‘accept their political answers although these were vital to their origi-
nal audiences’ (Bond 1994, p. 12). Giving one example, Bond observes
that one of the ways English Renaissance culture understood itself was
through the dramatic convention of using ghosts to create meaning;
however, for a modern audience ‘they become a confusion’ according to
Bond. For us to readily accept the ghost in Hamlet as anything more
than an Elizabethan stage convention becomes a false panacea for the
problems of our own age that are haunted by a different set of concerns
that for Bond include ‘the dead of Belsen… [the] hands of hungry peo-
ple—with our fear of streets’ (Bond 1994, p. 37.) Therefore, when Bond
 1 INTRODUCTION: APPROPRIATING THE PAST 3

uses ghosts in his own plays, as he does in Lear—he ensures they eventu-
ally die (Bond 1994, p. 43).

From Adaptation to Appropriation

Albeit unwittingly, many of the dramatists in this study owe debts to
French post-structuralism: since the 1960s, figures such as Roland
Barthes, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Gérard Genette have
mapped out theoretical pathways that attempt to account for the pro-
cesses that take place when material, taken from canonical texts of the
past, became incorporated within contemporary work: from Barthes
celebrated essay ‘The Death of the Author’ comes the idea of rejecting
the unique primacy of the sequestered text to a relationship based on
intertexts; Foucault’s formulation of the ‘author function’ in his ground
breaking essay ‘What is an Author’ argues that ‘discourses are objects of
appropriation’ (Rabinow 1984, p. 108), while Julia Kristeva has elabo-
rated and refined this existing work into a practice she terms intertex-
tuality, where every literary text can be seen as ‘a permutation of texts’
(Elam 1980, p. 9). Whereas in the past imaginative writing was assumed
to be an unconscious and hermetic act of authorship, what the work of
each of these theorists articulates and draws to our attention are the rela-
tionships that are initiated through the practice of rewriting other texts.
However, the theorist whose ideas come nearest to representing the
relationship that the dramatists in this study enter into with the work
of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is Gérard Genette and his book
Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1997). In his extensive
work, Genette further developed Kristeva’s ideas based around intertex-
tuality to propose a new term, transtextuality, to describe the relation-
ship-conscious or tacit-that the texts shared with one another. Whereas
Kristeva sees intertextuality as a process operating within another text,
Genette sees it as a form of quotation or plagiarism of a work (Genette
1997, p. 2). In that way transtextuality becomes a more pervasive pro-
cess based on ‘a relationship of co-presence between two texts or among
several texts [and] typically the actual presence of one text within
another’ (Genette 1997, pp. 1–2). By this Genette means the relation-
ship between a canonical work (the hypotext) and the text written in
response to it (the hypertext). The title of Genette’s book Palimpsests,
tellingly incorporates architectural imagery within its framework, where
hypotexts have become partially, or even completely subsumed over time
4 G. Saunders

by new structures (hypertexts) created by subsequent acts of rewrit-

ing. In this instance, Genette uses the term architext/architextuality to
describe what he calls ‘the entire set of general transcendent categories–
types of discourse. Modes of enunciation, literary genres–from which
emerges each singular text’ (Genette 1997, 4). Crucially for Genette,
what takes place in the process of transtextuality is that the architectural
structures of the originating hypotext, despite being obscured, can still
always be partially discerned beneath the new textual edifice erected
around them by the contemporary writer. Equally, these past textual
structures can still be glimpsed and interpreted by readers and audi-
ences cognizant with the relational hypotext. This prior familiarity to the
hypotext in turn grants a keener awareness of where to locate and derive
meaning from the interlinking connections that are produced between
the originating hypotext and hypertext. By the same token, non-famili-
arity with these associations renders the hypotext invisible and gives the
impression that the hypertext is an original and independent work. As we
shall see, the dramatist Howard Barker utilizes the same analogy between
the classical text as an architectural structure and seeing his function as
being an archaeologist, exposing the text’s original structures, but in so
doing, releasing its radical potential.
In a similar manner, Alison Forsythe, in what she terms the Dramatic
Rewrite, analyzes and draws comparisons in The Merchant of Venice,
between its architecture and the contemporary reception of classical
texts. She argues that the original structure of Shakespeare’s play has
become irrevocably altered by the Holocaust: ‘Shakespeare’s play has
been transformed into a weather-beaten, battle stormed and desolate
ruin over the centuries, but since the Holocaust it has become decid-
edly uninhabitable and uninviting’. Yet, in her book Gadamer, History
and the Classics: Fugard, Marowitz, Berkoff and Harrison Rewrite the
Theatre, Forsythe adds, ‘it is ruins and not palaces that bear testimony
to the truth’ and that since the Holocaust The Merchant of Venice has
become ‘a powerful literary ruin to explore and excavate (Forsythe 1998,
pp. 112–113). As we shall see in a later chapter, Forsythe, in conjunction
with others, explores two contemporary responses to the play–Charles
Marowitz’s Variations on the Merchant of Venice (1977) and Arnold
Wesker’s Shylock–that each create new texts from the ruins of the old in
acts of reclamation.
The idea of exposing the classical text to such scrutiny has been alluring
for critics working in this area. Alan Sinfield’s chapter “Making Space”:
 1 INTRODUCTION: APPROPRIATING THE PAST 5

Appropriation and Confrontation in Recent British Plays’ in Graham

Holderness’s influential collection The Shakespeare Myth (1988), sees the
process going beyond one of exposure, to the creation of cultural space
within the existing architecture of the Shakespearian text; for some, such
as Edward Bond and Arnold Wesker this is done for political reasons,
while for others such as Howard Barker, it comes more from an interest in
the architecture of the classical text itself.
While the likes of Barthes, Foucault, Kristeva, and Genette have come
a considerable way in producing models that explain the processes of
intertextuality, they have little or nothing to say about why a writer might
consciously want to enter a relationship with canonical hypotexts such as
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, King Lear, or the The Merchant of Venice. Such
questions might be considered an irrelevance by the theorists themselves,
yet for this study the various impulses that compel dramatists to engage
in the task becomes a crucial concern. However, despite the widespread
acceptance of intertextual relationships within the fields of literary and
performance studies, contention remains over the correct terminology to
denote the different forms the practice takes, as well as the question of
cultural value ascribed to the new texts produced as an outcome.
Most commonly, the blanket term adaptation is given to any partial
assimilation of an existing text within any given medium–from film and
plays, to novels, beat music, and video games. The main area of dispute
comes from this broadness of scope and although the field of adaptation
studies has undergone major developments that have attempted to the-
orize and describe the many subtle differences operating within differ-
ent media in recent years, there is still much more work to be done in
the area. It should also be noted that intertextuality as a set of discrete
theories has so far studiously avoided saying anything that either recog-
nizes or takes account of the different creative impulses or strategies that
have led contemporary writers to make use of canonical hypotexts in new
ways.
The term adaptation now dominates as a default for the entire practice
of rewriting itself, and enforced by acolytes who have sought to police
and admonish the introduction of alternative vocabularies that attempt
to identify differences in the practice of assimilating, altering, and trans-
forming classic texts. However, in 2001 Julie Sanders’ book Adaptation
and Appropriation marked an important change in altering this stasis. In
it she confronted a lingering discontent held by those who saw adapta-
tion as a limiting term, yet did not have access to any alternative critical
6 G. Saunders

vocabulary or theoretical approach. In relation to Shakespeare for exam-

ple, Douglas Lanier has called into question adaptation being the default
term for all forms of rewriting (Lanier 2002, pp. 4–5), while Daniel
Fischlin and Mark Fortier have questioned (albeit rather unhelpfully)
that ‘adaptation is not the right name…because there is no right name’
(Fischlin and Fortier 2000, p. 2).
Sanders offers an alternative term, appropriation, along with a substi-
tute vocabulary that gives nuanced meanings to the complex and myriad
practices that operate underneath the canopy of adaptation. That vocab-
ulary takes account of the many subtle distinctions that take place within
the act of rewriting-terms Sanders summarizes as, ‘variation, version,
interpretation, imitation, proximation…conivation, reworking, refashion-
ing, revision, re-evaluation’ (Sanders 2001, p. 3).
Crucially for Sanders, adaptation ‘signals a relationship with an
informing source text or original’, and often does so in a clear and unam-
biguous way, whereas appropriation ‘frequently affects a more decisive
journey away from the informing source into a wholly new cultural prod-
uct or domain’ (Sanders 2001, p. 26). Pascal Niklas and Oliver Linder
criticize Sanders for keeping adaptation and appropriation ‘hygienically
apart’, whereas they believe appropriation should always be considered
as a form of adaptation (Nicklas and Oliver 2012, p. 6). However, it is
directly out of this separation that Sanders is able to make crucial distinc-
tions between the two forms.
This also has a significant impact on the dramatists who form the
subject of this study; if plays such as Bond’s Lear and Barker’s Seven
Lears are appropriations, then they take on an autonomy and higher
status than simply being considered adaptations. Another way of think-
ing about the important implications Sanders suggests is to see the two
as related, yet separate forms-projectiles whose ‘journey’ is determined
by the gravitational pull exerted by their respective classical source
texts. Adaptations are ultimately more earthbound creations, whereas
appropriations have far greater capacity to escape the influence of their
progenitor.
The distinction Sanders draws also has important implications for the
work of the dramatists in this study in relation to the associations that
appropriation makes to questions of ethics and politics (Sanders 2001,
p. 2). The political dimension Sanders provides to appropriation origi-
nally came from its use within the field of post-colonial studies as a way
of challenging dominant cultural norms maintained through literature.
 1 INTRODUCTION: APPROPRIATING THE PAST 7

This featured most prominently in Homi K. Bhabba’s concept of mim-

icry as ‘a mode of representation, that marginalizes the monumentality
of history, quite simply mocks its power to be a model’ (Bhabba 1994, p.
122). For the most part, the appropriations of Shakespeare and his con-
temporaries within this study do not seek to use mockery to destabilize,
but rather choose other means, often by interrogating significant gaps
and absences within canonical texts. In short, appropriation challenges
and subverts, whereas adaptation mostly confirms and confers an already
assumed authority held by the source text.
However, Sanders was not the first to become aware of the inadequa-
cies that adaptation presented as a blanket term. In 1976, Ruby Cohn’s
Modern Shakespeare Offshoots became the first major study to look at
the practice of Shakespearian adaptation by contemporary dramatists.
Yet, the title of the book uses a horticultural term that immediately
assumes a subordinate relationship between the adapted text to its clas-
sical host. This same analogy is also later used by Genette in Palimpsests,
who describes hypertexts as ‘grafts’, material that both ‘imitates and
transforms’ its parent hypotext (Genette 1997, p. 21). Fortier and
Fischlin also find Cohn’s use of the term ‘offshoot’ unhelpful, in that
Shakespeare’s plays could also be considered the same due to their own
extensive borrowings (Fischlin and Fortier 2000, p. 3). Genette’s use of
the term ‘graft’ however, does provides a possible alternative as it implic-
itly assumes an autonomy, distinguishing the hypertext from its hypotext,
while still acknowledging a mutual relationship.
Cohn also considers another phrase, ‘transformations’, to describe a
textual practice involving Shakespeare, where new beginnings and end-
ings may be added and non-Shakespearian characters introduced. In
her 1994 book Talking Back to Shakespeare, Martha Rozzett Tuck uses
the same terminology, although she distinguishes between ‘transfor-
mation’ and ‘offshoot’, seeing the latter as less directly connected to
the Shakespearian text, and therefore ‘frequently makes no attempt to
employ or rework the structure of events in the Shakespeare play’ (Tuck
1994, p. 9). In this instance she gives the example of Brecht’s Round
Heads and Pointed Heads (1936) as an offshoot of Shakespeare’s
Measure for Measure (c1604). By contrast, ‘transformations’ come under
the wider ambit of appropriation which Tuck approvingly sees as a differ-
ent process, one that involves ‘dismantling, rearranging, sometimes frac-
turing the text, sometimes adding to or updating, parodying or inverting
8 G. Saunders

it and then reassembling it into a recognizable re-imagining of the play

as we know it’ (Tuck 1994, p. 8).
Elsewhere, critics have also argued for appropriation as a preferable
term due to it being able to produce the same significant changes to the
reception of classical texts that Tuck outlines. For example, Klaus Peter
Müller argues that at its best, appropriation creates a form of drama
in which ‘the world is looked at, and from a new angle; the vision has
changed and a specific culture is transformed by the new perspective.
Another cultural text has been created’ (Müller 1997, p. 30).
Forsythe’s work in the area has already been mentioned. She is less
interested in the terminology of appropriation, and concentrates instead
on how such processes might operate. She draws upon the work of Hans
Georg Gadamer in hermeneutics and history as a source of truth; for
Gadamer, the classical text, (or Eminent Text as he terms it) is in pos-
session of a potent ability to generate a strong interpretative value owing
to the status it has accrued over the ages. Forsythe argues that para-
doxically it is this very antiquity that far from removing them from the
present gives such texts properties by which they become ‘more deeply
enmeshed and complicit with the everyday world which we inhabit’
(Forsythe 1998, p. 5).
Consequently, when contemporary dramatists make use of such
texts, they are able to exploit that power. Forsythe calls such works
‘the Dramatic Rewrite’, and sees them exhibiting a quality ‘which nei-
ther affirms or refutes the classic’s status, but rather harnesses its cultural
cachet to provide the intratextual foundation between its production,
“classic” status and current reception for its own dramaturgy’ (Forsythe
1998, p. 19). While this might sound similar to the process of appro-
priation, Forsythe considers the Dramatic Rewrite entirely ‘distinct from
other artists’ negotiation with earlier works of art such as parody, appro-
priation, allegory, montage and pastiche’ (Forsythe 1998, p. xiii). For
Forysthe, the crucial difference comes out of a new and reciprocal trans-
historical dialogue between the classical text and the new work, one that
moves back and forth simultaneously between the past and present, and
one that ‘creatively mediates with the past and present, with knowledge
gathered through the force of transition (Enfahrung) and the immediacy
of transition (Enlebris), to perform new understandings (Forsythe 1998,
p. xiii). This is achieved primarily through the status of the classical text’s
canonicity, one that the Dramatic Rewrite exploits through ‘the clas-
sic’s imbrication with dominant ideology that contributes towards and
 1 INTRODUCTION: APPROPRIATING THE PAST 9

facilitates a new and potentially radical aesthetic experience in the pre-

sent’ (Forsythe 1998, p. 19).
Therefore, a play such as David Greig’s Dunsinane can incorporate
elements from Shakespeare’s Macbeth and at the same time negotiate
between medieval Scotland and recent military conflicts in Afghanistan
and Iraq. As we shall see in a later chapter, Greig also makes use of
Macbeth for the political resonances it can create with the present, but
for Forsythe this belongs to the realm of appropriation rather than the
Dramatic Rewrite. Here she makes the distinction between, ‘The politi-
cal determinism of…appropriation’, which in Forsythe’s view is ‘moti-
vated by deterministically utilising the cultural cachet and kudos of
Shakespeare for…political concerns’. By contrast, the Dramatic Rewrite
‘is neither politically determined, oppositional or decorative; rather it is
the residue of an historically effected consciousness of our transition for
the present’ (Forsythe 1998, p. 100).
As we shall see, Gadamer’s ideas share some notable similarities with
Howard Barker’s response to classical texts. The negotiation between
past and present that Forsythe identifies also chimes with Chantal
Zabus’s critical position, who in the introduction to her edited volume
of essays Tempests After Shakespeare (2002), which looks at the ways the
play has been appropriated within a variety of media, concludes that
appropriation is an ever developing and expansive practice that is con-
tinually relevant (Zabus 2002, p. 4). Writing elsewhere in the same
volume on The Tempest and its relationship with Gloria Naylor’s novel
Mama Day (1988), James Andreas also considers the act of appropria-
tion to be one of continual expansion that beneficially ends up compli-
cating its ur-text (Andreas 1999, p. 107). Martha Rozzett Tuck, who has
already been mentioned in relation to calling such texts ‘transformations’
also sees these processes collectively belonging to the wider practice of
appropriation in that they possess ‘the cultural and critical authority as
the originating premise for a new imaginative construct’ (Tuck 1994, p.
5). What all these interpretations have in common are a shared consensus
that irrevocable changes are created once a classical source text under-
goes appropriation; a relationship that Rabey in his discussion of Howard
Barker’s response toward Shakespeare’s work describes as ‘making a new
argument from old matter’ (Rabey 2006, p. 23).
In addition to demonstrating a capability for expanding and trans-
forming canonical texts, the plays within this study frequently seek
to expose and fill intriguing gaps within the architecture of the classic
10 G. Saunders

text. Sanders acknowledges this to be another important functional

tool of appropriation, one that operates in what she calls ‘a process of
reading between the lines, offering analogies to the source text, draw-
ing attention to its gaps and absences’ (Sanders 2001, p. 60). Yet, writ-
ing a decade earlier, these same missing and obscured elements had
been identified in Susan Bennett’s Performing Nostalgia (1996), where
she identifies the process of appropriation in phrases such as ‘symbiotic
relationship’ (Bennett 1996, p. 2) and ‘citation of the past’ (Bennett
1996, p. 22). Yet, like Sanders, Bennett shares a recognition of its radi-
cal agenda by its ability to interrogate gaps and expose what she calls
‘hegemonic authenticity’ (Bennett 1999, p. 47) within classical texts-
properties that not only stabilize and give cultural authority, but also
paradoxically render those texts anodyne and neutered in the present.
Examples of such interrogative appropriation include Howard Barker’s
Gertrude, a play that Sean Carney, in his important study of contempo-
rary tragedy, believes comes from a recognition that in Hamlet ‘there is
already a catastrophic tragedy within the play waiting to be excavated’
(Carney 2013, p. 109). For Bennett, such appropriations potentially
become ways through which a ‘contestation of cultural power’ can come
about, beyond ‘the containing processes of the apparatus’ (Bennett
1999, p. 48) that canon formation can endow, but also a conduit by
which the contemporary dramatist can enter ‘a tense yet sometimes gen-
erative relation[ship] to their ur-text’ (Bennett 1999, p. 48).
Howard Barker, speaking through the voice of his pseudo-biogra-
pher Eduardo Houth in A Style and its Origins (2007) encapsulates his
own methodology in a short poem, posing the question: ‘Have you
an eye for the cracks? Some have’ (Barker and Houth 2007, p. 116).
Jonathan Dollimore, writing about Barker’s (1986) appropriation of
Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women calls it ‘creative vandalism’
(Dollimore 1986). Alan Sinfield, in his book Faultlines (1992), while
not making direct reference to Barker’s work, refers to Dollilmore’s term
as a process of ‘blatantly reworking the authoritative text so that it is
forced to yield, against the grain, explicitly oppositional kinds of under-
standing’ (Sinfield 1992, p. 22). In Barker’s case, those acts of ‘creative
vandalism’ have included the rewriting of the final act of Women Beware
Women, that assumes Middleton was forced to add a conventional moral
ending following the deaths of characters driven by their sexual desires.
Elsewhere in Seven Lears, Barker gives us a prequel to King Lear, and,
 1 INTRODUCTION: APPROPRIATING THE PAST 11

the aforementioned Gertrude speculates and reenvisages among other

things, on the murder of Hamlet’s father.
Yet, as we shall see, it would be wrong to assume that anything like
a consensus exists in regard to the value of Barker’s appropriations, or
whether the term appropriation is fully recognized or acknowledged as
a legitimate term. Barbara Hodgon is correct when she comments that
adaptation and appropriation are ‘two extremely slippery labels’ (Massai
2005, p. 157), and as has already been discussed, Alison Forysthe sees
appropriation as just another form of parody. Yet even here she recog-
nizes that such ‘parodic and appropriative art can easily represent aes-
thetic means for concerted ideological ends’ (Forsythe 1998, p. 56).
The lack of consensus over terminology was brought into even
sharper focus, when in the same year as Sanders’s Adaptation and
Appropriation, Linda Hutcheon’s highly influential A Theory of
Adaptation was also published. In it, Hutcheon rejects appropriation
as being either a distinctive or independent practice (Hutcheon 2006,
p. 8), and instead continues to embrace adaptation as a catch-all term
for all forms of rewriting (Hutcheon 2006, p. 15). Such an approach
is both a virtue and a limitation: applying a theoretical perspective that
can account for all adaptive practice is both fresh and clear-sighted, and
undeniably breaks new ground on the subject. However, for the pur-
poses of this study the failure to recognize appropriation as being an
associated but quite separate practice is highly problematic; moreover,
Hutcheon’s insistence on the continuation of an already entrenched con-
sensus on the subject is in the end, limiting. In this respect, Hutcheon’s
understanding of adaptation has barely evolved since 2000 when Mark
Fortier and Daniel Fischlin defined the term in their anthology of
Shakespearian rewritings:

Writ large, adaptation includes almost any act of alteration performed

upon specific cultural works of the past and dovetails with a general pro-
cess of cultural recreation…works which, through verbal and theatrical
devices, radically alter the shape and significance of another work so as to
invoke that work and yet be different from it – so that any adaptation is,
and is not, Shakespeare. (Fischlin and Fortier 2000, p. 4)

Douglas Lanier, writing two years later, while recognizing that appro-
priation in relation to Shakespeare’s texts exists as a term in its own
right, interprets it simply as ‘Shakespeare moved from one cultural
12 G. Saunders

realm or interpretative frame to another’, so designating the process at

less than one remove from adaptation whereby ‘the context in which
Shakespeare’s words appear [but] without changing the words them-
selves’ (Lanier 2002, p. 5).
While the impact of Hutcheon’s work is undeniable, it has strength-
ened the association of adaptation being synonymous with the act of
rewriting; in so doing, this has inadvertently resulted in a closer policing
of what belongs and what is excluded from an understanding of the prac-
tice. An example is work understood as prequels (Hutcheon 2006, p. 9)
such as Barker’s Seven Lears and Gertrude or Steven Berkoff’s The Secret
Love Life of Ophelia (2001), that concern themselves with characters
from King Lear and Hamlet prior to their legitimation through textual
inscription in Shakespeare. Hutcheon’s disapproval of what she considers
unauthorized works is puzzling when one considers that those works not
only readily subscribe to Genette’s terms metatextuality and transmoti-
vaization, but he defends the prequel as a legitimate form of rewriting
past texts. In the former, Genette argues that some hypertexts can pro-
vide a commentary on the other ‘without necessarily citing it’ (Genette
1997, p. 4), while transmotivization in hypertexts such as prequels is a
given opportunity for a writer to ascribe motivation to characters that are
missing or silent within the hypotext.
As mentioned previously, this study takes as its cue the emphasis that
Sanders places on the political and the ethical through appropriation as
the main point of entry for most of the dramatists included. Furthermore,
Sanders’ observation about the embeddedness of appropriation (Sanders
2001, p. 2), of how the original text can be displaced by the new one,
is also a crucial difference from previous understandings of adaptation.
Lanier, speaking in relation to Shakespeare defines adaptations (which
he also calls transpositions), as works where ‘only minor particularities of
setting, idiom, plot or character have been altered and that the essence
of the original remains intact’ (Lanier 2002, p. 4). Sanders gives exam-
ples of pairings in drama where only a residual relationship between
hypotext and hypertext exist. Those include Alan Ayckborn’s A Chorus
of Disapproval (1984) with John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728); and
Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good (1988) with George
Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706) (Sanders 2001, pp. 27–32).
The same degree of estrangement can be found in Howard Barker’s
Gertrude, where despite the reference to Hamlet in its title, the nam-
ing of three of its central characters and the opening scene that includes
 1 INTRODUCTION: APPROPRIATING THE PAST 13

a startling re-enactment of the murder of Old Hamlet, the play subse-

quently quickly distances itself from Hamlet.
This uncoupling also becomes a significant historical feature of appro-
priation itself. Whereas the 1970s and 1980s witnessed plays such Bond’s
Lear and Brenton’s Measure for Measure as dramas that deliberately pro-
claimed their appropriated status to Shakespeare, a change took place
from the mid 1990s onward, where plays such as Sarah Kane’s Blasted,
David Greig’s Dunsinane, and Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem become
more clandestine, more assimilative and far less wedded to what Sanders
calls the ‘posture of critique, even assault’(Sanders 2001, p. 4) that previ-
ous appropriations had set out to do. Work from the 1990s onward also
tended to avoid mounting challenges to Shakespeare’s cultural authority,
as opposed to their predecessors.

Against Appropriation
Ever since the inception of the term appropriation, a countervailing
resistance and scepticism has been mounted against it. Even a cultural
materialist such as Alan Sinfield, who was among the first to seriously
consider Shakespeare’s appropriation by post-war British dramatists takes
on an uncharacteristically conservative tone in describing Stoppard’s
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (R&GAD) and Bond’s Lear as
adaptations to indicate their lesser status, and loftily dismisses any claims
for them being autonomous works: rather, they become signposts that
serve only to ‘point back to Shakespeare as the profound and inclusive
originator in whose margins we can doodle only parasitic follies’ (Sinfield
1985, p. 179). It is not hard to imagine the same sentiments being
expressed by A.C. Bradley or M.C. Bradbrook.
Howard Barker has provided a stinging reply to such views when
he says, ‘Shakespeare never thought up a story in his life; in this I am
vastly his superior’ (Brown 2011, p. 167), and which the critic David
Kilpatrick, writing about Barker’s Gertrude—The Cry in relation to
Hamlet considers to be ‘on a comparative and level par, bearing out a
new relation to the myth’ (Kilpatrick 2003, p. 147). It is perhaps a tacit
recognition of that power to subvert that lies at the nub of why appro-
priation is treated by some as a pejorative term. For example, Fischlin
and Fortier associate it with constituting ‘a hostile takeover, a seizure of
authority over the original in a way that appeals to contemporary sen-
sibilities steeped in a politicized understanding of culture’ (Fischlin and
14 G. Saunders

Fortier 2000, p. 3). It is interesting to note that it is the taint of radical

politics that Fischlin and Fortier find discomforting. Paul J.C.M. Frassen
expresses those concerns more bluntly in his understanding of appropria-
tion as ‘a kind of adaptation whose author has an ideological ax to grind
with his predecessor’, in which ideological issues are foregrounded in the
original text, so enabling the contemporary dramatist to ‘“talk back” to
Shakespeare’ (Franssen 2010, p. 246). Desmet and Sawyer see the act
of appropriation a bit differently, as an act that incorporates both a theft
and a diversion of resources at the same time. They refer to this double-
edged relationship as, ‘something happens when Shakespeare is appropri-
ated and both the subject (author) and object (Shakespeare) are changed
in the process’ (Desmet and Sawyer 1999, p. 1).
As will be discussed in the next chapter, anxieties about appropriation
eroding the cultural authority shored up in the body of Shakespeare’s
work has often expressed itself in the form of mockery or outright hostil-
ity, with appropriation frequently dismissed as a presumptuous practice.
By contrast, the attitude taken to adaptation is a respectful one-it knows
its place, and doing so is almost always apolitical in its stance, naturally
subscribing to and often reflecting the same ideological position already
taken in the source text. As such, it is no great surprise that adaptations
are not only tolerated, but actively welcomed by the cultural guardians
of Shakespeare as flattering confirmation of his continuity, authority,
and permanence. By contrast appropriation, through its compulsion to
‘talk…back to Shakespeare’ (Desmet and Sawyer 1999, p. 11) presents a
far more troubling and unstable relationship.
Despite breakthroughs in the recognition of appropriation as a sepa-
rate process from adaptation, little attention has been drawn to how
the practice has developed in post-war British drama. Major critical
work on the subject (Marsden 1991; Desmet and Sawyer 1995; Novy
1999; Fischlin and Fortier 2000; Sanders 2001; Zabus 2002) all con-
centrate almost exclusively on the appropriation of Shakespeare within
the medium of the novel and film. This exclusion within Adaptation
Studies—such as the gaps and absences that Howard Barker interrogates
in his excavations of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama—are in them-
selves highly revealing. Considering the long-established relationship of
appropriation between Shakespeare and British dramatists since 1966,
it is surprising to find just two single studies on the subject—the afore-
mentioned Modern Shakespeare Offshoots by Ruby Cohn, and Michael
Scott’s Shakespeare and the Modern Dramatist. Even within the three
 1 INTRODUCTION: APPROPRIATING THE PAST 15

major existing works that seriously consider appropriation as a legitimate

form-Sanders’s Adaptation and Appropriation, Desmet and Sawyer’s
edited collection Shakespeare and Appropriation, and Marianne Novy’s
two edited collections on the subject-with the exception of some cursory
mentions of Stoppard’s R&GAD (Sanders 2001, pp. 55–57) (Desmet
and Sawyer 1999, pp. 1–2), none of these studies acknowledge appropri-
ations of Shakespeare and his contemporaries by any other contemporary
British dramatist.
The failure also extends beyond the critical arena and includes works
such as John Gross’s anthology After Shakespeare: Writing Inspired by the
World’s Greatest Author (2003). While it includes appropriations such as
Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, and Ionesco’s Macbett, once
again its treatment of post 1960s British dramatists–sparing a cursory
extract from Edward Bond’s Bingo, Stoppard’s Dogg’s Hamlet (1979),
and the obligatory R&GAD–is again effectively ignored.
Allied to this critical neglect, many of the dramatists in this study have
frequently been forced to defend themselves against attacks by hostile
critics, who regard their plays as arrogant and insolent affronts, or at
best parasitic and insipid forms of imitation. Even Stoppard’s R&GAD,
generally regarded by many as a popular modern classic, has not been
immune from criticism over the ethicacy of its relationship, not only to
Shakespeare, but also to other modern canonical texts. For example,
Arnold Hinchcliffe comments:

It opened in 1967 to great acclaim not merely by the public but also by
critics…what remains then, is, to what purpose and how well and the
answer must be to little purpose and no more than competently…What we
see is a clever author manipulating rather than exploring a parasitic feed-
ing off Shakespeare, Pirandello and Beckett and however ingenious the
idea, the over-long execution is relentlessly familiar. (Hinchcliffe 1974, pp.
141–142)

This analogy of the appropriated text feeding upon its host is a common
criticism, but it is worth noting that Genette rejects the idea that hyper-
texts are somehow dependent on their hypotext. In fact, he concludes
that, like a parent or child each, are simultaneously bonded yet inde-
pendent from each other: ‘Every hypertext, even a pastiche, can be read
for itself…it is invested in meaning that is autonomous and thus in some
manner sufficient’ (Genette 1997, p. 397).
16 G. Saunders

While Genette’s assertion could be used as a counter-argument

against such criticisms, ironically, many of the dramatists in this study
aim also to deliberately establish what could be seen as a parasitic rela-
tionship to Shakespeare and his work. For example, when one considers
Bond’s Lear, it is striking that, apart from its title, just how little mate-
rial comes directly from Shakespeare. To Sean Carney’s description of
Bond’s methodology being one of ‘refashioning, refining and purifying’
(Carney 2013, p. 219), could also be added extraction, for while the
punishment of blinding (imposed in this case on Lear) and the reten-
tion of two (rather than three) daughters, together with the non-familial
character of Cordelia means that there is very little that directly connects
Lear to King Lear.
Powerful advocates against such criticisms also exist, who consider
these appropriations as independent entities, albeit indirectly related to
their source material. A measure of this independence can also be dis-
cerned by their standing within the contemporary theatrical canon.
Robert Wilcher for instance, believes that Arnold Wesker’s Shylock ‘is
much more than an adaptation of The Merchant of Venice. It is a wholly
independent work of art’ (Wilcher 1991, p. 119). Wesker himself consid-
ered the play to be ‘a coming together of everything I’ve been trying to
do up to now—the nearest I’ll get to writing a masterpiece’ (Leeming,
1977, p. 5). Similarly, Perry Nodelman considers Bond’s Lear to be ‘a
tragedy that makes as much sense for our time as Shakespeare’s did for
his’ (Nodelman 1980, 275), while Tony Coult believes it to be a work
that ‘summons up Shakespeare’s play, yet exists entirely free of it as an
autonomous piece of work’ (Coult 1977, p. 18).

Harold Bloom and the Anxiety of Influence

Artistic reputation and the recognition of originality, within the bound-
aries of appropriation also haunt Harold Bloom’s 1973 The Anxiety
of Influence. While contested today on several fronts, Bloom’s study
became influential in critical thinking for many years, and the implica-
tions it throws up regarding the practice of appropriation are still use-
ful. Bloom puts forward a theory that Romantic poetry was produced
through a series of creative tensions between figures such as Keats,
Shelly, and their literary predecessors. Couched in the language of
Freudian psychoanalysis, Shakespeare functions as a kind of father poet,
or as Bloom terms it, a precursor, with the contemporary writer cast in
 1 INTRODUCTION: APPROPRIATING THE PAST 17

the role of an offspring, or ephebe. In some ways, this view of literary

production is not new, and owes an unacknowledged debt to another
famous work of criticism, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929):

For masterpieces are not single and solitary births…Without…forerunners,

Jane Austen and the Brontë’s and George Eliot could no more have writ-
ten than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe
without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the
ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. (Woolf 1929, p. 98)

Bloom’s ideas were also influenced, at least in part, by T.S. Eliot’s essay
‘Tradition and The Individual Talent’ (1919). Whereas Bloom uses a
Freudian model as the motivation for poets to produce new works, Eliot
believes that it is literary tradition alone, rather than Oedipal driven anxi-
eties that motivate the process: ‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his
complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appre-
ciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists (Eliot 1975, p. 80).
Unlike Woolf however, Bloom does not see Shakespeare in thrall to
any literary predecessor, having somehow miraculously achieved what
he calls ‘the complete absorption of precursor (Bloom 1997, p. 31). For
Bloom, great writers ‘wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the
death’ (Bloom 1997, p. 5), and where regardless of gender, the ephebe
poet is destined to play out this oedipal struggle in an attempt to free
himself from the precursor’s influence. Few, if any, succeed and instead
Bloom talks of ‘weaker talents [who] idealize’, including presumably
many of the dramatists included in this study who are referred to as ‘fig-
ures of capable imagination [who] appropriate for themselves’ (Bloom
1997, p. 5). Whatever the true situation, a mixture of admiration and
resentment prevails as the contemporary writer attempts to establish for
themselves an individual voice in the literary pantheon.
Although now much discredited, not least for its entirely masculin-
ist view of literary history, examples can be seen where that struggle
is played out, and where the powerful influence of a precursor such as
Shakespeare has made the act of appropriation difficult. For example,
in an early diary entry during the writing of Shylock, Arnold Wesker
confesses:

What lunacy to take on Shakespeare…Ideally I want to make the first act

ninety minutes and the second seventy-five minutes long. That’s not too
18 G. Saunders

long for a work that aspires to sit beside the Master’s. No, not sit beside,
more as an appendage to. The fear remains, however, the panicky feeling
lurks constantly. The play is too facile! The language can’t make up its
mind whether to be fifteenth or twentieth century, prose or iambic pen-
tameter. Shakespearean rhythms creep in. The imagery is impoverished,
non-existent…so many fears. (Wesker 1997, pp. 4–5)

Fortunately, the diary entry for the following day is more optimistic:
‘I’m absolutely convinced that once the play is performed it will creep
out from the shadow of WS [William Shakespeare], take on its own life,
speak with its own voice.’ (Wesker 1997, pp. 6–7).
Bloom’s Freudian reading of poetic influence is still also appar-
ent in the verdicts of several critics who discuss appropriation of clas-
sic texts. For example, Martha Tuck has likened the process to ‘an
assertive adolescent, visibly and volubly talking back to the parent in
iconoclastic, outrageous, yet intensely serious ways’ (Tuck 1994, p.
5). Myung-soo Hur’s comparison between Stoppard’s R&GAD and
Shakespeare’s Hamlet also concludes that the former fails to ‘shed any
new light on the original’s artistry nor honour the spirit or the lan-
guage of the original. Instead, it was a product of Stoppard’s attempts to
defend his creativity against his great literary Father figure’ (Hurr 1992,
p. 785).

Postmodernism and the Parodic

One other significant reason that negative criticism frequently bedev-
ils the practice of appropriation comes, ironically, via another form of
textual appropriation: namely critical theory. Despite the seriousness
of the endeavour, much of the reason why the practice has not been
taken wholly seriously by mainstream criticism is that individuals such as
Genette have taken most of their literary examples from so-called minor
genres. In Palimpsests, the case-studies that especially interest Genette
are drawn from what he calls ‘certain canonical (although minor) gen-
res such as pastiche, parody, travesty’ (Genette 1997, p. 8) rather than
traditionally regarded serious forms such as tragedy, or political writ-
ing. In turn, this branch of critical theory has itself been appropriated or
assimilated under the even broader discourse of postmodernism, where
the term appropriation itself became synonymous with a mischievous
sense of playfulness or ironic and detached quotation. The main culprit,
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showed a slight prominence over the position of the first or second
lumbar vertebra. The spot was painful on pressure, and had been so
ever since the attack of whooping cough three years before. A tap on
the sole of either foot made her complain of severe pain in the back.
The same result followed pressure on the head. The patient was
unable to stand or walk, but occasionally sat up for a short time,
although suffering all the time. There was no muscular rigidity. The
limbs and body were quite thin, but, so far as could be detected, she
had no loss of motor or sensory power. At times, when the pains
were worse, the arms would be flexed involuntarily, and she stated
that once the spine was drawn back and a little sideways. The pain
in the hips was augmented by pressure. During the application of a
plaster bandage she had a sort of fit and fainted, and the application
was suspended. She soon recovered consciousness, but refused to
allow the completion of the dressing. I diagnosticated the affection as
largely hysterical, and a few months later received word that the
patient was on her feet and well.

Kemper109 relates the case of a lady who eventually died of sarcoma

of the vertebræ, the specimens having been examined by J. H. C.
Simes of Philadelphia and myself. She was supposed at first and for
some time to be a case of hysteria with spinal irritation. In the case
of a distinguished naval officer, who died of malignant vertebral
disease after great suffering a short time since, this same mistake
was made during the early stages of the disease: his case was
pronounced to be one of neurasthenia, hysteria, etc. before its true
nature was finally discovered. The absence of muscular rigidity in the
back and extremities is the strongest point against vertebral disease
in these cases.
109 Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, vol. xii., No. 1, January, 1885.

In hysterical hemianæsthesia, ovarian hyperæsthesia, hystero-

epileptic seizures, ischuria, and other well-known hysterical
symptoms have usually been observed. The anæsthesia in
hysterical cases is most commonly on the left side of the body, but it
may happen to be so located in an organic case, so that this point is
only one of slight value.

Some older observers, as Briquet, who is quoted and criticised by

Charcot, believed that hemianæsthesia from encephalic lesions
differed from hysterical hemianæsthesia by the fact that in the former
case the skin of the face did not participate in the insensibility, or that
when it existed it never occupied the same side as the insensibility of
the limbs. Recently-reported cases have disproved the accuracy of
this supposed diagnostic mark. In his lectures, delivered ten years
ago, Charcot observed that up to that period anæsthesia of general
sensibility alone appeared to have been observed as a consecutive
on an alteration of the cerebral hemispheres, so that obtunding of
the special senses would remain as a distinctive characteristic of
hysterical hemianæsthesia. He, however, expected that cases of
cerebral organic origin would be reported of complete
hemianæsthesia, with derangements of the special senses, such as
is presented in hysteria. His anticipations have been fulfilled. In the
nervous wards of the Philadelphia Hospital is now a typical case of
organic hemianæsthesia in which the special senses are partially
involved.

Paralysis and contractures, if present, are apt to be accompanied in

cases of organic hemianæsthesia, after time has elapsed, by marked
nutritive changes, by wasting of muscle, and even of skin and bone.
This is not the case in hysteria.

The subsequent history of these two conditions is different. The

hysterical patient will often recover and relapse, or under proper
treatment may entirely recover; while all the treatment that can be
given in a case of organic hemianæsthesia will produce no decided
improvement, for there is a lesion in the brain which will remain for
ever. Hemianopsia, so far as I know, has not been observed in
hysterical hemianæsthesia.

In the monograph of Shaffer, with reference to both true and false

knee-joint affections certain conclusions are drawn which I will give
somewhat condensed:

Chronic synovitis produces very few if any subjective symptoms;

hysterical imitation presents a long train of both subjective and
objective symptoms and signs, the former in excess. Chronic ostitis
may be diagnosticated if muscular spasm cannot be overcome by
persistent effort; when the spasm does not vary night nor day; when
it is not affected by the ordinary doses of opium or chloral; when
reaction of the muscles to the faradic current is much reduced; when
a local and uniform rise of temperature over the affected articulation
is present; when purely involuntary neural symptoms, such as
muscular spasm, pain, and a cry of distress, are present. Hysterical
knee-joint is present, according to this author, when the muscular
rigidity or contracture is variable, and can be overcome by mildly
persistent efforts while the patient's mind is diverted, or which yields
to natural sleep, or which wholly disappears under the usual doses
of opium or chloral; when the faradic response is normal; when rise
of temperature is absent or a reduced temperature is present over
the joint; when variable and inconstant, emotional, and semi-
voluntary manifestations are present.

To recognize the neuromimesis of hip disease Shaffer gives the

following points: The limp is variable and suggests fatigue; it is much
better after rest; it almost invariably follows the pain. Pain of a
hyperæsthetic character is usually the first symptom, and it is found
most generally in the immediate region of the joint. “In place of an
apprehensive state in response to the tests applied will be found a
series of symptoms which are erratic and inconstant. A condition of
muscular rigidity often exists, but, unlike a true muscular spasm, it
can in most cases be overcome in the manner before stated. A very
perceptible degree of atrophy may exist—such, however, as would
arise from inertia only. A normal electrical contractility exists in all the
muscles of the thigh.”

In the neuromimesis of chronic spondylitis or hysterical spine the

pain is generally superficial, and is almost always located over or
near the spinous processes; it is sometimes transient, and frequently
changes its location from time to time; a normal degree of mobility of
the spinal column under properly directed manipulation is preserved;
the nocturnal cry and apprehensive expression of Pott's disease are
wanting.

With reference to the hysterical lateral curvature, Shaffer, quoting

Paget, says “ether or chloroform will help. You can straighten the
mimic contracture when the muscles cannot act; you cannot so
straighten a real curvature.”

In the diagnosis of local hysterical affections one point emphasized

by Skey is well worthy of consideration; and that is that local forms of
hysteria are often not seen because they are not looked for. “If,” says
he, “you will so focus your mental vision and endeavor to distinguish
the minute texture of your cases, and look into and not at them, you
will acknowledge the truth of the description, and you will adopt a
sound principle of treatment that meets disease face to face with a
direct instead of an oblique force.” According to Paget, the means for
diagnosis in these cases to be sought—(1) in what may be regarded
as the predisposition, the general condition of the nervous system,
on which, as in a predisposing constitution, the nervous mimicry of
disease is founded; (2) in the events by which, as by exciting
causes, the mimicry may be evoked and localized; (3) in the local
symptoms in each case.

Local symptoms as a means of diagnosis can sometimes be made

use of in general hysteria. A case may present symptoms of either
the gravest form of organic nervous disease or the gravest form of
hysteria, and be for a time in doubt, when suddenly some special
local manifestation appears which cannot be other than hysterical,
and which clinches the diagnosis. In a case with profound
anæsthesia, with paraplegia and marked contractures, with recurring
spasms of frightful character, the sudden appearance of aphonia and
apsithyria at once cleared all remaining doubt. Herbert Page
mentions the case of a man who suffered from marked paraplegia
and extreme emotional disturbance after a railway collision, who,
nine months after the accident, had an attack of aphonia brought on
suddenly by hearing of the death of a friend. He eventually
recovered.

To detect hysterical or simulated blindness the methods described by

Harlan are those adopted in my own practice. When the blindness is
in both eyes, optical tests cannot be applied. Harlan suggests
etherization.110 In a case of deception, conscious or unconscious, he
says, “as the effect of the anæsthetic passed off the patient would
probably recover the power of vision before his consciousness was
sufficiently restored to enable him to resume the deception.”
Hutchinson cured a case of deaf-dumbness by means of
etherization. For simulated monocular blindness Graefe's prism-test
may be used: “If a prism held before the eye in which sight is
admitted causes double vision, or when its axis is held horizontally a
corrective squint, vision with both eyes is rendered certain.” It should
be borne in mind that the failure to produce double images is not
positive proof of monocular blindness, for it is possible that the
person may see with either eye separately, but not enjoy binocular
vision, as in a case of squint, however slight. Instead of using a
prism while the patient is reading with both eyes at an ordinary
distance, say of fourteen or sixteen inches, on some pretext slip a
glass of high focus in front of the eye said to be sound. If the reading
is continued without change, of course the amaurosis is not real.
Other tests have been recommended, but these can usually be
made available.
110 Loc. cit.

The diagnosis of hysterical, simulated, or mimetic deafness is more

difficult than that of blindness. When the deafness is bilateral, the
difficulty is greater than when unilateral. The method by etherization
just referred to might be tried. Politzer in his work on diseases of the
ear111 makes the following suggestions: Whether the patient can be
wakened out of sleep by a moderately loud call seems to be the
surest experiment. But, as in total deafness motor reflexes may be
elicited by the concussion of loud sounds, care must be taken not to
go too near the person concerned and not to call too loudly. The
practical objection to this procedure in civil practice would seem to
be that we are not often about when our patients are asleep. In
unilateral deafness L. Müller's method is to use two tubes, through
which words are spoken in both ears at the same time. When
unilateral deafness is really present the patient will only repeat what
has been spoken in the healthy ear, while when there is simulation
he becomes confused, and will repeat the words spoken into the
seemingly deaf ear also. To avoid mistakes in using this method, a
low voice must be employed.
111 A Textbook of the Diseases of the Ear and Adjacent Organs, by Adam Politzer,
translated and edited by James Patterson Cassells, M.D., M. R. C. S. Eng., Philada.,
1883.

Mistakes in diagnosis where hysteria is in question are frequently

due to that association with it of serious organic disease of the
nervous system of which I have already spoken at length under
Complications. This is a fact which has not been overlooked by
authors and teachers, but one on which sufficient stress has not yet
been laid, and one which is not always kept in mind by the
practitioner. Bramwell says: “Cases are every now and again met
with in which serious organic disease (myelitis and poliomyelitis,
anterior, acute, for example) is said to be hysterical. Mistakes of this
description are often due to the fact that serious organic disease is
frequently associated with the general symptoms and signs of
hysteria; it is, in fact, essential to remember that all cases of
paraplegia occurring in hysterical patients are not necessarily
functional—i.e. hysterical; the presence of hysteria or a history of
hysterical fits is only corroborative evidence, and the (positive)
diagnosis of hysterical paraplegia should never be given unless the
observer has, after the most careful examination, failed to detect the
signs and symptoms of organic disease.”

PROGNOSIS.—Hysteria may terminate (1) in permanent recovery; (2)

in temporary recovery, with a tendency to relapse or to the
establishment of hysterical symptoms of a different character; (3) in
some other affection, as insanity, phthisis, or possibly sclerosis; (4) in
death, but the death in such cases is usually not the direct result of
hysteria, but of some accident. Death from intercurrent disorders
may take place in hysteria. It is altogether doubtful, however,
whether the affection which has been described as acute fatal
hysteria should be placed in the hysterical category. In the cases
reported the symptom-picture would in almost every instance seem
to indicate the probability of the hysteria having been simply a
complication of other disorders, such as epilepsy, eclampsia, and
acute mania.

As a rule, hysterical patients will not starve themselves. They may

refuse to take food in the presence of others, or may say they will not
eat at all; but they will in some cases at the same time get food on
the sly or hire their nurses or attendants to procure it for them. In
treating such cases a little watchfulness will soon enable the
physician to determine what is best to be done. By discovering them
in the act of taking food future deception can sometimes be
prevented. Hysterical patients do sometimes, however, persistently
refuse food. These cases may starve to death if let alone; and it is
important that the physician should promptly resort to some form of
forcible feeding before the nutrition of the patient has reached too
low an ebb. I have seen at least two cases of hysteria or hysterical
insanity in which patients were practically allowed to starve
themselves to death, but an occurrence of this kind is very rare.
Feeding by means of a stomach-tube, or, what is still better, by a
nasal tube, as is now so frequently practised among the insane,
should be employed. Nourishment should be administered
systematically in any way possible until the patient is willing to take
food in the ordinary way. In purposive cases some methods of
forcible feeding may prove of decided advantage. Its unpleasantness
will sometimes cause swallowing power to be regained.

Wunderlich112 has recorded the case of a servant-girl, aged nineteen,

who, after a succession of epileptiform fits, fell into a collapse and
died in two days. Other cases have been recorded by Meyer. Fagge
also speaks of the more chronic forms of hysteria proving fatal by
marasmus. He refers to two cases reported by Wilks, both of which
were diagnosticated as hysterical, and both of which died. Sir
William Gull describes a complaint which he terms anorexia nervosa
vel hysterica. It is attended with extreme wasting; pulse, respiration,
and temperature are low. The patients were usually between the
ages of sixteen and twenty-three: some died; others recovered under
full feeding and great care. In many of the reported fatal cases
careful inquiry must be made as to this question of hysteria being
simply a complication.
112 Quoted in The Principles and Practice of Medicine, by the late Charles Hilton
Fagge, M.D., F. R. C. P., etc., vol. i. 1886, p. 736.

Are not hysterical attacks sometimes fatal? With reference to one of

my cases this view was urged by the physician in attendance.
Gowers113 on this point says: “As a rule to which exceptions are
infinitely rare, hysterical attacks, however severe and alarming in
aspect, are devoid of danger. The attacks of laryngeal spasm
present the greatest apparent risk to life.” He refers to the paroxysms
of dyspnœa presented by a hemiplegic girl as really alarming in
appearance, even to those familiar with them. He refers also to a
case of Raynaud's114 in which the laryngeal and pharyngeal spasm
coexisted with trismus, and the patient died in a terrible paroxysm of
dyspnœa. The patient presented various other hysterical
manifestations, and a precisely similar attack had occurred
previously and passed away, but she had in the interval become
addicted to the hypodermic injection of morphia, and Raynaud
suggested that it might have been the effect of this on the nerve-
centres that caused the fatal termination. Such cases have been
described in France as the hydrophobic form of hysteria.
 113 Epilepsy and Other Chronic Convulsive Diseases, by W. R. Gowers, M.D.,
London. 1881.

114 L'Union médical, March 15, 1881.

Patients may die in hysterical as in epileptic attacks from causes not

directly connected with the disease. One of these sources of danger
mentioned by Gowers is the tendency to fall on the face sometimes
met with in the post-epileptic state. He records an example of death
from this cause. He also details a case of running hysteria or
hystero-epilepsy, in which, after a series of fits lasting about four
hours, the child died, possibly from some intercurrent accident.

TREATMENT.—Grasset,115 speaking of the treatment of hysteria, says

that means of treating the paroxysm, of removing the anæsthesia, of
combating single symptoms, are perhaps to be found in abundance,
but the groundwork of the disease, the neurosis or morbid state, is
not attacked. Here he indicates a new and fruitful path. In his own
summing up, however, he can only say that the hysterical diathesis
offers fundamental grounds for the exhibition of arsenic, silver,
chloride of gold, and mineral waters!
115 Brain, January, 1884.

No doubt can exist that the prophylactic and hygienic treatment of

hysteria is of paramount importance. To education—using the term
education in a broad sense—before and above all, the most
important place must be given. It is sometimes better to remove
children from their home surroundings. Hysterical mothers develop
hysterical children through association and imitation. I can scarcely,
however, agree with Dujardin-Beaumetz that it is always a good plan
to place a girl in a boarding-school far from the city. It depends on
the school. A well-regulated institution may be a great blessing in
this direction; one badly-managed may become a hotbed of hysteria.

Recently I made some investigations into the working of the public-

school system of Philadelphia, particularly with reference to the
question of overwork and sanitation.116 I had special opportunities
during the investigations to study the influences of different methods
of education, owing to the fact that the public-school system of
Philadelphia is just now in a transition period. This system is in a
state of hopeful confusion—hopeful, because I believe that out of its
present condition will come eventually a great boon to Philadelphia.
At one end of the system, in the primary and the secondary schools,
a graded method of instruction has been introduced. The grammar
and the high schools are working on an ungraded or differently
graded method. I found still prevailing, particularly in certain of the
grammar schools for girls, although not to the same extent as a few
years since, methods of cramming and stuffing calculated above all
to produce hysteria and allied disorders in those predisposed to
them.
116 The results of these investigations were given in a lecture which was delivered in
the Girls' Normal School of Philadelphia before the Teachers' Institute of Philadelphia,
Dec. 11, 1885.

Education should be so arranged as to develop the brain by a

natural process—not from within outward; not from the centre to the
periphery; not from above downward; but as the nervous system
itself develops in its evolution from a lower to a higher order of
animals, from the simple to the more complex and more elaborate.
Any system of education is wrong, and is calculated to weaken and
worry an impressionable nervous system, which attempts to overturn
or change this order of the progress of a true development of the
brain. To develop the nervous system as it should be developed—
slowly, naturally, and evenly—it must also be fed, rested, and
properly exercised.

In those primary schools in which the graded method was best

carried out this process of helping natural development was pursued,
and the result was seen in contented faces, healthy bodies, and
cheerful workers. In future the result will be found in less chorea,
hysteria, and insanity.

To prevent the development of hysteria, parents and physicians

should direct every effort. The family physician who discovers a child
to be neurotic, and who from his knowledge of parents, ancestors,
and collateral relatives knows that a predisposition to hysteria or
some other neurosis is likely to be present, should exercise all the
moral influence which he possesses to have a healthy, robust
training provided. It is not within the scope of an article of this kind to
describe in great detail in what such education should consist.
Reynolds is correct when he says that “self-control should be
developed, the bodily health should be most carefully regarded, and
some motive or purpose should be supplied which may give force,
persistence, unity, and success to the endeavors of the patient.” In
children who have a tendency to the development of hysteria the
inclinations should not always or altogether be regarded in choosing
a method or pursuing a plan of education. It is not always to what
such a child takes that its mind should be constantly directed; but, on
the contrary, it is often well to educate it away from its inclination.
“The worst thing that can be done is that which makes the patient
know and feel that she is thought to be peculiar. Sometimes such
treatment is gratifying to her, and she likes it—it is easy and it seems
kind to give it—but it is radically wrong.”

In providing for the bodily health of hysterical children it should be

seen that exercise should be taken regularly and in the open air, but
over-fatigue should be avoided; that ample and pleasant recreation
should be provided; that study should be systematic and disciplinary,
but at the same time varied and interesting, and subservient to some
useful purpose; that the various functions of secretion, excretion,
menstruation should be regulated.

The importance of sufficient sleep to children who are predisposed to

hysteria or any other form of nervous or mental disorder can scarcely
be over-estimated. The following, according to J. Crichton Browne,117
is the average duration of sleep required at different ages: 4 years of
age, 12 hours; 7 years of age, 11 hours; 9 years of age, 10½ hours;
14 years of age, 10 hours; 17 years of age, 9½ hours; 21 years of
age, 9 hours; 28 years of age, 8 hours. To carefully provide that
children shall obtain this amount of sleep will do much to strengthen
the nervous system and subdue or eradicate hysterical tendencies.
Gymnastics, horseback riding, walking, swimming, and similar
exercises all have their advantages in preventing hysterical
tendencies.
117 Education and the Nervous System, reprinted from The Book of Health by
permission of Messrs. Cassell & Co., Limited.

Herz118 has some instructive and useful recommendations with

reference to the treatment of hysteria in children. It is first and most
important to rehabilitate the weakened organism, and especially the
central nervous system, by various dietetic, hygienic, and medicinal
measures. It is important next to tranquillize physical and mental
excitement. This can sometimes be done by disregard of the
affection, by neglect, or by removal or threatened removal of the
child from its surroundings. Such treatment should of course be
employed with great discretion. Anæmia and chlorosis, often present
in the youthful victims of hysteria, should be thoroughly treated. Care
should be taken to learn whether children of either sex practise
masturbation, which, Jacobi and others insist, frequently plays an
important part in the production of hysteria. Proper measures should
be taken to prevent this practice. The genital organs should receive
examination and treatment if this is deemed at all necessary. On the
other hand, care should be taken not to direct the attention of
children unnecessarily to those organs when they are entirely
innocent of such habits. Painting the vagina twice daily with a 10 per
cent. solution of hydrochlorate cocaine has been found useful in
subduing the hyper-irritation of the sexual organs in girls accustomed
to practise masturbation. Herz, with Henoch, prefers the hydrate of
chloral to all other medicines, although he regards morphine as
almost equally valuable, in the treatment of hysteria in children.
Personally, I prefer the bromides to either morphia or chloral. Small
doses of iron and arsenic continued systematically for a long period
will be found useful. Politzer of Vienna regards the hydrobromate
and bihydrobromate of iron as two valuable preparations in the
hysteria of children, and exhibits them in doses of four to seven
grains three to four times daily.
 118 Wien. Med. Wochen., No. 46, Nov. 14, 1885.

Hysteria once developed, it is the moral treatment which often really

cures. The basis of this method of cure is to rouse the will. It is
essential to establish faith in the mind of the patient. She must be
made to feel not only that she can be helped, but that she will be.
Every legitimate means also should be taken to impress the patient
with the idea that her case is fully understood. If malingering or
partial malingering enters into the problem, the patient will then feel
that she has been detected, and will conclude that she had better get
out of her dilemma as gracefully as possible. Where simulation does
not enter faith is an important nerve-stimulant and tonic; it unchains
the will.

Many physicians have extraordinary ideas about hysteria, and

because of these adopt remarkable and sometimes outrageous
methods of treatment. They find a woman with hysterical symptoms,
and forthwith conclude she is nothing but a fraud. They are much
inclined to assert their opinions, not infrequently to the patient
herself, and, if not directly to her, in her hearing to other patients or
to friends, relatives, nurses, or physicians. They threaten, denounce,
and punish—the latter especially in hospitals. In general practice
their course is modified usually by the wholesome restraint which the
financial and other extra-hospital relations of patient and physician
enforce.

Although hysterical patients often do simulate and are guilty of fraud,

it should never be forgotten that some hysterical manifestations may
be for the time being beyond the control of patients. Even for some
of the frauds which are practised the individuals are scarcely
responsible, because of the weakness of their moral nature and their
lack of will-power. Moral treatment in the form of reckless harshness
becomes immoral treatment. The liability to mistake in diagnosis,
and the frequent association of organic disease with hysterical
symptoms, should make the physician careful and conservative. It is
also of the highest importance often that the doctor should not show
his hand. The fact that an occasional cure, which is usually
temporary, is effected by denunciation, and even cruelty, is not a
good argument against the stand taken here.

Harsh measures should only be adopted after due consideration and

by a well-digested method. A good plan sometimes is, after carefully
examining the patient, to place her on some simple, medicinal, and
perhaps electrical treatment, taking care quietly to prophesy a
speedy cure. If this does not work, in a few days other severe or
more positive measures may be used, perhaps blistering or strong
electrical currents. Later, but in rare cases only, after giving the
patient a chance to arouse herself by letting her know what she may
expect, painful electrical currents, the hot iron, the cold bath, or
similar measures may be used. Such treatment, however, should
never be used as a punishment.

The method of cure by neglect can sometimes be resorted to with

advantage. The ever-practical Wilks mentions the case of a school-
teacher with hemianalgesia, hemianæsthesia, and an array of other
hysterical symptoms who had gone through all manner of treatment,
and at the end of seven months was no better. The doctor simply left
her alone. He ordered her no drugs, and regularly passed by her
bed. In three weeks he found her sitting up. She talked a little and
had some feeling in her right side. She was now encouraged, and
made rapid progress to recovery. Neglect had aroused her dormant
powers. It must be said that a treatment of this kind can be carried
out with far more prospects of success in a general hospital than in a
private institution or at the home of a patient. It is a method of
treatment which may fail or succeed according to the tact and
intelligence of the physician.

I cannot overlook here the consideration of the subject of the so-

called faith cure and mind cure. One difference between the faith
cure as claimed and practised by its advocates, and by those who
uphold it from a scientific standpoint, is simply that the latter do not
refer the results obtained to any supernatural or spiritual agency. I
would not advise the establishment of prayer-meetings for the relief
of hysteria, but would suggest that the power of faith be exercised to
its fullest extent in a legitimate way.

A young lady is sick, and for two years is seen by all the leading
doctors in London; a clergyman is asked in and prays over her, and
she gets up and walks. The doctors all join in and say the case was
one of hysteria—that there was nothing the matter with her. Then,
says Wilks, “Why was the girl subjected to local treatment and doses
of physic for years? Why did not the doctors do what the parson
did?”

Tuke119 devotes a chapter to psychotherapeutics, which every

physician who is called upon to treat hysteria should read. He
attempts to reduce the therapeutic use of mental influence to a
practical, working basis. I will formulate from Tuke and my own
experience certain propositions as to the employment of
psychological measures: (1) It is often important and always
justifiable to inspire confidence and hope in hysterical patients by
promising cures when it is possible to achieve cures. (2) A physician
may sometimes properly avail himself of his influence over the
emotions of the patient in the treatment of hysterical patients, but
always with great caution and discretion. (3) Every effort should be
made to excite hysterical patients to exert the will. (4) In some
hysterical cases it is advisable to systematically direct the attention
to a particular region of the body, arousing at the same time the
expectation of a certain result. (5) Combined mental and physical
procedures may sometimes be employed. (6) Hypnotism may be
used in a very few cases.
119 Influence of the Mind upon the Body.

The importance of employing mental impression is thoroughly

exemplified, if nothing else is accomplished, by a study of such a
craze as the so-called mind cure. Not a few people of supposed
sense and cultivation have pinned their faith to this latest Boston
hobby. A glance at the published writings of the apostles of the mind
cure will show at once to the critical mind that all in it of value is
dependent upon the effects of mental impression upon certain
peculiar natures, some of them being of a kind which afford us not a
few of our cases of hysteria. W. F. Evans has published several
works upon the subject. From one of these120 I have sought, but not
altogether successfully, to obtain some ideas as to the basis of the
mind-cure treatment. It is claimed that the object is to construct a
theoretical and practical system of phrenopathy, or mental cure, on
the basis of the idealistic philosophy of Berkeley, Fichte, Schelling,
and Hegel. The fundamental doctrine of those who believe in the
mental cure is, that to think and to exist are one and the same, and
that every disease is a translation into a bodily expression of a fixed
idea of mind. If by any therapeutic device the morbid idea can be
removed, the cure of the malady is assured. When the patient is
passive, and consequently impressible, he is made to fix his
thoughts with expectant attention upon the effect to be produced.
The physician thinks to the same effect, wills it, and believes and
imagines that it is being done; the mental action to the patient,
sympathizing with that of the physician, is precipitated upon the
body, and becomes a silent, transforming, sanitive energy. It must
be, says Evans, “a malady more than ordinarily obstinate that is
neither relieved nor cured by it.”
120 The Divine Law of Cure.

Hysteria cannot be cured by drugs alone, and yet a practitioner of

medicine would find it extremely difficult to manage some cases
without using drugs. Drugs themselves, used properly, may have a
moral or mental as well as a physical influence. Among those which
have been most used from before the days of Sydenham to the
present time, chiefly for their supposed or real antispasmodic virtues,
are galbanum, asafœtida, valerian, castor and musk, opium, and
hyoscyamus. The value of asafœtida, valerian, castor, and musk is
chiefly of a temporary character. If these drugs are used at all, they
should be used in full doses frequently repeated. Sumbul, a drug of
the same class comparatively little used, is with me a favorite. It can
be used in the form of tincture or fluid extract, from twenty minims to
half a drachm of the latter or one to two drachms of the former. It
certainly has in many cases a remarkably calmative effect.
Opium and its preparations, so strongly recommended by some, and
especially the Germans, should not be used except in rare cases.
Occasionally in a case with sleeplessness or great excitement it may
be absolutely indispensable to resort to it in combination with some
other hypnotic or sedative. The danger, however, in other cases of
forming the opium habit should not be overlooked. According to
Dujardin-Beaumetz, it is mainly useful in the asthenic forms of
hysteria.

Of all drugs, the metallic tonics are to be preferred in the continuous

treatment of hysteria. Iron, although not called for in a large
percentage of cases, will sometimes prove of great service in the
weak and anæmic hysterics. Chalybeates are first among the drugs
mentioned by Sydenham. Steel was his favorite. The subcarbonate
or reduced iron, or the tincture of the chloride, is to be preferred to
the more fanciful and elegant preparations with which the drug-
market is now flooded. Dialyzed iron and the mallate of iron,
however, are known to be reliable preparations, and can be resorted
to with advantage. They should be given in large doses. Zinc salts,
particularly the oxide, phosphide, and valerianate; the nitrate or
oxide of silver, the ammonio-sulphate of copper, ferri-ferrocyanide or
Prussian blue,—all have a certain amount of real value in giving tone
to the nervous system in hysterical cases.

To Niemeyer we owe the use of chloride of sodium and gold in the

treatment of hysteria. He refers to the fact that Martini of Biberach
regarded this article as an efficient remedy against the various
diseases of the womb and ovaries. He believed that the
improvement effected upon Martini's patient was probably due to the
fact that this, like other metallic remedies, was an active nervine. He
prescribed the chloride of gold and sodium in the form of a pill in the
dose of one-eighth of a grain. Of these pills he at first ordered one to
be taken an hour after dinner, and another an hour after supper.
Later, he ordered two to be taken at these hours, and gradually the
dose was increased up to eight pills daily. I frequently use this salt
after the method of Niemeyer.
The treatment of hysteria which Mitchell has done so much to make
popular, that by seclusion, rest, massage, and electricity, is of value
in a large number of cases of grave hysteria; but the proper selection
of cases for this treatment is all important. Playfair121 says correctly
that if this method of treatment is indiscriminately employed, failure
and disappointment are certain to result. The most satisfactory
results are to be had in the thoroughly broken-down and bed-ridden
cases. “The worse the case is,” he says, “the more easy and certain
is the cure; and the only disappointments I have had have been in
dubious, half-and-half cases.”
121 The Systematic Treatment of Nerve-Prostration and Hysteria, by W. S. Playfair,
M.D., F. R. C. P., 1883.

Mitchell122 gives a succinct, practical description of the process of

massage: “An hour,” he says, “is chosen midway between two
meals, and, the patient lying in bed, the manipulator starts at the
feet, and gently but firmly pinches up the skin, rolling it lightly
between his fingers, and going carefully over the whole foot; then the
toes are bent and moved about in every direction; and next, with the
thumbs and fingers, the little muscles of the foot are kneaded and
pinched more largely, and the interosseous groups worked at with
the finger-tips between the bones. At last the whole tissues of the
foot are seized with both hands and somewhat firmly rolled about.
Next, the ankles are dealt with in the same fashion, all the crevices
between the articulating bones being sought out and kneaded, while
the joint is put in every possible position. The leg is next treated—
first by surface pinching and then by deeper grasping of the areolar
tissue, and last by industrious and deeper pinching of the large
muscular masses, which for this purpose are put in a position of the
utmost relaxation. The grasp of the muscles is momentary, and for
the large muscles of the calf and thigh both hands act, the one
contracting as the other loosens its grip. In treating the firm muscles
in front of the leg the fingers are made to roll the muscles under the
cushions of the finger-tips. At brief intervals the manipulator seizes
the limb in both hands and lightly runs the grasp upward, so as to
favor the flow of venous blood-currents, and then returns to the
kneading of the muscles. The same process is carried on in every
part of the body, and especial care is given to the muscles of the
loins and spine, while usually the face is not touched. The belly is
first treated by pinching the skin, then by deeply grasping and rolling
the muscular walls in the hands, and at last the whole belly is
kneaded with the heel of the hand in a succession of rapid, deep
movements, passing around in the direction of the colon.”
122 “Fat and Blood,” etc.

Massage should often be combined with the Swedish movement

cure. In the movement cure one object is to call out the suppressed
will of the patient. This is very applicable to cases of hysteria. The
cure of cases of this kind is often delayed by using massage alone,
which is absolutely passive. These movements are sometimes
spoken of as active and passive, or as single and duplicated. Active
movements are those more or less under the control of the individual
making or taking part in them, and they are performed under the
advice or direction, and sometimes with the assistance, of another.
They proceed from within; they are willed. Passive movements come
from without; they are performed on the patient and independently of
her will. She is subjected to pushings and pullings, to flexions and
extensions, to swingings and rotations, which she can neither help
nor hinder. The same movement may be active or passive according
to circumstances. A person's biceps may be exercised through the
will, against the will, or with reference to the will.

A single movement is one in which only a single individual is

engaged; speaking medically, single movements are those executed
by the patient under the direction of the physician or attendant; they
are, of course, active. Duplicated active movements require more
than one for their performance. In these the element of resistance
plays an important part. The operator with carefully-considered
exertion performs a movement which the patient is enjoined to resist,
or the latter undertakes a certain motion or series of motions which
the former, with measured force, resists. Still, tact and experience
are here of great value, in order that both direct effort and resistance
should be carefully regulated and properly modified to suit all the
requirements of the case. By changing the position of the patient or
the manner of operating on her from time to time any muscles or
groups of muscles may be brought into play. It is wonderful with what
ease even some of the smallest muscles can be exercised by an
expert manipulator.

The duplicated active movements are those which should be most

frequently performed or attempted in connection with massage in
hysterical patients. The very substance of this treatment is to call out
that which is wanting in hysteria—will-power. It is a coaxing,
insinuating treatment, and one which will enable the operator to gain
control of the patient in spite of herself. As the patient exerts her
power the operator should yield and allow the part to be moved.

Much of the value of massage and Swedish movements, in hysteria

as in other disorders, is self-evident. Acceleration of circulation,
increase of temperature, direct and reflex stimulation of nervous and
muscular action, the promotion of absorption by pressure,—these
and other results are readily understood. “The mode in which these
gymnastic proceedings exert an influence,” says Erb,123 “consists, no
doubt, in occasioning frequently-repeated voluntary excitations of the
nerves and muscles, so that the act of conduction to the muscles is
gradually rendered more facile, and ultimately the nutrition of the
nerves and muscles is augmented.”
123 Ziemssen's Cyclopædia.

The objects to be attained by the use of electricity are nearly the

same as from massage and duplicated active movements: in the first
place, to improve the circulation and the condition of the muscles;
and in the second place, to make the patient use the muscles. The
faradic battery should be employed in these cases, and the patient
should be in a relaxed condition, preferably in bed. A method of
electrical treatment introduced some years ago by Beard and
Rockwell is known as general faradization. This is sometimes used
in the office of the physician. In this method the patient is placed in a
chair with his feet on a large plate covered with chamois-skin; the