Prospero's Lie (2000) (from the Shakespeare's Womyn series)

Mary Druce

Mary Druce

Shakespeare's Womyn is both a theatre company (under the auspices of Storymaker's Theatre)and a series of four short plays aimed at high school (Grade 10 and up), library, and festival audiences––the series was originally called "Women in Shakespeare." The plays have been performed at a variety of venues, including the Toronto Festival of Storytelling (1998-99), the Ottawa Fringe Festival (2000), and the Toronto Summerworks Festival (2001).

The four plays–– On Lammas Eve (Romeo and Juliet ), To Aleppo Gone (Macbeth), The Letter (Hamlet), and Prospero's Lie (The Tempest)––are written by Mary Druce for performance with her partner Susan Kerr. Druce is an actor, playwright, and storyteller who trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (London, England) and at the University of Toronto (English). She has taught at the Young People's Theatre (YPT) in Toronto and at Sheridan College. Kerr is also a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and came to Canada in 1967 where she has worked extensively in theatre and musical theatre as well as with the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) and the NFB (National Film Board of Canada).

Based on so-called marginal Shakespearean characters, the four plays focus on women and attempt to re-establish some sense of the gendered contexts for understanding their presence (or relative lack thereof) in Shakespeare's work. Thus, On Lammas Eve takes the character of Juliet's nurse 10 years after the end of Romeo and Juliet in order to examine the context of a 13th -century serving woman. To Aleppo Gone creates the character of Gruoch who lives in the Scottish Highlands and whose story interweaves with Macbeth's in order to comment on the persecution of so-called witches in the early modern period (for another site devoted to information about early modern witchesclick here).

The Letter imagines Polonius's wife, Magrit, reading a letter to Laertes after his death and being comforted by the ghost of Gertude, her old friend. The Letter dramatically remakes the idealized image of the old King Hamlet (held by young Hamlet) and posits the question of who really was Laertes's father. Finally, Prospero's Lie, anthologized by CASP here, focuses on Sycorax, Caliban's mother, who through Prospero's deceit has lost her magic and has been split into two beings (Sycora and Arax). The play details Sycorax's attempt to deal with the legacy of Prospero's deceit and her struggle to become whole again as she regains claim to her island.

Each of these plays, then, takes decisive liberties with the Shakespearean ur-texts in order to refocus narratives that have traditionally been patriarchal in their primary focus. In so doing, Shakespeare's Womyn reinscribes feminist principles of inclusivity imagining the other lives invoked by Shakespeare's plays. Interestingly, Druce has chosen to adapt plays in which memorable Shakespearean women are present (Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Ophelia and Gertrude, and Miranda) but does so by enhancing the characterizations and narratives of either marginal or purely imaginary characters (like Polonius's wife).

Critical reception of The Letter was, not unexpectedly, mixed––Jon Kaplan (of NOW Magazine) calling it an "intriguing concept, but . overwritten, overacted and over-earnest" and Iris Winston (of The Ottawa Citizen) calling it a "must-see" and "fine[ly] written." The disparity indicates, if anything, the disputed ideological terrain not to mention the variation in audience expectation that these feminist adaptations provoke.

The closural moments in Prospero's Lie make clear the kind of stakes that Shakespeare's Womyn engage with in their adaptive take on Shakespeare's women:

Arax: Let not this Man command us more .

Sycora: Remove this CURSE!

.Sycora: Restore to us Ourselves .

Arax: restore to us our Son!

Sycora: Restore to us our Island . CURSE the man that took it from us! (17)

The play ends with Prospero and the various other colonizers leaving the island with Caliban: "Prospero is delighted with himself . he is going to show the world this strange creature from an unknown continent . Alas! " (22). Caliban's symbolic alignment with indigenous American culture is used here by Druce as she replays the many instances in which indigenes were taken from the Americas for display in Europe. In C. Alice Baker's True Stories of New England Captives Carried to Canada During the Old French and Indian Wars (Cambridge, 1897), which demonstrates the extent to which white settler culture showed astonishing insensitivity to indigenous cultures, Baker refers to how Captain George Weymouth took "Indians" to England: "Weymouth's Indians were the objects of great wonder in England, and crowds of people followed them in the streets. It is thought that Shakespeare referred to them in 'The Tempest' a few years later. Trinculo there wishing to take the monster Caliban to England says: 'Not a holiday foolthere but would give a piece of silver … When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian'" (12). Uncannily, there is continuity between Baker's and Druce's visions: Druce's play reframes Baker's argument regarding the spectacle of aborginals from the so called New World in the so called Old. In this way, Prospero's Lie, with its closural lines pointing to issues of social justice in relation to abuses of colonial power, exemplifies a long-term historical problem that Canada is still struggling to resolve staisfactorily.

Prospero's Lie then plays off the problems of women's disempowerment and the use of magic (read "technology") as a means for colonial enslavement, all issues that much recent criticism of The Tempest has developed extensively. The deployment of these revisionary narrative strategies in the context of high school, library, and fringe performances provides an interesting example of the ways in which Shakespearean adaptations circulate at a local level, serving both performative and pedagogical functions.

Daniel Fischlin

Download Script
Link to database

CASP gratefully acknowledges Mary Druce's permission to publish this playscript to its website.