Canadian
theatre 
Shakespeare’s Brain (2006)
It was Kit: The TRUE Story of Christopher Marlowe (2006)
The Embarrassing Life of King Ficklefred (2004/05)
Allison McWood
Link to Shakespeare’s Brain script
Link to Shakespeare's Brain cast
Link to It was Kit: The TRUE story of Christopher Marlow
Link to The Embarrassing Life of King Ficklefred
This introduction serves as a foreword for Allison McWood's three adaptations: Shakespeare's Brain, the Embarrassing Life of King Ficklefred and It was Kit: The TRUE
Story of Christopher Marlowe.
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| Allison McWood |
Allison McWood received an honours degree at York University in English Literature with a speciality in Renaissance drama. She now works as a full time librettist and playwright. Drawing inspiration from a wide range of writers, such as William Shakespeare, Douglas Adams, Samuel Becket, Joe Orton and Christopher Marlowe, she has developed a particular interest in farce and satire. McWood has written a wide variety of plays, many using established characters or historical figures in new and humorous ways, such as Welcome to Eden, population 2 and Death of a Vacuum Cleaner Salesman. McWood has received “high praise for her fast-paced comedy, crisp dialogue, and vivid characters” (Allison McWood biography).
The character of William Shakespeare, perhaps because of the enduring mysteries associated with the Bard’s life and creative process, has become a topic for playwrights and in an extended sense, because they reflect on what Shakespeare means and how meaning circulates around Shakespeare, these plays can be called Shakespearean adaptations. Plots of these plays have as many twists, stolen identities, forgeries, and mysteries as any play the Bard ever wrote. For a man considered the greatest writer of the English language, there is little known about him that does not rest on speculation or uncertainty. For over two hundred and fifty years, a narrow group of scholars and researchers has attempted to refute the identity of Shakespeare as the author of the plays associated with him. Some spuriously cite his lack of a university education as a reason why he could not have written what he did. Instead they propose that Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, or even Edward de Vere may have been the author behind Shakespeare’s works. His face has suffered the same trials and tribulations around authenticity with many of the possible portraits of the Bard having been disproved or, at best, tied up in the authentication process. It is this enigmatic and veiled identity of the famous playwright that has made him just as subject to adaptation as any of his characters or storylines.
CASP has archived over twenty-five Canadian productions that feature Shakespeare as a character. These appearances by the Bard vary from Elizabethan period pieces (such as Christopher Dafoe’s Frog Galliard or Brian d’Eon’s Willful Pursuits), to placing the Bard in twenty first century situations: as a referee in Shakespeare’s World Cup, or as a ghost appearing to a modern Shakespearean society in the Heart of My Mystery. No matter the situation or setting, Shakespeare’s presence and instant recognizability affirm his significance to contemporary Canadian culture.
Correspondingly, Allison McWood’s three plays, Shakespeare’s Brain, It was Kit: The TRUE Story of Christopher Marlowe, and the Embarrassing Life of King Ficklefred place Shakespeare in three unique position as a character. Each of these plays makes critical comments on the academic theories and conspiracies surrounding Shakespeare’s life. In doing so, the plays beg the questions: What did Shakespeare’s contemporaries really think about him? Where did he get his creative inspiration? And what would he think about the unparalleled degree to which he has been adapted and the level of fame he and his writings have achieved posthumously? While these questions are unanswerable, the entertaining and humorous aspect of McWood’s loose adaptations serve a valuable purpose in situating Shakespeare’s historical presence, and in introducing or reaffirming his character to a wide and varied audience. Moreover, the characterization of Shakespeare within these three plays are ideal adaptations to include in CASP’s online anthology, as they are multi-functional, wide ranging, and appeal to varied audiences.
Shakespeare’s Brain
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| Shakespeare’s Brain Cast |
Shakespeare’s Brain is a one act comedic play that opened at the New Ideas Festival in Toronto, and ran from March 21-24, 2007. The production asks the question: “If only Shakespeare could see what we have done to his plays … Wait a minute … What if he can?” (Production Summary). To explore this scenario, McWood utilizes two settings: one of William Shakespeare and Charles Darwin playing checkers in Purgatory, and the other featuring two literature professors, Smog and Blather, who through a mysterious and possibly illegal situation have obtained Shakespeare’s brain for dissection. Notably, a satirical critique on academic fanaticism and authenticating Shakespeare’s character by using body parts has an earlier Canadian precedent in Charles Ebeneezer Moyse’s Shakespere’s Skull and Falstaff’s nose from 1889. Like Moyse’s adaptation, McWood’s two professors employ a constant satirical banter that has a basis in spoofing the scholarly theorizing over Shakespeare. McWood’s play focuses on the comparison between supposed “scientific” fact and the academic speculation associated with literary criticism. For instance, Professor Blather believes in fact when he states, “a lifetime of research. Twenty plus years. Thesis papers. Dusty folios. Cold coffee. Convoluted interpretations of a thousand academics who all have a different meaning … I have something that none of the other academics have. I have his brain” (Shakespeare’s Brain Playscript 3). While Professor Smog takes the more academic side, when asked what to do with the brain, by replying, “Can’t we just gawk at it worshipfully and imagine all the innovative ideas that once swirled around inside?”(Shakespeare’s Brain Playscript 9).
The situation is mirrored in Purgatory as Darwin champions the argument for absolute knowledge, while Shakespeare despairs, “academics do nothing but bicker … they argue and bark with their fists flailing in the air, opinions darting wildly in every direction … nobody wins” (Shakespeare’s Brain Playscript 13). The use of University professors and the characters of Shakespeare and Darwin further accentuate McWood’s critique of academic pedantry. The critique of the often-convoluted attitudes and theories of Shakespearean academics is brought to the forefront when Shakespeare returns to Earth to engage Smog and Blather. Unaware of Shakespeare’s presence the two professors lecture to a university literature class and teach a complex and torturous session of theories that are overt stereotypes of the most spurious academic theories about Shakespeare. These include the impressionistic notions that Shakespeare was either a woman and/or Christopher Marlowe or that he didn’t exist at all; that Hamlet was a swine; and that Shakespeare was “in a very bad mood when he wrote The Tempest” (Shakespeare’s Brain Playscript 18). Shakespeare screams to no avail, “You’re ruining me!” but in the end it is the scientific Darwin who points out, “So they’re wrong. Who cares?” (Shakespeare’s Brain Playscript 20).
The Embarrassing Life of King Ficklefred
Alternatively, McWood’s The Embarrassing Life of King Ficklefred makes a moral comment geared especially to children. This interactive play is geared around the theme of “be yourself.” The setting features a King, who has a decidedly imperfect Kingdom. His minstrels are tone deaf, his jester isn’t funny, his subjects throw rotten tomatoes, his knights are chicken-hearted and the Princess isn’t in love with the Prince. It is at the juncture when King Ficklefred is despairing over his embarrassing life that William Shakespeare enters onto the scene. Shakespeare requests to write about a play about the King, and tells him, “I’ll be watching your every move for the next couple of days, so just be yourself” (King Finklefred Playscript 11). As soon as Shakespeare makes his exeunt, Ficklefred laments that he’s “about to have a famous play written about [him] and soon the whole world will know how embarrassing my life is!” (King Finklefred Playscript 12) His drastic changes to make his life as perfect as possible backfire, when Shakespeare informs him that his Kingdom is “too perfect” and asks how can he write “an interesting play when nothing unusual ever happens to you?” Shakespeare continues to say he only writes about “Kings who are not perfect”, for which he cites Richard II, Macbeth, Henry VI, and Richard III as examples (King Finklefred Playscript 18).
This adaptation demonstrates that not only can Shakespeare’s character be used to introduce his presence to children, but also to present Shakespeare’s work as the definitive example of the spectrum of human emotions, trials and tribulations, which has garnered unprecedented recognition and canonical importance within contemporary society. The implicit critique in McWood’s play of unrealistic notions of leadership and kingship (as a trope for leadership), drives home the point so frequently made in Shakespeare’s plays about kingship, namely, the extraordinarily fickle nature of power. So, at the same time as McWood introduces children to issues surrounding Shakespeare’s canonical influence, her play also gets at important issues that relate to core themes in Shakespeare’s own works, both strategies being key features of the extended adaptation techniques studied by CASP.
It was Kit: The TRUE Story of Christopher Marlowe
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| Kit: The TRUE Story of Christopher Marlowe |
It was Kit: The TRUE Story of Christopher Marlowe is a full-length play that debuted at the Toronto Fringe Festival in 2006. The Fringe program states that the play “is a farce [that] examines the last week of Marlowe’s life, raising questions regarding the accuracy of history, the legitimacy of the Monarchy and the interpretation of the artist” (Fringe Program). Marlowe is not the only artist featured in this play, as it also introduces Thomas Kyd, Robert Greene and, of course, Shakespeare. Much like Shakespeare’s Brain, the ideas of academics and theorists are again criticized and exemplified as over-saturated and problematic. Shakespeare is presented as the black sheep of Elizabethan playwrights. Marlowe tells him that Romeo and Juliet “is the corniest play I have read in my life” (It was Kit Playscript 2) and Robert Greene advises him “Keep your hindquarters out of the theatre! You don’t belong here! Just because everyone loves your plays, doesn’t mean they are any good” (It was Kit Playscript 4).
Shakespeare’s reactions are innocent and dense, as he furtively attempts to assimilate into the educated and highbrow caste of his peers. He views Marlowe as all that he would like to achieve, begging, “I want to think like you, dress like you, but most of all I want to write plays the way you do” (It was Kit Playscript 2). The academic theories regarding Marlowe and Shakespeare are numerous and often unbelievable. One that McWood confronts is the idea that Marlowe wrote some of Shakespeare’s plays. Within the play, the theory originates when Shakespeare tries to comfort Marlowe’s over-excitable Mother after Marlowe’s death by stating that Kit has gone into hiding, and will be writing Shakespeare’s plays from now on. The fabrication of gossip and over-exaggeration is just one example of how McWood examines how scholars can take hearsay and speculation as extravagant fact. Additionally, It Was Kit reminds its audience that scholars essentially know very little about the everyday lives of Shakespeare or Marlowe, which then suggests a more cautionary approach to the theoretical tales and biographical speculations of scholars.
The Fringe Festival, much like the works of Shakespeare, is something that began in the United Kingdom and filtered in to Canada. Canada now has more Fringe Festivals than any other country in the world. It is in this environment that plays, such as It Was Kit, get their start. With selection based on a lottery system, and a philosophy of benefiting artists while remaining accessible, the Fringe Festivals of Canada have become a centre for increasingly large numbers of varied Shakespeare adaptations that might have not gotten their start elsewhere. Chris Coculuzzi, who played Christopher Marlowe in the original Fringe production, states “The Fringe is all about trying new things, taking greater risks whether you’re doing Shakespeare or a new play” (It was Kit: Passion over Paycheck). Fringe encourages new writers and stages a range of performances from “brilliant to bad, professional to putrid” that have helped to develop and create an exceptionally unique, and distinctive Canadian theatrical culture. The anarchic, exploratory, free-style nature of Fringe creation mirrors in many ways the adaptive process, which derives its generic strength from being anti-generic and impossible to contain in pre-conceived aesthetic structures.
Farce and satire are both theatrical genres that are well matched to Shakespearean adaptation. The far-fetched situations, irony, clever critique, extravagant plot twists, juxtaposition, and witty dialogue are not that far removed from what we know of Shakespeare’s own plays, which deploy mistaken identity, the faults of human nature, puns, and sophisticated humour on a regular basis. Shakespeare as a character also functions well within the contexts of farce and satire, as McWood’s plays exemplify. Using Shakespeare in a period or contemporary setting to critique the accuracy of “history” and those who write it and the often-dubious theories regarding Shakespeare’s life and work, as in Shakespeare’s Brain and It was Kit serves a useful satirical purpose that is coincident with CASP’s theory about Canadians’ use of satire as a means of spoofing highbrow culture (often troped as a function of association with Shakespeare’s canonical and historical greatness). Likewise, the characterization of Shakespeare as a sympathetic protagonist used as a means to prove a theme or moral, evident in The Embarrassing Life of King Ficklefred, allows the audience to identify with the character. That identification concretizes Shakespeare’s role in contemporary culture and allows for further reflection, discussion, and additional adaptation of the creative and historical mysteries embedded in Shakespeare’s cultural presence.
Danielle Van Wagner
Link to Shakespeare’s Brain script
Link to Shakespeare's Brain cast
Link to It was Kit: The TRUE story of Christopher Marlow
Link to The Embarrassing Life of King Ficklefred
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Fischlin, Daniel. Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project. University of Guelph. 2004. <http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca>.
