Hanna Scolnicov

Tom Stoppard’s plays often disclose, even declare, their ‘sources’ already in their titles. Critics have not been lax in following these and other carefully placed cues in their search for the ‘meaning’ of the plays. But even those who have pursued Stoppard’s re-working of previous materials have stopped short of recognizing the essential intertextual nature of Stoppard’s works, the deliberate reference to other works rather than to any realistically perceived ‘world’. This article intends to take a first step in this direction, by proposing to apply a consistently intertextual approach to the reading of Stoppard’s plays.¹

I shall begin with a brief survey of some of the underlying ideas and ideology of intertextualism. I shall show how the intertextual approach broadens the accepted boundaries of literary criticism by promoting interdisciplinary readings. The second part of the article illustrates the interdisciplinary intertextual procedure through a practical example: the analysis of three plays by Tom Stoppard (After Magritte, Dogg’s Hamlet and Cahoot’s Macbeth) in relation, mainly, to the works of a painter (Renי Magritte), a philosopher (Ludvig Wittgenstein), and another playwright (Shakespeare).² This analysis then leads to an intertextualizing of the three plays to each other.

Intertextuality is a methodology that topples the notion of the text as autonomous, discrete and independent. Instead, the essence of the text is seen to reside in the web of relations it forms with other, surrounding texts. This rather startling conception of the nature of text was formulated in the sixties by Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes, who perceived the text as created in the meeting of the reader and the work, hence ‘the (productive) equivalence of writing and reading.’ Instead of being a passive response, a ‘mere act of consumption,’ reading is now assigned an active and creative role, sharing with writing in the creation of the text.³ An important corollary of the reader’s creative role is that reading necessarily produces not one but many, reader-dependent, texts. Even the self-same reader will produce different texts at different times, depending on the different intertexts he or she brings to bear on the text.

Placing the text within a system of texts blurs the borderlines between it and other texts. In this, the intertextual approach challenges the practice of New Criticism, that saw the exposure of internal structure as the goal of critical interpretation. By contrast, it is the relations between texts rather than the individual text that is the focus of the intertextual inquiry.

The older model of reading, based on communication theory, of the work as transmitter and the reader as receiver, is replaced by a new epistemological analysis. The encounter between reader and work even carries, for Barthes, sexual overtones: ‘the reader is nothing less than the one who desires to write, to give himself up to an erotic practice of language.’ In his view, every reader is also a writer, or rather should have been one, had the educational system only trained him properly.⁴

In Barthes’ world of texts there is no place for a hierarchy of texts, such as is established when we differentiate between the work of art or literature and the criticism of it. Here there are no meta-texts. Instead, critical writing takes up a position next to its object, on a par with it, and, in its turn, establishes a new web of intertextual relations with it. In fact, the intertextual nature of both ‘creative’ work and criticism blurs the difference between the two, making this distinction obsolete: ‘There are no more critics, only writers.’⁵

In the subversive phrasing of both Kristeva and Barthes, the text is defined as a productivity, an action rather than an object.⁶ This intentional violation of the basic categories of language and thought poses something of an intellectual hurdle. In seeing the text as an activity, Kristeva and Barthes fracture one of our deepest cognitive beliefs. This is probably a strategic manoeuver meant to shake us out of our habitual mode of thinking about texts, by simultaneously fomenting and assuaging our instinctive resistance.

The reader brings to the reading his unique storehouse of knowledge and views, based on his previous readings. The act of reading opens up a dialogue with the work, which likewise possesses its own ideational and ideological concerns. The text, in Kristeva’s theory, is the intersection or crossing point of all these units of ideology, or ideologטmes.⁷

The particular selection of previous readings which each reader brings to bear on a work is necessarily subjective, arbitrary and contingent. I as a reader will pick out from the text only those aspects which I can place in already familiar contexts. Without such frames of reference, the work can have little meaning for me, and I will not be able to generate from it a text. These frameworks are necessarily many and varied, from the language I must be familiar with, through a welter of linguistic, literary, historical, scientific and political allusions, to quotations that the work may require me to recognize. Beyond all these, I also bring to my reading my more private contexts, texts that I connect with my new object of reading but which are not, and even cannot be, encoded in the work, e.g. because they postdate it. Phenomenologically speaking, here is a contingent and subjective biographical element that is allowed to enter and play an important part in the intertextual reading. Critical practice anticipated the theory: Every psychoanalytic, Marxist or feminist analysis of classical works is a reading of an older work through the prism of a later critical position.

Intertextuality between verbal and non-verbal arts is widely perceived to possess a great, even if not yet fully realized, cultural and critical potential. Roland Barthes advocated pulling down the barriers between the arts by extending the concept of ‘text’ to include works in all manner of media. In his own discussions of intertextuality, however, he relied for the most part on literary examples.

When the concept of text is allowed out of its linguistic confines, the result is an expansion of the accepted critical territory. Barthes refused to restrict the concept of text to what is written, seeing in all the arts, in all semiotic systems, a potential for the engendering of texts. Written language has an advantage over visual or auditory ‘languages’ in that ‘there the sign is distinct and directly signifying (it is the “word”), and language is the only semiotic system which has the power to interpret the other signifying systems and itself.^’8

The intertexual reading of texts from different artistic media institutionalizes the existing tendency of bringing together the different arts. It is customary, for example, to interpret the medieval mystery plays with the aid of the series of wall-paintings and reliefs in many churches, known as Biblia pauperum. In this example, it is the common Biblical subject-matter and its exegesis, shared by the plays and the visual material, that invites comparison. But modern intertextuality goes much further, bringing together works from different artistic disciplines even when they have no common subject-matter. Thus, an analysis of the plot-structure of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in terms of musical polyphony is an instance of interdisciplinary intertextuality. Within the framework of intertextual reading, there is no need to prove a material link between the musical ideas and the structure of the play in order to justify discussing them together.

The Achilles’ heel of intertextuality is that there is no clear limit to the degree of liberty allowed by the play of text with intertext. The borders between the acceptable and the non-acceptable cannot be defined or sketched. Both the strength and the weakness of the inteapproach derive from the impossibility of positing critical criteria, of distinguishing between a reading that is enriching and one that is simply wild. Despite the enchantment of bredown the barriers between writer and reader and transforming the reading from passivity to activity, one must not forget the responsibility of the reader - the fully fledged reader - to produce an interesting new reading. Where such a reading succeeds in approaching the work from a new and convincing angle and to locate it within contemporary discourse, the gains justify the risks taken.

The intertextual approach opens up new directions for criticism. Instead of analyzing the work with conventional critical tools, derived ultimately from Aristotle’s six elements, instead of discussing plot, characters, themes, and so forth, it suggests reading the work through the filter of subjectively chosen intertexts.

Thus, for example, I read the lyrical and romantic love between Romeo and Juliet through Petrarca’s love poetry. It is this understanding that generates for me the text, highlighting Mercutio’s comparison of Romeo to Petrarca, the repeated use of Petrarcan sonnets, the prevalence of the contrastive metaphors of love and death, light and dark, and the special tragic key in which the whole play is written. The dramatic structure of the street scenes in the play becomes meaningful for me through my acquaintance with the scenic conventions in the Italian Renaissance theatre and my awareness that no such scenery was available in the Elizabethan theatre. I understand the famous window scene as a theatrical elaboration of the musical and poetic genre of the serenade, and so on. The points of intersection between these texts are, as Kristeva has argued, ideological crossroads: the convention of the serenade reflects the position of woman in patriarchal society, her confinement to the house; the street scene, that is structured along the principles of symmetry on the one hand and escalation of violence on the other, expresses the same values of hierarchy and absolutism that are suggested by the perspective depiction of the Italian piazza on the stage.⁹

The broadening of the contemporary field of research through the institutionalization of interdisciplinarity radicalizes intertextuality. Whereas the investigation of sources, quotations and literal allusions belong to traditional critical strategies, the new emphasis on the figure of the reader and the function of reading have opened up new possibilities. The theoretician Michael Riffaterre has suggested an interesting distinction between an intertextuality that is encoded in the work and demands to be deciphered, an obligatory intertextuality, and an intertextuality that is brought to bear on the work by the reader, and is therefore incidental and contingent, and which he terms aleatoric, i.e. as the throw of dice.¹⁰ This second kind of intertextual reading encapsulates the more daring and exciting critical developments, the newly discovered potential for understanding works from unexpected directions by reading them through the filter of other works.

*

 I now propose an intertextual reading of three plays by Tom Stoppard. Rather than refer mimetically to any ‘reality’, his plays seem to relate to other texts, thus exemplifying obligatory intertextuality. In a tone that is always amused, ironic and sophisticated, Stoppard seems to be conducting a dialogue with the best in art and philosophy, and, through it, articulates his position on a variety of contemporary intellectual, social and political issues. His consumate wit and ingenuity ensure the originality of what is said via intertextuality. Stoppard’s wide use of obligatory intertextuality does not however preclude an aleatoric intertextual reading of his plays. In fact, the opposite may be the case, since the obligatory intertextuality of the plays encourages us as readers to explore beyond the work for more and more significant intertexts in ever widening circles.

First, an example of interdisciplinary intertextuality, of the intertextuality of a play with paintings by the Belgian painter Renי Magritte. Already the title of the play, After Magritte, points to the necessity of an intertextual reading.¹¹ ‘After Magritte’ is a double entendre: It has a simple temporal sense, as well as an art-historical meaning of source, influence, or homage. The temporal sense of the title refers to an event preceding the opening of the play, ‘We went to see an exhibition of surrealistic art at the Tate Gallery’ (p. 93), which serves as the focus of the whole action. It is conceivable that the play itself was written after Stoppard’s own visit to the retrospective exhibit of Magritte at the Tate in 1969, the year before the premiטre of the play.¹² Thus, the temporal sense of ‘After Magritte’ is itself split into internal (referring to the play) and external (referring to the playwright) meanings. In the terminology of art history, Stoppard chose to write a play ‘after’ Magritte in analogy to the artistic practice of painting ‘after’ famous paintings: e.g. Manet’s Olympia, after Titian’s Venus of Urbino, or Picasso’s Le Dיjeuner sur l’herbe based on Manet’s picture of the same name, or Picasso’s numerous versions of Las Meninas, after Velasquez’ famous group portrait of The Family of Philip IV. The title itself thus directs the reader’s attention to the complexity of intertextual relations established between the two artistic disciplines. The intertextuality encoded within the play demands that the play be produced so that it is visually intertextualized with Magritte. Similarly, it calls upon readers and spectators to read the play in conjunction with the paintings and the ideas expressed through them.

The similarity between the opening stage directions in Stoppard’s play and Magritte’s painting L’assassin menacי (Fig.1) has been generally recognized.¹³ But the reliance of the picture, in its turn, on a verbal piece has been overlooked. Apparently, L’assassin menacי was painted ‘after’ a short prose piece bearing the same title, that appears in a collection called Images peintes, written by a friend of Magritte, the Belgian poet Paul Nougי. Written in 1927, shortly prior to the painting of the picture, this piece served as a scenario for the painting.¹⁴ From the intertextual and interdisciplinary point of view, the three works (by Nougי, Magritte and Stoppard) form a series of verbal and pictorial interactions: from quasi-dramatic scenario to painting and back into drama.

Despite the many similarities between L’assassin menacי and After Magritte - the woman lying in the centre of the room, ‘the wind-up gramophone with an old-fashioned horn’, the observer or observers peering through a window, the black bowler hat, and other details - it is far from clear, in view of the many discrepancies between the two scenes, why it is this

Fig. 1

painting alone to which the play should be particularly related. Neither does the name of the play point to any specific work by Magritte. On the other hand, many interesting links can be formed between the play and a number of other Magritte paintings, from the opening gambit in which, in order to save the delicate balance of the lamp, Harris takes a bite from the apple (see Fig.2), to the scenes with the tuba, Mother’s musical instrument (see Figs.3,4,5). In fact, Magritte’s tuba-canvasses are expressly referred to as the for visiting the Tate Gallery exhibition (p. 94), and Mother describes some of these disparagingly: ‘Tubas on fire, tubas stuck to lions and naked women, tubas hanging in the sky - there was one woman with a tuba with a sack over her head as far as I could make out. I doubt he’d ever tried to play one’ (p. 95). Another character, Thelma, criticizes these paintings for not being painted from life, thus anticipating our response to the play.

Clearly, relating After Magritte to a single painting cannot do justice to the intricacy of the connections with Magritte’s works and their signifying power. Nor is ienough to compare play and paintings and show that it substitutes farce for menace.¹⁵ The nature of the relations between the two ‘texts’ is far more intricate, subtle and intellectually demanding. The play transliterates Magritte’s unique language of surrealistic images into the theatrical medium, and uses this transliteration to comment on Magritte’s ideas about the relation between reality and its representation, the object and its painting, the object and its name, the icon and the word.

Using the terminology of Kristeva and Barthes, we may say that the intertextuality of Stoppard with Magritte occurs at the ideological crossroads where they wrestle with the meaning of their art, with the question of the ontological status of artistic representation, with the question of the relationship between word and icon, verbal art and visual art, and with the problems of the philosophy of language.¹⁶ This is not just an artistic crossroads but a complex interchange, criss-crossed also by linguists and philosophers like de Saussure, Wittgenstein, G.E. Moore, and Michel Foucault.¹⁷ The intertextual approach makes me read Stoppard’s play together with Magritte and then, further, with Magritte’s own intertexts, thus transforming the obligatory intertextual reading into an aleatoric one.

Magritte’s various pictorial dictionaries (such as La clef des songes), (Fig.6), in which the accepted coordination of word and icon has been deliberately distorted, shake our confidence in the signifying power of language. Significantly, the confrontation between word and icon takes place on the page, without reference to the objects both of these are supposed to represent.

Fig.7

The realization of the arbitrariness of all representational systems, whether verbal or pictorial, cuts the signifying systems of the arts loose from their moorings in reality, setting them adrift. Separated from their signifieds, from the world of objects, the language of art becomes a closed system, signifying nothing. Hence Magritte’s life-long obsession with the theme of Ceci n’est pas une pipe (Fig.7). Due to the unbreachable gap between representation and reality, the pipe itself can never be painted, but only, paradoxically and circularly, its iconic or verbal representations.¹⁸ The theoretical impossibility of bridging this gap is underlined in a startling painting, La tentative de l’impossible, which depicts a painter painting a woman, not a painting of a woman (Fig.8).¹⁹

The severance of the semiotic systems from their signifieds leaves us only with the possibility of relating them to each other, i.e. intertextually. Instead of looking for a meaningful pronouncement about reality, we now look for a significant relationship between texts. Artistic realism is no longer tenable, and our ability to ‘understand’ a text depends on our ability to find its links with already familiar texts, not with ‘the world outside’.

The plot of After Magritte illustrates the characters’ inability to reconstruct a ‘real’ event or to deduct anything from their perceptions. Each of them saw and interpreted differently the strange figure on the street. This farce on the-crime-that-never-was derives its interest from Stoppard’s epistemol- ogical and ontological position, expressed through his use of Magritte. Stoppard himself has recounted how the play was inspired by

a friend’s story about the morning he was shaving when he saw from the bathroom window his pet peacock leap over the garden-hedge and make off down the road. Peacocks being rare birds, he dropped his razor and, barefoot and lathered, he pursued it, caught it, and returned with the peacock under his arm. Now, I tend to write plays about people who drive by in a car at that particular moment. They see a man in pajamas, bare feet and shaving foam, carrying a peacock, for about a third of a second. They never see him again. They never quite understand what it is they’ve seen. They probably wouldn’t even agree on what it was.²⁰

It is easy to misread this ‘authorial testimony’ as a confirmation of Stoppard’s ‘realistic’ approach to the world. But Stoppard is not describing a first-hand experience; he is emphasizing that the idea for the play ‘sprang up from a friend’s story’, i.e. from a textual (although oral) source. Furthermore, the story itself, of ‘the barefoot and lathered’ man running with a peacock under his arm, was obviously chosen because of the discrepancy between the bizarre, surrealist appearance and the mundane and trivial causality behind it. Stoppard states that his plays are about ‘people who drive by in a car’ but will ‘never quite understand what it is they’ve seen’. He divorces the signifier from its realistic signified, using it for its purely iconic value.

The intertextual approach spreads in all directions, enabling us to create unexpected and unconventional connections. After Magritte may be linked, for example, with the genre of detective plays and stories in general, or with Detective Maigret, the brainchild of another Belgian, Georges Simenon, in particular. Maigret’s name is in fact allowed into the play as a quickly-corrected slip-of-the-tongue (‘my mother-in-law is a devotee of Maigret’, p. 94). Taking intertextuality even further, the structure of the plot, in which a Police Inspector sets out to find the perpetrator of a crime through a series of interrogations, only to find out at the end of the day that all the clues point at himself, carries ironic parallels with the plot of Oedipus. The Inspector’s name, Foot, is spotlighted when he takes off one of his shoes and socks and is asked by Harris: ‘Is something the matter with your foot, Foot? Inspector, Foot?’ (p. 100). This rather heavy-handed pointing may suggest that the intertextuality with Oedipus, the swollen-footed, arrived at through an aleatoric process, is in fact anticipated by the writing, i.e. obligatory.

*

 The title of Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, the two short plays coupled together, points to an intricate intertextual tissue. Witty and ironic as always, Stoppard scrambles together, within the scope of his plays, very different intertexts. Both plays offer abbreviated versions of Shakespearian plays, and the first even contains an abbreviation of the abbreviation, a two-page version of quotations from the play. The Reduced Shakespeare Company that performs a spoof of Shakespeare probably takes its inspiration from these plays, but for Stoppard the gimmick is not an end in itself but a signifying means.

The Shakesperian plays used are crisscrossed by other intertexts. The name Dogg, rather than dog, refers to The Dogg’s Troupe of Inter-Action, Ed Berman’s company, for which the play was originally written. Beyond this private joke, the title carries a number of preparatory hints about the spirit of the play. Stoppard employs the word ‘dog’ for its myriad associations and uses, both positive and negative. ‘Dog Latin’, for example, refers to the corrupted language used by ignor. Like dog Latin, the ‘English’ of Dogg’s Hamlet is a language gone wrong. This meaning of ‘dog’ is reinforced by the association with doggerel, i.e. burlesque, trivial, or undignified verse or jingle. These associations with ‘dog’ imply a sub-standard and ironic layer of language, but there are also others that derive from the various characteristics attributed to the dog, and they too are relevant to the punning nature of the title. In Cahoot’s Macbeth, the Inspector speaks disparagingly of the ‘doghouse’, ‘dog’s dinners’ and ‘the Canine Defence League’.²¹

Along with the Shakespearian play, another crucial intertext of Dogg’s Hamlet is a passage from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. In this late work, Wittgenstein challenges the accepted concept of ‘meaning’. He points to the absence of any direct link between language and a ‘reality’, and proposes to replace our belief in the objective meaning of words with a functional view of language. Accordito this view, meaning is use. The example he analyzes is of a language that is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and his assistant B:

  A is building with building-stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words `block’, ‘pillar’, ‘slab’, ‘beam’. A calls them out; B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call.²²

The four words that constitute this ‘primitive language’ serve the same function as a full request or command sentence. The use of a particular word, that makes the assistant pass a requested building-stone to the builder, constitutes all its meaning.

Dramatizing a paragraph from the Philosophical Investigations hardly seems, on the face of it, a promising starting-point for an entertaining farce. But Stoppard does precisely this, writing a play that examines our use of language, our ability to understand his own plays as well as Wittgenstein’s theory. The Wittgensteinian conception of language as a game²³ feeds into the various play-patterns developed by Stoppard.

Stoppard begins to develop Wittgenstein’s model in his Preface to the play. His building-blocks are made of pieces of wood of different shapes and sizes. The builder calls out for planks, slabs, blocks and cubes to build a platform, which another man then throws to him:

An observer would probably conclude that the different words described different shapes and sizes of the material. But this is not the only possible interpretation. Suppose, for example, the thrower knows in advance which pieces the builder needs, and in what order. In such a case there would be no need for the builder to name the pieces he requires but only to indicate when he is ready for the next one.

The four words of this language, which the observer took to mean different shapes and sizes, could be understood by the thrower as the following cues: ‘Ready’, ‘Okay’, ‘Next’, and ‘Thank you’. Both interpretations can exist simultaneously without either proponent ever finding out the discrepancy in their understanding of the language.²⁴

Stoppard was intrigued by the idea of ‘writing a play which had to teach the audience the language the play was written in.’ In the play, he demands of his audience to learn a new language, a language made up largely of English words that have totally changed their grammatical and pragmatic functions. We are introduced into Dogg language playfully, without any kind of formal initiation or learning process. The reader, as well as the potential actor, are provided with an English translation in parentheses, at least at first. Not so the spectator, whose exposure to Dogg language comes as a total surprise and who must pick it up, unaided, from the dramatic situation and tone of voice. For example: When a character tests the microphone (the English translation reads: ‘Testing, testing ... one-two-three ...’), what the audience hears is: ‘Breakfast, breakfast ... sun-dock-trog ...’ When he realizes that the microphone isn’t working, he shouts: ‘Haddock priest!’, i.e. ‘The mike is dead’, a meaning underlined by the interchange: ‘Haddock?’ `Priest.’

Stoppard emphasizes here the arbitrary nature of the link between word and object, a central theme of philosophy of language, from Plato’s Cratylus to the structural linguistics of de Saussure and his followers. One can also find parallels between Stoppard’s arbitrary language and Magritte’s picture-dictionaries. What Magritte does with icons, Stoppard does with words, wrenching them from their accepted ‘meanings’. The bizarre compounding of haddock with priest belongs in the comic nonsense tradition. At the same time, it shows how we can understand what is said on stage without understanding the words, and also how we understand through the agency of such bizarre formulations what the play is really all about, its reflexive concern with our ability to understand words or through words or even despite words, those familiar words that have suddenly become estranged.

The dramatis personae are English schoolboys, wearing grey flannel shorts, blazers, school caps, etc., but they speak Dogg, not English. With great deference, one of them asks the headmaster, Dogg, for the time: ‘Cretinous pig-faced, git?’ While they munch the sandwiches they have extracted from their satchels, the boys start rehearsing their lines from the school play they are about to perform Hamlet, in English. Against the background of only dimly comprehended dialogue in Dogg, the audience now experiences the relief of hearing the familiar English lines. But is their language really more comprehensible? It certainly lacks the immediacy of the colloquial Dogg spoken by the children and headmaster. These verses from Hamlet have been quoted so often that their significance seems to have been lost. The boy playing Horatio falters over the line: ‘The morn in russet mantle clad walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill’, raising doubts about the reference or what is actually signified by these words for a modern audience. Paradoxically, it turns out that the words ‘haddock priest’ are much clearer to us than the famous Shakespearian quotation. The words spoken in Dogg make more sense because, as Wittgenstein saw it, we understand their function.

The confrontation between the two languages comes to a head with the entrance of Easy, the lorry driver from Leamington Spa who delivers the wooden building blocks for the scenery of the impending performance. Unlike the other characters, Easy speaks English, so that his words and theirs carry conflicting meanings and the interchanges between them run at cross-purposes.

Easy proceeds to build the scenery, according to the construction plan given to him by Dogg, from the blocks, planks, cubes and slabs he has brought in his lorry. He keeps calling out for the different shapes he needs, but, as in Wittgenstein’s model, the boys understand his requests as words in their own language. As the basis for the discrepancy between Dogg and English has already been laid earlier in the play, Stoppard can now build on that foundation a completely zany farce. Our enjoyment as spectators is dependent on our understanding of the gap between the two languages that use the very same words.²⁵ Stoppard expands the boundaries of farce, the genre based on discrepancies in knowledge and recognition, to include also disparity in language.

Towards the end of the play, Easy begins speaking Dogg, introducing the performance of the 15-minute Hamlet about to take place: ‘Hamlet bedsocks Denmark. Yeti William Shakespeare’ This play-within-the-play is a collage of famous quotations that preserves both the plot-line and the main scenes. The play is so well known that even a few words suffice to evoke entire scenes. Because of its intertextuality with the Shakespearian play, tselected quotations are charged with meanings far beyond the simple verbal meaning of the words.

The Siamese-twin play, Cahoot’s Macbeth, likewise offers, in the words of the Preface, an `over-truncated’ version of a play by Shakespeare, but here the inspiration comes from quite a different direction. The harsh predicament of the Czechoslovak writers and actors who had signed ‘Charter 77’, and who found themselves, after the fall of Dubcek, forced to leave their working places and pursue menial jobs, occasioned the founding, by Pavel Kohout, of a Living-Room Theatre. Perhaps taking his cue from Lady Macbeth’s ‘What, in our house!’, Kohout performed his drastically shortened adaptation of Macbeth in private homes. His version ran for seventy-five minutes, and it was performed by a company of five, including himself. The choice of a play that deals with a ruthless and bloody tyrant was obviously not accidental.

Stoppard puts on stage a living-room in Prague in the course of such a performance of Macbeth, thus intertextualizing his play with both Shakespeare’s original and Kohout’s version. The shortened version is allowed to run smoothly up to the knocking on the gate, which here heralds the entraof the Police Inspector and brings the performance to a halt. Stoppard dramatizes the political implications of performing Macbeth in a police state and develops the conflict between the Police Inspector and the political dissidents gathered in the flat. The Inspector’s growing consternation stems from his conviction that the performance is a subversive act against the authorities, coupled with his inability, due to the evasive nature of the words, to pinpoint the law they are infringing. If only the words had a clear and fixed meaning, it would be possible to establish decisively what was said. The law rests on the plainness and specificity of words, but the sophisticated theatrical statement made through the performance of Macbeth is insidious in the extreme. On this point, the Inspector quotes ‘the chief’:

The chief says he’d rather you stood up and said, ‘There is no freedom in this country’, then there’s nothing underhand and we all know where we stand. You get your lads together and we get our lads together and when it’s all over, one of us is in power and you’re in gaol. That’s freedom in action. But what we don’t like is a lot of people being cheeky and saying they are only Julius Caesar or Coriolanus or Macbeth. Otherwise we are going to start treating them the same as the ones who say they are Napoleon.²⁶

In Stoppard’s play, the desire for a clearly defined, single meaning, is presented as authoritarian, while playing with words is anarchist and subversive. The centrality of the word in the theatre is restored, though with a difference: not the integrity of the Shakespearian text, not the repetition of the same sacred formulas, but the restoration of the words to centre stage as the active agents of the drama. This activism of the words is not only a political activism, as demonstrated in Cahoot’s Macbeth. It is also a theatrical activism, in which stage business and acrobatics, all that is subsumed under ‘action’, are performed not just via movement and stage effects, so common today, but also, and perhaps chiefly, by means of language. For Stoppard, language has thrown off the yoke of semantics and become an acrobat taking upon itself risks without the safety net provided by the frameworks of the past. Instead of serving plot and character, language now enslaves them, turning them into intertextual elements with which it can play, re-arranging them in patterns that express its novel ideas.

The power of the words is already expressed in the punning title of the play: The Czech playwright Kohout becomes the character ‘Cahoot’, his name relating him to ‘cahoots’, a slang word meaning partnership, usually applied to shady dealings. Our perception of the slipperiness of this word is further exacerbated by being conditioned to suspect the very notion of ‘meaning’ through our acquaintance with Magritte’s picture-dictionaries, Wittgenstein’s model and Stoppard’s own Dogg language. Here the shady partnership refers primarily to the collusion between the dissidents when the police burst into the flat during the performance of Macbeth.

It is the figure of Easy, the driver who has learnt Dogg language, that links Stoppard’s Hamlet to his Macbeth. His entrance serves, among other things, to supply a farcical substitute for Banquo’s Ghost. Easy arrives with his lorry, from Leamington Spa straight into the Prague flat. It is now he that begins speaking Dogg, the new language he acquired in the previous play, in an English-speaking environment. On a simplistic level, one can say that the relationship between the two languages parallel those between the Czech of the adaptation and the English of the original Macbeth.

With the exception of Easy, all the characters of Cahoot’s Macbeth are new, as are also the plot, location and atmosphere of the play. Yet, the play has no independent, separate existence from Dogg’s Hamlet. Although the only visible link between the two plays is this one character, the Dogg language we have picked up as spectators in the first play is invaluable for the comprehension of the second. Easy, the builder who knows how to build with cubes, slabs, blocks and planks, is a person who has picked up the new language, with the ease suggested by his name. His entrance initiates the dissident actors into this new language which they learn to handle quickly, with the aid of a phrase book. This secret language is now shared by audience and dissidents, transforming the spectators, who are also treated in the play as the audience assembled to watch the forbidden performance of the play-within-the-play, into tacit accomplices.

The salient features of this language now become apparent: although it uses a vocabulary taken for the most part from standard English, the words are used differently. Following what is being said on stage demands of the spectator an agility of thought and a measure of intuition. The words must be dissociated from their conventional meanings, from the limits imposed on them by their seemingly a-priori meanings. All we are left with, all we have to go by, is their function within rapidly changing dramatic situations.

The words are the weapons of the dissidents in evading the authority that wishes to control their minds. In the absence of free speech, the dissidents express themselves through Shakespeare’s verse; when that too is threatened, they resort to continuing the performance of Macbeth in Dogg. Even more than weapons, the words have become dissidents themselves, refusing to accept the dictates of any pre-determined, fixed meaning. Let loose in Dogg’s Hamlet, they seem to run wild here. The spiritual dexterity of the dissidents playing with the words, passing them around as in a ball game, is contrasted with the Police Inspector’s frustration at not being able to follow these quick moves. Our enjoyment as spectators and readers depends on our own ability to free ourselves from the accepted meanings of the words and follow what is taking place despite the willful neglect of conventional dictionary meanings.

As I have tried to demonstrate, an intertextual reading of Cahoot’s Macbeth involves Dogg’s Hamlet, the twin play linked ostensibly through the figure of Easy, but more deeply through the question of the language we use. This ideological link, in its turn, connects both plays with the work of Magritte (and After Magritte), as well as the Wittgenstein paragraph referred to explicitly in the Preface. Reading Stoppard calls for the development of interdisciplinary methods of research that will facilitate the mapping of the intricate intertextual networks set up in his plays.

The intertextual approach calls into question the conventional and arbitrary nature of the between icon, word and object, between signifier and signified, hinging on the older philosophical problem of the relationship between epistemology and ontology. But although the artistic and philosophical aspects of this subject are evoked through this methodology of reading, Stoppard’s plays employ a uniquely theatrical medium, demonstrating reflex-ively how a self-contained system of signifiers dissociated from their conventional signifieds can function successfully.

Notes

9. I have developed some of these ideas in two essays: ‘Window and serenade: A scenic and dramatic convention’, Motar 2, 1994; 15-20 (in Hebrew); Romeo and Juliet and the scenic convention of the piazza’, ‘Dyvers toyes mengled’: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance European Culture in honour of Andrי Lascombes. Ed. Michel Bitot. Tours: Centre d’ֹtudes Supיrieures de la Renaissance; forthcoming.

13. L’assassin menacי, 1927, oil on canvas 159 by 195, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. On the connection with the painting, see, e.g., W. Harris, ‘Stoppard’s After Magritte’. Explicator 34, 1976; Richard Corballis, Stoppard: The Mystery and the Clockwork. New York: Methuen, 1984; 55; Jenkins; 55; Neil Sammells, Tom Stoppard: The Artist as Critic. London: Macmillan, 1988; Katherine Kelly, Tom Stoppard and the Craft of Comedy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991; 87.

16. See A.M. Hammacher, Renי Magritte. Tr. James Brockway. New York: Abrams, n.d.; ‘Magritte and the Linguists’; 30-35.