Celebrity Plays and Embodied Fidelity

Abstract

ABSTRACT In human subjects, celebrity is an active, yet predictable, phenomenon, one that is a carefully structured and managed experience designed to evoke ideas of talent, of charisma that is presented as distinct from the machinations that generate fame, even as it is obliquely acknowledged to depend on these very factors. Celebrity, therefore, is a reactive phenomena that helps define cultural norms. This essay suggests that Shakespeare plays are celebrities in their own right and accrue particular stage histories that are actively perpetuated as ‘Shakespearean’. Stagings of famous plays are expected to visually embody an idea of Shakespeare that is faithful to, not the original text, but a rich and often hegemonic cultural mythology that is embedded in the collective understanding of a particular play. For canonical plays, celebrity manifests in the competing assumption that a Shakespeare play’s fame stems from its universal timelessness and that it can be mobilised to speak to the current political moment or changing cultural practices. If embodied fidelity, then, is when a celebrity play is expected to look, feel, and be acted a particular way, theatre’s capacity as memory machine means that lineages develop that can actively dictate performance and casting strategies, making implicit decisions about who is granted access to ‘authentic’ Shakespeare – and who is not. This essay uses appropriation theory to suggest that the stakes of embodied fidelity are high, as it dictates conditions of performance along lines of race and gender, ability, and class.