The cliff, or the ‘stinking hospital bed’?: Howard Barker’s Gertrude (The Cry).

In May 2004, I directed students in a production of English playwright Howard Barker’s Gertrude (the Cry) at the Dolphin Theatre at the University of Western Australia. Barker’s play draws on the canonical Hamlet, known best in the various print and performance versions attributed to Shakespeare. Barker’s play, which I shall refer to as Gertrude, is one of several that Barker has written over, or ‘written back to’. These include Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women (1986); Minna (1994) – a reworking of G. E. Lessing’s 1767 play, Minna von Barnhelm; Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (1992); and Seven Lears: The Pursuit of the Good (1989), a play which treats the life of Lear up till the timing of Shakespeare’s play and strongly features, as protagonists, the lovers of Lear – a mother and her daughter, the latter of whom becomes the mother of Lear’s three daughters. I directed students in a production of this play in May 2007.

Barker’s treatment of Middleton’s play retained the first three-and-a-half acts, somewhat condensed but almost verbatim, and then developed the later acts as almost completely rewritten dialogue, with alterations to the plot – principally where Leantio and Livia triumph, with the help of the Ward. Uncle Vanya imagines a life-affirming world where Vanya takes control of his destiny, and Chekhov, who enters the play, is defeated, and expires on stage holding Vanya’s hand.In May 2006, I directed students in a production of Knowledge and a Girl (The Snow White Case). This play constitutes Barker’s reworking of the Grimm brothers’ tale, with the Queen/wicked stepmother as the wilful protagonist.

Importantly, Barker is neither a bardolator, nor an iconoclast. He uses Shakespeare’s play as a springboard for exploring possibilities – particularly where the possibilities of desire and passion may flourish in a catastrophic world. Barker, in an interview with Gilles Menegaldo, talks of ‘honouring’ the text in these revisitings and reworkings. As Barker puts it, he is not attempting to ‘modernise the texts, which would be a futile and chic enterprise’ but to engage ‘rather in a quarrel at the ethical level with aspects of the writing’.[1]

While Barker’s works are frequently staged – more often outside the United Kingdom than within – and universities have proved fertile venues for productions of his works, it would still be useful to provide some brief background on this playwright/director. Born in South London in 1946, he has an MA in History from Sussex University and after writing poems, short stories and novels, and several radio plays, Barker had his premiere play, Cheek, staged at the Royal Court in 1970. He started his playwriting from a socialist perspective – coming out of that group of English playwrights in the late 1960s and early 1970s such as David Hare, Trevor Griffiths, David Edgar, Edward Bond, Howard Brenton – and Caryl Churchill in the late 1970s. Barker’s early plays were strongly focused on class struggle. He states that he ‘gnawed at English socialism for ten years … coming at last to History’.[2] Barker’s body of work is impressive – plays, poetry, film and television scripts, books theorising and arguing for his approach to theatre, and essays – frequently in print in newspapers and magazines.[3] He has been a prolific publicist for his own theatre works – and is not short of a manifesto or two. It is not that he is trying to change the world – but he is certainly seeking to rescue theatre from what he sees as its moribund naturalism and easy-watching content. For Barker: ‘The theatre must start to take its audience seriously. It must stop telling them stories they can understand.’[4] This is where Barker differs quite radically from the abovementioned British playwrights – these ‘sociologists’ (as Barker has called them) who seek to explain and rationalise their dramatic worlds.

Barker terms his plays from the mid-1980s onwards as a Theatre of Catastrophe. The settings are catastrophic – invariably after some calamity that has rendered the normal mechanisms of social life inoperable – whether through war, or plague, or natural catastrophe. As Amanda Price puts it in her introduction to the second edition of Arguments for a Theatre:

The settings of Barker’s later plays are … panoramas of desolation, reflecting the ravaged landscape of the ideological battlefield. The solid structures and inviolable edifices which characterized the setting of the naturalistic play give way to crumbling and shattered remnants, standing as testimony to willed destruction. The characters which traverse this landscape are refugees from a world which once seemed to offer them reason and purpose; as the structures atrophy around them, so does their ability to give their lives coherent meaning. Out of the pain of their loss emerges an imperative: the need to forge new meanings out of the fractured ruins of their identity.[5]

In these liminal situations, characters no longer have the sustenance of regularity and habit to sustain them. They must learn different ways of thinking and knowing – and those who cannot adapt, often will perish.

What Barker is seeking is a theatre that invites the spectator to speculate – to move beyond the comfort zones of the majority of cultural experience. It is what Charles Lamb calls, in a book of the same name, a ‘theatre of seduction’, with Barker inviting the spectator to explore the boundaries of moral experience and emotion.[6] Barker’s theatre is overtly a theatre of speculation – not a place for learning and instruction. It is a theatre that requires effort, and challenges the spectator. As the Wrestling School website puts it: ‘Theatre of Catastrophe takes as its first principle the idea that art is not digestible. Rather, it is an irritant in consciousness, like the grain of sand in the oyster's gut...’.[7] The Wrestling School, a loose ensemble of actors originally coming mainly from Joint Stock, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the Royal Court, have staged Barker’s plays since 1988 in the United Kingdom and abroad. While Kenny Ireland was the principal director of the earlier plays with the Wrestling School, Barker has directed his own plays with them since 1994, with Hated Nightfall.

Gertrude (the Cry) was premiered at Riverside Studios, Hammersmith in London in October 2002, and at Kronborg Castle at Helsingor (Elsinore) in Denmark at the annual International Shakespeare Festival later in the same year. While many will have some knowledge of the plot of Hamlet –in my discussion of Barker’s play I will necessarily be referring to it. So, for those who are not familiar with it, briefly bear with my reading of the play.

Claudius kills his brother, the King Hamlet (husband of Gertrude and father of Hamlet), in order to take the throne of Elsinore, and to possess the late king’s wife. The seizure of power is the motive, as well as love for Gertrude. Hamlet sees himself as betrayed by this murder and this union. He certainly finds the hasty remarriage of his mother repugnant, and Shakespeare needs no help from Barker in the way that Hamlet’s thoughts are expressed. He makes reference to their ‘incestuous sheets’ and the ‘rank sweat of an enseamed bed, Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love over the nasty sty’ [3.4. 93-5]. Hamlet plots revenge on Claudius the King, but in the conventions of the revenge tragedy form, must gather enough evidence before taking his revenge – along the way, killing Polonius, destroying Ophelia (the daughter of Polonius), and ensuring the deaths of his two school friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. It would appear that Claudius knows what he is up to, and after failing to have him killed by the King of England tries to orchestrate the death of Hamlet by Ophelia’s brother Laertes. Bodies litter the stage at the end of the play – Hamlet, Laertes, Gertrude and Claudius – as a new ruler, Fortinbras, takes over.

Barker’s Gertrude has an obvious and distinct relationship to its source text Hamlet, in its settings, its characters, and its themes of desire, lust, and betrayal. It also has a strong resonance with the form of Jacobean revenge tragedies in its feral stage world of impulsive action, betrayal and death – signified by a fitting number of ‘dead’ bodies on stage at their conclusions. However, there are major differences from the source text. Gertrude, as may be deduced from the title, is given the role of principal protagonist; Hamlet is sidelined to some degree, and reconfigured (though perhaps not greatly) into a mean-spirited prude, more upset by his mother’s seeming promiscuity than by his father’s death, but who is made king nonetheless, and eventually chooses suicide rather than revenge. Another major and most important difference is that the play takes a step in a different direction from conventional closure, where justice is done and seen to be done. In particular, there is a willful lack of conventional moral rewards or punishments being meted out, and this appears to lie at the heart of certain critics and spectators dissatisfactions with the play. Aspects that Barker has commented on in respect of Shakespeare’s tragedy, though more broadly covering the genre of tragedy, are the desire for resolution, along with ‘reconciliation or apology’. Barker’s tragedy, which he terms catastrophic tragedy, is ‘open-ended and continues. All that the audience can expect to gain from it … is a sense of human complexity’.[8]

While Shakespeare’s play, in the print text at least, has a multitude of characters (invariably doubled or tripled in performance), in Barker’s play there are seven speaking roles, listed in the print text as follows:

GERTRUDE	A Queen
CLAUDIUS	A Prince
CASCAN	Servant To Gertrude
HAMLET	An Heir
ISOLA	Mother Of Claudius
RAGUSA	A Young Woman
ALBERT	A Duke Of Mecklenburg

Claudius, Gertrude and Hamlet are retained. Polonius (so faithful to Claudius) becomes Cascan (so faithful to Gertrude). Ophelia is echoed in Ragusa (a consort for Hamlet, but who is strongly proactive in her taking both Albert and Claudius as sex partners, and in her drowning the child of Claudius and Gertrude). Albert can be seen – in part – as an amalgam of Horatio (friend to Hamlet) and Fortinbras (conqueror of Denmark). Isola, the mother of Claudius, is a purely Barker invention. Fascinated by, and envious of, the sexual power of Gertrude which she sees as echoing her own former power, her primary but often conflictual desire is to save the life of her remaining son, Claudius. Paradoxically, and somehow inevitably, Claudius strangles his mother, to ‘PUT HER OUT HER MISERY [sic]’ (p. 89) so that she will not survive to witness his death. And there is the doomed baby of Gertrude and Claudius, Jane, who cries but never speaks. There is no ghost in Gertrude – the old king is dead.

Barker’s Gertrude is a play in twenty-one scenes. Where Shakespeare jumps in post murder, and the poisoning of the old king in the orchard is related back to us by the Ghost, Barker’s play opens with the murder of Old Hamlet. Thus, Barker’s play takes a seemingly more conventional linear line, starting at the beginning with the murder of the King, and finishing at the end with the death of Claudius and the marriage of Gertrude to Albert. However, the staging of this first murder shifts markedly from the accepted conventions of both the Elizabethan and Naturalistic modes. At the start, Gertrude and Claudius debate who should kill Old Hamlet, not whether they should or not. This is the very beginning of the play, and there is no equivocation about Gertrude’s role in this murder.

GERTRUDE:		(Entering) I should Surely I should Me
CLAUDIUS:		(Entering) No
GERTRUDE:		Me Let me
CLAUDIUS:		It must be me who
GERTRUDE:		Why not me
CLAUDIUS:		Me who
GERTRUDE:		HE IS MY HUSBAND WHY NOT ME (Pause)
CLAUDIUS:		Because he is your husband it must be me
GERTRUDE:		Let me kill Oh let me kill for you (Pause)
CLAUDIUS:		I’m killing Me (Pause)
GERTRUDE:		KILL MY HUSBAND THEN KILL HIM FOR ME (p. 9)

On Claudius’ demand, Gertrude then strips naked. (In the university production, the actor playing Gertrude was directed to ‘cheat’ her nudity by turning side on to the audience and opening her long coat to the gaze of the actor playing Claudius. There is no doubt that such a strategy undermines the vital role that nakedness plays in Barker’s theatre,[9] but the moral context of student theatre in Australia at that time demanded such a tactic.) Once the poison is poured in the ear, Claudius and Gertrude fornicate over the top of the dying King, the combination of their orgasmic cries and the King’s death cries forming what Barker terms in the stage directions, a ‘music of extremes’ (p. 10). And one of those cries is Gertrude’s ecstatic orgasmic cry, a cry occasioned by the act of betrayal, rather than a Naturalistic vocal response to orgasm. This cry resonates throughout the play, principally at those moments of betrayal when Gertrude’s desire overrides conventional moral precepts. It is what Claudius lives for – for him, ‘it kills God’ (p. 22).

Following this scene, Hamlet enters to where the Old King lies in state, and contemplating ‘tearlessness’ rather than grief, identifies Gertrude as a killer:

You
Choked
Him
With
A
View (p. 17)

The next scene is set at a graveyard, where Gertrude is performing fellatio on Claudius as Isola enters; then to a banquet, some seven weeks later, where Hamlet expresses his further disgust at his mother’s behaviour and belittles his wife-to-be, Ragusa. Albert, Duke of Mecklenburg, an old school friend of Hamlet’s arrives in Elsinore. Albert becomes the lover of Gertrude, and dallies with Ragusa – Hamlet’s consort. And, it is implied, Ragusa also ‘shares’ the bed of Claudius. An incestuous stew, indeed.

To condense to an ending: Cascan (while carrying the baby Jane) is killed by Hamlet – in part echoing the killing of Polonius. But there is nothing accidental about this murder. Cascan, in perceiving the danger that Hamlet (as moralist) presents to Gertrude, and realising that Claudius cannot act, pursues Hamlet (offstage) in an attempt to kill him. But while Cascan is carrying the baby Jane under one arm, Hamlet – in Isola’s words – ‘has a knife’. Hamlet ‘sticks it in … more than necessary’ (p. 72), implying a certain willingness to kill that may seem at odds with his professed expressions of morality, but fit the actions of a revenging Jacobean malcontent. Eventually, Claudius throttles his mother, Isola; Ragusa drowns the baby Jane – the issue of Claudius and Gertrude; and Gertrude kills Claudius with her words of betrayal. As David Kilpatrick puts it in a review: ‘This final scene … is a brutal blend of matricide, infanticide, and ultimately, death by words’.[10] Gertrude and Albert exit for their honeymoon – ‘two weeks in a warm climate’ (p. 91) – leaving the bodies of Hamlet, Isola, Claudius, and the baby Jane, on the stage. Albert’s parting words are ruthlessly to the point:

BURN THESE
BURN AND SCATTER THESE (p. 93)

While Barker’s re-‘playing’ of Gertrude gives prominence to a relatively sidelined character in Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet is rewritten in markedly different terms to the majority conventional treatments of the tragic hero. Hamlet is called unflatteringly, a ‘prig, and a prude, and a moralist’ by his grandmother Isola, who adds, ‘and you hide inside your indignation like a baby in a pen’ (p. 24). But, Hamlet is more than just a prig, a prude and a moralist – he is a dangerous moralist. As Cascan tellingly warns Claudius, in words that have resonances across contexts past and present:

Oh you do not know the moralists you do not know the python length of their ambition and how could you innocent oh innocent are the immoralists (p. 68)

Hamlet also expresses his misogyny frequently – towards his mother and his betrothed – drawing on the source character’s distaste for sexuality and women, and invoking a certain antic disposition when contemplating ‘tearlessness’ while viewing the body of his father. As a point of style, as can be seen in Cascan’s words above, and in Hamlet’s below, Barker often leaves the work of punctuation and phrasing to the actor, allowing the rhythm of the text to dictate, or rather suggest, appropriate phrasing.

HAMLET:

I expected to be more moved than this (Pause) Cascades Storms of Torrents of emotion Never mind these things will come later when I least expect them in bed with a bitch or on a horse eyes full of tears you’re crying she will say you’re crying the horse will neigh yes horse yes bitch I am and I don’t know why I’m blind I’m choking silly ha ha forgive me ha I’ll get off off the bitch off the horse have you a handkerchief (He laughs briefly) Horses don’t have handkerchiefs but bitches might to wipe their crevices that stinks I’ll say that stinks of filthy copulations am I to wipe my eyes with that yes wipe away and fuck your finicky fastidious and (He laughs, shuddering) WOMEN ARE SO COARSE (p. 13).

Along with his distaste for sex, or any physical contact, Hamlet also expresses his hatred of love: ‘love I hate it /all manifestations of the thing called love fill me with horror and contempt’ (pp. 54–55). He knows the truth of his father’s death, but is not interested in revenge – he is the King. He eventually carries out the implications of suicide which critics and commentators have argued for in relation to the ‘to be or not to be’ speech in Shakespeare’s play. Barker plays out the implications in his Scene 19, where Hamlet appears to make the choice to die by drinking poisoned wine offered by Claudius, knowing it is meant for him. As does Gertrude, his mother, in another act of betrayal. This episode, on pp. 76–78 of the print text, is a stunningly effective piece of theatrical writing, and staging potential. Hamlet, see-sawing between Claudius and Gertrude, is finally ordered by his mother to drink the poisoned wine. He asks ‘why’ and Gertrude responds:

I don’t know
I DON’T KNOW WHY JUST DRINK THE
(Her hands lift)
I don’t know why (p. 77)

It is on a ‘sudden impulse’ that Hamlet lifts the glass to his lips and drinks. This voluntary (or perhaps involuntary) impulse leads to his death on the stage, where he remains till the conclusion of the play.

As Barker has stated, in an interview with Charles Lamb:

The search for a reason not to commit suicide lies at the heart of my work, and what is distilled from that is a sense of melancholy …. I don’t mean depressing. Only a populist, entertainment-obsessed, comedy-obsessed culture confuses melancholy with depression.[11]

Both worlds – Barker’s and Shakespeare’s – are worlds where characters seek to fulfill their desires, whatever the consequences. But Shakespeare’s moral world is struggling to find a balance between the scary spaces of secular free will and the sacred order of divine providence. Barker’s characters are more elementally, and essentially, Jacobean than that. Their desires drive them — not the knowledge and fear of possible consequences in the here-and-now, or the hereafter. David Ian Rabey offers a definition of desire which serves well to describe some of the characters of Gertrude:

The willingness to acquiesce in the destruction of all previously held notions of one’s self; in the demolition of all alternative notions of importance and worth for one’s self; in order to pursue the unknown possibilities which may be generated by complete and explosive sexual engagement with the desired one.[12]

There is a constant conflict in Barker’s later plays between what David Barnett sees as ‘the desire for satisfaction’ that is ‘constantly at odds with the imposition of order.’[13] For Barnett, writing on Barker’s plays (and in particular on his play The Europeans in relation to what he sees as its Nietzschean themes), this invokes the Nietzschean paradigm of tragedy and echoes the struggle between the Apolline and the Dionysian – between rationality and ecstasy. As Cascan states on his service to Gertrude: ‘My devotion IT’S AN ECSTASY’ (p. 50). This struggle between desire and order is foregrounded in Barker’s play in a key theme – the struggle between the moralists and the immoralists. But while Hamlet may personify the moralists, and Cascan labels Claudius as one of the immoralists, the character of Gertrude seems to inhabit a space between – an amoral space where her desires are neither moral nor immoral, but are expressions of a power that she cannot control. The cry – finally, as CLaudius dies, ‘comes, not from herself, but from the land’ (p. 92).

Gertrude, the character, escapes the moral universe of both the Elizabethan/Jacobean world and our contemporary conventions of staged morality. She is — to borrow from Nietzsche —beyond good and evil. She is an elemental power, seemingly devoid of agency by the play’s end. Gertrude inhabits a liminal world of amoral freedom – existing between the right and wrong of a societally imposed and enforced moral order, and the choice of immorality. This liminality is echoed throughout the Elsinore of Shakespeare’s play – a late-medieval world of impulsive revengers struggling with the humanist and individualist renaissance world view, where a reflective subjectivity could forestall action.

E. M. W. Tillyard (with apologies to the cultural materialists) argued that the conflict between reason and passions is at the core of much of Shakespeare’s moralising. It is a moral and philosophical sphere that may well still inform us, as Tillyard puts it “the commonplace of every age” (p. 83).[14] Indeed, as Hamlet states in reference to ‘his mother’s hasty marriage’:

O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourned longer. (1.2.150–1]

It certainly can be argued that the moral centre of Hamlet does not exist, other than through choices in performance, by actors and spectators. Any character morality can be subverted/diverted in performance. The words on the page are only the potential of the words in performance. Shifts of register and tone, a hand gesture, the pulling down of a corner of the mouth – all are potentially subversive of whatever agreed meaning by convention has been determined through a literary critical history rather than a history of performance events. Furthermore, how can we possibly access so much of what Shakespeare’s plays are alluding to – especially in performance. We have no footnotes, we are not that educated segment of an Elizabethan audience who might understand where much or most of this pot pourri of medieval, Christian, Greek and neoclassical concepts emanate from, or what they portend. And, while this may seem terribly immoral, why should theatre works in performance profess a morality for us either to follow, or reject? We may agree or disagree with the morality of the characters on stage, but we can recognise that they are characters, that it is a fiction, that the actors leave the theatre, the lights get turned off, and we go home or elsewhere – entertaining the breaking of barriers perhaps, but not doing anything. Theatre is neither necessarily a cathartic warning, nor an encouragement to transgression. It is a brief span of time where we may – in part, and to varying degrees – be temporarily transported out of our everyday lives – temporarily, and partially.

Tillyard goes on to say, with reference to the Shakespeare play: “Gertrude’s sin is not against human decency alone but against the whole scale of being,”[15] Barker’s Cascan offers a viewpoint on a different sin, the sin of ignoring the possibilities of experience through risk, or the choice between ecstasy and violent death, or the abyss of the ‘stinking bed inside a stinking hospital’:

All ecstasy makes ecstasy go running to a further place that is its penalty we know this how well we know this still we would not abolish ecstasy would we we would not say this ever-receding quality in ecstasy makes it unpalatable on the contrary we run behind it limping staggering I saw it there I saw it there
(He laughs)
A haunting mirage on the rim of life
(He extends the gown for Gertrude)
Eventually I can't help thinking eventually it lures us over a cliff so what why not a cliff is a cliff worse than a bed a stinking bed inside a stinking hospital no give me the cliff do put this on the cliff every time … (pp. 10–11)

As the critic Lyn Gardner wrote in The Guardian in October 2002, ‘In the end [Barker] offers us the same choice as Gertrude: plunging over the cliff of ecstasy or dying quietly in a stinking bed in a stinking hospital. We would all choose what she chooses. It is the only moral choice.’[16] The assertion sounds tempting, and following the transports of the stage for the duration of the play one may entertain the courses of action that many of Barker’s characters take – to plunge over the cliff rather than rotting in the hospital bed. But, removed from that imagined space it is questionable how many would have the guts to step outside the moral pythons of a bourgeois society. As Bob Dylan sings: ‘To live outside the law you must be honest’.[17] Gertrude’s elemental honesty is that of a character in a play. Such honesty is harder to live up to in the actuality of the world. But, at least Barker opens the possibilities of speculating on that choice through characters such as Gertrude, or his Vanya, who dare to live their desires.

Works cited

Barnett, David. ‘Howard Barker: Polemic Theory and Dramatic Practice. Nietzsche, Metatheatre, and the Play The Europeans,’ Modern Drama 44.4 (2001), 458–475.

Barker, Howard. Arguments for a Theatre. Second edition. Manchester: M.U.P., 1993.

Barker, Howard. Gertrude – the Cry/Knowledge and a Girl. London: Calder, 2002.

Boon, Richard and Amanda Price. ‘Maps of the world: “Neo-Jacobeanism” and Contemporary British Theatre.’ Modern Drama 41 (1998), 635–654.

Gardner, Lyn. Review. The Guardian, Friday, October 25, 2002.

Gritzner, Karoline and David Ian Rabey, eds. Theatre of Catastrophe: New Essays on Howard Barker. London: Oberon, 2006.

Kilpatrick, David. “Gertrude – the Cry.” Review. Theatre Journal 55.4 (Dec. 2003), 704–706.

Lamb, Charles. Howard Barker’s Theatre of Seduction. Amsterdam: Harwood, 1996.

Menegaldo, Gilles. ‘Challenging conventions: An interview with Howard Barker,’ sources (Autumn 1997), 157–171.

Rabey, David Ian. Howard Barker – Politics and Desire: An Expository Study of his Drama and Poetry, 1969–87. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1989.

Tillyard, E. M. W. The Elizabethan World Picture. 1943; Harmondsworth: Penguin/Pelican, 1972.

Wrestling School website address. http://www.thewrestlingschool.co.uk/

Notes

[1] Gilles Menegaldo, ‘Challenging Conventions: An Interview with Howard Barker,’ sources (Autumn 1997), 164.

[2] Howard Barker, Arguments for a Theatre, Second edition (Manchester: M.U.P., 1993), p. 23.

[3] His Arguments for a Theatre has been in three editions – 1989, 1993, and 1997. His most recent books are Death, The One and the Art of Theatre (London: Routledge, 2005), and Howard Barker/Eduardo Houth A Style and its Origins (London: Oberon, 2007).

[4] Arguments for a Theatre, p. 18.

[5] Arguments for a Theatre, p. 7.

[6] Charles Lamb, Howard Barker’s Theatre of Seduction (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1997).

[7] http://www.thewrestlingschool.co.uk/

[8] Menegaldo, p. 160.

[9] See pp. 34–35 in Rabey and Gritzner’s ‘Barker in Conversation,’ and Elizabeth Angel-Perez in ‘Facing Defacement,’ in Theatre of Catastrophe, ed. Karoline Gritzner and David Ian Rabey (London: Oberon, 2006), pp. 136–49.

[10] Review. Theatre Journal 55.4 (Dec. 2003), 704.

[11] Quoted in Richard Boon and Amanda Price, ‘Maps of the world: “Neo-Jacobeanism” and Contemporary British Theatre,’ Modern Drama 41 (1998), 649.

[12] David Ian Rabey Howard Barker: Politics and Desire (Macmillan, 1989), p. 113.

[13] David Barnett, ‘Howard Barker: Polemic Theory and Dramatic Practice. Nietzsche, Metatheatre, and the Play The Europeans,’ Modern Drama 44.4 (2001), 459.

[14] E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (1943; Harmondsworth: Penguin/Pelican, 1972), p. 83.

[15] Ibid., p. 84.

[16] The Guardian, Friday, October 25, 2002.

[17] Absolutely Sweet Marie. Dwarf Music, 1966.