Sudokothellophobia: Writing Hypertextually, Performatively

Summary

If you are an adventurous (or hypertextual, perhaps performative) reader I invite you to skip this introduction and go straight to the puzzle (you can always come back); what follows here is an orientation, a way into and around the main body of this article. If, as Umberto Eco writes, ‘A title must muddle the reader’s ideas, not regiment them’, then the next few pages aim to (slightly) un-muddle, though certainly not regiment, access to the puzzle through explanation of my title and method. I feel, at once, that I should apologize for this title and perhaps I would have abandoned the initial monstrosity altogether had its tripartite awkwardness not so neatly encapsulated the method. Writing about (Shakespearian) performance often involves such apologies, especially when the writing is deliberately methodological rather than descriptive of performance itself – I mean not writing about performance, but writing about writing about performance – and this is perhaps a tacit acknowledgement that writing cannot hope to reproduce a given production, neither its materiality nor ephemerality. Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, to whom I will return, defend their discrete disciplines of theatre and archaeology with ‘Apologia’ before less apologetically and less obviously bringing them together into a fruitful interdisciplinary blend. Michael Dobson begins his reflection on ‘Writing about [Shakespearian] Performance’ most deferentially (which is not always the way he writes about Shakespearian performances): ‘I should apologize first of all for starting this chapter thus in the first person’ and then he further excuses the article, which is ‘purely personal’ and ‘very cursory and simplistic’; he also defends a title about which he feels uncomfortable. Broken down, my title reveals an attempt to create a form of writing which thickly describes Shakespearian production – in this case an adaptation of Othello I directed in 2003/4 called Othellophobia – and to weave together the most pressing textual and contextual concerns. Thus: the form of the writing is (post)structured by the number puzzle sudoku; the content is Shakespeare’s Othello – the text itself, its more recent production history and the way that my production shaped the play; and the analysis of the content, which is facilitated by the form, is represented by phobia, which signals my concern here with (sub)textual and cultural anxieties generated and sustained by the play in performance.