Afterword: Performing the City — A Wonder Cabinet

Abstract

Shakespeare in Love, John Madden and Tom Stoppard’s award-winning 1998 film, ends by rhyming paired images: Will Shakespeare writing Viola’s name and her first line in Twelfth Night, ‘What country, friends, is this?’ on a blank parchment page, and Viola de Lesseps’s solitary figure walking on an expansive empty beach. Madden, however, had filmed an alternative ending in which Viola, meeting a Native chief and his squaw, speaks her first line, to which the chief replies, ‘This is America, lady’. Madden also had imagined having Manhattan’s skyline, the World Trade Center Towers prominent, rise (magically, digitally) in the distance, but only Viola’s encounter with Native Americans survives in the archives. When I first wrote about these absent endings, I saw them as cinema’s equivalent of foul papers, as a sly but discarded joke about how America’s cinematic marketplace for Shakespeare has replaced London’s Rose Theatre. After reading (and viewing) these chapters on Performance(s) and the City, revisiting Madden’s absent endings seems especially apt, for the mirage of the city he once imagined has disappeared. It disappeared in a politically brilliant, brilliantly horrible event (a performance?¹), leaving behind an unreal, surreal city. Brightness fell from the air; that endemic universal of performance — ‘Someone is dying in front of your eyes’ (Blau: 156) — was played out over and over and over and over again.