Joe Orton and Shakespeare: collage, class and queerness

Abstract

This essay considers Joe Orton's relationship to Shakespeare through the library book covers that he redesigned with his partner Kenneth Halliwell and through his plays. It proposes that Orton and Halliwell's neglected Shakespeare dust jackets are as subversive as the better-known covers of the popular and middlebrow library books they reworked. Their collages ironise or queer Shakespeare's themes and contest critical authority. By focusing specifically on Arden editions, Orton and Halliwell resist the gentrification of Shakespeare engendered by elitist academic discourse and bourgeois spaces such as the public library and the theatre. The same irreverent attitude to Shakespeare is evident in Orton's plays. Although he admired, identified with and drew inspiration from his predecessor, Orton recycles Shakespeare's plots, lines and motifs to transform their class politics and to amplify their sexual dissidence. Overall, this essay contends that by reshaping Shakespeare from a working class, queer perspective Orton resists the Bard's growing function as an emblem of social distinction in mid-century Britain.

Keywords:

• Orton
• Shakespeare
• queer
• revision
• collage
• cultural capital

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my colleagues Anne Marie D’Arcy, Sarah Knight and Kate Loveman for their generous and helpful comments on this essay. Thanks are due to the Estate of Joe Orton for kind permission to quote from the unpublished teenage diary. Images of the book covers reproduced with kind permission of Islington Local History Centre.

Notes

1. Some were destroyed; it is not known how many.

2. The figure at the top of Olympus is Mercury, not a ‘devil’, as Colsell states (2013, 152).

3. Orton scholars and enthusiasts owe Ilsa Colsell a huge debt of gratitude for identifying many of the pictures used on the Shakespeare covers. However, this image is St Michael (1504/5) and not St Michael Conquering Satan (1518), as she states (2013, 152).

4. For further information about the debate about sexuality in Shakespeare, see Stanley Wells, Looking for Sex in Shakespeare (2004).

5. See the Bloomsbury website: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/academic/academic-subjects/drama-and-performance-studies/the-arden-shakespeare/, accessed 8 August, 2016.

6. Orton’s teenage diary records that he recites a Gloucester soliloquy from Henry VI (26 April, 1950) and a speech by Ariel in The Tempest (10 May, 1950). He also recites a speech by Arthur in King John at the Nottingham Festival of Music and Drama (23 July, 1950).

7. Despite his initial distaste for Orton, Gielgud later appeared in the BBC Radio 3 adaptation of Up Against It (1997).

8. See http://www.literaryramblings.com/1000-books-in-10-years-vol-332-funeral-games-by-joe-orton, accessed 8 August, 2016.

9. BBC interview with Roland Orton, August 1967. Listen here: https://soundcloud.com/scribblinggin/joe-orton, accessed 8 August, 2016.

10. See John Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton (1978).