Language as an antinormative co-construction in Tom Stoppard’s "Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth"

This paper illustrates how Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth (1979) combines typical Stoppardian wordplay and linguistic experimentation based on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations with political criticism, in order to create an utterly original theatrical experience. Stoppard’s method involves combining two interrelated plays, interdependent and essential in a gradual didactic process which aims at creating and reinforcing a unique socio-linguistic bond between actors and audience. The first segment of Dogg’s Hamlet, the most overtly indebted to the Investigations, introduces the public to the use of the peculiar “Dogg language,” shattering the audience’s preconceptions on signification and substituting them with a reliance on shared experience and extralinguistic codes. Once the audience has been familiarized with the new linguistic medium, Stoppard’s didactic method focuses the attention on the use of parody, transforming Hamlet through what Hutcheon defines as “meaning-making,” the construction of (ironic) meaning which is always dynamic and relating to a specific context. This process, being applied to a theatrical performance, necessarily includes both actors and audience, einforcing the already hinted collaborative intent of this work. Finally, Cahoot’s Macbeth assigns an innovative function to the newly presented Dogg’s language, which, through parody and co-construction of meaning, becomes the speech of creative dissent, and as such of the Charta 77 movement, as opposed to the normalizing and conservative speech of the Soviet repression embodied by the Inspector.