Introduction
Examining the ruptures and changes that drive the evolution of the Sherlock Holmes character through time and text is primarily an investigation of environment.
‘Changes in the environment often bring about changes in the phenotype, whether that environment be biological or cultural’ (448), Bortolotti and Hutcheon remind us, so that
‘what we then end up with is the product of cultural selection; what have survived are mutations that allow the story to better fit (adapt to) its culture or environment’ (449). It is the purpose of this section to investigate the relationship between those
environmental changes and the phenotypic variations of Sherlock Holmes in order to move closer to an understanding of the processes that contribute to the success of the character.
The thread that connects the three sections of this chapter is performance.
Character is mediated through performance in several ways, and it is through performance that character adapts to various environments. In Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler addresses a tension associated with common understandings of ‘being’ and ‘substance’. She objects to the assumption that being necessitates substance (Kindle Loc. 920), offering instead a grammatical reading of the transitive concept of ‘being’, which precludes prior substance: if one thing is being another thing, it is, by definition, not that thing, but performing that thing.
As Barthes describes character indices as those qualities which are ‘being’ character,1
1 Refer to page 6
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Applying Butler’s reading suggests that the substance of character is generated through performance.
The three evolutionary mechanisms that this chapter interrogates are inheritance, environmental pressure, and mutation. Section one considers how inheritance influences the Sherlock Holmes character by considering the role and functions of actors who have portrayed Sherlock Holmes on screen. Although their performances may be viewed and analysed in isolation, it is more revealing to consider how, as successive rungs on a ladder, they have each added or altered qualities of the character that was ‘bequeathed’
to them, building, step-by-step, Sherlock Holmes as he exists today. There are
numerous qualities ascribed to Holmes, taken for granted by modern audiences, that are nowhere to be found in Conan Doyle. Far from being any sort of corruption of the original author’s intent or will, these qualities represent the evolution necessary for the survival of Holmes and his popularity. Actors, by the nature of their close association—
their embodiment—of the role, carry much of the responsibility for not simply playing Holmes a particular way, but for becoming so indelibly linked with playing him a particular way, that it becomes nearly impossible to play him otherwise. This section traces this pattern of descent through inherited performances.
Although a comparison of adaptations of Sherlock Holmes seems at first glance to reveal a host of wildly different interpretations of the character, there are some indices that have survived from portrayal to portrayal. However, a main contention of this project is that indices accumulate as the character evolves, so that many indices of the Sherlock Holmes character are not drawn from Conan Doyle. Several important indices have been infused into the character by the actors who have played him. I will be focusing on the actors whose contributions are not merely a matter of bringing the
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vision of directors and screenwriters to life, but are a consequence of their own natures and their own often unwanted extra-textual links with the character.2
Section two uses gender as a case study to analyse how pressure on the character from shifts in the socio-cultural environment over time drive its evolution. Gender is also a matter of performance: ‘As a shifting and contextual phenomenon, gender does not denote a substantive being, but a relative point of convergence among culturally and historically specific sets of relations (Butler Kindle Loc. 700), according to Butler’s theorisation of gender construction. The indices that denote Sherlock Holmes’ gender identity shift as they are performed in different contexts, and by an examination and comparison of several of those contexts, a picture of how such environmental pressures act on and reform the character emerges. I have selected Holmes’ gender identity as the subject of this examination because it is among the most frequently explored and debated attributes of the literary Holmes, which allows me to situate my analyses in a larger critical conversation. This larger conversation informs my work, and it may also be enlarged and enriched by the addition of a discussion of the adapted Holmes’ gender identity.
Finally, the third section of this chapter addresses mutations in the character’s aesthetic. Again, we refer to Bortolotti and Hutcheon: ‘Mutation is the raw material of evolution. Despite some of its nonscientific connotations, mutation is not a negative term in biology where it is judged as beneficial, neutral, or deleterious in the context of its environment’ (449). Beneficial mutations contribute to the success of the character, neutral mutations are transient and have essentially no symbolic or narrative value, while deleterious mutations impede the character’s success in some way. Beneficial
2 Specific justification for my selection of actors will appear in section one.
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mutations persist, neutral mutations are ignored, and deleterious mutations are ‘failed attempts’, which ‘are eliminated in both biology and culture’ (449). The visual image of the Sherlock Holmes character, which much necessarily be intentionally generated for every screen adaptation, thus undergoes mutations, which accumulate currency through repetition and replication.
Sherlock Holmes is a character who is so firmly linked to his aesthetic that it forms the exclusive basis of a great portion of the speculation and conversation
surrounding an adaptation. This section will interrogate how beneficial and deleterious mutations have influenced the image of Sherlock Holmes, and, by comparing Holmes’
aesthetic to the visual language of superheroes, offer an argument for how costume functions as a signifier for the character. Because designers, in researching for their task, cannot escape the image of Holmes that already exists from previous adaptations, they have to make a choice of whether to build on the existing aesthetic or create a look in opposition to it. Regardless, their work is inevitably a reaction of some kind. In this way, the visual qualities of Sherlock Holmes evolve from production to production, helping to establish a uniform vision. This vision is more than an answer to the simple question, ‘what does Sherlock Holmes look like?’ Instead, the visual politics of costume design operate as indices of the character.
There are admittedly many more aspects of inheritance, environmental pressures, and mutations that a project like this might examine. I have been selective, and have focused on those attributes that are directly involved in the performance of the Sherlock Holmes character on screen. Through this investigation of the pressures that act on the character across time and texts, I hope to shed light on the process and trajectory of the evolution of Sherlock Holmes.
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Becoming Sherlock Holmes: Inheriting Character
In terms of adaptation, the practical bridge between the indices of character and the audience is the actor. Each actor who has performed the role of Sherlock Holmes has become the physical embodiment of the myth. Bennett and Woollacott devote a considerable amount of analysis to the role of actors in mediating popular heroes. They concur with the argument of this section, namely, that the drawing of fiction into reality, as analysed in the introduction, is not the only process involved in this modern myth-building: The inverse process is also at work. This process, they claim, is ‘best
exemplified in the star system, whereby “real lives” become fictionalised and blended with screen images to result in the construction of a mythic figure poised midway between the two’ (45). Bennett and Woollacott go on to interrogate the cross pollination of Bond and the three actors who, at the point their work was published, had embodied the role in the series of films produced by Eon. This section interrogates the process by which particular actors have added to the accumulated meaning of the Holmes character through their lives and performances.
In their ‘On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and
“Success”—Biologically’, which provides the framework for this project, Gary Bortolotti and Linda Hutcheon note that the first homological link between biological evolution and adaptation is the transience of physical bodies. While an adaptation may continue to be consumed indefinitely, it is, itself, a finite product, and the version of Sherlock Holmes it depicts is tied to a specific, limited performance. That performance, whether it takes place in a single film, or across many films or episodes of a television programme, is inevitably tied to its cultural moment. This necessity of the evolutionary drive toward perpetuation manifests as a pressure to continually re-embody the
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character in living and relevant performance. However, the purpose of this project is not to consider how often Sherlock Holmes has been embodied, but rather to examine how the process of continual renewal in performance has reflected back on and affected the evolution of the character’s indices.
Utilising actors as a major delineator of specific adaptational ‘bodies’,
understanding that actors are in practical terms responsible for performing the myth of character, and recognising that, within our evolutionary framework, bodies will ‘wear out’, it is worth turning to the influence of a series of specific actors on the evolution of the Holmes character in order to investigate how the myth is performed and
re-performed, and how those performances act on the Holmes character. As noted in the introduction, with each new embodiment of the character, and particularly by actors who become, for various reasons, personally associated with the role, the meaning of the indices proper change.
In evolutionary terms, the actors who portray Sherlock Holmes do not merely interpret the single isolated text in which they are cast; they are necessarily part of a larger intertextual conversation, as the character is interpreted by one actor and then bequeathed to the next with the previous actor’s stamp etched upon it. This
collaboration across time and text between actors becomes stronger and more
significant in light of the iron-gripped and often fraught relationship that many actors have had with the role. Bennett and Woollacott argue that readers of a source text are
‘profoundly affected by [their] specific preorientation to the novels produced by [their]
insertion in the orders of inter-textuality,’ and that ‘the process of reading is not one in which reader and text meet as abstractions but one in which the inter-textually
organised reader meets the intertextually organised text’ (56). They note this in order to
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illustrate how an actors’ performance becomes a virtually unavoidable element of the process of consuming any version of the text, even those in which the actor does not figure, and/or which contradict the actor’s interpretation of the character. This is true, particularly in the case of a performance that saturates the culture surrounding the character; reading character is inevitably an intertextual exercise. What Bennett and Woollacott leave unsaid, however, is that given this process, actors themselves cannot approach the role tabula rasa once it has been previously performed, and thus, if the character is performed in multiple defining adaptations, as Sherlock Holmes has been, there is a perpetual accumulation of meaning.
This section offers a fresh look at the contributions that actors have made to the Sherlock Holmes franchise. There is not yet any comprehensive study on how the portrayals of various actors interpreting the role have influenced one another. What has been researched at length is the influence of the Holmes character on specific actors, and their individual contributions to Holmes’ legacy. This information is available through biographies, such as Henry Zecher’s America’s Sherlock Holmes, which is an exhaustively researched, if poorly organized and badly presented, work on William Gillette, and David Stuart Davies’ Bending the Willow, which offers a fair and nuanced look at Jeremy Brett. Several actors have chosen to tell their own stories and offer views on playing Sherlock Holmes in their own words. Such autobiographies include Basil Rathbone’s In and Out of Character, Christopher Lee’s Lord of Misrule, and Peter Cushing’s Peter Cushing: An Autobiography and Past Forgetting. Additional
information on various actors’ relationships to and opinions of the Holmes character is
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scattered throughout various published Sherlock Holmes filmographies3 as well as in interviews archived at the British Film Institute in London and the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles. One of the aims of this section is to put all of these works in conversation with one another for the first time.
The deep connections that actors have with their roles through the construction of their characters has been explored through application of the theory of the embodied mind. Acting is not merely a physical exercise: it requires the engagement of actors’
minds, both in their perceptions of their role and their perceptions of themselves. In his Acting in the Cinema, James Naremore states simply that ‘at its most sophisticated, acting in theatre or movies is an art devoted to the systematic ostentatious depiction of character’ (23). He goes on to claim that to be an actor, one must be ‘embedded in a story’ (23). In the case of Sherlock Holmes, that story is not the plot of the adaptation, but the story of the Holmes character itself, as it is the character indices, not the
functions proper of narrative that are carried across the boundaries between adaptations.
In embedding himself consciously in the ongoing story of constructing Holmes, each actor who plays him embodies him; he thus lends a portion of himself and his own personality and perceptions about Holmes to that continuing story.
There are the only two instances in which the actor portraying Holmes was replaced within the same programme or franchise. The first is the BBC’s The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which starred Douglas Wilmer in 13 episodes between 1964 and 65, and later Peter Cushing in 16 episodes in 1968. The second is the pair of films co-produced by the BBC and Tiger Aspect in the early 2000s: The Hound of the Baskervilles starred Richard Roxburgh, and The Case of the Silk Stocking starred Rupert
3 For a list of such filmographies, see the beginning of the section ‘Good Old Index’ in the introduction of this work.
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Everett. In both cases, the actors portraying Watson—Nigel Stock and Ian Hart, respectively—provided continuity across the adaptations. Despite the continuity provided by the production companies and supporting actors, as well as consistency in writing—the project of directly adapting Conan Doyle’s narratives in the case of the The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and the expedient of having the same screenwriter, Allan Cubitt, in the case of the films—both projects are generally divided and
interpreted as discrete works based on their lead actors.
As Sherlock Holmes is a character franchise,4 and as the primary purpose of this project is a to take a trans-adaptation approach to the character, investigation of the embodied Sherlock Holmes becomes a question of the interconnectedness of actors’
performances of the same ‘inherited’ character. Though current Holmes adaptations are linked with their directors and screenwriters, auteur director Guy Ritchie and maverick screenwriters Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss, particularly, the question of myth-performance leads us naturally to actors, who are stewards of the Sherlock Holmes character. The concept of stewardship is vital to understanding how a character evolves through the hands of actors over the course of successive adaptations. Stewardship is a product of inheritance, in which contributions of specific actors to the larger Holmes myth are bequeathed to future actors. Sherlock Holmes as a character is never a finished work, but rather always a work in progress. A monarch is the steward to the crown that he inherits from his ancestors and bequeaths to his descendants. He may make changes to the country during his reign, some of which alter the fabric of the nation, others of which do not. Some monarchs’ legacies are writ large on their nations’ histories, others fade into obscurity. Regardless, a nation’s laws, history, and culture are not begun anew
4 In contrast with a narrative franchise, see introduction for a more thorough discussion of the concept of
‘character franchise’.
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with each monarch who rules it, and the character of Sherlock Holmes is not begun anew with each actor who plays it. Actors who play Sherlock Holmes are stewards of character. They inherit the character from their predecessors; some make indelible changes to it, particularly in the indices they elect to highlight versus those they choose to de-emphasise or ignore, and in the qualities within themselves that they either willingly or unintentionally allow to become entangled with the Holmes character. In several cases, actors have become so entwined with the role of Holmes beyond the bounds of the adaptation that they have, themselves, become part of the myth.
To trace this stewardship and how it has influenced the evolution of Sherlock Holmes on screen, I will focus particularly on those actors who have become part of the Holmes myth. These actors and their contributions are identifiable because their
relationships with the character of Sherlock Holmes are Gordian Knots of influence:
Although this section is titled ‘Becoming Sherlock Holmes’, it is not only about actors becoming Holmes, but also about Holmes becoming the actors who play him. Instead of focusing entirely on the actors themselves, I wish to consider the qualities that they infused into the character, which, since their association with it, have become part of the role as it was bequeathed to subsequent actors who undertook to play it. The focus here on a few select actors should not be taken to suggest that the multitudes of unnamed players did not leave their marks on the character. In some cases these unnamed players were the first to play Holmes with some of the characteristics with which we now associate him. However, it is the intense bond between a few actors and the character that seared those qualities indelibly into the public consciousness. The actors whose contributions to the evolution of the Holmes character are discussed here are
particularly those who followed in the footsteps of Arthur Conan Doyle when they
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found their careers and their prospects consumed by Sherlock Holmes. These are the actors whose association with the role extended a long reach beyond the film or television set, and into their personal lives.
In order to justify my specific selections, I return again to Bennett and
Woollacott, who faced a less taxing range of actors to discuss, but nonetheless worked to highlight the blurred line between actors, and Sean Connery in particular, and the character of James Bond. ‘The identity of Bond has proved dominant’, they note, ‘in
Woollacott, who faced a less taxing range of actors to discuss, but nonetheless worked to highlight the blurred line between actors, and Sean Connery in particular, and the character of James Bond. ‘The identity of Bond has proved dominant’, they note, ‘in