Re-Reading, Re-Writing, Re-Contextualising Shakespeare

Contemporary Readings in Global Performances of Shakespeare, ed. Alexa Alice Joubin, 2024

In recent years, Shakespeare has been increasingly discussed in relation to shifting understandings of language and race. Fifty years ago, Shakespeare was perceived to be iconically English, and the scholarly community acknowledged but did not devote much attention to the reception of Shakespeare in other languages; often, a reference was simply made to Shakespeare’s pervasive presence in translations, with the point simply being that the whole world loves him. That approach has gone away, and increasingly, scholars are interested not just in the fact that the world is interested in Shakespeare, but also in how, why and where the world enters into dialog with Shakespeare. On one level, appropriations of Shakespeare, in Japan, India, and Kuwait, are worthy of study as art forms in their own right. But in addition to this, in many cases those translated versions of Shakespeare amount to more than just a response to the Bard, but in many ways a conversation with England and America. In short, England is no longer the center of the conversation about its most famous poet. My essay here takes up this situation and offers some ways current scholars can approach new work. I discuss four moments in time, and for each one of them, I show how these moments surprise us and tell us stories that we do not expect. The first moment is Shakespeare’s own lifetime. The second is the life of Ira Aldridge, the first Black man to play Othello, the next is the theatrical tour of Edwin Booth, and the final moment is a recent staging of The Tempest in Paris. I argue that Shakespeare was never confined to the English language, a fact that jars with our stereotype of the past. Ira Aldridge’s remarkable career has been largely ignored by Shakespeare scholars, even as race has become central to our work. I suggest that the reason for this lapse is that his life story does not match what we want to find in the past. He fled racial persecution, not in the American South, but in New York, and then in England. He only found acceptance in Eastern Europe. I examine some primary sources in Russian to show that he was well received by a more sophisticated and open theatrical culture in Saint Petersburg. Edwin Booth’s tour through Germany exposed gaps of cultural perception, both within Germany and between Europe and the US, that persist to this day. The recent French staging of Shakespeare was billed as a trans-European project with EU funding, but it actually reinforced stereotypes and rivalries between European countries. My overall argument is that we should examine the remote and recent past with careful attention to the historical record as well as to our own biases, to find a more rich, and sometimes more uncomfortable, account of what Shakespeare has meant to the world.

2010

Written by a team of leading international scholars, this Companion is designed to illuminate Shakespeare's works through discussion of the key topics of Shakespeare studies. Twenty-one brand new essays provide lively and authoritative approaches to recent scholarship and criticism for readers keen to expand their knowledge and appreciation of Shakespeare. The book contains stimulating chapters on traditional topics such as Shakespeare's biography and the transmission of his texts. Individual readings of the plays are given in the context of genre as well as through the cultural and historical perspectives of race, sexuality and gender, and politics and religion. Essays on performance survey the latest digital media as well as stage and fi lm. Throughout the volume, contributors discuss Shakespeare's long and constantly mutating history of reception and performance in both national and global contexts. margreta de grazia is the Sheli Z. and Burt X. Rosenberg Chair in the Humanities and Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Shakespeare Verbatim (1991) and 'Hamlet' without Hamlet (2007). She has also co-edited Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (1996) with Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass.

Résumé: L’écriture dramatique de William Shakespeare a re çu diachroniquement des fonctions culturelle uniques, vue la multitude d’ét udes et de traductions de son œuvre. Notre recherche se propose une évaluation de son importan ce culturelle, de même que les effets multiples que son œuvre a eus sur le plan internati o l dans le processus de formation des identités culturelles, littéraires et des idéologie s partout dans le monde. Notre premier objectif est de donner une image globale sur tout le domaine qui traite ces aspects et les pratiques historiques de la traduction de Shakespeare. Mots-clés : traduction, œuvre dramatique, histoire, linguist ique, néoclassicisme, culture, traditions littéraires.

International Journal of English Studies

In the last few years there has been an increased interest within the field of Shakespeare studies in criticism. The 400 th anniversary of Shakespeare's death was celebrated with the publication of Shakespeare in Our Time. A Shakespeare Association of America Collection (Callaghan & Gossett, 2016). This varied collection of essays, mostly written by former SAA presidents, examines key concerns and new critical approaches in the ever-growing field of Shakespeare studies. More recently, The Arden Shakespeare released The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism (Gajowski, 2020), twenty chapters that provide a general overview of the most influential theoretical trends in Shakespearean criticism from the mid-twentieth century until the present. Unlike the aforementioned studies in Critical Approaches to Shakespeare (1623-2000). Shakespeare for All Time (2022) Marta Cerezo Moreno does not offer a general overview, but instead an in-depth analysis of the main critical currents that dominated Shakespeare studies during the last four centuries. To acquire a better understanding of Shakespeare in our time, one ought to look first at the historical schools of thought that have strongly influenced and, also, served as the basis for contemporary Shakespeare criticism. This is precisely the reason why Critical Approaches to Shakespeare (1623-2000). Shakespeare for All Time constitutes a valuable contribution to

2020

This comparative and interdisciplinary study of the historical spread of Shakespeare among non-Anglophone nations in Europe and India sheds important new light on individual novelistic, operatic, and dramatic adaptations, while at the same time both theorising a major revision to postcolonial thinking and offering a new vision for Shakespeare studies. Sen's concept of 'performative transculturation' allows for a welcome and more encompassing vision of artistic innovation over time and across cultures. He complicates simple binaries, especially of European/Indian acceptance or rejection of Western culture/ Shakespeare, revealing instead the rich middle ground in between these extremes of reception. In the process, Sen's innovative 'relational' approach to reading cross-cultural adaptations also makes a major contribution to adaptation theory.

Renaissance Studies, 2007

2016

This article engages with one of the current critical and bibliographical concerns of Shakespeare studies: the collaborative nature of Shakespeare’s work. Bibliographers have identified other hands in the fabric of Shakespeare’s plays. Here the focus is Shakespeare’s collaboration in the plays of others. Three such instances will be examined; The Book of Sir Thomas More, The Spanish Tragedy and The Chronicle History of King Lear. Substantially different as these cases may be, in all of them Shakespeare is working with the materials of others. Shakespeare’s King Lear is an adaptation of the older Leir play performed by the Queen’s Men and in that sense it is a deeply collaborative work. As this essay concludes, without a model there would be nothing to stimulate, or provoke or exceed. One of the major developments in the study of early modern drama over the past two decades has been an increased focus on the collaborative processes through which plays are brought to the public.1 Inst...

College Literature, 2004

ABSTRACT: Shakespeare, the 17th century Universal and Humanist Bardic figure has sown his transnational seeds throughout time and space through the ample usage of appropriations in the literary sphere. While Alexander Huang posits that “the idea that Shakespeare belongs to the world has become a cliché” (Huang, 2006), Linda Hutcheon pinpoints that Shakespeare offer a heteroglossic understanding of the postmodernist concern to grasp the what (Forms), Who? Why? (Adapters), How? (Audiences), Where? When? (Contexts)(Hutcheon, 2006). The fabula, that is, the story or the plot, being the googol of any text has opened up the avenues for Shakespeare’s plays to be appropriated and adapted in a palimpsest literary, media, games, cartoons, and musical comedies on a multi-global arena. Shakespearean appropriations have spread their tentacles to Mauritius, Canada, Italy, Bulgaria, South Africa, USA, U.K, Japan, Caribbean islands, France, Czechoslovakia, Tunisia, India to name a few. Though appropriations demand a lot of effort in preserving the 17th aura, gist and zeitgeist, its complexity brings about polyphonic receptions according to the context, race, age, language, culture, politics, religion and society. Keywords: Shakespeare, humanist, transnational, heteroglossic, palimpsest, appropriation, polyphonic, zeitgeist, gist, postmodernist.