English Department, Glendon College

Writing his play Endymion as a panegyric to Elizabeth I, John Lyly was grappling with the problem which the queen, as a woman in the position of power, presented for the natural order. Drawing on the contemporary witchcraft debate, Lyly argues that women cannot exert influence on the world around them and the so-called witches are as impotent as the rest of womankind. Cynthia, the woman healer and the representation of Elizabeth, is the one exception. Unique in her authority, she cannot serve as a model for emulation; rather, her function is to regulate the behaviour of other women in the play. However, even this powerful female ruler is confined by the requirements of her singular, idealized position and threatened with transition into the category of a witch – the category characterized not by malice but by impotence.

In 2012, Belarus Free Theatre (BFT) participated in the Globe to Globe festival, staging King Lear in Belarusian, radically edited and modernized. The choice to use Belarusian as the primary language of this performance was a daring one, for it is a language that does not exist in a single accepted version and, even within Belarus, is frequently superseded by Russian. An online comment posted under a 2012 review in The Guardian offers a vivid example of indifferent dismissal that such a choice might have produced: “I can imagine few things worse than being subject to Shakespeare in Belarusian. Honestly who's interested?”

As it turned out, many people were interested. In September 2013, BFT's King Lear was brought back to the Globe to glowing reviews. Produced by a theatre exiled from Belarus (the country sometimes called the last dictatorship in Europe), this performance speaks directly to the questions that emerge, again and again, in Global Shakespeare discussions. Is Shakespeare in translation still Shakespeare? Are the tensions of early modern play really best accessed through painstaking reproduction of the text, however it is defined, with period-appropriate costumes, props, and decorations, or through participating in an ongoing dialogue with present-day socio-political issues?  BFT’s production of King Lear reaches beyond the “authentic historical Shakespeare” construct, frees the play from the constricting framework of expectations formed over centuries of Western performance and criticism, and brings together a varied array of histories to re-create potent Shakespearean drama for the twenty-first century stage. Intensely metatheatrical, this production repurposes the long Soviet history of making ideological use of Shakespeare to interrogate the performances of totalitarian power in present-day Belarus.

At first glance, Romeo and Juliet could offer little to post-revolutionary audiences who, at least theoretically, were more interested in class equality and free labour than in star-crossed lovers. However, by the mid-1930s the play came to be closely associated with the undertaking of defining and teaching a new kind of love for the new society – an optimistic, vigorous, and untainted emotion that supposedly distinguished Soviet subjects from their bourgeois counterparts. This essay traces the changing attitudes toward Romeo and Juliet from the 1920s to the 1970s, focusing primarily on discussions in periodicals and literary adaptations. After the largely negative response of the 1920s, the play was embraced as an affective model for rejecting the outdated bourgeois world and embracing the socialist future. With the waning of ideological control in the 1960s and 1970s, Romeo and Juliet became a potential intertext for literary works exploring individual emotion and personal desire in opposition to the expectations of socialist realism.

Othello was the most often-staged Shakespeare play on early Soviet stages, to a large extent because of its ideological utility. Interpreted with close attention to racial conflict, this play came to symbolize, for Soviet theatres and audiences, the destructive racism of the West in contrast with Soviet egalitarianism. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, however, it is not unusual for Russian theatres to stage Othello as a white character, thus eliminating the theme of race from the productions. To make sense of the change in the Russian tradition of staging Othello, this article traces the interpretations and metatheatrical uses of this character from the early Soviet period to the present day. I argue that the Soviet tradition of staging Othello in blackface effectively prevented the use of the play for exploring the racial tensions within the Soviet Union itself, and gradually transformed the protagonist’s blackness into a generalized metaphor of oppression. As post...

Othello was the most often-staged Shakespeare play on early Soviet stages, to a large extent because of its ideological utility. Interpreted with close attention to racial conflict, this play came to symbolize, for Soviet theatres and audiences, the destructive racism of the Western societies in contrast with Soviet egalitarianism. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, however, it is not unusual for Russian theatres to stage Othello as a white character, thus eliminating the theme of race from their productions. To make sense of the change in the Russian tradition of staging Othello, this article traces the interpretations and metatheatrical uses of this character from the early Soviet period to the present day. I argue that the Soviet tradition of staging Othello in blackface effectively prevented the use of the play for exploring the racial tensions within the Soviet Union itself, and gradually transformed the protagonist’s blackness into a generalized metaphor of oppression. As post-collapse Russia newly embraced whiteness as a category, Othello’s blackness became a prop that was entirely decoupled from race and could be unproblematically appropriated by ethnically Slavic actors and characters. The case of Russia demonstrates that staging Othello in blackface, even when the initial stated goals are those of racial equality, can serve a cultural fantasy of blackness as a versatile and disposable mask placed over a white face.

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This paper traces the evolution of the belief, in post-revolutionary Russia, that Shakespeare’s plays were written by Roger Manners, the 5th Earl of Rutland, proposing that this early Soviet alternative authorship theory can be approached and analyzed as an instance of cultural appropriation. The state-supported view that Rutland was the true author of Shakespearean works was voiced by theatre theorists and practitioners, including Vsevolod Meyerhold, and appeared in periodicals, scholarly monographs, and textbooks. I argue that early Soviet anti-Stratfordianism was largely fuelled by the preservationist desire to justify staging and printing Shakespearean drama in the context of cultural restructuring after the October Revolution of 1917. What was known of the Stratford Shakespeare’s biography positioned him as a member of the English bourgeoisie and supporter of the monarchy, and therefore an alien presence in the new proletarian society. Paradoxically, Rutland’s humanist education and his connection to Essex’s rebellion of 1601 made it
possible to imagine him as a revolutionary aristocrat rising against the monarchy. Early Soviet cultural theorists used Rutland’s assumed authorship to frame Shakespeare’s plays as acts of rebellion against the tyrannical state, thus suggesting these works’ immense usefulness to the proletarian audiences. The assumption of alternative authorship died out in the early 1930s, when Soviet productions of Shakespeare began
becoming an important mark of cultural superiority in international conversations. Ultimately, I suggest that anti-Stratfordian movements in the West also deserve serious study as attempts to appropriate the figure of Shakespeare as part of broader cultural projects.
Pre-print publication:
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This article re-examines the scholarly assumption that the theater of early Soviet Russia saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream as an ideologically unobjectionable and unproblematic play. Tracing how Russian productions of Dream were reviewed from 1919 throughout the 1920s, the first section of this article examines comments on the play’s potential usefulness for building a proletarian theater and concerns about the interpretative challenges it posed. The second section moves to address the expectations for Shakespearean comedy as a genre in the 1930s, framed by Shakespeare’s new position as a cult writer within the cultural policy of socialist realism, and shows that Dream was interpreted as a humanist vision of an idyllic, egalitarian, and conflict-free future. Finally, the article analyzes the 1941 production at the Central Red Army Theater in Moscow, focusing on the director’s assistant’s rehearsal notes, which were eventually published as an essay. Both the initial notes and their final, published version reveal Soviet theater practitioners’ battle with the recalcitrant play-text as they attempted to force the play into alignment with its official interpretation. By charting how staging Dream challenged early Soviet Russia’s idealized vision of Shakespearean comedy and, by extension, of Shakespeare as a proto-socialist playwright, this article proposes that, when translated into performance, this comedy proved no less ideologically insidious and destabilizing than did Hamlet.

Puck famously concludes A Midsummer Night’s Dream by suggesting that the players’ utmost goal has been to avoid offending their audience and offering to “mend” any damage the play might have caused (Epilogue 8). While superficially conciliatory, Puck’s final speech reminds the audience, yet again, of Dream’s many offenses and harms, and challenges theater practitioners to navigate the darker, more unsettling aspects of the play-text. Taking its cue from Puck, our introduction to this special issue on Dream in modern performance outlines the key inequities and disharmonies of the play-text that might be taken up in performance, including problems of consent, misogyny, colonialism, inequity, and ecological disaster. In the second half of the introduction, we offer a brief survey of how some of these issues have been addressed—magnified, mitigated, or erased—in the play’s staging history from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Finally, we conclude by briefly summarizing how the essays in this special issue explore the mixed results of theatrical projects around the world that employ the play as a tool for social critique and/or imagining alternative futures.

Western studies of the Russian response to Shakespeare's political tragedy after the October Revolution of 1917 have traditionally focused on Hamlet and paid little attention to the fortunes of Macbeth. This article argues that early Soviet Russia saw Macbeth as a play that sent a revolutionary message to its audiences and offered an ideologically useful vision of the world re-made by political violence. It explores the competition for control over the readings of Macbeth in early Soviet Russia by analysing the allusions to Macbeth in texts produced by those troubled by the violence of the October Revolution and the responses to these allusions from the supporters of the Bolshevik regime. Examining the two stage interpretations of Macbeth produced in the first post-revolutionary years, this article suggests that the ideologically minded directors and critics ultimately lost that competition and were forced to abandon the project of locating the October Revolution in the play as unprofitable. I propose that the absence of this tragedy from the central Soviet stages from the mid-1920s and throughout the intensely ideological Stalinist era can then be read not as neutral disinterest but as an active apprehension of its potential for subversive political messaging.

This chapter is from a recently published book (Routledge, 2015) edited by Yin Ling Cheung, Selim Ben Said & Kwanghyun Park. Inspired by David Corson, Karl Polanyi and Michel Foucault, the chapter explores the economistic regulation and subject-formation of ESL teachers in Ontario via mandatory professional accreditation procedures. The chapter than relates these observations to current research in language teacher identity.

The original publication is in Portuguese and published in Brazil: 'Letramentos transnacionais: Mobilazando o conhecimento entre Brasil/Canada' edited by Roseanne Tavares and Diana Brydon (2013, EDUFAL). The chapter explores the challenges of teaching critical digital multiliteracies based on an unexpected encounter with culture jamming in an EAP course.

To what extent do we prepare teachers to be passive recipients of the social, cultural, and economic changes that align with the global spread of English? Alternatively, how might we encourage teachers to become active participants—“agents of change”—through their mediation and implementation of language curricula and pedagogy? The author addresses such questions by first reflecting on his own personal and professional development in EFL and EAP teaching contexts. These experiences are then related to the growing research literature in language teacher identity and several theoretical issues related to this area of interest. The following sections of the article look at the complexities of transferring theory to practice in the specific context of a pre-service, language teacher education course, one of whose primary goals is to foster awareness of language as a social practice linked to unequal relations of power, and one in which language teachers are encouraged to imagine and act otherwise through their teaching and interpersonal relationships with students and colleagues. In the final sections, these course aspirations are explored through a group assignment called a “social issues project,” in which students conceptualize and design a blueprint for transformative action in various forms such as an advocacy letter, workshop, curricular materials, etc. Reflection on the strengths and weaknesses of several selected projects conclude the article.

This chapter offers a comprehensive survey of the concept of identity in second language teaching and learning with particular focus on the field-internal adaptations and innovations (i.e.  conceptual vernacularization) that have shaped this development.

This is a shorter, response paper to Guerrettaz and Johnston (2013), in which Ian Martin and I discuss aspects of the Glendon Certificate in the Discipline of Teaching English as an International Language (D-TEIL), its practicum at Varona Pedagogical University in Havana, and how we see the program conceptualized via ecological principles, particularly through the work of Gregory Bateson. We briefly discuss notions such as recursion, stochasticism, eco-semiotics, and affordances and describe how we see these ecological principles and metaphors informing our work in D-TEIL.