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Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History, from the Restoration to the Present
... Несмотря на цензурные ограничения, драматурги эпохи Реставрации обращаются к тем пьесам Шекспира, которые содержат политическую проблематику, и осовременивают их [Taylor 1990]. Во многих из адаптаций шекспировских пьес по этой причине полностью изменен сюжет. ...
The article is devoted to the reception of Shakespeare’s works in England in the last third of the 17 th century, when Shakespeare’s plays were rewritten for the stage and adapted to the contemporary conditions and rules of English drama. Thomas Otway is considered one of the major translator-interpreters of Shakespeare plays into the language of his own modernity. The article examines how Otway treats the love story of Romeo and Juliet, namely, which elements he rewrites, which are left exactly as in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet , and which are completely removed from the text of Otway’s play. Thus, the adaptation is regarded as a kind of translation within the framework of a single national tradition — from the language of the Elizabethan era to the language of the Restoration. Of particular importance are the changes made by Otway to the final episode of the play (the lovers get a chance to say goodbye to each other before their death, which does not exist in Shakespeare’s play). It is also important to mention that Otway’s play reflects the political situation of his epoch. Otway’s interpretation influenced all subsequent adaptations and European (German and French) translations of the 18 th century.
... 7-11) speak to the enthusiasm generated by this teaching methodology as well as the insights it offered them into the language of the actual written texts. Thus the project involved not only 'recycling Shakespeare' (Marowitz, 1991;Taylor, 1989) in trendy digital format, but also kindling a sense of scholarly engagement with the actual language of the traditional Shakespearian text. The project also inducted future Drama educators experientially into a teaching and learning method that they would be able to use later with their own pupils, adding a further layer to that involved in the Drama Studies project (Ngcongo & Pratt, 2016). ...
by Nellie Ncgongo, UKZN (ngcongon@ukzn.ac.za) Dee (Deirdre) Pratt, DUT (deep@dut.ac.za) Abstract: As with the 2015 #RhodesMustFall student protests, the 2019 #FeesMustFall protests have once again raised the issue of transforming outdated, irrelevant and decontextualized university curricula based on Eurocentric models. As pointed out at the UKZN Decoloniality Summer School 2019, this is at the core of student protests, and not just fees. It is an issue we as academics have to face right now, not wait for committees to take years to decide. This chapter looks at a doctoral research project in which co-author Nellie Ngcongo developed a methodology to transform interpretation-through-performance of the Shakespearean texts which are the traditional property of Drama departments. We draw on postcolonial theory, which highlights the domination of South African theatre curricula by a canon of works whose values enshrine the colonial domination from which higher education is still struggling to emerge. However, there is the danger that postcolonial theory can ghetto-ise indigenous cultures by identifying them, and not Shakespeare, as the 'other'. We rather embrace the concept of decolonising, or making education relevant to its actual present-day context and student populations. This is not necessarily 'Africanising' performances of Shakespeare, which process can range from a superficial inclusion of African-type costumes and props to yet another type of colonisation, potentially more restrictive and oppressive than that of the past. We do not claim that Shakespeare is universal, but acknowledge that his works mirror deep insights into the human condition, and not only have the potential for 'damn good theatre', but constitute a vast repository of plots for modern adaptations and makeovers. Shakespeare's language is the main barrier, even to mother-tongue English students. However, the most important issue arising out of the doctoral research was the need to contextualise Shakespearean interpretation-through-performance to make it relevant and meaningful to Zulu students in Drama Education. The resulting performance of excerpts from Julius Caesar was 'Africanised' in the sense of the medium being predominantly in isiZulu, but its freshness and intensity was entirely a new product, born of its co-creators, the students themselves. This chapter will show how co-author Nellie Ngcongo developed a methodology for transforming the teaching/learning of interpretation-through-performance of Shakespearean texts, using a constructivist, student-centred approach, and arriving at a model showing the key points of this methodology in a form easily adapted by Drama Education educators in different contexts.
... An outstanding Shakespearean scholar Gary Taylor metaphorically represents the unique nature of Shakespeare's dramatic talent as a "black hole", "Light, insight, intelligence, matterall pour ceaselessly into him, as critics are drawn into the densening vortex of his reputation; they add their own weight to his increasing mass. The light of other starsother poets, other dramatistsis wrenched and bent as it passes by him on its way to us" (Taylor, 1990). In the modern intellectual space Shakespeare's creative works are so influential that they have become a 'cultural impulse amplifier' that can be used by other writers to better understand the contemporary context and attract the reader's attention to the most urgent issues. ...
The paper focuses on the specificity of metatextual potential of John Madden’s fictional biopic “Shakespeare in Love” (1998), viewed as a complex metatextualintermedial construct. The metatextual resources of the film are being analysed on three key levels: intratextual (metatextual fragments), intertextual (allusions to the other works of the canon) and extratextual (text as an intersemiotic metatext). On the intratextual level four main forms of metatextual commentary are singled out: a) the paratextual commentary; b) the leitmotif; c) the self-referential fragments; d) the allusions to the present-day realia. In relation to the intertextual level of the film’s metatextual potential references to Shakespeare’s works are discussed as a metatext which offers an explanation of the sources of Shakespeare’s inspiration. Within the extratextual level, “Shakespeare in Love” is viewed as an intersemiotic metatext which comments upon two major semantic fields: the figure of Shakespeare and the epoch of the English Renaissance. The authors also put forward the suggestions for the practical application of the research results.
... Als eine der zentralen Kulturtechniken der Postmoderne, lässt sich das Zitat an keinem Autor so gut studieren wie an William Shakespeare, dessen intertextuelles Nachwirken die gesamte westliche Kulturhemisphäre durchzieht (Maxwell & Rumbold, 2018, S. 1). Eine Untersuchung dieser allgegenwärtigen Spuren ist somit zwingend auch eine Geschichte unserer gesamten Kultur (Taylor, 1991) und beantwortet und eröffnet Fragen, die weit über Shakespeare hinausgehen. Dabei finden sich intertextuelle Bezüge auf das Werk Shakespeares nicht nur in unterschiedlichsten literarischen Genres, sondern in zunehmendem Maße auch im Massenmedium Film und Fernsehen (Malone, 2018). ...
... It is with regard to this relational approach, one in which adaptations of Shakespeare from culturally distinct non-Anglophone regions are studied through a shared methodological lens, that this book differs from the vast scholarly body of work that set the tone for the reception histories of non-Anglophone Shakespeares. Because of the rich performance history of Shakespeare's reception in England itself, many studies of Shakespeare adaptations have focused on England or America, either chronologically (e.g., Taylor 1989;Bristol 1990;Jackson and Bate 1996), or on a particular period of critical significance (e.g., Marsden 1995), or by focussing on the way Shakespeare has been appropriated into Anglo-American mass culture, (e.g., Hodgdon 1998;Holderness 2001;Burt 2007). On the other hand, some of the first collections of essays that placed Shakespeare's reception in an international context focused either on Europe (e.g., Delabastita and D'Hulst 1993;Stříbrný 2000;Pujante and Hoenselaars 2003;Lambert and Engler 2004), or a specific country within Europe (e.g., Bailey 1964;Carlson 1985;S. ...
The text-based orientation of traditional musicology and theory hampers thinking about music as a performance art. Music can be understood as both process and product, but it is the relationship between the two that defines “performance” in the Western “art” tradition. Drawing on interdisciplinary performance theory (particularly theatre studies, poetry reading, and ethnomusicology), I set out issues and outline approaches for the study of music as performance; by thinking of scores as “scripts” rather than “texts,” I argue, we can understand performance as a generator of social meaning.
In 1823, the first edition of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the manuscript of John Milton’s theological work De Doctrina Christiana (On Christian Doctrine) were both discovered after having been lost to history for centuries. These literary discoveries were subsequently published in 1825, challenging the established perspectives of them: the one as the one as the infallible magician of the stage, and the other as the juggernaut Christian poet. These two documents reshaped how scholars thought about them and their legacies. Shakespeare became a man at work, trafficking in a messy theater and printing culture. Milton became a theological outlaw, increasingly resembling to some his epic’s grand antagonist.
The introduction argues that allusion is a central part of the Golden Age detective novel, and should be read as a reaction to a crisis in the shared textual foundation constituted by Shakespeare and the Bible. This chapter reviews previous scholarship on allusion in the detective novel, elaborates the idea that the texts of Shakespeare and the Bible had come to seem unstable and troubled by the mid-twentieth century, and connects this to the knotty and difficult allusions found in detective fiction. It goes on to outline a major argument of this study: that the midcentury allusive tendency was exemplified in the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers, and that later novelists exercised the same allusive habit on Sayers’ works.
This book is a proposal of Queering the classics of drama, more specifically Shakespeare
Shakespeare has often served as an instrument of cultural colonialism. In this essay I argue that the current practice of Shakespeare studies in many ways replicates this pattern. By priming the discourse through Shakespeare, it perpetuates logocentric regimes of knowledge that tend to impose reductive perspectives—such as the binaries of Shakespeare’s original–adaptation and that of the author–adapter, but also scripture–exegesis, London–province or London–Continent, centre–periphery and empire–colonial subjects. Drawing on case studies from five centuries—of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travelling performers, through eighteenth-century German theatre, to twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing and performance, I argue for a need to revisit the logocentric and colonial epistemology. I call for breaking away from the critical heritage of the “Shakespeare Empire,” for reconceptualising how we use Shakespeare, and for refocusing our critical attentions to the thick descriptions of cultures and crafts that make and host Shakespeare.
The Infinite Monkey Theorem is an idea frequently encountered in mass market science books, discourse on Intelligent Design, and debates on the merits of writing produced by chatbots. According to the Theorem, an infinite number of typing monkeys will eventually generate the works of Shakespeare. Shakespeare and Nonhuman Intelligence is a metaphysical analysis of the Bard's function in the Theorem in various contexts over the past century. Beginning with early-twentieth century astrophysics and ending with twenty-first century AI, it traces the emergence of Shakespeare as the embattled figure of writing in the age of machine learning, bioinformatics, and other alleged crimes against the human organism. In an argument that pays close attention to computer programs that instantiate the Theorem, including one by biologist Richard Dawkins, and to references in publications on Intelligent Design, it argues that Shakespeare performs as an interface between the human and our Others: animal, god, machine.
This research paper examines the psychoanalytic study of three characters from William Shakespeare's play Hamlet: Prince Hamlet, Queen Gertrude, and Ophelia. Each character is analyzed through various psychoanalytic theories, including the Oedipus complex, repression, and the Madonna-Whore complex. Prince Hamlet's character is analyzed in terms of his unresolved conflicts with his father, his unconscious desires for his mother, and his subsequent madness. Queen Gertrude's character is analyzed in terms of her repressed desires, her relationship with Claudius, and her role in Hamlet's psychological development. Ophelia's character is analyzed in terms of the Madonna-Whore complex, repression, the uncanny, and the theme of mourning. Overall, the psychoanalytic study of these characters provides a deeper understanding of the psychological dynamics at play in Shakespeare's play and highlights the relevance of psychoanalytic theory in the analysis of literature and human behavior.
Active approaches to teaching Shakespeare are growing in popularity, seen not only as enjoyable and accessible, but as an egalitarian and progressive teaching practice. A growing body of resources supports this work in classrooms. Yet critiques of these approaches argue they are not rigorous and do little to challenge the conservative status quo around Shakespeare. Meanwhile, Shakespeare scholarship more broadly is increasingly recognising the role of critical pedagogy, particularly feminist and decolonising approaches, and asks how best to teach Shakespeare within twenty-first century understandings of cultural value and social justice. Via vignettes of schools' participation in Coram Shakespeare School Foundation's festival, this Element draws on critical theories of education, play and identity to argue active Shakespeare teaching is a playful co-construction with learners and holds rich potential towards furthering social justice-oriented approaches to teaching the plays.
While Restoration and early-18th-century English theatre tends to be associated predominantly with comedies of manners, this period was in fact a time of great theatrical innovation, when new possibilities of stage action were explored and old dramatic material often received a distinct new take. The present article shows how the pre-Interregnum story of Doctor Faustus was revived multiple times after 1660 and how each new reiteration of the work testifies to the then recent developments in London theatres. The post-1660 dramatic versions of Doctor Faustus show how versatile the theatre of the period was and how one particular subject could easily oscillate between genres, as well as entire cultural spheres.
“Revising Shakespeare”, an International Conference organized by Government Arts and Commerce College, Netrang, Bharuch, Gujarat in collaboration with Department of English, Baba Ghulam Shah Badshah University, Rajourifrom 20th June to 22nd June, 2020. It aimed to revisit Shakespeare and his great works in the age of Covid-19. This Three Days E-Conference successfully engaged many scholars from various prestigious universities of India. They discussed and disseminated their wise words. More than fifty academicians had presented their scholarly papers. More than 36 research articles were received for publication. Many researches on Shakespeare were discussed and debated. It not only provided opportunities to Indian scholars to present their points of view but it really opened a new chapter in the critical history of the great writer. With a view to share the brilliant ideas, the organizers have published two books. I hope that the books published from the proceedings of this International E-Conference will be of great use to scholars pursuing research work on Shakespeare. They would be help to those seeking knowledge about the bard and open up new panorama of dissemination in the specific field. Moreover, I wish that they would be addition in the vast discourse of Shakespearean Studies.
It gives me immense pleasure to inform you that the book
Revising Shakespeare which contains Articles and Papers presented by the Experts all over India in the above-mentioned Conference organized by Government Arts and Commerce College, Netrang, Dist-Bharuch, Gujarat during the pandemic period due to Covid-19 is also published
Macbeth has been adapted at least fourteen times into eight different opera genres since its being put on the Chinese opera stage in 1980s. As China has become more involved in intercultural communication and international Shakespeare studies, scholars have shown a growing interest in how Chinese traditional opera affects the way Shakespeare is presented. Drawing on interviews with directors and actors, this article examines the differences between Shakespeare’s Macbeth and its adaptations in Chinese traditional opera, focusing on three adaptations of Macbeth produced during the last decade in Wu Opera, Hui Opera, and Cantonese Opera. We argue that adaptations of Macbeth into Chinese traditional opera, while having their own interests and distinctive features, limit the exploration of ideas in Macbeth by commenting on the action and applying various operatic strategies and skills to didactic purposes, thus encouraging their audience to interpret the play straightforwardly as a moral fable, a chance to learn more about what is right and what is wrong. In contrast, Shakespeare’s play reveals the complexity of human nature, examining human psychology and making no explicit moral judgments of its characters, therefore leaving enough space for the audience’s ambivalent response and interpretation.
KEYWORDS: Shakespeare xi qu morality
The article explores one of the most assiduously researched topics in Shakespeare criticism: that of the ways in which Shakespeare’s responsibility as author of the plays that traditionally bear his name has been established. Rehearsing the major contributions to this debate (from the mid-nineteenth-century idea that Shakespeare’s plays were the work of a group of intellectuals, to recent tendencies in attribution studies which dismember the canon on the basis of theories of co-authorship and collaboration), it maintains that one of the most persistent tendencies in the debate has been that of disintegration; and that both the dismembering of the canon as a whole and the amputating of parts of it as collaboratively written have had the paradoxical effect of de-authorialising what are conventionally known as ‘Shakespeare’s plays’.
Not simply meant as a historical survey, the article also highlights the fact that, as well as determining effects on the Shakespeare canon, disintegrative tendencies have inspired theories of the text relevant to the construction of authorial identity, and have also generated a fallout on the idea, expressed by bibliographers and textual scholars, that the composition and configuration of texts are inescapably collaborative. Finally, the article maintains that biography too has been affected by a notion of disintegration which insists on a de-personalised subject and the idea that a life, no less than a text, is a socially-composed construct.
John Faed, 'Shakespeare and the King's Men' (1851). Public Domain
Closely examining the relationship between the political and the utopian in five major plays from different phases of Shakespeare's career, Hugh Grady shows the dialectical link between the earlier political dramas and the late plays or tragicomedies. Reading Julius Caesar and Macbeth from the tragic period alongside The Winter's Tale and Tempest from the utopian end of Shakespeare's career, with Antony and Cleopatra acting as a transition, Grady reveals how, in the late plays, Shakespeare introduces a transformative element of hope while never losing a sharp awareness of suffering and death. The plays presciently confront dilemmas of an emerging modernity, diagnosing and indicting instrumental politics and capitalism as largely disastrous developments leading to an empty world devoid of meaning and community. Grady persuasively argues that the utopian vision is a specific dialectical response to these fears and a necessity in worlds of injustice, madness and death.
This chapter focuses on liberalism and neoliberalism as both constituents and consequences of the emergence of the psy disciplines through specific processes of modernity in the West. It explores the unified Cartesian subject on which psychology initially depended. It addresses American and South African versions of liberalism and their relationship to race. It also addresses the notion of universal humanity and its relation to the idea of complicity, and begins to apply the idea to intersubjective psychology. The chapter also summarizes the place of Freud’s Oedipus complex in this matrix of ideas and history, and the idea of the Western subject that has emerged accordingly, through and for psychology.
In Upstart Crow (BBC Two, 2016–20), writer Ben Elton makes William Shakespeare into the protagonist of a television sitcom in the British working class tradition. In this chapter, Reto Winckler argues that Upstart Crow thereby seeks to transform Literature with a capital L (that is, literature as an institution, associated with cultural prestige) into television, in a bid to reclaim Shakespeare for popular culture. With the subsequent printing and publication of the Upstart Crow scripts, however, sitcom and television also became literature. The chapter shows how, as an example of both televisual literature and literary television, Upstart Crow embodies the complex artistic and political relationships that exist between the two art forms and media.
For certain scholars, it is Edmond Malone’s edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the modern editorial tradition that followed which forged a crucial link between the author’s life and work. This article refines that idea by focusing on John Benson’s ‘second edition’ of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, entitled Poems (1640), and its early editorial tradition. It argues that early editors and publishers of the Sonnets restricted, manipulated, and exploited its biographical potential. This engagement came to a head in the early eighteenth century when Charles Gildon became the first editor to articulate an explicit biographical approach to the Sonnets (albeit Benson’s version). Gildon considered the Benson sonnets to be mostly epigrams, which gave his biographical approach distinctive features, heretofore unrecognised, such as heightened miscellaneity and internal fragmentation, and associations with the ancient writer Catullus. This earlier version of the biographical approach, long eclipsed by that of Malone, still holds valuable insight for readers of the Sonnets today.
This chapter explores the question ‘Is Shakespeare perceived as one of the powerful global icons through which local education is westernised?’ in Japan. It foregrounds the perceptions of people studying and teaching Shakespeare in Japan in the early twenty-first century. The chapter demonstrates that some of these perceptions around Shakespeare in Japanese higher education are predicated on a binaric understanding of Shakespeare as the ‘foreign’/’other’/west, distinct from the ‘indigenous’/‘our’/East Asian. His foreignness is perceived varyingly from positive to malignant, with reference to the nature and purpose of subject English; the use of western productions in the classroom; and the delivery of a westernized ‘world view’ through Shakespeare. However, other perceptions explicitly or implicitly trouble this supposed polarity, emphasising Shakespeare as (adapted to be) local, regional and Asian, in terms of perceptions of his bawdy humour, affinity with Japanese history and culture, and use of locally-made or -inflected resources.
Monograph on drama translation.
It includes chapters on the state of the art of drama translation, translation studies and their connection with theatre studies.
It analyses the connections of drama translation with visual codes and scenography, with aural codes and music, and with textual and ideological decision, with attention to specific productions.
Commemorations of William Shakespeare have always been multimedial ideological constructs with particular aims and purposes in different cultures and contexts at different times. Shakespeare commemorations have been instrumental in the creation of the cultural capital that is attached to Shakespeare today. This essay traces some significant Shakespeare commemorations since the eighteenth century, beginning with David Garrick's Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769. From the commemorations of 1864, the tercentenary of Shakespeare's birth, it goes on to trace Shakespeare commemorations particularly in the United Kingdom and Germany in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, after World War II, Shakespeare commemorations became ever more globalised in a world dominated by the Cold War and the Western hegemony of the anglosphere, in particular the USA. With its split in 1963, just before the quadricentenary, the German Shakespeare Society followed the split of Germany on the frontier between the Western and Eastern political blocks. After the end of the Cold War, the Shakespeare cult and industry of the 21st century instigate even more globalised commemorations that compete with each other and that arguably result, for instance at the 450th anniversary in 2014, in an excess of commemorations, both in academia and in popular culture.
Festivals have always been part of city life, but their relationship with their host cities has continually changed. With the rise of industrialization, they were largely considered peripheral to the course of urban affairs. Now they have become central to new ways of thinking about the challenges of economic and social change, as well as repositioning cities within competitive global networks. In this timely and thought-provoking book, John and Margaret Gold provide a reflective and evidence-based historical survey of the processes and actors involved, charting the ways that regular festivals have now become embedded in urban life and city planning.
Beginning with David Garrick’s rain-drenched Shakespearean Jubilee and ending with Sydney’s flamboyant Mardi Gras celebrations, it encompasses the emergence and consolidation of city festivals. After a contextual historical survey that stretches from Antiquity to the late nineteenth century, there are detailed case studies of pioneering European arts festivals in their urban context: Venice’s Biennale, the Salzburg Festival, the Cannes Film Festival and Edinburgh’s International Festival. Ensuing chapters deal with the worldwide proliferation of arts festivals after 1950 and with the ever-increasing diversifycation of carnival celebrations, particularly through the actions of groups seeking to assert their identity. The conclusion draws together the book’s key themes and sketches the future prospects for festival cities.
In Confessions, Augustine condemns the Roman spectacles, but not their medium. Reworking the potential of spectacle to shape the Christian reader’s and communicant’s sensibility, Augustine instantiates a medial critique in which spectacle has a strikingly beneficial purpose, not only in sustaining the ritual performativity of Christianity but also in modeling Christian reading and writing as performative activities. The intermedial liaison registered in Confessions provides for the redirection of performance in humanities discourse, as is suggested in an account of Tony Davies’s Humanism. While Augustine sees reading and spectating as interpenetrating sites and acts of performance, Davies reproduces the humanist reduction of performance to enervating spectacle yet complementarily frames reading in metaphors of theatrical experience, tellingly pointing to the mutual embeddedness of these practices.
The Standard Western Approach cannot be salvaged for world theatre history because it is predicated on three historiographic fallacies. First is the fallacy of the mainstream, which involves both ethnocentrism and presentism, and leads to the fallacious belief that there is a mainstream of theatre history that runs directly through Europe. Second is the fallacy of the East-West dichotomy. By dividing the world into a pair of ostensibly equivalent units, it seeks to draw a line between “us” and “them,” implicitly serving to glorify the Western “us.” (A newer dichotomy draws a no less dubious line between the West and “the world.”) Third is the fallacy of progressivism, which holds that theatre history is marked by an ineluctable progress from ritual, song, and dance, to the civilized theatre of spoken dialogue and naturalism—a progress to which “non-Western” theatre is seen as being largely irrelevant, and therefore excusably marginalized or ignored.
Few people would suggest that theatre historians should categorically avoid studying the theatre of lands that are conventionally spoken of as “non-Western,” but it is apparent that world theatre history is frequently taken to be problematic in one or more ways. This chapter examines why that might be so, presenting eight arguments against world theatre history. Anyone interested in the global perspective needs to understand these arguments, if only to be able to contest them. The first four arguments are practical in nature and concern the difficulties of studying theatre history on a global scale. The following four arguments are ideological, attacking the very idea of world theatre history from a variety of perspectives. While discussing and rebutting these eight arguments, the chapter offers further clarification on what world theatre history entails, and why the academic disinclination toward it is self-defeating for theatre studies.
What is entailed in the cultural practice of screening, in both senses of the verb, Shakespeare in transnational audio-visual idioms in the modern times? The past decades have witnessed diverse incarnations and bold sequences of screen and stage Shakespeares that gave rise to productive encounters between the ideas of Asia and of Shakespeare. Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (Macbeth, 1957) and Ran (Lear, 1985) are far from the earliest or the only Shakespeare films from Asia; around the time Asta Nielsen's cross-dressed Hamlet (1921) was filmed, gender-bender silent film adaptations of The Merchant of Venice and Two Gentlemen of Verona were being made in Shanghai. In the other direction, Hollywood and the global economy in general have brought Asian cultures forcefully into the Western cultural register, as evidenced by the mediation and reception of Shakespeare and world cultures on screens big and small, including silent film, television, feature film, documentary, and such media as online games, anime, and YouTube. Two prominent examples are Kenneth Branagh's As You Like It (2006), set in Japan, and the appropriation of eastern spirituality in Thich Nah Han's scene in Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000). In both directions of the intercultural traffic, Asian audio-visual idioms have been appropriated along with Shakespeare's text on stage and on screen. Therefore, we need to ask: On what terms do transnational Shakespeares animate and redirect the traffic between different geo-cultural or virtual localities? In turn, how do the collaborative processes of signification operate as local stagings of Shakespeare and global locales?
This book is a major contribution to the study and analysis of divination, both in Africa and elsewhere. It falls in the tradition of Evans-Pritchard’s 1937 classic “Witchcraft Oracles and Magic among the Azande” and seeks to return attention to the details of divinatory practice, using the questions asked, and life histories to help understand the perspective of the clients rather than that of the diviners. The book is based on continuing fieldwork with the Mambila in Cameroon, and compares Mambila spider divination with similar systems in the area. The regional comparison examines the different sorts of explanation for different features of social organisation, leading to a discussion of the continuing utility of moderated functionalism. A detailed case study is examined, and analysed using conversational analytic principles. This leads to a more sociological consideration of a corpus of more than 600 cases.
The book will be of interest to area specialists and students concerned with religion and rationality, as well as those with an interest in discourse and the rationality of decision making, and hence it may attract a readership from outside African studies and anthropology, in particularly, from subjects such as philosophy of the social sciences pragmatics and decision making.
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Much attention has been given to the comedy of Mark Rylance’s Shakespeare performances and his interaction with the audience. Comedy and audience interaction informed the initial creation of many of Shakespeare’s roles, particularly Richard III, a figure indebted to the medieval Vice character. Rylance and his collaborators often attribute the playing to the audience as part of Original Practices, however, Rylance’s performances also demonstrate many of the attributes of contemporary theatrical clowning. Contemporary clowning, as expounded by Jacques Lecoq and his aesthetic descendants, places particular emphasis on the relationship of failure and the audience. The power of Rylance’s performance as Richard III comes from this synthesis of past and present to create a contemporary hybrid style. This essay will showcase the importance of failure and the audience to contemporary clown, before comparing it to the use of audience and comedy in Shakespeare’s Richard. After examining the two historical moments, the paper turns to the ways Rylance embodies different aspects of past and present theatrical forms, using a hybrid practice to create a Richard of his own theatrical moment, thus reflecting but not replicating tensions tensions between past and present theatrical practices of the initial creation of the role.
This chapter provides a brief critical history of relevant, popular appropriations of Shakespeare, setting the existing criticism on Morecambe & Wise within this history. Adaptations of Shakespeare proliferate in twentieth and twenty-first-century comedy, posing interesting interpretative challenges. The chapter’s overview of ‘Shakespop’ criticism provides the necessary foundation for examining the Boys’ use of Shakespeare.
This chapter details the persistence of the comic duo into the twenty-first century, tracing both their continuing popularity as well as their contested use in multiple discourses. The chapter establishes that Morecambe & Wise function today as multivalent symbols attached to a growing range of cultural artefacts, events, people, and places within British culture.
It has been traditionally accepted that the first professional performance by an English actress occurred on December 8th, 1660 in a production of Othello staged at the Vere Street Theatre in London. The name of the actress who played the role of Desdemona in this production is not known, however many theatre historians have claimed that it was Margaret Hughes. Using archival research, this article explores the history of women on the Restoration stage to determine the importance of the Vere Street Desdemona and then conducts an historiographical examination of the case for Hughes as the first professional English actress. It looks in-depth at the evidence supporting this assertion and addresses the issues present in the existing historical analyses, ultimately showing that Margaret Hughes was not on the stage in London prior to 1668 and therefore could not have been the Vere Street Desdemona.
Geniuses are rarely recognized and acknowledged during their times. However, once a writer is acknowledged as a genius posthumously, his oeuvre undergoes a thorough legitimation process through which his scholarly reception replicates the mythmaking and universalizing rhetoric of genius. The conceptual refashioning of the author in the image of geniuses of yore simultaneously shapes and derails the intellectual trajectory of textual scholarship by privileging a discourse of genius in the service of which the author’s canon could well be demolished beyond recognition. Further, the disproportionate amount of attention invested in his outstanding accomplishments could eclipse and obfuscate the variety and complexity of the textual culture that he represented.
Inferior works by retrospective geniuses are vulnerable to incrimination and canonical annihilation on grounds of suspect authenticity because of the implicit assumption that technical perfection is a prerequisite of greatness. As the author grows in stature and attains greatness, these inferior works proceed inexorably down the road to disattribution and de-legitimation. If the author, to use Roland Barthes’ phrase, is “the father and the owner” of these works, then these become ‘bastard texts’. Proceeding from the a priori assumption that someone is a genius, the notion of creative perfection decides upon the authenticity of a given piece. Thus the genius trope erroneously makes legitimacy and perfection mutually constitutive.
The present paper approaches the canonical legitimation process with, to use Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. It attempts a brief survey of the Shakespeare canon as a specific example to trace instances where canonical de-legitimation coincides with the canonization of the author as a genius. Scrutinising the genius tropes that propel the ‘aesthetics of perfection’ this paper suggests that instead of discarding, these bastard texts need to be celebrated, for, to these marginalised works these writers owe a great deal.
Keywords: Marginalisation, Legitimation, Genius, Critical Canon, Bastard Texts, Shakespeare Apocrypha, Shakespeare Authorship Question
This article traces some of the adaptation history of Shakespeare’s twin farce, The Comedy of Errors. The play highlights some of the paradoxes inherent in Shakespeare’s status in the field of adaptation, as it is often perceived as a rather derivative effort. By delivering a more detailed reading of Angoor (1982), Gulzar’s film adaptation of the play, I want to argue for the significance of transcultural adaptations when it comes to upending some of the established hierarchies inherent in adaptation studies. Moreover, the chapter highlights the theme of dubious births and the problem of primogeniture to conceptualize adaptation itself as a form of twinship.
Every year since 2007, the Globe Theatre has run the Playing Shakespeare project, largely funded by Deutsche Bank. This has three main components: school-based workshops, CPD sessions for teachers and free performances for school students. From 2014 to 2016, we were commissioned to evaluate this project. In what follows, we reflect on the nature of this project and its relation to the versions of Shakespeare that figure so prominently in the terrain of contemporary schooling in England.
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