Foreign Shakespeare

This collection considers contemporary performance of Shakespeare's plays in non-English-speaking theatres.

In Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds, Carole Levin and John Watkins focus on the relationship between the London-based professional theater preeminently associated with William Shakespeare and an unprecedented European experience of geographic, social, and intellectual mobility. Shakespeare's plays bear the marks of exile and exploration, rural depopulation, urban expansion, and shifting mercantile and diplomatic configurations. He fills his plays with characters testing the limits of personal identity: foreigners, usurpers, outcasts, outlaws, scolds, shrews, witches, mercenaries, and cross-dressers. Through parallel discussions of Henry VI, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice, Levin and Watkins argue that Shakespeare's centrality to English national consciousness is inseparable from his creation of the foreign as a category asserting dangerous affinities between England's internal minorities and its competitors within an increasingly fraught European mercantile system. As a women's historian, Levin is particularly interested in Shakespeare's responses to marginalized sectors of English society. As a scholar of English, Italian Studies, and Medieval Studies, Watkins situates Shakespeare in the context of broadly European historical movements. Together Levin and Watkins narrate the emergence of the foreign as portable category that might be applied both to "strangers" from other countries and to native-born English men and women, such as religious dissidents, who resisted conformity to an increasingly narrow sense of English identity. Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds will appeal to historians, literary scholars, theater specialists, and anyone interested in Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Age.

This book treats William Shakespeare’s romances as international relations (IR) theory plays depicting paths to peace abroad, showing that the playwright sounds the depths of human emotions and resolves diplomatic crises threatening entire populations overseas. Remarkably, Shakespeare vindicates Renaissance concepts of IR classical realism, as well as our modern definitions of IR realism, defensive realism, and constructivism. These late plays reveal the playwright at the height of his aesthetic powers, for, by virtue of his art, his antagonistic state actors restore frayed international alliances and reap the benefits of a renewed sense of universal well-being.

Eating Shakespeare provides a constructive critical analysis of the issue of Shakespeare and globalization and revisits understandings of interculturalism, otherness, hybridity and cultural (in)authenticity. Featuring scholarly essays as well as interviews and conversation pieces with creatives – including Geraldo Carneiro, Fernando Yamamoto, Diana Henderson, Mark Thornton Burnett, Samir Bhamra, Tajpal Rathore, Samran Rathore and Paul Heritage – it offers a timely and fruitful discourse between global Shakespearean theory and practice. The volume uniquely establishes and implements a conceptual model inspired by non-European thought, thereby confronting a central concern in the field of Global Shakespeare: the issue of Europe operating as a geographical and cultural 'centre' that still dominates the study of Shakespearean translations and adaptations from a 'periphery' of world-wide localities. With its origins in 20th-century Brazilian modernism, the concept of 'Cultural Anthropophagy' is advanced by the authors as an original methodology within the field currently understood as 'Global Shakespeare'. Through a broad range of examples drawn from theatre, film and education, and from both within Brazil and beyond, the volume offers illuminating perspectives on what Global Shakespeare may mean today.

This volume critically analyses and theorises Asian interventions in the expanding phenomenon of Global Shakespeare. It interrogates Shakespeare’s ‘universality’ from Asian perspectives: how this has been modified or even replaced by the ‘global bard’ as a recognisable brand, and how Asian Shakespeares have contributed to or subverted this process by both facilitating the worldwide dissemination of the bard’s plays and challenging and resisting the very templates through which they become globally legible. Critically acclaimed Asian productions have prominently figured at premier Western festivals, and popular Asian appropriations like Bollywood, manga and anime have created new kinds of globally accessible Shakespeare. Essays in this collection engage with the emergent critical issues: the efficacy of definitions of the ‘local’, ‘global’, ‘transnational’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ and of the liminalities and mobilities in between. They further examine the politics of ‘West’ and ‘East’, the evolving markers of the ‘Asian’ and the equation of the ‘glocal’ with the ‘Asian’; they attend to performance and archiving protocols and bring the current debates on translation, appropriation, and world literature to speak to the concerns of global and transnational Shakespeare. These investigations analyse recent innovative Asian theatre productions, popular cinematic and manga appropriations and the increasing presence of Shakespeare in the Asian digital sphere. They provide an Asian standpoint and lens in rereading the processes of cultural globalisation and the mobilisation of Shakespeare.

Contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare's plays have brought into sharp focus the legacies of slavery, racism and colonial dispossession that still haunt the global South. Looking sideways across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans to nontraditional centres of Shakespeare practice, Shakespeare in the Global South explores the solidarities generated by contemporary adaptations and their stories of displacement and survival. The book takes its lead from innovative theatre practice in Mauritius, North India, Brazil, post-apartheid South Africa and the diasporic urban spaces of the global North, to assess the lessons for cultural theory emerging from the new works. Using the 'global South' as a critical frame, Sandra Young reflects on the vocabulary scholars have found productive in grappling with the impact of the new iterations of Shakespeare's work, through terms such as 'creolization', 'indigenization', 'localization', 'Africanization' and 'diaspora'. Shakespeare's presence in the global South invites us to go beyond familiar orthodoxies and to recognize the surprising affinities felt across oceans of difference in time and space that allow Shakespeare's inventiveness to be a part of the enchanting subversions at play in contemporary theatre's global currents.

Shakespeare, Theory and Performance is a groundbreaking collection of seminal essays which apply the abstract theory of Shakespearean criticism to the practicalities of performance. Bringing together the key names from both realms, the collection reflects a wide range of sources and influences, from traditional literary, performance and historical criticism to modern cultural theory. Together they raise questions about the place of performance criticism in modern and often competing debates of cultural materialism, new historicism, feminism and deconstruction. An exciting and fascinating volume, it will be important reading for students and scholars of literary and theatre studies alike.

Structured around modes in which one might encounter Asian-themed performances and adaptations, Shakespeare and East Asia identifies four themes that distinguish post-1950s East Asian cinemas and theatres from works in other parts of the world: Japanese formalistic innovations in sound and spectacle; reparative adaptations from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; the politics of gender and reception of films and touring productions in South Korea and the UK; and multilingual, diaspora works in Singapore and the UK. These adaptations break new ground in sound and spectacle; they serve as a vehicle for artistic and political remediation or, in some cases, the critique of the myth of reparative interpretations of literature; they provide a forum where diasporic artists and audiences can grapple with contemporary issues; and, through international circulation, they are reshaping debates about the relationship between East Asia and Europe. Bringing film and theatre studies together, this book sheds new light on the two major genres in a comparative context and reveals deep structural and narratological connections among Asian and Anglophone performances. These adaptations are products of metacinematic and metatheatrical operations, contestations among genres for primacy, or experimentations with features of both film and theatre.