Shakespeare beyond English
A Global Experiment
Published on 29. August 2013
Book
Hardback
341 pages
978-1-107-04055-7 (ISBN)
Description
Tackling vital issues of politics, identity and experience in performance, this book asks what Shakespeare's plays mean when extended beyond the English language. From April to June 2012 the Globe to Globe Festival offered the unprecedented opportunity to see all of Shakespeare's plays performed in many different world languages. Thirty-eight productions from around the globe were presented in six weeks as part of the World Shakespeare Festival, which formed a cornerstone of the Cultural Olympics. This book provides the only complete critical record of that event, drawing together an internationally renowned group of scholars of Shakespeare and world theatre with a selection of the UK's most celebrated Shakespearean actors. Featuring a foreword by Artistic Director Dominic Dromgoole and an interview with the Festival Director Tom Bird, this volume highlights the energy and dedication that was necessary to mount this extraordinary cultural experiment.
Reviews / Votes
'With a foreword by the Globe's artistic director, Dominic Dromgoole, a chapter by Globe to Globe director Tom Bird, generous endnotes for the essays, a performance calendar (noting language, company size, and other data), 23 halftones and 16 colour plates, the book serves as both a flavourful impression and a complete documentary record of the 'big, simple, stupid idea' (as the editors describe it in their introduction) that piqued audiences with political and gender issues and at the same time exhilarated them as well as the performers.' Choice 'Of lasting use to anyone interested in Shakespeare our contemporary.' The Times Literary SupplementMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
23 Halftones, unspecified; 16 Halftones, color
Dimensions
Height: 250 mm
Width: 175 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
774 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-107-04055-7 (9781107040557)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
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E-Book
08/2013
1st Edition
Cambridge University Press
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Book
08/2013
Cambridge University Press
€64.80
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E-Book
08/2013
Cambridge University Press
€14.49
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Persons
Susan Bennett is University Professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary, Canada. Her interest in contemporary performances of Shakespeare's plays dates back to her 1996 monograph Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past. Her latest book is Theatre and Museums (2013). A current research project is concerned with the circulation of performance in global markets where Shakespeare, not surprisingly, is a premium brand. She hopes to see some of the Globe to Globe Festival performances again at different international venues and with other audiences. Christie Carson is Reader in Shakespeare and Performance in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is co-editor of The Cambridge King Lear CD-ROM: Text and Performance Archive (2000) and the Principal Investigator of the AHRB-funded research project Designing Shakespeare: An Audio-Visual Archive, 1960-2000. She has published widely on the subject of contemporary performance and co-edited Shakespeare's Globe: A Theatrical Experiment with Farah Karim-Cooper (2008) and Shakespeare in Stages: New Theatre Histories (2010) with Christine Dymkowski. She hopes to continue to document international gatherings of this kind from a vantage point that takes in both the onstage action and the audience response.
Content
Foreword; Introduction: Shakespeare beyond English; The Globe to Globe Festival: an introduction; Performance calendar; Week One; 1. U Venas no Adonisi: grassroots theatre or market branding in the rainbow nation?; 2. Festival showcasing and cultural regeneration: Aotearoa New Zealand, Shakespeare's Globe and Ngakau Toa's A Toroihi raua ko Kahiri (Troilus and Cressida) in Te Reo Maori; 3. 'What's mine is yours, and what is yours is mine': Measure for Measure, Vakhtangov Theatre, Moscow; 4. 'The girl defies': a Kenyan Merry Wives of Windsor; 5. Pericles and the Globe: celebrating the body and 'embodied spectatorship'; 6. Technicolour Twelfth Night; Week Two; 7. Performing cultural exchange in Richard III: inter-cultural display and personal reflections; 8. 'A girdle round about the earth': Yohangza's A Midsummer Night's Dream; 9. Intercultural rhythm in Yohangza's Dream; 10. Art of darkness: staging Giulio Cesare at the Globe Theatre; 11. Neoliberal pleasure, global responsibility, and the South Sudan Cymbeline; 12. Titus in no man's land: the Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio's production; 13. Tang Shu-wing's Titus and the acting of violence; 14. 'A strange brooch in this all-hating world': Ashtar Theatre's Richard II; 15. 'We want Bolingbroke': Ashtar's Palestinian Richard II; 16. O-thell-O: styling syllables, donning wigs, late-capitalist, national 'scariotypes'; Week Three; 17. Power play: Dhaka Theatre's Bangla Tempest; 18. Locating Makbet/locating the spectator; 19. 'Who dares receive it other': conversation with Harriet Walter (9 May 2012) following a performance of Makbet; 20. Two Gentlemen of Verona for/by Zimbabwean diasporic communities; 21. Inter-theatrical reading: theatrical and multicultural appropriations of 1-3 Henry VI as a Balkan trilogy; 22. 'This is our modern history': the Balkans Henry VI; Week Four; 23. Shakespeare 2012/Duchamp 1913: the global motion of Henry IV; 24. Foreign Shakespeare and the uninformed theatregoer: Part 1 an Armenian King John; 25. The right to the theatre: Belarus Free Theatre's King Lear; 26. 'Playing' Shakespeare: Marjanishvili, Georgia's As You Like It; 27. Romeu e Julieta (reprise): Grupo Galpao at the Globe, again; Week Five; 28. Bread and circuses: Chiten, Japan and Coriolanus; 29. 'No words!': Love's Labour's Lost in British Sign Language; 30. Ending well: reconciliation and remembrance in Arpana's All's Well That Ends Well; 31. Creative exploitation and talking back: Renegade Theatre's The Winter's Tale or Itan Oginintin ('Winter's Tales'); 32. A Shrew full of laughter; 33. Foreign Shakespeare and the uninformed theatregoer: Part 2 a Turkish Antony and Cleopatra; 34. 'Didst hear her speak? Is she shrill-tongued or low?': Conversation with Janet Suzman following a performance of Antony and Cleopatra 26 May 2012; Week Six; 35. Habima Merchant of Venice; performances inside and outside the Globe; 36. Patriotism, presentism and the Spanish Henry VIII: The Tragedy of the Migrant Queen; 37. Touch and taboo in Rah-e-Sabz' The Comedy of Errors; 38. Shakespeare and the Euro-crisis: The Bremer Shakespeare Company's Timon aus Athen; 39. Restaging reception: translating the Melange des Genres in Beaucoup de bruit pour rien; 40. Reviving Hamlet? Nekrosius' Lithuanian 'classic'; Afterwords; 'From thence to England' (1HVI): Henry V at Shakespeare's Globe; De-centering Shakespeare: a hope for future connections.