Re-casting shakespeare: gendered performances and performativity of leadership

Reviewed by: Henry VIII, and: Anne Boleyn Carolyn Sale Henry VIII Presented by the Globe Theatre Company at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, London. May 24–August 21, 2010. Directed by Mark Rosenblatt; designed by Angela Davies; composer, Nigel Hess; choreographer, Sian Williams; stage manager, Vicky Berry; production manager, Paul Russell. With Kate Duchêne (Queen Katherine), Dominic Rowan (Henry VIII), Miranda Raison (Anne Boleyn), Antony Howell (Duke of Buckingham, Lord Chancellor), Amanda Lawrence (Fool, Lady-in-Waiting), Ian McNeice (Wolsey), Michael Bertenshaw (Sir Thomas Lovell, Cardinal Campeius, Porter), John Dougall (Lord Sandys, Gardiner), Colin Hurley (Thomas Cranmer), and Dickon Tyrrell (Duke of Suffolk). Anne Boleyn Presented by the Globe Theatre Company at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, London. July 24–August 21, 2010. Written by Howard Brenton; directed by John Dove; designed by Michael Taylor; composer, Willian Lyons; choreographer, Sian Williams; stage manager, Vicky Berry; production manager, Paul Russell. With Miranda Raison (Anne Boleyn), James Garnon (James I), Anthony Howell (Henry VIII), Amanda Lawrence (Lady Rochford), Peter [End Page 111] Hamilton Dyer (William Tyndale), John Dougall (Thomas Cromwell), Colin Hurley (Wolsey, Henry Barrow), Sam Cox (Dean Lancelot Andrewes), Michael Bertenshaw (Robert Cecil), Ben Deery (George Villiers), and Dickon Tyrrell (Dr. John Reynolds). In the summer of 2010, the Globe Theatre had some real fun with its "Kings & Rogues" season, which gave audiences an opportunity to see a lot more of a character who is, in one of the season's plays, Henry VIII, little more than a flitting, fleeting tease: Anne Boleyn. Anyone who bought a ticket for the new play by that title which Howard Brenton wrote for the season might fairly have concluded that Shakespeare is all right, but we should all really be buying more tickets for plays by Brenton. The pair of plays benefited from a crucial casting choice, which was to have the same actress, Miranda Raison, play Anne Boleyn in both productions. I saw Henry VIII first, and was glad to know that when I returned I was going to get to see Raison in the same role. In Henry VIII, Boleyn is a teasing, tantalizing figure, who flirts with Henry, denies that she wants the "glistering grief" of being queen, and haunts the principal action from the periphery—indeed, in this production, from the recesses of the stage where she was in one scene nothing more than a nightgown clad figure departing from Henry. The delight of Brenton's play is that it frees this peripheral figure from the cribs and confines of her limited role in Henry VIII to let the actress playing her win us over to an idea of Anne that flouts all popular conceptions. But those Globe-goers who showed up for Anne Boleyn as well as Henry VIII were also treated to things they could not have possibly have expected from Brenton's title. Not only does Brenton's play reclaim Anne from her ignominy so that she can matter to English history—or at least to Brenton's reinvention of the English history play—it also gives us a screamingly funny satiric portrait of that misogynist and demoniac known as James VI of Scotland and James I of England and Ireland. Making use of the very aspects of Anne's story that Shakespeare and Fletcher choose to leave out, Brenton has the English Reformation find its fulfillment in a bizarre alliance across time between two of the period's more notorious figures, a siren and a tyrant. His play serves up a comic fantasia that is an answer to so many of the problems of Henry VIII, which is not only—let's be frank!—too episodic for most theatre-goers' taste, but also—let's be franker!—hard work to listen to. I watched an audience take it in across a sweltering summer afternoon from paper visors that guarded their eyes from the [End Page 112] Click for larger view View full resolution Dominic Rowan as King Henry VIII in Shakespeare's Globe's 2010 production of Henry VIII, directed by Mark Rosenblatt. Photo courtesy of John Tramper. [End Page 113] sun and with the assistance of programs as fans, and I was impressed by their stoicism...

Reviewed by: Titus Andronicus, and: Coriolanus Arnold Preussner Titus Andronicus Presented by Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, London. May 20–October 6, 2006. Directed by Lucy Bailey. Designed by William Dudley. Music by Django Bates. With Douglas Hodge (Titus), Richard O'Callaghan (Marcus Andronicus), David Sturzaker (Lucius), Hugh Wyld/Steven Williams (Young Lucius), Laura Rees (Lavinia), Patrick Moy (Saturninus), Simon Wilson (Bassianus), Geraldine Alexander (Tamora), Richard Riddell (Chiron), Sam Alexander (Demetrius), Shaun Parkes (Aaron), Claire Nielson (Nurse), Chris Emmett (Emillius), and others. Coriolanus Presented by Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, London. May 5–August 13, 2006. Directed by Dominic Dromgoole. Designed by Mike Britton. Music by William Lyons. With Jonathan Cake (Coriolanus), Margot Leicester (Volumnia), Robin Soans (Menenius Agrippa), John Dougall (Junius Brutus), Frank McCusker (Sicinius Velutus), Joseph Marcell (Cominius), Ciaran McIntyre (Titus Lartius), Akiya Henry (Valeria), Jane Murphy(Virgilia), Richard Butler (Young Martius), Trevor Fox (1st Citizen), Paul Rider (2nd Citizen), and others. The 2006 Globe season marked the debut of Dominic Dromgoole as artistic director after nine years of the inventive, if sometimes controversial, leadership of Mark Rylance. For his initial run, Dromgoole chose to stage three of Shakespeare's four Roman plays, omitting only Julius Caesar while adding The Comedy of Errors and two non-Shakespearean productions, Simon Bent's Under the Black Flag and Howard Brenton's In Extremis: The Story of Abelard and Heloise, to round out the season's ambitious schedule. The entire bill of fare was promoted under the title "The Edges of Rome," with posters, programs, schedules, and even individual performance tickets bearing the emblem of a blood-red victory (or funeral?) wreath against a white background (or, conversely, of a ghostly white wreath against a red background). Coriolanus, directed by Dromgoole himself, opened the season in early May before being joined two weeks later by Lucy Bailey's production of Titus. The two plays then ran in repertory for five weeks before the opening in late June of a much-anticipated Antony and Cleopatra, also directed by Dromgoole, with the other three plays scheduled for openings later in the summer. The productions of Coriolanus and Titus were clearly counted upon to carry much of the responsibility for making a successful transition from one supervisory regime to the next, and, judging from the generally positive responses from the corps of London reviewers, as well as from the solid box-office sales that both plays seemed to generate, the ploy was successful. Above all, devotees of the Globe appeared to be curious whether Dromgoole would continue to emphasize the more free-wheeling, experimental elements of the venue's approach to interactive theatre while, perhaps, managing to avoid some of the perceived pitfalls of Rylance's sometimes eccentric artistic choices. Certainly, the choice of Roman tragedy [End Page 116] as the exclusive fare for the 2006 season's first nine weeks signaled a movement towards gravitas; at the same time, the staging strategies for both Titus and Coriolanus indicated an interest on the part of the two directors in continuing to take the dramatic action quite literally to its audience, making extensive use of the yard and the groundlings. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Titus Andronicus at Shakespeare's Globe. Photographer John Tramper. The seven weeks during which the productions of Titus and Coriolanus retained sole possession of the Globe stage indicated that Dromgoole presumably wanted his theatre-goers (assuming they attended both productions) to consider Shakespeare's first and last tragedies from a comparative perspective. The notion made some thematic sense, since, despite their differences in theme, tone, and technique, both plays involve heroes who become alienated from their communities and, as a result, seek to carry out revenge upon those communities. The role of Lucius in Titus as a banished figure who in his anticipated march on Rome at the head of a Gothic army threatens "to do / As much as ever Coriolanus did" highlights a structural pattern shared by both plays. At the same time, costuming, stage design, and musical embellishments helped to keep the productions sufficiently separate from each other. Upon entering the yard for performances of Titus, groundlings were warned by signs posted on the doors to...

Review of Shakespeare's Coriolanus (directed by Dominic Dromgoole for Shakespeare's Globe Theatre) at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre London (May–August 2006)

An incident was being hotly debated in the local (and later, national) media when Nick Bagnall's production of the Henry VI trilogy for the touring arm of the Shakespeare's Globe Theatre opened at ...

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements My thanks are due to the British Academy, Jaq Bessell, Eugene Giddens, Margaret Healy, Mark Houlahan, Michelle Keown, Lindsey Moore, Judith Pryor, Carol Chillington Rutter, the anonymous reader for Textual Practice and the Globe Library. I am also grateful to participants in the 2004 Shakespeare Association of America seminar on cross-dressing in contemporary performances of Shakespeare, especially Barbara Hodgdon, Elizabeth Klett, Skip Shand and Philippa Sheppard. All Globe Research Bulletins are available at the Globe Library. These Bulletins are in the process of being posted on the Globe's website at http://www.shakespeares-globe.org/navigation/frameset.htm; this site supersedes the now inactive Globe Research website which was hosted by the University of Reading. Notes 1. Pauline Kiernan, ‘Findings from the Globe Opening Season: Henry V ’, Research Bulletin 2, March 1998, p. 5. The basic requirements for these original practices performances are: an all-male cast, cuts to speed performance time, several interval-free performances, doubling of parts, extensive historical costume work, authentic weapons including swords and crossbows, authentic music, experiments with jigs, stage management as close to the Elizabethans as possible within the confines of modern safety standards, use of stage traps, the lords' and music rooms in the balcony, a cannon and ticket prices set at rough equivalents to Elizabethan playhouse prices (Research Bulletin 2, pp. 5–8). 2. Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 3. 3. See for example Andrew Gurr, ‘Thinking about the new Globe’, The European English Messenger, 4.1 (1995), pp. 9–11, and Robert Clark, ‘The new Globe rises’, The European English Messenger, 4.1 (1995), pp. 12–13. 4. See for example Graham Holderness and Carol Banks, ‘“True Original Copies”’, The European English Messenger, 6.1 (1997), pp. 20–5, and John Drakakis, ‘Theatre, ideology and institution: Shakespeare and the roadsweepers’, The Shakespeare Myth, ed. Graham Holderness (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: St Martin's Press, 1988), pp. 24–41. 5. For an excellent example of recent criticism on the Globe, which situates the project in relation to theme parks, living-history restorations and intercultural Shakespeare, see W.B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. pp. 79–116, 148–68. 6. Gurr, ‘Shakespeare's Globe: a history of reconstructions and some reasons for trying’, Shakespeare's Globe Rebuilt, ed. J.R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 46. 7. The first Globe was reconstructed in 1599 from the timbers of the Theatre and burned down in 1613 as a result of cannon fire during a performance of Henry VIII. This theatre was rebuilt as the tiled-roof New Globe Theatre in 1614. Following the close of the theatres in 1642 the New Globe was subsequently demolished in 1644. 8. Christian Camargo, interview with Kiernan, Research Bulletin 2, p. 40. 9. Henry V at the Globe, dir. Steve Ruggi, Channel 4, videocassette, 15 June 1997. 10. Kiernan, Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe, Early Modern Literature in History Series (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's Press, 1999), p. 99. 11. Mark Rylance, qtd in Barry Day, This Wooden ‘0’: Shakespeare's Globe Reborn (London: Oberon, 1996), p. 22. 12. Kristin Linklater, Freeing Shakespeare's Voice: The Actor's Guide to Talking the Text (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992), pp. 196, 195. 13. Kiernan, Staging, p. 119, and Camargo, qtd in Kiernan, Staging, p. 153. 14. Richard Olivier, qtd in Kiernan, Staging, p. 143. 15. Shakespeare's Globe Exhibition and Theatre Tour, pamphlet (London: Planart Reproduction, [2001]), n. pag. 16. Shakespeare's Globe Exhibition and Theatre Tour, n. pag. 17. Joseph Roach, ‘History, memory, necrophilia’, The Ends of Performance, ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 23. 18. Roach, ‘History, memory, necrophilia’, pp. 26–7. 19. Jenny Tiramani, interview, programme, Henry V, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, London, 1997, n. pag. 20. Kiernan, Staging, pp. 86–7. 21. Kiernan, Staging, pp. 102–3. 22. For discussions of early modern acting see for example, Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 95–103, and Michael Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theatre: Plays in Performance (London: Routledge, 1982), esp. pp. 50–6, 72–9. 23. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 2nd edn. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 141–64. I am also indebted to work by W. B. Worthen, Joseph Roach and Richard Schechner on the relationship between ‘origin’ and performance. See Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force, esp. pp. 64–5, 99; Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), esp. pp. 1–4; and Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), esp. pp. 35–7. 24. Female characters are sometimes played to comic effect as actors highlight the tension between the male body and voice and the female character in the manner of drag or a pantomime dame, such as the minor female roles in the partially cross-dressed production of Thomas Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1997) and the role of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet (2004). However, the major trend in the original practices productions is for the male actors to be ‘believable’ as female characters; this is exemplified by Cockerell's preparation for Katherine. 25. See Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London: Routledge, 1993), esp. pp. 12–16. 26. Toby Cockerell, interview with Kiernan, Research Bulletin 2, p. 22. 27. Kiernan, Staging, p. 55. 28. Gurr, ‘Staging at the Globe’, Mulryne and Shewring, pp. 165–6. 29. The Taming of the Shrew (2003), Richard III (2003) and Much Ado About Nothing (2004) were played as original practices productions, but with all-female casts. In his programme note for Richard III Michael Dobson notes the phenomenon of all-female performances in the 1660s and 1670s (‘To the Men Women, to the Women Men’, programme, Richard III, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, London, 2003, pp. 14–15). The Globe may thus be seen to use academic expertise in its promotional material to claim a degree of chronologically displaced historical ‘authenticity’ for its all-female productions. While it is beyond the scope of this article, the all-female productions, like instances of colour-blind casting at the Globe, invite further consideration. 30. Paul Nelsen, ‘Oaths and oracles: will the Globe spin on an axis of “authenticity”?’ Shakespeare Bulletin, 13.3 (1995), p. 31. 31. Elin Diamond, Introduction, Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Diamond (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 1. 32. Robert Hewison, rev. of Antony and Cleopatra, dir. Giles Block, Sunday Times, 8 August 1999, rpt. in Theatre Record, 31 August 1999, p. 1005. 33. Alastair Macaulay, rev. of Antony and Cleopatra, Financial Times, 3 August 1999, rpt. in Theatre Record, 31 August 1999, p. 1000. 34. Block, interview with Jaq Bessell, ‘Actor interviews 2000: Red and White companies’, Research Bulletin 18, p. 13. 35. Nicholas de Jongh, ‘Vivid and raw tale of royal love’, rev. of Edward II, dir. Timothy Walker, Evening Standard, 1 August 2003, p. 30, and Susannah Clapp, rev. of Edward II, Observer, 3 August 2003, p. 13. 36. See for example Kiernan, Staging, p. 55. 37. Anon. qtd in Rylance, ‘The power and passion of Kabuki private view’, Daily Telegraph, 26 May 2001, p. 7. 38. David Schalkwyk, ‘From the globe to globalisation: Shakespeare and Disney in the postmodern world’, Journal of Literary Studies, 15.1–2 (1999), p. 45. Schalkwyk's emphasis. My analysis of the audience and its interplay with the actors extends, via a discussion of complicity, coercion and resistance, issues raised by Worthen in Shakespeare and the Force, esp. pp. 98–102, 107–10. 39. Kiernan, Research Bulletin 2, p. 42. 40. Chantal Miller-Schütz, ‘Findings from the Globe Prologue Season 1996’, document held at the Globe Library, p. 5. 41. Shakespeare's Globe Theatre: The Celtic Season, pamphlet (London: Graphic Thought Facility, 2001), p. 19. 42. Kiernan, Staging, p. 21. 43. Liam Hourican, interview with Bessell, ‘Interviews with the Red Company: The 1999 Season’, Research Bulletin 14a, [Feb. 2000], p. 29. Hourican's emphasis. 44. Benedict Nightingale, ‘Send out the clowns at the Globe’, The Times, 3 August 1998, p. 16. Interviewed after the 2000 season, actor Steven Alvey suggests that the audience response of booing seems to have stopped, contending ‘that generally audiences seem to have grown up a bit with the Globe’. See Alvey, interview with Bessell, Research Bulletin 18, p. 7. 45. These audience observations are made from Julius Caesar, dir. Rylance, face-on camera, videocassette, 7pm, 21 Sept. 1999, held at the Globe Library, and are supplemented by Bessell's interview with actor Liam Hourican in Research Bulletin 14a, pp. 28–9. 46. Bessell attributes this intention to Rylance, ‘The 1999 Globe Season: The Red Company Julius Caesar’, Research Bulletin 15, Feb. 2000, p. 22. Bessell's emphasis. 47. Hourican, Research Bulletin 14a, p. 29. 48. Jasper Britton, interview with Bessell, Research Bulletin 18, p. 19. 49. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 2.

Rebuilding Shakespeare's Globe. By Andrew Gurr with John Orrell, foreword by Sam Wanamaker. New York: Routledge, 1989, Pp. 183 + illus. $26.75. - Globe Theatre, publication of The Museum of London, Department of Greater London Archeology, October, 1989. Pp. 4 + illus. [‘Site of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre Revealed’, Archeological Services, Museum of London, 1990. Pp. 2.] - Volume 16 Issue 1

Shakespeare's Globe Theatre Peter J. Smith Shakespeare at the Globe Theatre, London, Summer 2007 Othello May 4–August 19, 2007 As each generation's freshman lecture notes make clear, generic distinction is not only about thematic difference but about varieties of dramatic construction. Genre is unfair, for while comedies allow a more or less even spread of lines across the whole company, and therefore facilitate an ensemble effort (among which a single weak performance can be allowed to fade mercifully into the background), tragedies prioritise an individual—Richard III, Coriolanus, Lear. Occasionally two members of the company carry the production's weight upon their shoulders—Antony and Cleopatra, Juliet and Romeo, Iago and Othello. In the case of these pairings, the dramatic structure can make matters even worse. If the pair is not evenly balanced, the virtues of one performance can serve to magnify the shortcomings of the other. Likewise, a poor performance by one [End Page 186] of a pair of protagonists will exaggerate the achievements of the other, while, at the same time, intensifying the deficiencies of the production as a whole. A mediocre Iago and a mediocre Othello may be better for a production than an excellent Iago and a lacklustre Othello. Genre is not fair to its players. Unbalanced pairings of players are not fair to the audience. Bluntly and not without reluctance, I have to pronounce Eamonn Walker's performance as Othello to be unfit for the purpose. His rapid delivery, redundant enjambment and his tendency to deliver the speeches as though he were line-running in the privacy of his dressing-room made this a vocally under-powered performance. The rapidity of the reviewer's note-taking often necessitates the appropriation of textual fragments and commentary thereon. When the Duke pondered the eloquence and majesty of Othello's wooing he remarked thoughtfully: "I think this tale would win my daughter too" against which my notes say, "no chance." When Desdemona asked her husband, "Why do you speak so faintly?", I jotted down "quite." Walker's hasty and indistinct verbal delivery made his occupation of the role almost inconspicuous. For a character of the supposed charisma of Othello, this was all but fatal to the entire production. (That the program credits Patsy Rodenburg as Voice Coach and Giles Block with Text Work makes the modest amplitude of Walker's performance all the more unfortunate.) To make matters worse, the strength and variety, sensitivity and intelligence of Tim McInnerny's Iago served to point up rather than downplay the shortcomings of his opposite number. McInnerny displayed a deft comic timing throughout and vocally, he moved from rapidly delivered repartee to a sonorous bass for "I hate the Moor." McInnerny's multifaceted villain was as mercurial and quick-witted as the role demands, improvising his way around tricky situations and concealing his inner void behind a series of ingenious façades. As he lectured his master on the evils of jealousy or expressed his misgivings about the apparently subtle exit of Cassio, he staggered his words, as though the information was being wrung out of him—a device which made the confiding apparently all the more reluctant and so "sincere." He discoursed in fits and starts as though he were struggling to censor himself. Perhaps most disarming of all was McInnerny's matter-of-factness when he addressed the audience directly. Alone onstage he turned to us and explained with utter reasonableness how he would displace Cassio, eliminate Roderigo and make Othello love him "For making him egregiously an ass." His treatment of Roderigo, played by Sam Crane as a callow and useless sixth-former [End Page 187] from an English public school, was comically superior. Roderigo would enter behind him, shrouded in his cape as though ingeniously under-cover. Even without turning towards him, Iago would acknowledge his presence as though his omniscience provided him with 360-degree vision. There was more than a touch of the comic savagery of Toby and Andrew between the pair and McInnerny's Iago would frequently raise his eyes to heaven as though to suggest to the audience, "How can this man be so gullible?" Far more disturbing still...

Claire van Kampen, the Director of Music at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre on London's Bankside, followed up her jazz score for Macbeth and innovative minimalist style score for Cymbeline – complete with authentic ritualistic temple gongs from Burma – with an intriguing modern score for one of the plays for Season 2003 too.

This article argues that a comic tension is embedded in the experience of historical difference within a reconstructed playhouse like Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. Focusing on the visual experience of contemporary audience members of the disjunction between the image of "present-day" spectators versus the historical hue of the interior architecture, Caldwell suggests that this historical disjunction or tension is experienced as comic and released through laughter. He argues that the use of sunlight in the Globe theater is in fact harnessed to an attempt to ground the historical reality of the playhouse. Caldwell revises theories of the historicity of light to claim that the Globe playhouse cuts time out of daylight, splitting it between a sense of present-day-ness and the past. Furthermore, he argues the various forms of "direct address"-gestures from actor to audience-- catalyze the comic tension inherent in this disjunction into laughter, for an audience whose gaze is drawn from the stage to itself set against the reconstructed architecture. He concludes that these spaces solicit a mode of spectatorial surrogation for manifestly vacant early modern spectators. This position of standing in for audiences lost to a past the sun has left behind can offer a form of representation that loosens their narrow sense of historical identity, while enabling them to laugh in the face of historical absence both present-day and early modern audiences are implicated in.

Shakespeare's Globe Theatre Season 2012, entitled ‘The Play's The Thing’, centred on Henry V and Richard III, with new music scores by Claire van Kampen, and The Taming of the Shrew, with a new score by Richard Hammarton. In addition – and well timed in the year of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and also the London Olympics – the Globe Theatre celebrated by sending out a worldwide invitation asking who would like to participate in their ‘Globe to Globe Festival’. As a result, 37 countries performed Shakespeare in 37 different languages here during the Season, within the architecture for which Shakespeare wrote, bringing with them a vast array of cultural diversity in music and dance dovetailed into the drama.

Shakespeare's Globe Theatre has recently reopened, nearly 400 years after it burned down. To mark the event, this article publishes interim results from an ongoing research programme which has so far lasted 25 years. Shakespeare is often believed to have been merely a playwright, philosopher, psychologist and poet. But according to the author of this article, his greatest act of genius may have been to invent the academic discipline of Organisational Behaviour and to found the Harvard Business School case study approach to management education.

Review of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (directed by Jonathan Munby) and The Merry Wives of Windsor (directed by Christopher Luscombe) at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, London, 2008

Why do so many Americans celebrate Shakespeare, a long-dead English poet and playwright? By the nineteenth century newly independent America had chosen to reject the British monarchy and Parliament, class structure and traditions, yet their citizens still made William Shakespeare a naturalized American hero. Today the largest group of overseas visitors to Stratford-upon-Avon, the Royal Shakespeare Company and Bankside's Shakespeare's Globe Theatre come from America. Why? Is there more to Shakespeare's American popularity than just a love of men in doublet and hose speaking soliloquies? This book tells the story of America's relationship with Shakespeare. The story of how and why Shakespeare became a hero within American popular culture. Sturgess provides evidence of a comprehensive nineteenth-century appropriation of Shakespeare to the cause of the American Nation and shows that, as America entered the twentieth century a new world power, for many Americans Shakespeare had become as American as George Washington.

This chapter suggests that several associated tendencies can be detected — a cultivation of theatrical ‘authenticity’, the overtaking of the local by the global, and the application of Shakespeare in projects of local self-definition. It concentrates on Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). A pragmatic reading of the RSC's ‘ambassadorial role’ can attribute as much of its success to financial and political imperatives as it can to cultural influence. International adaptations of Shakespeare are now as often viewed as acts of self-definition, instigating local cultural debates and British responses. Shakespeare's influence may be thinly spread, and the text may be subject to radical reinterpretation, but the influence of Shakespeare's work in the twenty-first century will likely more fully encircle the global community, engaging with a wider range of world views and representational possibilities.

Shakespeare's Globe Theatre