Shakespeare's Play Research Articles

SHAKESPEARE VE EGEMENLİK: MACBETH’İN BİYOPOLİTİK BİR OKUMASI

Biopolitics has brought new perspectives on power relations in society with the conceptualization of Michelle Foucault. Although the history of the concept goes back to the past, biopolitics has been used to analyze the power and social power relations in many areas from body control to population politics, thanks to Foucault. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has carried the concept of biopolitics to another point and contributed to the concept of biopolitics with his studies on sovereignty. Unlike Foucault, who claims that biopolitics is a modern thought, Agamben traces biopolitics in ancient texts. In his book Homo Sacer, Agamben allows us to reflect on the limits of sovereignty with the concept of bare life. Agamben searches for the holy man who can be killed but not sacrificed in Roman Law and makes analyzes on social power relations and sovereignty through this concept. In this article, it is aimed to make a biopolitical reading of William Shakespeare's play Macbeth, based on Agamben's analysis of the Homo Sacer. As Macbeth kills King Duncan and becomes king himself, his struggle with the ghost of sovereignty begins. While this article seeks the reasons for Macbeth's inability to legitimize his power as the possessor of sovereignty and power in Elizabethan political theology and ideological structure, it reveals, in a biopolitical reading, that Macbeth has fallen into the position of the Homo Sacer, who cannot be sacrificed but is legitimate to be killed, that the sovereign is not above sovereignty, and that the king's mystical existence is separated from bodily existence. It is intended to analyze that with the killing of the king, Macbeth seeks to retain sovereignty while trying to cope with the pain of breaking the sacred order as an object of the dominant ideology. In this article, the reason why Macbeth's sovereignty cannot be legitimized is discussed based on the argument that power has a productive rather than an oppressive nature, while examining how his position has transformed into the Homo Sacer in Agamben's theory.

Almost Shakespeare – But Not Quite

Taking Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Gary Schmidt’s Wednesday Wars as test cases, this article explores generic considerations in modern novels that employ Shakespeare but do not retell or recast the plot of any particular work by Shakespeare. Questions to be considered include how the works employ the Shakespearean genres of comedy, tragedy, history, romance and tragicomedy to create their own genres – and, conceivably, to transcend them. The article will also consider the mainstream appropriation of Shakespeare in Mandel and Schmidt. The Three Fates by Linda Lê will be briefly examined as a less straightforward reworking of the material of a single Shakespeare play (King Lear).

Racial Conflict in the Selected Plays of William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare embraces the racial concerns of the seventeenth century in his various plays. The racial clash was one of the significant inquiries of the seventeenth century. There were numerous prohibitions against the relationship of black and white. The etymological colonialism was at the core of the Shakespearean dramatization that rendered on racism. The language utilized as a pioneering instrument for racial discrimination. Moreover, Shakespeare's play was effectively associated with darker-looking individuals during Elizabethan times. Therefore, the darker-looking Othello and the Jewish Shylock have assumed a significant role in the play. They dominated their respective play, that’s why Shakespeare's works depict the dramatization of racial conflict. There are numerous cases of racial segregation in the current situation, so the issue of race is expected to be re-evaluated with a fresh point of view.This knowledge will help to solve the problem of racial conflict with ground breaking thoughts.

El Rey Lear y los desafíos de la jubilación

Shakespeare's great play, "King Lear" traces the downfall of a man who retired without sufficient insight into the impact of his decision. The author uses the play to frame questions about the course of her own retirement from psychoanalytic practice, on May 31, 2019. How might the decision to retire change the analyst's sense of her own identity, and her patients' perceptions of who she really is? What are some of the challenges of living in retirement, without the structure and purpose an analytic practice provides?

A STUDY OF BOLLYWOOD’S COMEDY OF ERRORS: AN INTERTEXTUAL APPROACH

The cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare's play never been antediluvian around the world. There are a plethora of lms in Hindi cinema which have been adopted from literary works by lm makers. When it shows up to adaptation of William Shakespeare's epic tales in Hindi cinema, Vishal Bharadwaj acclaimed trilogy of Maqbool, Omkara and Haider comes rst in mind but not comes rst in the history of Indian cinema. This paper will begin with analysing one of the rst adaptation of Brad's epic-the 'comedy of errors' into Gulzar's enduring popular 'Angoor'(grapes) considered one of the Bollywood's best comedies. This research article is an attempt to understand and answer these questions with intertextually approach. Why a comedy of error is an appropriate choice for an adaptation? How the Gulzar's Angoor has an accurate title for an adaptation of Brad's saga of two sets of identical twins? And how Gulzar has done justice to his Bollywood adaptation of an epic play with obvious similarities and difference in plot and characterization? The paper will end with the discussion over the very rst adaptation of comedy of errors into Bengali theater well as Bengali cinema with the same name by Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar's -' Bhranti Bhilas' which can also be considered as inspiration for Gulzar's tribute to Shakespeare.

Of Metals and Men: Kofman, Conversion and The Merchant of Venice

Mindful that philosophy is for Kofman always sublated ( relevé) by literature and psychoanalysis, this essay examines Kofman's rarely discussed text ‘Conversions: The Merchant of Venice under the Sign of Saturn’ (1987) in the light of themes from elsewhere in her work. Typical of her method, Conversions is a richly philosophical reading of a psychoanalytic interpretation of a literary text. It is also Kofman's most sustained engagement with Shakespeare. In the study she builds on her earlier interest in the trope of metaphor and, drawing on Freud's reading of Shakespeare's play, derives a generalized theory of convertibility or ambivalence. Where the play seeks to establish symbolic equivalences between men and metals — between the triads Antonio/Bassano/Shylock and the lead/gold/silver of the three caskets — Kofman's analysis focuses instead on their respective Janus faces and alchemical transmutations. Beneath the explicit thematizations she follows Freud in discerning the interconvertibility of love and death, but she also goes beyond Freud in arguing that its condition of possibility is the structural ambivalence of time itself.

Something’s Rotten in Kashmir: Postcolonial Ambivalence and the War on Terror in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider

ABSTRACT Haider, the terminal film in Vishal Bhardwaj's Indian Shakespeare trilogy, reconfigures Hamlet in the context of Indian-occupied Kashmir. Haider, tethers Shakespeare's play to contemporary geopolitical issues destabilizing the Indian subcontinent, the uneasy and anxious location of Kashmir within the Indian national and political imaginary. Drawing on the turmoil of the nativist insurgency and Indian government sponsored counter-insurgency, which literally turned brother against brother, Bhardwaj's aptly pivots to Hamlet as the vehicle through which to represent the conflict. While Bhardwaj's adaptation offers a compelling meditation on the ways in which postcolonial adaptations of Shakespeare can interrogate the very notion of postcoloniality, particularly when portraying a state—Kashmir—of ongoing colonial contest and violence, Haider is further complicated, I argue here, by its ambivalent participation in “War on Terror culture,” which demands a certain pathologically violent depiction of Muslim identity and in which the film eagerly and easily traffics.

Order vs. Counter-order: Love in Shakespeare's Plays

Love between men and women is the most moving content in Shakespeare's plays. Humanists in the Renaissance believed that love was a natural human right, the most natural, the most beautiful, the most noble and the most praiseworthy emotion in the world. Boys and girls break through the cage of medieval asceticism, burst out in true love of hot passion, mobilize the abundant energy, life's most happy activities and the most noble words and deeds into one -- this is shown incisively and vividly in Shakespeare's plays. However, the power of the Christian Church was still strong at that time, and the traditional religious concepts influenced social morality and ethics and constrained the thoughts of intellectuals. Shakespeare was no exception. According to the English literary critic Tillyard, "The Elizabethan conception of the world order is generally medieval, although many medieval details have been removed. It is the perfect work of God that the universe is a whole and everything has its place in it." Christian theology holds that God created all things, and also created the divine order in which the universe operates, which regulates social ethics and morality. Tillyard said: "Because of this set of ideas in mind, it was Shakespeare who got Odysseus to mention that social order follows degrees and takes its place, and these are the organizations and activities that fit man's place in all existence." Shakespeare said, "Take away the strings of Degree and listen. How many shrill noises will come out." Shakespeare's love believers, although they can sacrifice everything for love at the risk of life and death, but cannot offend the eternal order of male and female, they are willing to obey the order, each put himself in his place, only in this way can they enter into the happy Garden of Eden. Order is an important key word to understand Shakespeare's plays. Following the clue of order and anti-order, we can find a key to open the treasure house of Shakespeare's plays.

Impressive Shakespeare: Identity, Authority and the Imprint in Shakespearean Drama by Harry Newman

Impressive Shakespeare: Identity, Authority and the Imprint in Shakespearean Drama by Harry Newman

Twelfth Night

Reviewed by: Twelfth Night Molly Beth Seremet Twelfth NightPresented by the American Shakespeare Center, Staunton, VA. 2020 SummerSafestart Season. 2507– 1810 2020. Directed by Dan Hasse. Costumes by Victoria Depew. With Mia Wurgaft (Viola/Sebastian), Zoe Speas (Viola/Sebastian), Brandon Carter (Orsino), Constance Swain (Olivia), Michael Manocchio (Malvolio), Chris Johnston (Feste), Jessika D. Williams (Antonio), John Harrell (Sir Toby Belch), Matthew Radford Davies (Fabian), Sarah Suzuki (Maria), Topher Embry (Sir Andrew Aguecheek), Danielle A. Festa (Valentine/Officer), Cat M. Thomas (Curio/Officer), and Sam Saint Ours (Musician) As part of what it heralded as its "Safestart Season," the American Shakespeare Center took over several stages in Summer 2020, launching two repertory productions inside the Blackfriars Playhouse and on the lawn at the nearby Blackburn Inn. In the midst of the strangeness of a global pandemic and subsequent closing of (nearly all of) the playhouses, the ASC became a theatrical oasis, succeeding in doing theater on the frontline. It was fitting, then, that one of the company's dual offerings in these tempestuous times was Twelfth Night, a play that opens with a catastrophic event that distances a woman from her twin, stranding them each amidst new friends, estranging them from their routines, and alienating them from the comfort that their physical proximity breeds. In a socially distant 2020, this Safestart Twelfth Nightshowcased an Illyria that realized the togetherness the audience was already longing for, with some bittersweet perspective on why closeness does not always feel the way we expect it to. This production highlighted estrangement in its use of a coin toss at the start of each performance to determine who would play Viola in each performance. To embed this gimmick into the play's dramaturgy, the cast gathered onstage together during pre-show to perform Ingrid Michaelson's song, "The Chain." The two actors, Zoe Speas and Mia Wurgaft, flipped a coin between them in a show of sibling camaraderie. They were dressed identically in white trousers and jackets, each inhabiting a [End Page 131]vaguely Sebastian-like masculine energy, jostling each other and hitting shoulders more like identical twin brothers might do. On the night I attended the show at the playhouse, Wurgaft won the toss and left immediately to don her woman's weeds. Accordingly, Speas took on the role of Sebastian, creating a dynamic in which the actors playing the roles of the play's central twins knew each other's inward parts as intimately as the characters themselves. Sebastian began the play, remaining onstage as the song concluded to flip his coin one last time before making way for Orsino's entrance. The similarities of these actors in terms of appearance, physical type, and energy invited a question about just how much chancethis choice-making engendered, however. On the one hand, it offered a glimpse into a world in which Sebastian and Viola might realistically be mistaken for one another, similar grains of sand irritating the tender flesh of Orsino's Illyrian oyster. On the other, the physical and energetic differences between these Violas were so slight that the ripples dissipated shortly after either Viola washed to shore, both outdoors at the Blackburn when I saw Speas take up Viola's mantle and inside the Playhouse when Wurgaft took her turn. In Shakespeare's play, by contrast, Viola and Sebastian encounter different Illyrias when they land. As Cesario, Viola is never quite "man" enough to avoid attention, causing Olivia's obsession, Aguecheek's pique, and Feste's gloom. By contrast, Sebastian's masculinity rests on him comfortably and affords him the opportunity to take advantage of both Antonio's and Olivia's interest casually and without too much self-examination. In passing as Cesario, the male-presenting avatar of his beloved sister, Sebastian compounds his male interest, and it pays out dividends by the play's end. Hasse's Safestart production took relatively few risks in terms of challenging Illyria's binaries. Instead, this production realized a world in which Viola and Sebastian were always already mutually interchangeable. Given the diversity of the acting company, it might have been interesting to put this device of deterministic doubled casting to...

Shakespeare and the Folktale: An Anthology of Stories ed. by Charlotte Artese

Reviewed by: Shakespeare and the Folktale: An Anthology of Stories ed. by Charlotte Artese Sara Cleto (bio) Shakespeare and the Folktale: An Anthology of Stories. Edited by Charlotte Artese, Princeton University Press, 2019, 373 pp. In 2015, Charlotte Artese published her groundbreaking text Shakespeare’s Folktale Sources, in which she demonstrated how folktales profoundly shaped and influenced Shakespeare’s plays. While scholars had previously noted connections between folktales and Shakespeare’s plots and characters, these observations were largely restricted to motif spotting. In Shakespeare’s Folktale Sources, Artese argued that the majority of Shakespeare’s plays are deeply entwined with folklore and, more specifically, that seven of the plays have plots that are derived directly from folktales. Furthermore, she illuminated the ways in which the network of Shakespeare’s plays and their narrative elements function much like folktales themselves. Artese’s new book, Shakespeare and the Folktale, is the logical and welcome extension of her previous project. In this anthology, she has collected [End Page 383] and edited the folktales that are the backbone of her argument: the folktales that animate Shakespeare’s plays. As she explains in her introduction, “[T]his anthology aims to augment our knowledge of Shakespeare’s sources and influences by supplying examples of his folktales’ sources rather than revisiting his acknowledged literary ones,” which are already generally recognized and are readily available in other texts (3). The book consists of an introduction, eight chapters, a bibliography, and an extensive index. Each chapter addresses one Shakespeare play, including a brief discussion of that play’s sources followed by the full text of five to eight related folktales. In Shakespeare’s Folktale Sources, Artese considered seven plays: The Taming of the Shrew (1592), Titus Andronicus (1592–93), The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597/1602), The Merchant of Venice (1596–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1598–1608), Measure for Measure (1603–04), and Cymbeline (1611), each of which features one or more plots drawn directly from a folk-tale. The contents of Shakespeare and the Folktale: An Anthology overlap with but do not replicate those found in the earlier book. The new anthology includes a chapter on King Lear (1606), which “adapts a legendary history that includes folktales and folk narrative motifs,” a chapter on The Comedy of Errors (1594), which has a classical Roman source as well as a folktale source, and a chapter on The Tempest (1610–11), “whose dependence on the ‘Magic Flight’ folktale is partial and incomplete but fascinating nonetheless” (7). Artese does not include chapters on The Merry Wives of Windsor or Measure for Measure because of the lack of relevant folktale versions available to print in English. There is a significant methodological challenge to Artese’s project, which is, simply put, that we do not know exactly which versions of each folktale circulated in Shakespeare’s day, let alone which ones he personally encountered. The very nature of oral tradition makes a perfect reconstruction of Shakespeare’s folktale sources impossible. However, this does not make Artese’s project any less worthwhile. We know that the folktale plots that underpin Shakespeare’s plays existed before he ever set pen to paper because medieval versions survived (2). Though we will never know exactly which versions Shakespeare encountered orally, “folktales collected in the modern world (the nineteenth century and after) can give us insight into the stories Shakespeare and his audience might have known” (2). The folktales that Artese has assembled are, therefore, not Shakespeare’s exact sources but instead “later members of the genus of his sources” (2). Because we cannot know the exact sources—and because Shakespeare himself may likely have been working from several different oral versions—Artese has included several examples of each folktale type in the collection to provide a sense of possible variations. “Attending to the folktale in its many guises can [End Page 384] give us a clearer sense of the story tradition available to Shakespeare, although we cannot reconstruct it exactly” (3). Because the anthology represents an educated and creative reconstruction rather than a precise replica of Shakespeare’s sources, Artese’s primary criteria for selection was how closely a folktale resembled the Shakespeare play...

"Some subtleties o'th' isle": Shakespeare's Tempest and Montaigne's Apologie of Raymond Sebond

A remarkable fact about William Shakespeare's The Tempest is that characters do not always see or hear the same thing. But while this estrangement of knowledge thins out the boundaries between character and environment to recognizably great dramatic effect, the aporetic energies underlying that estrangement are not yet fully understood. This article explores their significance by examining the connections between The Tempest and Michel de Montaigne's An Apologie of Raymond Sebond (long suspected to be related). It proposes a new verbal parallel between the play and the essay but does not confine its argument to such a criterion. Rather, it is a case study in the Renaissance practice of imitation that works from a number of aspects—shared matrices of thought and feeling, similar metaphors, networks of texts—to reconstruct the presence of a locus classicus of Renaissance skepticism in Shakespeare's late play. Along the way, it triangulates these works with a discussion of King Lear and examines the presence of Vergil and the possible presence of Seneca. It argues that Shakespeare used Montaigne's essay to make his island epistemologically strange and that this sensitive use of a philosophical source is notable for being so deeply dramatically embedded.

Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations ed. by Marina Gerzić and Aidan Norrie

Reviewed by: Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations ed. by Marina Gerzić and Aidan Norrie Jennifer E. Nicholson Gerzić, Marina, and Aidan Norrie, eds, Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations, New York, Routledge, 2020 hardback; pp. 279; 15 illustrations; R.R.P. US $252.00; ISBN 9780367256463. 'Play' is the thing in Marina Gerzić and Aidan Norrie's Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations. The purpose of the collection is to highlight the importance of irreverence and play in the creation of 'new "Shakespeares"', as described in the book's abstract. From Victorian burlesque to contemporary graphic novels, this collection provides a range of material for the reader interested in Shakespearean adaptation of drama (his poems are not extensively addressed). The collection seems best suited to students or scholars new to examples of adaptation or those wanting to expand their knowledge of it. The first section is entitled 'Page to Stage/Stage to Page'. Roberta Grandi opens with emphasizing the long history of playfully mocking Shakespearean genre and text through her exploration of three burlesques that adapt King Lear. Grandi's is unfortunately the only chapter that addresses historical representations as its main subject, although Gerzić's excellent chapter on children's editions of Richard III identifies the importance of early Shakespeare for children from Charles and Mary Lamb, Harrison S. Morris, Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch, and Henrietta Maria Bowdler. Gerzić argues that these and more contemporary editions demonstrate the flexible and complex ways of adapting even a violent Shakespearean play for young audiences and makes particular note of the effects of illustration in each edition. Chelsea L. Horne tackles Neil Gaiman's The Sandman comics that directly adapt Shakespeare as their subject. She deftly addresses the metatextual complexities of the adaptation process of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the value of such an exercise. Between Grandi and Gerzić's chapters lies Miranda Fay Thomas's critique of Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed. Thomas identifies how Atwood's novel 'advocates for accessible Shakespeare' (p. 48), even though the nature of her approach perhaps alienates those readers. Thomas also rightly questions the motivations of Hogarth Press for commissioning even a 'ludic' collection of Shakespearean adaptations (p. 51). This section closes with Sophie Shorland's romp through Terry Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters and its debts to Shakespeare. I must admit this chapter was a personal favourite, as Shorland provides an inspired and rich discussion of the implications of fantasy genres and audience in Pratchett's adaptation. The next section provides invaluable information about two recent adaptation projects. The creation and success of the Shakespeare Republic web series is outlined by Sally McLean in the first chapter. As she heads up the project, McLean offers both a potted history of its genesis and a reflection on how her team's playfulness towards Shakespeare has created their best work. The second chapter discusses richard III redux, a faintly damning reimagining of questions concerning disability and representation in Richard III by playwrights Kaite O'Reilly and Phillip Zarrilli and actress Sara Beer. Their critique of previous stagings of Richard's disability extends to reflecting on the relationships between [End Page 216] the historical and Shakespearean Richards. They offer a sensitive and insightful discussion of how this can play out very negatively in casting and costuming practices. These chapters' different authorship, emphases, and insights are an excellent counterpoint to the remainder of the collection. Sections III and IV consider televisual adaptations of Shakespeare and his context, with historical and neoliberal points of focus. For Ronan Hatfull, the Shakespearean origin stories of the film Bill (2015, made by the team at Horrible Histories), and to a lesser extent the television series Will (2017), demonstrate our cultural interests in playfully enforcing and undermining stereotypes of genius when imagining the past of an iconic figure like Shakespeare. Norrie's chapter works in a similar vein, but with relation to representing Elizabeth I. He notes that a range of films and television programmes frequently depict her fictional relationship with Shakespeare to enforce and undermine our cultural memory of her. In Section IV, Jennifer Clement discusses the cringe comedy Hamlet 2 and the cruel irony of its irrational plot of eventual success despite the odds...

Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Sellars by Ayanna Thompson

Reviewed by: Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Sellars by Ayanna Thompson Deb Streusand SHAKESPEARE IN THE THEATRE: PETER SELLARS. By Ayanna Thompson. Shakespeare in the Theatre series. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2018; pp. 208. Arden Shakespeare’s Shakespeare in the Theatre series explores the relationships between Shakespeare’s works and key artists and companies associated with them, blending biography and history with academic theatre criticism. This unique series promotes monographs with multiple interlocking lines of argument rather than a single thesis. Ayanna Thompson’s recent contribution, a thoughtfully constructed engagement with the work of the American director Peter Sellars, is a particularly successful example of this approach. Thompson deftly interlaces several related claims as she lays out a clear but complex vision of what Sellars contributes to Shakespeare and Shakespeare to Sellars. The most intriguing arises from a speculation: What if Sellars, like Peter Brook and other avant-garde directors, had had access to a consistent company of actors and a regular audience? Without straying too far into the hypothetical, Thompson makes a persuasive case that certain Sellars productions could have escaped critical disdain if the director had been able to train his actors and audience in his approach. Such training would have enhanced audiences’ appreciation of Sellars’s work, which requires processing over time to have its full impact. This argument is bolstered by Thompson’s claim that Sellars’s work is intended to produce long-term reflection leading to political action, rather than to present something easily digested during the performance. This desire to challenge the audience sometimes renders his work less immediately “accessible,” which critics have often assumed is a sign of elitism or even hostility to spectators. Thompson elucidates the resulting paradox: the artistic values that lead to critical assumptions of snobbish scorn from a self-indulgent director are, in fact, deeply democratic. Sellars’s directorial approach is profoundly collaborative, removing interpretive authority from Shakespeare or himself to vest it in his actors, designers, and audience. As Thompson convincingly argues, however, his lack of a permanent company has thwarted this aim of shaping spectators into active participants in the democratic process. One closes the book with a rather wistful feeling about living in an alternate universe in which he had one. An introduction outlining Sellars’s theatrical career lays out these threads: his desire to create theatre that audiences reflect on over time, a false critical perception that his work is inaccessible, and his challenges to traditional notions of authority and authorship. The first chapter examines Sellars’s relationships with his artistic influences. Thompson argues that despite strong avant-garde connections his direction is not postmodern, because his productions are “earnest explorations of the multivocal” rather than fragmented pastiche (27). By bringing a diverse range of voices into a production designed to extend beyond the actual performance, he seeks to create political and spiritual transformation in his audience. [End Page 261] Chapter 2 shows why Sellars has often chosen Shakespeare’s plays in his pursuit of this goal. Shakespeare helps him to challenge his audience to think deeply about our world because the playwright “uncovers the epic moments” in life (40). His plays portray the shared human experience of heightened emotion during intense events, allowing audiences to connect these works—and Sellars’s interpretations of them—with their own lives. Sel-lars also perceives a Shakespearean play not as a polished, unified, and untouchable whole, but as a jagged mixture that purposefully avoids smoothing away life’s contradictions. This sense of the plays licenses a collaborative process that reassigns the authority to create meaning away from author and director and toward spectators. The third chapter addresses nontraditional casting, which first drew Thompson—a scholar of Shakespeare and race, editor of the collection Colorblind Shakespeare (2006)—to Sellars’s work. Sellars, Thompson argues, is consistently seeking to open a dialogue about race that theatre critics have refused to engage in. She analyzes the provocatively color-conscious casting of his Othello (2009) and Midsummer Night’s Dream (2014). For the former, Sellars chose actors of color for all but two roles, with a Latino actor as Othello and a Black actor playing the Duke to resemble President Obama...

Othello: The Moor of Venice, and: Becoming Othello: A Black Girl’s Journey

Reviewed by: Othello: The Moor of Venice, and: Becoming Othello: A Black Girl’s Journey Brandy C. Williams Othello: The Moor of Venice Presented virtually by the Harlem Shakespeare Festival, in partnership with the National Arts Club and Voza Rivers/New Heritage Theatre Group. 21 September 2020. Adapted by Lisa Wolpe. Directed by Vanessa Morosco. Production direction by Norman Anthony Small. Technical production by Nidal Q. Associate production by Jackie Jeffries. Producing artistic direction by Debra Ann Byrd. Associate artistic direction by Dathan B. Williams. With Debra Ann Byrd (Othello), Lisa Wolpe (Iago), Mary E. Hodges (Cassio), Amanda Barron (Roderigo), Jennifer Le Blanc (Desdemona), Amy Driesler (Montano), Natasha Yannacañedo (Emilia), Kim Wuan (Bianca), Aixa Kendrick (Sailor 1), and Anja Lee (Sailor 2/Herald). [End Page 290] Becoming Othello: A Black Girl’s Journey Presented virtually by the Harlem Shakespeare Festival, in partnership with the National Arts Club and Voza Rivers/New Heritage Theatre Group. 14 December 2020. Written by Debra Ann Byrd. Directed by Tina Packer. Movement by Dyane Harvey-Salaam/Forces of Nature Dance. As COVID-19 case numbers in the United States rose exponentially, theaters were forced to shutter their doors and halt production for the foreseeable future. As 2020 continued on and the prominence of Zoom became a daily feature of the “new normal” in the wake of an ongoing global pandemic, theater companies would take to the platform’s offerings as well. At the same time, the United States also saw a reinvigoration of the Black Lives Matter movement in national media, marked by nationwide demonstrations in response to the 25 May murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at the hands of local law enforcement. As the protests grew to include seeking justice for other Black people—across gender and class lines—killed at the hands of police, attention shifted from police brutality to anti-Black violence more broadly. Global attention turned to the political movement for the preservation of Black lives, and American consciousness focused more squarely on the subject of anti-Black racism and its pervading every facet of American society and history. In a way, it feels almost intuitive to stage Othello in this present moment; for some, it is the quintessential Black Shakespeare play and, more importantly, it shows the persistent vulnerability of Black subjects. “Valiant Othello,” as the Duke addresses him (1.3.49), is a decorated general who has served the State well, but is still bound by a social order which dictates that, on account of his Blackness, he must be villainous because of his marriage to the white Desdemona. While I do not seek to assert some objective claim about a “universal” reading of Othello, I want to call attention to a common reading of the play through a critical race studies lens. Read through that lens—which I should perhaps note, is the one I hold most firmly—Othello is not about race as much as it is about the insidious nature of anti-Black racism. No matter what time this play is staged, its central tension speaks to historical anti-miscegenation efforts, driven by the anxiety of what an interracial marriage may produce. As Iago frantically attempts to urge Brabantio, he fails: [End Page 291] Zounds, sir, you’re robbed, for shame put on your gown!Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul,Even now, now, very now, an old black ramIs tupping your white ewe! Arise, arise,Awake the snorting citizens with the bellOr else the devil will make a grandsire of you,Arise, I say! (1.1.85–91) It is not Iago’s urgent insistence upon the magnitude of this act, but rather Roderigo’s passive agreement, that convinces Brabantio of the severity of Othello and Desdemona’s union. Othello and Desdemona’s marriage may produce a Black child with white inheritance rights. The Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 pushed conversations beyond the obvious assertion that racist violence is bad to more critical, nuanced understandings, and drew broad attention to the pervasiveness of racist logics in every fiber of society—including calling for an examination of the ways that various groups participate...

Shakespeare for the "Triers": Richard Hawkins and Q2 Othello at the Serjeants' Inn

In 1630, the Stationer Richard Hawkins began selling an edition of Shakespeare's Othello from "his shoppe in Chancery-Lane, neere Sergeants-Inne" (Othello 1630 title page). This edition, identified by modern scholars as Q2, is remarkable as the first edition to fully conflate existent quarto and folio texts of a Shakespeare play. Scholars have remarked on the process that brought Q2 into being—but the question of why a seventeenth-century publisher/bookseller would invest the time and money to create such an edition remains to be considered. This article decenters the author to reconsider Q2's place among the people and ideas of the area in which it was published and sold: the Serjeants' Inn in the heart of the Inns of Court area of London. The article examines how Hawkins fashioned the books sold in his shop to entice this local readership. Literary and textual evidence from the Quarto is then reconsidered in the light of this new readership, providing fresh insights into the construction of this unique quarto and its place in modern editorial practice. This article also highlights the extent to which individual members of the book trade in the early seventeenth century engaged with local readerships and looks at the value of second-plus editions to that market.

How Should You Perform and Watch Othello and Hairspray in a Country Where You Could Never Hire Black Actors? Shakespeare and Casting in Japan

This paper discusses how Japanese theatres have handled race in a country where hiring black actors to perform Shakespeare’s plays is not an option. In English-speaking regions, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, it is common to hire a black actor for Othello’s title role. Blackface is increasingly unacceptable because it reminds viewers of derogatory stereotypes in minstrel shows, and it deprives black actors of employment opportunities. However, the situation is different in regions where viewers are unfamiliar with this Anglo-US trend. In Japan, a country regarded as so homogeneous that its census does not have any questions about ethnicity, it is almost impossible to hire a skilled black actor to play a title role in a Shakespearean play, and few theatre companies would consider such an idea. In this cultural context, there is an underlying question of how Japanese-speaking theatre should present plays dealing with racial or cultural differences. This paper seeks to understand the recent approaches that Japanese theatre has adopted to address race in Shakespearean plays by analysing several productions of Othello and comparing them with other major non-Shakespearean productions.

Ovid, Shakespeare, Shevchenko: features of autocommunication practices

The paper presents analysis of cases of indirect literature influences of Ovid and Shakespeare upon Taras Shevchenko's poetry. The author questions the view which is common in modern Ukrainian literature studies that Shevchenko's interest in Ovid's works was caused by similarity of certain facts of their biographies, and in Shakespeare's one — because of their oeuvres' humanistic dimension. Based on analysis of some relevant aspects of Ovid's and Shakespeare's works, and poems, letters and diaries by Shevchenko, the author argues that Shevchenko's keen interest in both poets' works was specified by his concern with modes of autocommunication and its display. In Shevchenko's poems, autocommunication manifest is addressed to his own poems in many cases; in Ovid's works, it manifested itself in the same way, while for Shakespeare's dramas, it appeared in numerous soliloquys delivered by characters of his. Shevchenko's fierce need for autocommunication was rooted in his psychological portrait, therefore, he was interested in Ovid and Shakespeare not because of searching for some objects for reception or imitation but because of deep feeling of emotional affinity with Ovid's and Shakespeare's characters.

‘The Time Is out of Joint’: Interactivity and Player Agency in Videogame Adaptations of Hamlet

Although Shakespeare and his plays have been a frequent subject of videogame adaptations in the past, these have often been confined to either theatre-making games (which present the staging of Shakespeare plays using the mechanisms of strategy or simulation videogame genres) of education/trivia games that aim to familiarise players with Shakespeare’s texts. While references to Shakespeare abound in videogames, there have been relatively few attempts to directly adapt one of his plays into the form of an interactive videogame narrative, where the player controls one or more of the principal characters and can affect the outcome of the story. This paper will examine four videogame adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, whose differing approaches to player-agency and interactivity in relation to narrative of the classic play demonstrate the interactive potential of Shakespearean drama. While the player-driven overwriting or rewriting of the classic text may appear irreverent, it is, in each game, dependent on some conception the original play and the past tradition that it represents, which is translated into the contemporary medium of the videogame. This illustrates Jacques Derrida’s contention that the longevity and translatability of Shakespearean texts are due to their ‘spectral’ qualities, in that they allow the past to be re-examined through the lens of the present and vice versa.

To the question of choreographic interpretation of male images of W. Shakespeare’s drama of the later period “The Winter's Tale” in the eponymous ballet of C. Wheeldon

The subject of this article is the interpretation of male images from W. Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” by the choreographer C. Wheeldon in the context of its conceptual commonality with the literary original. The goal of this research is to determine the stage means and elements of choreographic language used by the choreographer for creation of male roles, as well as to draw ideological-imagery parallels with the original text. Methodological foundation of this study features the principles of critical analysis of text of the play along with the semantic analysis of choreography, developed in the scientific works of such theoreticians of ballet art as Lopukhov, Dobrovolskaya, Krasovskaya, Surits, Slonimsky. Comprehensive approach towards interpretation of the literary original on the modern ballet stage required  the analysis of such sources, as the English-language peer reviews of the world premiere of the ballet and video materials from the archives of the Royal Opera House in London and the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. The author also applied the method of overt observation based on the personal experience of working with Wheeldon in Bolshoi Theatre, and accompanied by the analysis of rehearsals from the author's archive (over the period from March to April 2019). The author carried out a detailed semantic analysis of the stage interpretation and choreographic language of the male images of W. Shakespeare's play of the later period “The Winter's Tale” in the eponymous ballet of C. Wheeldon (which served as the key instrument for this research). The conclusion is made that the conceptual ground of Wheeldon’s interpretation of the male images is based on the Shakespeare’s text adapted to the realities of a stage performance.  He employs a wide array of plasticity and other innovative means of expression, applying an individual approach towards staging each male role.