Shakespeare Studies Research Articles

Рецензия на книгу Э. Смит «И все это Шекспир» (Смит Э. И все это Шекспир. Самая эротичная комедия, самая драматичная трагедия, сгорающие от стыда мужчины, картонные злодеи, феминистки, звезды шоу-бизнеса и многое другое / Эмма Смит; пер. с англ. М. Сухотиной; науч. ред. Д. Иванов, В. Макаров. М.: Ма

Modern literary criticism offers the reader a whole sphere of Shakespearean studies based on the ideas of historical poetics. In accordance with the latter, we understand the images and problems of dramas, comedies and tragedies of the great English playwright in the key of romantic, symbolist, psychoanalytic, and other interpretations. Emma Smith offers a relevant reading of Shakespeare’s texts, based on theatrical productions and film adaptations of his works in the 20th and 21st centuries. The actualization of the Shakespearean heritage is being implemented in modern theater and cinema as an attempt to bring the complex and diverse content of the writer’s tragedies and comedies closer to mass culture. As a result, there appears the effect of inversion, of a break-off with the deep philosophical problems of the Shakespeare theater. The chapters of the book somehow address the problem of interpretation -contemporary with Shakespeare and with our time. The author’s arsenal includes psychology and psychoanalysis, cultural and sociological approaches, which are combined with the actual philological analysis of plays. However, the book discusses the evolution of themes and genres the least. The works chosen for the analysis are well known to readers and experts. The book includes 20 chapters, each dedicated to one play. We stress that, in the educational process, this structure is very convenient because it draws one’s attention to the work as much as possible and allows determining one’s own perception, consent or disagreement with the author of the book. This feature has been tested in practical work with students in classes on Shakespeare’s works. We analyze all the interpretations of Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies, both modern and historical, given in Smith’s book. The author of the book is interested, first of all, in topical approaches to understanding the plays of the English playwright, this is dictated by the very aim of the study - to interest the reader and show Shakespeare as our contemporary. The author of the book speaks a modern language with her reader, relying on the experience of attracting both wide readers and experts to reading Shakespeare’s works. Contribution of the authors: the authors contributed equally to this article. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

Rulership in Early Modern England: Shakespeare’s King Lear in Context

This book review discusses Judit Mudriczki’s monograph, Shakespeare’s Art of Poesy in King Lear. An Emblematic Mirror of Governance on the Jacobean Stage (Budapest, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2020) in the light of Shakespeare studies. Mudriczki’s book analyses dramaturgical devices, rhetorical and political-philosophical concepts, appearing in Shakespeare’s King Lear and other 16th and 17th century texts of different status, from an early Tudor interlude, John Skelton’s Magnyfycence, to rhetorical and political treatises and emblems. The review emphasizes how the inspiring, but often insufficiently elaborated analyses in the monograph could have been made more precise and informative by considering achievements of recent scholarship in the field.

The Ethics of Selfless Action in Hamlet and The Bhagavad Gita

This essay offers a comparative study of the two classical texts of East and West, the Indian scripture of The Bhagavad Gita and Shakespeare’s tragedy, Hamlet. Both heroes, Arjuna and Hamlet, face the similar moral dilemma of killing of their kinsmen, and both fulfill their duty by overcoming the initial inaction through some insight into the mystery of life. I explain this insight with Krishna’s central teaching in the Gita, the ethics of Nishkam-Karma or selfless action, comparing it with Hamlet’s “readiness” in the last act. Nishkam-Karma is based on other key concepts in Indian philosophy, such as the immortality of the soul, reincarnation, Trigunas, detachment and discernment, some of which find parallel expression in Christianity. While discordant with the current politicized “turn to religion” in Shakespeare studies, this essay stresses the need for ethical reflections in religious approaches. It also aims to contribute to a better understanding of Indian philosophy, which is an under-researched field of study as compared to Shakespeare.

Recent Articles

Recent Articles

The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England. Edited by Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole

This stimulating collection takes up a subject that has been somewhat neglected in the “turn to religion” in Shakespeare studies: popular hermeneutics. The Reformation called on believers not only to read the Bible but also to interpret it; the introduction to the volume takes us into the worlds of Bible reading and interpretation and shows us how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers learned exegesis from notes and paratextual material in early modern Bibles, as well as from theological tracts and sermons that modeled typological reading, collocation, and ways of working with the densely figured “literal” narrative. To read about open-air sermons, attended by as many as six thousand people with Bibles in hand to check and annotate referenced passages, helps us imagine the attention and interpretive energy audiences might have brought to bear on Shakespeare’s plays in the theater. The volume is divided into four parts. Bruce Gordon’s and Aaron T. Pratt’s respective essays in the first part (“Europe, England: Contextualizing Shakespeare’s Bible”) historicize the discussion of biblical interpretation in the context of international linguistic scholarship and textual developments (Gordon) and publishing and marketing books in England (Pratt). Gordon’s essay provides valuable information on the work of Christian Hebraists, and notes the publication of a Rabbinic Bible in the period, but I would have liked some assessment of how this scholarship fed into the Geneva translation (the one most used in England), how it might illuminate the vexed question of Shakespeare’s attitude toward real Jews. Pratt studies translations of the New Testament, beginning with the extremely popular volume produced by Sir John Cheke (1553). The paratextual material in that edition provided continuity for the different authorized translations that circulated throughout the century, and Pratt explains that its function was to stress that the Bible should be understood within the context of the official church. If Shakespeare did work from a Cheke volume, as Pratt thinks possible, and was typical in that sense, the paratextual guides for interpretations did not constrain the uniqueness of his biblical readings and the originality of his theology.

Error in Shakespeare: Shakespeare in Error. By Alice Leonard

Error in Shakespeare: Shakespeare in Error’s chiasmic title playfully hints at an intersection upon which the field of Shakespeare studies has long been based. From New Bibliography and New Textualism to the “unediting” movement, debates about how to deal with errors in Shakespearean texts have ranged from the practical to the theoretical and philosophical. But Alice Leonard’s argument in her first monograph centers around the notion that “in order to understand error, we must resist the ideology of standardisation that privileges what is ‘good’ and ‘correct’” (11). Crucial to this, Leonard contends, is the necessity of historicizing the concept of error: she notes that “in the early modern period, error did not just mean mistake or falsity which is its primary sense today. It was more closely linked to its Latin etymon errare, meaning to wander” (35–6). Leonard’s conception of error is not figured as something incorrect and in need of deletion or revision; rather, to commit error can be read as taking a different path and ending up somewhere new. It is this fundamental opening up of possibilities, rather than shutting them down, which makes Leonard’s work provocative, liberating, and even radical.

Women as Heroes in Shakespearean Drama

Shakespeare studies Nature in the context of human behaviour. His drama deals with transformations and he displays these changes on both social and personal levels through alternating the graphic images from characters to situation. In an authoritarian society where lives of women were governed by a belief system which resulted out of Nature’s disposition of preordained roles in society, the portrayal of dominating female voices would have bothered many. Shakespearean drama is a protest against the society which is always dominated by the destructive forces of male paranoia, egocentrism, patriarchal instinct of exploitation of the weak, male sexual anxiety and corrupt abuse of rules of justice by the powerful. A study of the female mind presented in Shakespearean drama is seen at its best in The Winter’s Tale. The following article is an attempt to explore some of the aspects of Womanhood in Shakespearean art.

‘How can you say to me I am a King?’: New Historicism and its (Re)interpretations of the Design of Kingly Figures in Shakespeare’s History Plays

The 1980’s saw the emergence of New Historicist criticism, particularly through Stephen Greenblatt’s work. Its legacy remains influential, particularly on Shakespearean Studies. I wish to outline New Historicist methodological insights, comment on some of its criticisms and provide analytical comments on the changing approach to historical plays, asking “What has New Historicism brought into our understanding of historical plays and the way(s) of designing kingly power?” Examining Shakespeare’s second tetralogy, I will review Greenblatt’s contention that these plays largely focus on kingly power and its relationship to “subversion” and “containment”. I intend to focus on aspects of the plays that I believe have not received enough attention through New Historicism; particularly the design of the kingly figures.

SHAKESPEARE’S THEATER OF LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY OF BAROQUE THEATER: «FAUSTIAN SPIRIT» OVERTAKES ANCIENT FORM

Purpose of the article is to identify the components of creative method and anthropology of Shakespeare’s theater, to compare Shakespeare’s theater to Baroque theater, to analyze various conceptions of Shakespeare. Methods: hermeneutic, cultural anthropology, historical and cultural, analytical, psychoanalysis. From philosophical and anthropological positions, creative method and creative works of W. Shakespeare have been analyzed, a strong connection of theater and philosophy of Shakespeare’s theater with Baroque theater has been revealed (mysticism, fabulousness, hyperrealism, formal features are replaced by effective ones, usage of parable and utopia (image of King Lear in particular), motives of vanitas (vanity), duality of the world, allegory, «figureness»). Shakespeare suggests a new philosophy of theater based on elimination of borders between reality and art, «baroqueivisation», theatricalization of reality, masks are used as symbols of a real person without distorting it but rather revealing his or her deepest essence, sincerity. It is also reflected in understanding of Shakespeare’s authorship problem where mask of a clown and a buffoon are used in order to convey the deepest and most philosophical thoughts to society. Baroque reform of the theater suggested by Shakespeare, reduces theater to universal anthropological model both synchronically and diachronically. Theater runs around the actor, not only art but life of the universe is carried out via actor. This new philosophy of theater cannot be considered only within the «culture of meanings» (G.U. Gumbrecht) but on principle is within the limits of «culture of presence», which helps to understand the ideological idea of Shakespeare’s theater, to view biography and personality of Shakespeare in a new way because Shakespearean Studies was within the culture of meanings and tried to consider only the hidden codes and symbols of Shakespeare’s theater. Beyond these philosophical hermeneutics remained the transforming, effective power of Shakespeare’s theater. Humanization of theater also takes place: based on the old Antique form a new humanistic content is built, where much attention is paid to «life of soul», love, kindness, wits, passion, vengeance, etc., sinfulness of a soul and its ability to clear of evil. Theatre is considered to be not an external spectacle but a deep instrument of immersion in life of a soul and its gradual growth. Since theater is the whole world (in philosophy of culture it can also be identified with the formation of «Faustian soul» (O. Spengler), «Faustian spirit» focused on the infinite formation, the infinity of space), it requires the creation of a corresponding dictionary because the word itself becomes a word-action. A special role of allegory genre for philosophy of Shakespeare’s theater is considered, his philosophy is compared to philosophy of F. Bacon.

Performing Calibanesque Baptisms: Shakespearean Fractals of British Indian History

This paper uncovers new complexity for Shakespearean studies in examining three anecdotes overlooked in related historiography—the first Indian baptism in Britain, that of Peter Pope, in 1616, and its extrapolation in Victorian history as Calibanesque; the tale of Catherine Bengall, an Indian servant baptised in 1745 in London and left to bear an illegitimate child, before vanishing from Company records (like Virginia Woolf’s invention Judith Shakespeare vanishing in Shakespeare’s London); and the forgotten John Talbot Shakespear, a Company official in early nineteenth-century Bengal and descendant of William Shakespeare. I argue that the anecdotal links between Peter, Caliban, Catherine, Judith, Shakespear and Shakespeare should be seen as Jungian effects of non-causal “synchronic” reality or on lines of Benoit Mandelbrot’s conception of fractals (rough and self-regulating geometries of natural microforms). Although anecdotes and historemes get incorporated into historical establishmentarianism, seeing history in a framework of fractals fundamentally resists such appropriations. This poses new challenges for Shakespearean historiography, while underscoring distinctions between Shakespeareanism (sociological epiphenomena) and Shakespeare (the man himself).

Shakespeare on the Arabian Peninsula. By Katherine Hennessey

Katherine Hennessey’s Shakespeare on the Arabian Peninsula offers a necessary intervention in the field of Shakespeare and Islamicate geographies. Not only does Hennessey shift the ambit of critical inquiry into Islamicate worlds away from the Mediterranean and toward the Arabian Peninsula, but her study also exposes the need for scholarly investigation into contemporary pedagogical and performance practices: each of the societies and cultures of the Peninsula offers its own specific challenges, and attendant rewards, in its approach to Shakespeare’s plays. Situated within the “global” turn in Shakespeare studies, Hennessey’s book also interrogates the methods that undergird global-Shakespeare methodologies, especially those that might put Shakespeare rather than the geographies and cultures producing the work at the center. Shakespeare on the Arabian Peninsula takes as its charge the vital task of uncovering this region for non-Gulf audiences. Hennessey bounds her study within seven specific nation-states that occupy the region of the Arabian...

Slings & Arrows and the State of Play in Shakespeare Studies

ABSTRACT The critically celebrated but academically controversial Canadian television series Slings & Arrows presents a poignant exploration of the interrelations between art and life. By depicting a dialectic of faith in and doubt about the transformative power of fictional narrative, Slings & Arrows mirrors the larger world of Shakespeare studies as it has unfolded not only since the Bardbiz debate of the early 90s but across much of the last century. In large part, this is because the show allegorises some of the key distinctions outlined in Peter Brook's landmark work The Empty Space (1968). In doing so, the series rises above the status of a televisual roman-à-clef about the Stratford Ontario Shakespeare Festival under the direction of Richard Monette to become a convincing account of the dialectic between conviction and malaise typical of modern classical theatre as a vocation, and, by extension, of early modern literary studies as a vocation. Ultimately, the show's avowal of Shakespeare's cultural authority does not rest on camera-angles, keenly timed arpeggios, emotional realism, or hunky actors. More fundamentally, it derives from its overall narrative conception, its weaving together of the plays, the show's own story, and the producers' real lives.

Leave to Speak: White Scholars, “Allyship”, and Shakespeare Studies

ABSTRACT This article considers the vexed question of “allyship” in Shakespeare and early modern studies. It asks what white scholars can materially do to support their colleagues of colour in the field and beyond, and puts out a call for greater and more urgent recognition of the racist and whitewashed structures on which the study of Shakespeare and early modern literature have historically been built.

Backlash: Libel, Impeachment, and Populism in the Reign of Queen Anne by Rachel Carnell

Reviewed by: Backlash: Libel, Impeachment, and Populism in the Reign of Queen Anne by Rachel Carnell Joseph Hone Rachel Carnell, Backlash: Libel, Impeachment, and Populism in the Reign of Queen Anne (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2020). Pp. 312. $34.95 cloth. Historic times call for historic parallels. The litany of crises that has convulsed British and American politics over the last five years has simultaneously repulsed and intrigued historians. However bizarre or exceptional an event may at first appear, in the hands of certain scholars there always seem to be correspondences with events in the past. Every eventuality seems to have been anticipated; for each unprecedented crisis, a precedent is duly found. In suggesting parallels between early modern culture and contemporary politics, Rachel Carnell’s new book attempts to do for the reign of Queen Anne what Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics (2018) did for Shakespeare studies. Unfortunately, it has succeeded. Backlash takes a moment of eighteenth-century history as its focus. In 1709, the British government and parliament were dominated by the Whigs; by the end of 1710, both institutions had fallen to the Tories, following a summer of rioting and vicious campaigning against the toleration of Protestant dissenters. The key trigger was the impeachment in the spring of the clergyman Henry Sacheverell for the crime of delivering a sermon critical of the government. Though notorious among experts on the period, this story is not so well-known as it ought to be and seems—at first glance, anyway—to offer some intriguing parallels with contemporary politics. Carnell’s book, which is pitched somewhere between a specialist monograph and a generalist trade book, does an excellent job of telling the tale. Linking her years of authoritative scholarship on Delarivier Manley with the broader ideological conflicts at play, Carnell deftly handles the twists and turns of the political situation, the various intrigues of the court, and the essential background on Queen Anne’s deteriorating relationship with the Marlboroughs. The book is particularly good at communicating the breakneck pace at which events unfolded, with Manley getting her moment in court only days before Sacheverell’s impeachment trial got underway. It is skillfully done. Readers new to the period will doubtless enjoy being swept along by the narrative arc. Although I expected to disagree with certain analyses and interpretations of events, I was eager to read about the familiar incidents of 1709–10 from a new angle and fully anticipated admiring Backlash (as I have Carnell’s previous work) and sympathizing with its core objectives. However, having now spent a week mulling over the book, I find myself increasingly troubled by certain recurring features. These fall into three categories: simple technical errors; a lack of historiographical awareness; and a reluctance to engage with historical actors on their own terms. Individually, it would be possible to overlook these qualities. Taken together, however, they give cause for concern. [End Page 1048] In the first instance, consider Carnell’s handling of the book trade. There are repeated claims that, for vague “ideological reasons” (33), the “Whigs tended to support an unfettered press” (44) and had a fundamental “belief in press freedom” (211). That is simply not true. The Succession to the Crown Act of 1707, masterminded by members of Whig Junto, made it a hanging offense to write or print material against the Hanoverian succession. This piece of legislation later resulted in the execution of a teenage boy.1 Both in theory and in practice, Whigs were zealous censors of the press. Then there is the confusion resulting from specialist terminology. The misunderstanding of key terms comes sharply into focus in the paragraphs documenting the printing in 1709 of Manley’s The New Atalantis. Because of the legal risks, Carnell writes, the printer John Barber “commissioned two other printers, John Woodward and John Morphew, to do the actual printing and put their names on the title page, as the ‘trade printers’ for the work” (45). Rarely have I encountered such a short sentence crammed with so many errors. The name was James Woodward, not John.2 The book was not “commissioned” by Barber; the “actual printing” was done by him in house...

'Shakestivalling' in the New Europe

This article maps out the landscape of Shakespeare festivals in Europe and argues that the European Shakespeare Festivals Network (ESFN) has been crucial to putting them on the Shakespeare tourist map. ESFN is a cultural foundation established in March 2010 as an association of five Shakespeare festivals: Bath (United Kingdom), Craiova (Romania), Gdansk (Poland), Gyula (Hungary), and Neuss (Germany). This article begins with documenting the Network's first ten years of activity (as yet not attempted) in a survey of its member festivals. The second part of this article offers potential directions for a broader exploration of European Shakespeare festivals as a phenomenon in its own right, as a form of Shakespeare tourism, with a place in the broader field of Shakespeare studies.

Staged Normality in Shakespeare's England. Rory Loughnane and Edel Semple, eds. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. xiv + 298 pp. €83.29.

Staged Normality in Shakespeare's England. Rory Loughnane and Edel Semple, eds. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. xiv + 298 pp. €83.29.

HamletRevision: Bhardwaj’sHaideras Crossmapping and Contact Zone

AbstractCompleting his trilogy of adaptations of Shakespearean tragedies, Indian director Vishal Bhardwaj’s film Haider (2014) tackles Hamlet. A generic fusion of realist drama, Bollywood movie, and espionage thriller, the film intersects the Elizabethan source text’s revenge plot with intertextual references to journalist Basharat Peer’s contemporary war memoir Curfewed Nights (2011), detailing the realities in insurgency-torn Kashmir in the 1990s. Taking its cue from the film’s controversial reception, which runs the gamut from censorship, appraisals, and criticism that Indian film does not need the ‘crutch’ of Hamlet to claim attention, this article explores questions about border-crossing, violence, and reconciliation raised on the level of form and content. Haider presents an adaptation of not one but two source texts: one ‘global’ and one ‘local’. The result, this article argues, is astonishingly harmonious and the contested metaphors of adaptation theory and global Shakespeare studies, such as ‘appropriation’ or ‘indigenization’, apply less to it than that of a transcultural ‘contact zone’ (Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd. ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2008) and of a ‘crossmapping’ (Bronfen, Elisabeth. Crossmappings. On Visual Culture. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2018). By placing greater emphasis on communality and having the ending turn from revenge to forgiveness, Haider interrogates the transcultural appeal of Hamlet, drawing attention to histories of violent conflict. It also reveals a revisionist agenda that captures both hidden political realities and a haunting refiguration of Shakespeare.

Hamlet Versus Othello: Or, Why the White Boy Keeps Winning

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of race in Shakespeare studies and, by extension, English Literature. The traditional view of Hamlet as a universal paradigm for humanity can be seen as a symptom of institutional racism. Unpicking the assumptions of whiteness that underpin this racialized discourse, I propose a new definition of “Hamletism” as a disciplinary instance of institutional racism that elides the everyday legacies of Empire and slavery in teaching and research. This racialized discourse places Othello outside a centre silently assumed to be white. However, Othello offers a global paradigm for humanity as common and powerful as Hamlet's. It is a paradigm that has been marginalized by the insidious forces of “Hamletism” – a white, middle-class discipline that takes Hamlet to be the most accurate representation of human subjectivity because of his whiteness.

Shakespeare and Conceptual Blending: Cognition, Creativity, Criticism. By Michael Booth

To Shakespeareans familiar with conceptual blending theory, pioneered nearly twenty years ago by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities, 2002), this book by Michael Booth offers a welcome contribution both to Shakespeare studies and to the modest-sized, interdisciplinary, and international fellowship of scholars working in the field of cognitive poetics. Cognitive poetics has frequently been deployed as a close-reading method for poetry, but its potential for more wide-ranging applications across other literary genres has long been evident to those attuned to the interdisciplinary field of cognitive linguistics, from which blending developed. Booth is the first to take on the enormity of applying blending to the full range of Shakespeare’s texts. As is to be expected, he offers readings across the traditional genres. He also crosses through what we might call thought-states that characterize key patterns of conceptual organization throughout Shakespeare’s works: patterns that sometimes, but not always, correspond to genre. He titles his main chapters “Shakespeare’s Stories,” “Shakespeare’s Wit,” “Shakespeare’s Poetry,” and “Criticism and the Blending Mind.” Recategorizing in this way allows Booth to address a broader-than-usual sample of Shakespeare’s work, including twenty-eight plays, two verse narratives, and a handful of sonnets. Booth’s approach also allows him to launch challenges to many critical orthodoxies, as I discuss further below.

The Tempest as “Gift of Death”

ABSTRACT This article opposes the view that The Tempest knowingly betrays the barbarity implicit in the creation of aesthetically pleasing works of art, thereby disabling the aesthetic as a source of value. I argue that The Tempest takes the foundational oppositions which constitute dramatic art (representation versus reality, script versus performance, belief versus scepticism), and, by incorporating them into the drama, demonstrates their contingency. This involves a consideration of the distinction drawn by Robert Weimann between the “doubly encoded” stage figure of Prospero, at once “actor” living within the fiction of the play, and “player” wishing to escape its captivity. The aporia that this creates is related to Derrida's concept of “gift” as disruptive of both teleological temporality, and of an ethic founded on an economy of obligation. The relationship of aesthetic value to alterity is ultimately focused in the figure of Caliban, the “thing of darkness” at once central and alien to the lives of those whom he, resistingly, serves. He comes to betoken the “gift of death” as enabling condition of aesthetic and ethical experience. The piece responds to an ethical turn in Shakespeare studies, and a renewed interest in aesthetic issues. It opposes an exclusive historicist emphasis on the plays, attempts to give a more nuanced context for a “presentist” consideration of Shakespeare's works, and sketches a possible approach to works of art in general aimed at articulating an alternative to their “disenchantment” at the hands of critics without sacrifice of the intellectual integrity previously seen to be suppressed by aesthetic responses.