Shakespeare Modern Research Articles

Shakespearean Medievalism

This essay studies the narrative strategies by means of which Lydgate and Shakespeare historicize their authorial models, thereby investigating medieval and early modern constructions of temporal alterity within the history of authorship. A localized reading of Troy Book and Richard II reveals Lydgate's and Shakespeare's historicizing of the hybridization of transparent poetry and opaque performativity into self-concealing, translucent counter-authors (Cheney). Lydgate veils his Chaucerian sources, backdating his authorial model to ancient theatre, while Shakespeare seems to stage a chronological development: the transparent medieval poet-king Richard begins to render himself opaque as he recognizes the efficacy of Bullingbrook's modern performativity. Shakespeare's intertextual references to a 15th-century poetics of translucence belie such a teleology, unveiling the medieval origins of Shakespeare's modern counter-authorship.

Unstaging King Lear

In 2008, Singapore audiences were treated to two large-scale King Lear productions: the internationally acclaimed Royal Shakespeare Company's production, directed by Trevor Nunn, with Ian McKellen in the lead role, and Ho Tzu Nyen and Fran Borgia's The King Lear Project: A Trilogy. The two productions are drastically different in that the former is a production of King Lear proper, while the latter is an experimental project that uses Lear as a frame to explore, discover and critique the nature of stagecraft and audience perception through a series of notable Lear essays. The King Lear Project is not an adaptation of Lear, but a three-night performance about the play. Ho and Borgia's work questions if it is possible to stage Lear, and if there is in fact a ‘right’ and ‘proper’ way to do so. For local audiences, these questions are immensely provocative for several reasons, especially since the Nunn–McKellen Lear has since been declared – by way of critical reviews – the definitive King Lear. The metatheatricality of the Lear Project implicates audience members and demands an understanding from them through active engagement that is otherwise not required in conventional productions. Ho and Borgia's assumptions of audience perception are strikingly accurate and telling, and they consider the complex negotiations between literary and theatrical experiences, or what Ho calls ‘Word and Flesh’. By turning to the history and the processes of staging what is believed to be Shakespeare's most ‘unstageable’ tragedy, the Lear Project also questions the future of Shakespeare's modern theatre. This dossier, which includes an in-depth review of the play, a commentary by an actor in the play, and an interview with the author/director of the Lear Project, hopes to construct a critical and insightful understanding of the making and reception of this original and ambitious piece of work.

Shakespeare's modern collaborators

Recent work in Shakespeare studies has brought to the forefront a variety of ways in which the collaborative nature of Shakespearean drama can be investigated: collaborative performance (Shakespeare and his fellow actors); collaborative writing (Shakespeare and his co-authors); collaborative textual production (Shakespeare and his transcribers and printers). What this leaves unaccounted for is the form of collaboration that affects more than any other our modern reading experience of Shakespeare's plays: what we read as Shakespeare now always comes to us in the form of a collaborative enterprise - and is decisively shaped by the nature of the collaboration - between Shakespeare and his modern editors. Contrary to much recent criticism, this book suggests that modern textual mediators have a positive rather than negative role: they are not simply 'pimps of discourse' or cultural tyrants whose oppressive interventions we need to 'unedit' but collaborators who can decisively shape and enable our response to Shakespeare's plays. Erne argues that any reader of Shakespeare, scholar, student, or general reader, approaches Shakespeare through modern editions that have an endlessly complicated and fascinating relationship to what Shakespeare may actually have intended and written, that modern editors determine what that relationship is, and that it is generally a very good thing that they do so.

Shakespeare in China (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare in China Alexander C. Y. Huang (bio) Shakespeare in China. By Murray Levith. London: Continuum, 2004. xv + 156 pp. Cloth, $ 80.00, Paper, $ 22.99. As a new publisher in the field, Continuum has produced a growing list in cutting-edge Shakespeare studies in the past few years, including a handsomely designed new series entitled "Shakespeare Now!" (Douglas Bruster's [End Page 110] To Be or Not to Be and Lukas Erne's Shakespeare's Modern Collaborators, among others). Although it is not part of the Shakespeare Now! series, Shakespeare in China by Murray Levith (author of Shakespeare's Italian Settings and Plays) shares the compact format with volumes in that series. It provides students and teachers a basic historical overview of twentieth-century stage adaptations of Shakespeare's plays in mainland China, with a personal touch—accounts of the author's trip to China and photographs of the author and Chinese scholars (74 and 59). In our times, China, like Shakespeare, has become a major international presence. As cross-cultural collaborations and dialogues, Chinese interpretations of Shakespeare are becoming increasingly difficult for Shakespeareans to ignore. The unique dynamics between Chinese and Shakespearean modes of signification provide rich opportunities to explore a wide range of questions for audiences interested in provocative and bold re-imaginings of Shakespeare and for scholars interested in Shakespeare's currency in our world. Although the appropriation of Shakespeare has been the cornerstone of postcolonial criticism that focuses on such locations as India, Africa, and the Caribbean, the history of Shakespeare in East Asia where the local cultures have a more ambiguous relation to the European West is less known by teachers and students of Shakespeare. Ironically, the marginalization of the field does not result from the lack of critical attention per se, but from an overflow of "reports" without theoretical reflection that make Asian interpretations into predictably exotic objects that are never positioned to be properly known. Levith's Shakespeare in China is aimed at a general Anglophone readership and is similar in structure to John Pemble's Shakespeare Goes to Paris: How the Bard Conquered France (2005) and Li Ruru's Shashibiya: Staging Shakespeare in China (2003). In the preface, Levith contrasts the idea that Shakespeare is "a socioeconomic export product from an imperialist West bent on the . . . exploitation [or] depreciation . . . of unique local cultures" with the possibility that "various peoples [such as] the Han Chinese have happily . . . adapted Shakespeare to . . . serve their own particular ends" (xiii). Chapter 1 rehearses the early history of Shakespeare in mainland China up to 1949, when the People's Republic of China was founded, and concentrates on translation and criticism. Chapter 2, titled "Shakespeare and Mao," pursues Mao Zedong's Marxist-inflected literary utilitarianism and how the tendency has negatively influenced the already complicated process of cross-cultural interpretation. Levith discusses the role of Mao's influential "Talks at the Yenan [should be Yan'an]" in Chinese interpretations of Shakespeare between 1949 and 1966. Chapter 3 contains Levith's musings about the Cultural Revolution and Shakespeare, including observations on [End Page 111] the similarities between Henry V and Taking Tiger Mountain, a Chinese revolutionary model play (52), Chinese anti-Westernism, as well as American journalists Lois Wheeler Snow's and Edgar Snow's relationships with the Chinese government during and after the times of political crackdown (42; 48–49; 51–54). Readers may benefit from a more systematic account of how these erratic events relate to the topic of this chapter. Chapter 4 records the revived mainland Chinese interest in Shakespeare after the Cultural Revolution, a well-known story. Levith notes that even after the revolution, Chinese Shakespeare criticism still tended to follow the same "tired and dogmatic models of Marxist criticism" (86) and remained unsophisticated. Levith seems to follow a tired critical paradigm. He quotes He Qixin, a mainland Chinese scholar, at length and agrees with He's judgment that Chinese criticism of Shakespeare "very often miss[es] the essence and dramatic power of the plays" (87). A better course would have been to analyze such misreadings and take readers beyond the facts to understand the many historical and cultural questions in Shakespeare's...

"Timon of Athens" and the Three Graces: Shakespeare's Senecan Study

For reasons which are understandable enough, Shakespeare's modern editors have decided that of Athens play in which, as David Bevington puts it, dramatic situation also unusually static for Shakespeare. Frank Kermode, in the most widely used college text, comments that a tragedy of ideas, much more schematic than Hamlet and adds that play was evidently designed to consist of two halves illustrating contrasting modes of excess. In spite of a cunning diversification of texture . . . the series of interviews between Timon's servants and false friends which constitutes the bulk of Act III shows how simple the scheme of the play is; and the second half consists of procession of visitors to static More recently, in chapter entitled Big Idea, John Bayley has been even more emphatic; claiming that 'big idea' does not [generally] go with Shakespearean tragedy, he considers to be an exception. There nothing in the least elusive about Timon. He the centre of his play and his point and function are equally unmistakable . . . the idea seems so tyrannical that the construction process has to be continued all the way. Two 'states,' of generosity and misanthropy, are necessary for displaying the point and drama of Timon: he moves from one to the other, and that the end of the matter. The language of the play brilliantly rhetorical, but mechanical nonetheless, while himself lacks inwardness, although his hurt touching. His violence, Bayley concludes, is never quite convincing, never rings and, instead of subtle character, we are left with a 'case'-of special sort-but sort that Shakespeare's sympathy can make us see and feel with.' Because Timon's dramatic structure has seemed to many as oversimplified as the character of himself, the play has often been called Morality, written possibly for an academic occasion. Timon [Shakespeare's] true morality play in the straight sense said A. S. Collins in 1946, and his argument has been elaborated by Anne Lancashire, Michael Tinker, Lewis Walker, and others.2 Yet the immediate source of Shakespeare's ideas about bounty and generosity has not been identified, although Geoffrey Bullough came close when he discussed Cicero's epistle to Laelius.3 More than any other play of Shakespeare's, indebted for its ideas