Of imaginings,mobility and mapping

This brief closing endorsement is called a coda (rather than, e.g. an afterword) out of more than a pedantic preference on my part. In its prevalent use in English, the term is borrowed from musical terminology, where it refers to a short final flourish. As a closing device at the end of a longer composition, a coda promises to ‘finish it off in a pleasing way’ (Collins English Dictionary). Rather more plainly, a coda is also – as a word in Italian, and in its Latin root – a tail. This is a sobering thought when, under such a title, one enjoys the privilege of a final word (at the tail end of the volume, indeed). With privilege comes responsibility, which will also mean performing that pleasing flourish with proper gratitude and humility: this (short) tail will never presume to wag the dog, but will rather follow the movements of the body that precedes it; call it consonance.

The rationale and makeup of this special issue of Cahiers Élisabéthains could hardly be more congenial to my own concerns and commitments in the period I served as Chair of the European Shakespeare Research Association (ESRA) – the capacity in which I was kindly prompted by the editors to contribute these closing words. Their invitation came in the wake of the ESRA conference that, in the summer of 2019, was memorably hosted by Roma Tre University under the title ‘Shakespeare and European Geographies: Centralities and Elsewheres’. This theme – now largely relayed, with adjustments, into this special issue – reflected the association's defining interest in probing the manifold ways in which Shakespeare's work has continued to provide imaginative footholds for the challenges faced by European cultures as they historically develop a sense of emplacement and delineation. Crucially for such evolving processes, as for the resonance they have often found in Shakespeare, this mutuality of identity attainment and imaginative empowerment has not privileged a logic of cultural enclosure or self-sufficiency: what at ESRA we have pondered as ‘European Shakespeare’ has mostly found itself on the outside of ‘fortress-Europe’ scenarios. On the contrary, it has fostered a deeper engagement with those many Others, sometimes non-European, that Shakespeare influentially endowed with presence and voice.

Also with signal importance for our concerns, this rationale has also closely reflected developments in recent intellectual history that are anything but indifferent to the set of essays above. This special issue of Cahiers fully belongs within the recent and ‘profound reassertion of space in humanities’ that has propelled ‘matters of space, place, and mapping […] to the forefront of critical discussions of literature and culture’. ¹ The broader philosophical framework for such developments is grounded in the perceived constructedness of space that has prevailed in the Humanities since the late 1980s. As noted by the editors themselves in their Introduction, the so-called ‘geographical turn’ has seen space construed ‘as a human artefact, a complex set of “places” and “non-places”, shiftily related to each other and never fixed in time nor untouched by ideology’. The inflection hinges, to a significant extent, on the notion that emplacements happen through spatial delineation and semantic investment: ‘Place is space to which meaning has been ascribed’, as proclaimed 30 years ago by the editors of a collection on ‘theories of identity and location’. ² The broadly constructivist arguments that are proper to this conceptual range cannot but accommodate the sense of irony with which we note that, in my epigraph from Antony and Cleopatra, when Varrius mentions ‘space’ he is really referring to time – a time-lapse construed as a gap in space.

Such complexities underlie this special issue's broad theme, and they are fully apparent in the 10 essays that it compiles. The collection's cohesiveness is favoured by the resonance that some of the contributions that originated in keynote lectures now find in this volume. Such is the case with Stephen Greenblatt's essay on temporal and spatial vicariousness as a potent source of relational insights in Shakespeare, allowing for perceptions of difference to come through while also shedding light on domestic and coeval conditions. Displacing current concerns to a remote juncture or geography has allowed Shakespeare to keep providing many agents operating under political duress with ‘a way to articulate what it is not otherwise safe to express’. This ventriloquism – representing an elsewhere in such terms that it appears coextensive with a here and now – remains balanced against the sense that art itself is an elsewhere: ‘the aesthetic screen – the […] understanding that works of art lie outside the sphere of the serious – [also] functions as an invisible boundary keeping in check what would otherwise be viewed as dangerous’. And yet, as Greenblatt also notes, ‘the Shakespearean strategy of obliquity’ retains its power to get us ‘to shed light on the present by looking at it from [a distance]’.

This measure of wary confidence in the vantage over temporal and spatial elsewheres that Shakespeare's text affords, through its perceived remoteness, thoroughly pervades this special issue. It underlies Michelle Assay's discussion of Russian ‘transmedial adaptations of Hamlet’, straddling ‘the post-Thaw and the post-Soviet eras’ and revealing the sustained impact of contexts on a range of interpretive exercises. It is in evidence in Nora Galland's view of Julia Taymor's ‘presentist’ processing of Titus Andronicus as grounded on a ‘diachronic approach’ that offers a way out of the intractable dualities of exclusion and inclusion; as also in the tropes of location and dislocation, bearing on time as in space, that Davide Del Bello addresses with regard to the ‘allegorical intimations of [Cymbeline's] geography’. In distinct ways, the same general assumption energises Michela Compagnoni's argument on the revealing power held by notions of extreme alterity in the ‘geographies of monstrosity’ troped in Othello, and, in Lisa Hopkins's contribution, it resonates with the binary logic set off by an interest in walls and boundaries from Antiquity to Early Modernity. The revealing virtues of ‘Shakespearean […] obliquity’ are also apparent in the importance of process, balanced against allure, that, for David Lucking, defines the shifting grounds on which Cleopatra delineates a performative (rather than essentialist) sense of identity; as also in the tensions between physical and metaphysical that, for Pascale Drouet, define the conditions for mobility and displacement as troped in Cleopatra's barge. In its broadest contours, the programme set out for this collection of studies finds another defining foothold in Andrew Hiscock's exploration of postmodern philosophical alertness to ‘constructions of hosting, migration and exile’, which allows him to probe the various ‘ways in which home and alienation are conceived’ in the Shakespearean text.

This is therefore a volume that honours the remit and concerns that, over the years, have defined the European Shakespeare Research Association (further confirmed and reiterated through our activity since our great get-together in Rome ³ ). At the point of rounding it off, I am proud and grateful to have been part of the trajectory that now finds such a welcome culmination.