Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies

Words spread into diverse spaces. Such a word is ‘occupy’ along with its derivatives. It designates both possession and ownership, concepts explored in Shakespeare’s King John. Non-portable property is problematic: Can one ‘own’ enclosed commons, colonies designated as ‘plantations’, countries (The Tempest)? Certain comedies are set in occupied lands (Love’s Labour’s Lost, Much Ado About Nothing). Could a Renaissance prince be emperor in his own realm at the time of imperial papacy? The word became so ‘ill sorted’ (2 Henry IV), after it came to designate sexual possession or rape, that it almost vanished for 150 years.

This article seeks to enquire into different redistributions of Shakespeare’s aura and into different conceptions of authorship articulated around recent stagings of Shakespeare’s works in Spain. Faced, now, with the task of making Shakespeare relevant in a world of diversified cultural offers and a highly competitive cultural market, I inspect three trends in contemporary theatre direction: the universalizing, the localizing and the post-theatrical attitude. The essay reflects on how modern theatre directors negotiate Shakespearean drama and how they confront cultural heritage while at the same time strategically define their attitude towards Shakespeare to claim their own authorial space.

This article provides an overview of the few modern Greek productions that connected Shakespeare with contemporary political issues. It subsequently explores a variety of references to Shakespeare’s plays in recent Greek political speeches, articles about late twentieth- and twenty-first-century politics in Greece, as well as Greek satirical programmes of the last decade, focusing on the current financial crisis in the country. It also argues that during the last decades Shakespeare’s identity in Greece has changed from a playwright for the elite to a commodity for the masses.

Monika Pęcikiewicz belongs to a handful of Polish theatre directors who identify themselves as feminists. It is a very important stance as feminism in Poland is considered a left-leaning proclivity, shunned for fear of being considered post-communist, antisocial or anti-Catholic. For Pęcikiewicz, Shakespeare’s texts alone are not enough to realize her artistic vision. She has shifted her attention to the use of new digital technologies, to undermine the narrative, linear quality of Shakespeare’s stories. Ultimately Pęcikiewicz is intent on producing different levels of experience for her spectators with a focus on female experience in particular.

Forests, the production by the iconoclastic Spanish-Catalan director Calixto Bieito staged at the ‘Old’ Birmingham Repertory Theatre in September 2012, functions here as the starting point for an exploration of the way a radical revisioning of Shakespeare in performance stimulated through an engagement with European modernism began in this now venerable theatre over 100 years ago. What was dubbed Bieito’s ‘epic arboreal mash-up’ was I suggest haunted by the material traces of groundbreaking past performances mounted by the Rep’s founder Barry Jackson, which included the first Shakespeare in modern-dress productions of the 1920s and the highly influential 1951–53 staging of the Henry VI trilogy.

In the context of a proposed multi-speed neo-Europe where the wealthier nations are allowed to accumulate more wealth and the less wealthy nations such as Portugal are left to fend for themselves, this article looks at the staging of national stereotypes in Portuguese director Nuno Cardoso’s Shakespeare trilogy (Richard II in 2007, Measure for Measure in 2012 and Coriolanus in 2014). Each of these performances examined the relationship between those who govern and those who are governed, using strategies of disidentification with stereotypes of the nation and national identity.

The article discusses two productions, respectively of Julius Caesar and Macbeth, by the experimental Italian theatre company Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio (SRS). My wider scope is a reflection on what I may call the ‘peregrinations’ of the sense of the tragic in our times; my more specific question is: How is the Shakespearean tragic envisioned by SRS? What does their ‘performative thinking’ reveal about tragedy and our sense of the tragic today? As the performances are in Italian, based on Italian translations of Shakespeare, the question of the different language will also be briefly considered, to listen to the ‘ear of the other’ in critical action.

This article takes as its starting point the Footsbarn Travelling Theatre’s move from Britain to France in the early 1980s. It argues that this relocated Footsbarn in a political, geocultural and linguistic context that reinforced their idiosyncratic approach to Shakespeare and Molière. Focusing on performances in southern France and drawing on textual and visual archives as well as interviews and spectator-responses, the article offers insights into the ways exposure to non-Anglophone audiences enriched the company’s art forms through exchanges with different cultures, enabling it to elaborate a language of performance that also relocates Shakespeare.

This article sets out to survey the multifarious European attempts to render Shakespeare’s sonnets in a variety of other languages. The universal and specific problems of translating these texts are explored and their solutions are discussed.

This article offers a discussion of the competing strategies of retranslating Shakespeare for the stage in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It presents a variety of translation policies used to legitimize the new translations of Shakespeare’s canon, with some special emphasis on the proliferation of theatrical rewritings, transpositions, tradaptations and cultural hybrids. The issues at stake include the ever-tantalizing concept of ‘translation for the stage’, the translators’ claims to authority, the multicultural dimension of the theatre, the increasing role of in-house dramaturges and the possible (if ominous) decline of the logocentric approaches to drama translation.

Focusing on two productions of this past decade of The Merchant of Venice in Germany, the article challenges the predominant national focus of ‘European Shakespeares’. It suggests that contemporary Shakespeare productions can indeed comment on Europe’s intricate relations – political, economic and cultural – with other parts of the world, and on the tension between English as a lingua franca and the cultural and linguistic diversity of Europe. It suggests to complicate, with Shakespeare, the notion of ‘European identity’, in a time of mass migration, multi-ethnic societies and the globalization of economy, media and the arts.

This article investigates how Shakespeare’s Hamlet has become a platform for negotiating memory politics in Serbia in the new millennium. Focusing on two productions in Belgrade’s Yugoslav Drama Theatre since 2005 (Dušan Jovanović, 2005 and Aleksandar Popovski, 2016) and one adaptation, Cirkus istorija (Sonja Vukičević, 2006), the specific conditions for each of the productions’ actualization are investigated. Through a discussion of these Hamlet productions, the analysis reveals the ways in which the repeated staging of classical dramatic texts, with each production embedded within a specific staging tradition, becomes a renewed source of inspiration for political theatre.

To contribute to the colourful palette of Europe’s noteworthy contemporary Shakespeares, this article analyses the unique approach to Shakespeare of the Hungarian director László Bagossy through case studies of two productions, The Tempest (2012) and Hamlet (2014). Bagossy’s Shakespearean productions peeled method acting off from Shakespeare for good and effectively demonstrated how a change in performance traditions (distancing, operatic, realist) can initiate a novel handling and reading of the familiar classics.

This essay is a comparative study of Tzvetan Todorov’s concept of barbarity as performed in Cheek by Jowl’s 2004 stage production of Othello and Ivan Mladenov’s film adaptation of the play (2008), set in a Bulgarian prison and featuring inmates cast according to crime. The two productions share a minimalist aesthetic at odds with the play’s spectacular qualities. The theatre production incites an acute discomfort with narratives of barbarity imposed upon the manipulated bodies of the play’s Others; in the film, criminal ‘barbarians’ are cinematically aestheticized and ennobled through their Shakespearean roles, imbuing with dignity their own self-narratives.

The ‘dramatic rise’ of Titus Andronicus ‘among critics and directors’ in the 1990s was primarily linked to ‘the growth of feminist Shakespeare criticism’.¹ Its recent stage popularity, however, lies in its responses to the new geopolitical realities and the shifting physical and mental borders of the European Union. This article examines four European productions of Titus Andronicus in their engagement with political change, migration, rising nationalism and xenophobia, which, I argue, refocus attention onto this play’s position in the Shakespeare canon.