Shakespeare beyond English
A Global Experiment

What does it mean to perform Shakespeare in languages other than English and how do audiences respond?

Susan Bennett (Edited by), Christie Carson (Edited by)

9781107674691, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 29 August 2013

341 pages, 23 b/w illus. 16 colour illus.
24.7 x 17.5 x 1.6 cm, 0.71 kg

'Of lasting use to anyone interested in Shakespeare our contemporary.' The Times Literary Supplement

Tackling vital issues of politics, identity and experience in performance, this book asks what Shakespeare's plays mean when extended beyond the English language. From April to June 2012 the Globe to Globe Festival offered the unprecedented opportunity to see all of Shakespeare's plays performed in many different world languages. Thirty-eight productions from around the globe were presented in six weeks as part of the World Shakespeare Festival, which formed a cornerstone of the Cultural Olympics. This book provides the only complete critical record of that event, drawing together an internationally renowned group of scholars of Shakespeare and world theatre with a selection of the UK's most celebrated Shakespearean actors. Featuring a foreword by Artistic Director Dominic Dromgoole and an interview with the Festival Director Tom Bird, this volume highlights the energy and dedication that was necessary to mount this extraordinary cultural experiment.

Foreword
Introduction: Shakespeare beyond English
The Globe to Globe Festival: an introduction
Performance calendar
Week One
1. U Venas no Adonisi: grassroots theatre or market branding in the rainbow nation?
2. Festival showcasing and cultural regeneration: Aotearoa New Zealand, Shakespeare's Globe and Ng?kau Toa's A Toroihi r?ua ko K?hiri (Troilus and Cressida) in Te Reo M?ori
3. 'What's mine is yours, and what is yours is mine': Measure for Measure, Vakhtangov Theatre, Moscow
4. 'The girl defies': a Kenyan Merry Wives of Windsor
5. Pericles and the Globe: celebrating the body and 'embodied spectatorship'
6. Technicolour Twelfth Night
Week Two
7. Performing cultural exchange in Richard III: inter-cultural display and personal reflections
8. 'A girdle round about the earth': Yohangza's A Midsummer Night's Dream
9. Intercultural rhythm in Yohangza's Dream
10. Art of darkness: staging Giulio Cesare at the Globe Theatre
11. Neoliberal pleasure, global responsibility, and the South Sudan Cymbeline
12. Titus in no man's land: the Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio's production
13. Tang Shu-wing's Titus and the acting of violence
14. 'A strange brooch in this all-hating world': Ashtar Theatre's Richard II
15. 'We want Bolingbroke': Ashtar's Palestinian Richard II
16. O-thell-O: styling syllables, donning wigs, late-capitalist, national 'scariotypes'
Week Three
17. Power play: Dhaka Theatre's Bangla Tempest
18. Locating Makbet/locating the spectator
19. 'Who dares receive it other': conversation with Harriet Walter (9 May 2012) following a performance of Makbet
20. Two Gentlemen of Verona for/by Zimbabwean diasporic communities
21. Inter-theatrical reading: theatrical and multicultural appropriations of 1-3 Henry VI as a Balkan trilogy
22. 'This is our modern history': the Balkans Henry VI
Week Four
23. Shakespeare 2012/Duchamp 1913: the global motion of Henry IV
24. Foreign Shakespeare and the uninformed theatregoer: Part 1 an Armenian King John
25. The right to the theatre: Belarus Free Theatre's King Lear
26. 'Playing' Shakespeare: Marjanishvili, Georgia's As You Like It
27. Romeu e Julieta (reprise): Grupo Galpão at the Globe, again
Week Five
28. Bread and circuses: Chiten, Japan and Coriolanus
29. 'No words!': Love's Labour's Lost in British Sign Language
30. Ending well: reconciliation and remembrance in Arpana's All's Well That Ends Well
31. Creative exploitation and talking back: Renegade Theatre's The Winter's Tale or Ìtàn Ògìnìntìn ('Winter's Tales')
32. A Shrew full of laughter
33. Foreign Shakespeare and the uninformed theatregoer: Part 2 a Turkish Antony and Cleopatra
34. 'Didst hear her speak? Is she shrill-tongued or low?': Conversation with Janet Suzman following a performance of Antony and Cleopatra 26 May 2012
Week Six
35. Habima Merchant of Venice
performances inside and outside the Globe
36. Patriotism, presentism and the Spanish Henry VIII: The Tragedy of the Migrant Queen
37. Touch and taboo in Rah-e-Sabz' The Comedy of Errors
38. Shakespeare and the Euro-crisis: The Bremer Shakespeare Company's Timon aus Athen
39. Restaging reception: translating the Mélange des Genres in Beaucoup de bruit pour rien
40. Reviving Hamlet? Nekrosius' Lithuanian 'classic'
Afterwords
'From thence to England' (1HVI): Henry V at Shakespeare's Globe
De-centering Shakespeare: a hope for future connections.

Subject Areas: Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Shakespeare plays [DDS], Theatre studies [AN]