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ABSTRACTS
"Stretching Shakespearean SpaceTime: New Horizons (and Challenges) for
Collaboration" (Diana E. Henderson, MIT)
The past two decades have brought a sea-change in attitudes toward collaborative
authorship and processes, across a wide array of Shakespearean subfields: in
editing, critical theory, adaptation studies, translation, performance history, media
studies, cultural studies and more.
No longer need we begin every scholarly
argument by addressing the bugbear “fidelity,” even as we continue to wrestle with
ways of signaling interest in both early modern historical specifics and
contemporary cross-cultural exchanges. Drawing on the metaphorical potential of
recent debates regarding the foundational reality of space and time, I want to
consider collaboration not only in our objects of inquiry but in our research
methods and teaching—recognizing the hard work involved in group efforts that
still run counter to much of our training and credentialing of expertise. How can the
continued centrality of the name and works of Shakespeare help anchor us, licensing
new possibilities that reward our individual as well as collective study?
Teatro Praga and "Erased Shakespeare" (Maria Mendes, Escola Superior de
Teatro e Cinema)
In this paper, I will examine Teatro Praga's adaptations of "A Midsummer Night's
Dream" and "The Tempest", and claim that in them we perceive a notion of
collaboration with the author which duplicates that of Rauschengerg's "Erased de
Kooning Drawing". In 1953, Rauschenberg persuades de Kooning to offer him a
drawing, which he then obliterates. This erasure is used in order to create a new
work of art, one which only exists in its relation with de Kooning's drawing. I will
claim that this is the nature of Teatro Praga's collaboration with Shakespeare, one
which pays homage to the Bard, while seeking to obliterate his words. This is
perceived, for example, in the way Shakespeare is made to collaborate with Purcell's
works ("The Fairy Queen" and "The Enchanted Island") through the mediation of
Músicos do Tejo, Xinobi and Moulinex. But also when Teatro Praga calls upon visual
artists such as Catarina Campino, Javier Nuñez Gasco, Vasco Araújo, João Pedro Vale,
and directors such as André Godinho to interpret through their works
Shakespeare's plays. The fact that these adaptions' scripts only use Shakespeare's
words from time to time, i.e. that a process of rewriting takes place, leads critics to
consider that Teatro Praga is working against Shakespeare. I hope to show,
however, that this collaborative process reframes Shakespeare's cultural capital
and, thus, reinforces its appeal.
“Transcolonial (Re)Visions. Shakespeare in Guinea-Bissau” (Elena Brugioni,
Universidade do Minho)
Proposing a critical discussion of what has been defined as “Postcolonial
Shakespeare” (Loomba & Orkin, 1998; Banham, et al, 2013) particularly with regard
to African contexts, the aim of this paper is to analyse Abdulai Sila’s As Orações de
Mansata (2007; 2011) addressing the (re)vision of Macbeth as a cultural and
political practice of transcolonial translation.
On the one hand, as Françoise Lionnet puts it, tackling “rewriting and rereading of
the Shakespearean canon” as a “transcolonial form of solidarity with the subversive
aspects of the original” (Lionnet, 2005: 206-207) will offer the possibility to put
forward an original and alternative reading of Sila’s work, underlining its meaning
and agency within the political and social context of Guinea-Bissau.
On the other hand, considering the inclusion of As Orações de Mansata within the
International Project P-STAGE — Portuguese-Speaking Theatre Actors Gather
Energies / IV Estágio Internacional de Actores Lusófonos, it will be possible to
address aspects related with performance collaborations and critical practice within
the Portuguese-speaking World, focusing on several inter and transcultural features
that have characterized the international co-production and touring of As Orações de
Mansata.
A Brazilian ‘Romeo and Juliet’: New approaches to the dramatic text
(Paula Mathenhauer Guerreiro – Unicamp)
Grupo Galpão’s 1991 'Romeo and Juliet', directed by Gabriel Villela, is considered one of
the landmarks of Brazilian theater in the ‘90s. It illustrated the power of classical
dramaturgy by approximating Brazilian popular culture to the Elizabethan universe.
Through an analysis of approaches to the dramatic text in contemporary theater, this
study considers the perspective of Sarrazac – for whom the dramatic space was renovated
but not extinct – and deals with the historical relationship between drama and
performance as well as discussing the role of the dramatist and metalanguage in the
group’s creative process. Created in 1982, Grupo Galpão is one of the most important
Brazilian theater groups. In its ‘Romeo and Juliet’, the group achieves an organic
composition that brought together actors’ play, work with the text, a sense of myth and
aesthetic choices.
Whose play is it anyway? Representation and Participation in two
contemporary Portuguese performances of Shakespeare (Francesca Rayner
Universidade do Minho)
In his chapter on performance and democracy in The Cambridge Companion to
Performance Studies (2008), Nicholas Ridout suggests that issues of participation
and representation might be key to thinking through the “special relationship”
between contemporary performance and contemporary democracies. Indeed, in the
present context of what has been referred to by Jacques Rancière (1998) as
“postdemocracy,” questions of participation and representation have become
critical faultlines in struggles over democratic rights with, on the one hand, the
Occupy movement questioning the representativeness of democratic governments
and, on the other, participation in mediated events being invariably cast in the more
passive terms of interactivity.
This paper thinks through some of the questions of participation and
representation raised by performances of Shakespeare that actively include
members of the audience. Are they merely cynical attempts to render Shakespeare
“our contemporary” by providing an illusion of active engagement or invaluable
techniques against the obliteration of the past and the theatrical community by neoliberalism? Teatro Oficina’s King Lear brought together performers and audiences
around a large table to think through together the role of Shakespeare and
citizenship in the present political environment while Tiago Rodrigues’ By Heart
could only end when ten onstage members of the audience could recite a
Shakespeare sonnet “by heart and not by brain” within a personal and political
advocacy of memory as a weapon against censorship and personal decline. How
might
the
performer/audience
collaborations
in
these
two
Portuguese
performances of Shakespeare contribute towards challenging authority and
extending democracy?
‘Striving to make an ugly deed look fair’? Performing Shakespeare’s Jointly-
Authored Plays (Varsha Panjwani , University of York)
Shakespeare’s jointly-authored plays challenge directors and actors today. Using the co-
authored play Timon of Athens (believed to have been written by Shakespeare and
Middleton) as a case study, I examine how recent directors and actors have approached
the play in order to tap into the politics of Shakespeare’s co-authored plays in the
theatre.
In 2008, Lucy Bailey directed the play at Shakespeare’s Globe. When asked about the
play’s multiple-authorship in an interview, Bailey replied, ‘to begin with I was worrying
over whether some lines were weaker than others, and it made me distrust the play’. In
2012, Nicholas Hytner directed Simon Russell Beale in the role of Timon for a
production at the National Theatre (London). In a pre-show talk, Beale said that this
had been ‘the most fascinating experience because, of course, you basically have to
rewrite [the play]…because it doesn’t make any sense otherwise’.
What does Beale’s rewriting suggest about the theatre’s attitude towards Timon of
Athens and towards co-authored plays? What made Bailey distrust the play? Was she
uncomfortable about joint writing as a method of composition or did she think that
Middleton’s lines were weaker than Shakespeare’s? How do these productions redefine
Shakespeare? How do they redefine collaborative authorship? In raising and trying to
answer these questions, the paper not only sheds considerable light on the production
of a single play but makes an important contribution to larger debates concerning
collaboration, authorship, and textual authority in the theatre.
Debt versus gold:The first Portuguese production of Timon of Athens (2012)
(Miguel Ramalhete Gomes, University of Porto/Polytechnic Institute of Porto)
The first Portuguese production of Shakespeare and Middleton’s Timon of Athens
was staged at Teatro de Almada by the late Joaquim Benite and Rodrigo Francisco in
late 2012, one and a half years after the Portuguese bailout and four years after the
Wall Street Crash of 2008, during a moment of considerable national and
international contestation of the austerity policies decreed by the troika.
This paper will discuss this groundbreaking production in terms of the
contradiction between the evident topicality of its discourse on debt, very
accurately captured by Yvette K. Centeno’s translation, and claims for the
timelessness and universality of the problem of gold which are to be found
throughout the programme of the production. Specifically, the paper will address
the enduring understanding that Timon of Athens is above all a play about the evils
of gold, an understanding that privileges the second, more Shakespearean half of the
play, at the expense of its first, more Middletonean half. It is also an understanding
which is more aligned with Karl Marx’s famous commentary of Timon’s discourse on
gold in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), than with more recent
analyses of the mechanisms of debt. It will be argued that this dialectic is modulated
in the performance at Teatro de Almada, not only through a strong emphasis on the
discourse of debt, but also through considerable cuts to the text, which, though they
were distributed more or less evenly between both halves of the text, tended to
hasten the second, more abstract part, while privileging the more topical scenes of
the first half.
“Where Exiled Dramatists Find Their Voice: Lorca, Brecht, and Shakespearean
Adaptation” Rachel Holmes (University of St. Andrews)
Federico García Lorca and Bertolt Brecht’s interest in Shakespeare unites their
theatrical and political projects. Lorca penned El Público, an adaptation of Romeo
and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while in exile at a crucial moment in
Spain’s political history, which saw the dissolution of the Primo de Rivera
dictatorship and the birth of the Second Spanish Republic. However, the years that
followed the Republican success were years of intense political struggle, and led to
the rise of the dictatorship of General Franco. Similarly, Brecht wrote The Resistible
Rise of Arturo Ui, an adaptation of Richard III, in exile following the 1933 Reichstag
fire in Berlin, a pivotal incident to the progress to power of Adolf Hitler. Both
dramatists’ approach to Shakespearean adaptation is characterized by their
response to their respective vulnerable political positions, a response encapsulated
by Lorca’s observation that ‘[e]n este momento dramático del mundo, el artista debe
llorar y reír con su pueblo.’ Their appropriation of Shakespearean materials is
arguably an attempt to mobilise ‘la fuerza vigorosa y la monumentalidad de
Shakespeare’ against their oppressors. These playwrights appropriate Shakespeare
to say something meaningful to their public; it is not just a matter of casting Romeo
as a revolutionary, or Richard III founding the Third Reich, but of enabling the
voicing of that which must otherwise remain unsaid.
“Cardenio’s legacy to Drama in English Language: A Strange Fascination”
(María José Álvarez-Faedo, University of Oviedo)
In 2003 Charles Mee and Stephen Greenblatt collaborated in the writing of Cardenio,
inspired by Shakespeare’s lost play. It was performed at the American Repertory
Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2008. Then Greenblatt decided to contact
certain theatre companies all over the world and offer them his script to have it
adapted for performances in their own cultural circumstances.
Gary Taylor’s Cardenio, Shakespeare’s Lost Play Re-Imagined is a new English
dramatic versión of Double Falsehood or The Distrest Lovers, by Lewis Theobald
(1727), apparently revised from a manuscript written by John Downes and probably
adapted by William Davenant for Thomas Betterton based on Shakespeare’s and
Fletcher’s not-yet-found play The History of Cardenio (1612), inspired on
Cervantes’s episode in Don Quijote de la Mancha, which had been translated into
English by Thomas Shelton in 1612. That version was presented by the Royal
Shakespeare Company in the Swan Theatre in Stratford upon Avon in 2011.
This paper will offer a close study of both Greenblatt’s and Taylor’s plays in an
attempt to determine how much they retain from Cervantes’s story in comparison to
Theobald’s dramatic piece, and how much, if anything, they owe to their 21st-
century authors’ “imagination”. Apart from those dramatic adaptations, in the last
twelve years Greenblatt has been leading the Cardenio project, to study the different
productions of his play throughout the world. Thus, I will also try to determine the
reasons for the strange fascination this play has aroused in the Anglo-Saxon world
in the early 21st century.
“Black, White, and Red all Over: Liz White’s Othello” (Courtney Lehmann
University of the Pacific)
Liz White’s Othello, completed in 1966 against the backdrop of racial violence in
America, is the first and only Shakespeare film directed by a black woman, as well as
the first cinematic adaptation of a Shakespeare play to feature an all-black cast and
crew. White’s film was a truly home-grown production. Shot on location at her
grandfather’s residence on Martha’s Vineyard, Othello took four years to complete
and, with the exception of one salaried actor, was filmed with a cast comprised
entirely of family and friends—with White’s son playing Iago and White herself
playing Emilia. Perhaps the most remarkable collaboration occurred in the context
of the film’s soundtrack: rather than reproducing the jazz accompaniment of her
stage production, White opted to work with exiled South African performer-
composers Hugh Masekela (then married to the famous vocalist Miriam Makeba),
Caiphus Semenya, and Jonas Gwangwa who, having journeyed to New York to
escape apartheid, would later become major figures in the world music
movement. Indeed, South African politics and the challenges of racial assimilation
play a major role in the film’s paratext, for White’s production additionally features
female vocalists who fled the Pretoria Regime in search of a new life in New York’s
thriving music scene. Working with Masekela’s “chorus of South African ladies”—as
Othello’s cinematographer Charles Dorkins described them—White helped to foster
their transition from South Africa to black America in the thick of the Civil Rights
movement, echoing Othello’s own journey from Africa to Italy while inscribing a
world of difference in the space between these subject positions. This “back story”
is thus inseparable from the film’s own status as a political intervention, as the
haunting Zulu melodies, chants, and instrumentation herald the end of
segregationist America only to warn of an apartheid forming within the African
American community. A tragedy in every sense of the term, Liz White’s Othello—
despite its extraordinary historical significance—never received commercial
distribution. The director died with the four reels of her cherished project tucked
safely beneath her mattress.
“Ken Ludwig’s Shakespeare in Hollywood: Collaboration as Censorship in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Darlena Ciraulo, University of Central Missouri)
Ken Ludwig’s farcical play, Shakespeare in Hollywood, opened on September 5, 2004,
at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. The drama takes a satirical behind-the-scene
look at Hollywood’s bowdlerization of an early cinematic rendering of
Shakespeare’s idyllic A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As one commentator notes,
Shakespeare in Hollywood conforms to the dramatic genre of high-jinx, screwball
comedy. Yet the genre of farce often functions as a form of rebellion or critique of
power. Thus underlying the comedy’s madcap and zany antics, Ludwig’s play calls
attention to the social polemic between artistic expression and Hollywood
censorship in the 1930’s. Shakespeare in Hollywood engages directly with the
American film industry’s censorship of Max Reinhardt’s 1935 film version of
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ludwig’s play ridicules Will Hays’s
ludicrous application of the strictures of the Motion Picture Production Code
(1930): a set of rules and regulations that governed the moral and social content of
movies made in the United States for well over thirty years. In addition to
lampooning the use of the Production Code on a filmic production of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, Ludwig’s farce allows us to consider how censorship is a form of
coercive collaboration or anti-collaboration: the desire to control perception by
regulating desire restricts and delimits meaning, occluding the plurality of
interpretation that creative articulations foster.
“‘It’s a Mystery’: Collaborating to Produce Shakespeare in Love.” (Robert
Sawyer, East Tennessee State University)
One of the running punch lines in Shakespeare in Love occurs whenever it seems that
an overwhelming obstacle cannot be overcome when producing the play. For
example, when Shakespeare and Philip Henslowe are confronted by the fact that the
voice of the boy who is to play Juliet changes the night before the performance,
Henslowe claims, “It will be all right.” When Will exasperatedly asks, “How will it?”,
Henslowe calmly responds: “I don’t know. It’s a mystery.” At the end of the movie,
when Viola De Lesseps suggests that the new play Will is writing “ends well,” he
poses a similar question, “How does it?” Viola responds “I don’t know. It’s a
mystery.” As a number of critics have pointed out, getting the play produced in the
movie results from a collaborative effort by Will, Henslowe, Viola, and even Queen
Elizabeth herself.
The mysterious manner in which problems are solved in the film through a
collaborative effort, however, began even before the motion picture itself came into
being. Collaboration seems especially relevant when we consider the group effort
that produced the film: Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman worked together on the
screen play, while John Madden directed the movie, so it makes sense that the plot
suggests a resemblance between the shared duties of the Elizabethan theatre and
those of modern filmmaking; but there is even more of a collaborative back-story for
this film, as Norman apparently consulted Shakespeare scholars such as Stephen
Greenblatt about the possibilities of producing a popular culture version of
Shakespeare’s life. My essay will trace the story of the dealings to bring this film to
the big screen, particularly focusing on the collaborative nature of the joint venture.
"Palace & Playhouse: Shakespeare’s Royal Collaborators" (Alycia Smith-
Howard The Royal Collection Trust, Windsor Castle)
This paper is a selective survey of the dramatic partnership of Shakespeare and
monarchy. At the heart of this study is an exploration of the impact of royal
influence on Shakespeare’s cultural legacy, alongside a revelation of the role(s)
Shakespeare has played in the lives of the British monarchy. The association of
Britain’s monarchy and with Britain’s greatest dramatist begins, of course, with the
sovereign of his day - Elizabeth I. Shakespeare’s journey from Elizabeth I to
Elizabeth II is quite a royal adventure. In his proudly patriotic history play, Henry V,
Shakespeare identifies monarchy as “the makers of manners”(5.2.245). To be sure,
Shakespeare is indebted to Britain’s kings and queens for propelling his words,
works and image forward since the late 16th century, by means of royal patronage
and participation. This undeniable and ongoing association is marked by unrivalled
success, heated controversy and great art. This paper will reveal several significant
episodes of the collaborative nature of the relationship between the Palace and the
Playhouse. Topics will include: censorship and controversy on and off the
Elizabethan stage; the mandate for 'the Shakespearean actress' by Charles II; and
the theatrical partnership of Queen Victoria and Charles Kean. This paper is based
upon current research being undertaken by royal commission. Royal engagement
with Shakespeare has never before been explored from within The Royal Collection.
As such, the forthcoming book, Royal Shakespeare, (being published by The Royal
Collection Trust, 2016) will be the first of its kind, focused exclusively on the
remarkable theatrical liaison of Palace and Playhouse, and the extraordinary
Shakespeariana in the Royal Collection.
“A cur cannot keep himself in all companies” : Interspecies collaboration
and animal performance in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Michele de
Benedictis, Universitá di Cassino)
During the English Renaissance cultural productions and more informal
pastimes – as interludes or acts of clowns – used to feature a remarkable cast of
performing animals for entertainments before their amused audience.
Bearbaiting was traditionally considered the leading national form of popular
spectacle in sixteenth century London, and Paris Garden represented the main
competitor of city playhouses for stage business. Besides, “canonical” plays
written by professional dramatists were not exempted from interspecies
stances of teamwork between human and non-human performers.
This paper aims to analyze the controversial achievements of those
collaborative productions involving live partnership with real animals in
Shakespeare’s plays, by focusing on the paradigmatic role of Launce’s Crab in
The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The dog’s tragicomic presence, here evoked by
oblique references and wordy monologues, embodies a complex range of
conflicting issues emerging from the joint interaction between hired human and
animal actors, either according Early Modern theatrical perspectives or more
contemporary staging of the play. Does Crab constitute an interfering spectaclewithin-the spectacle, for distracting the audience’s attention through his
peculiar feature of non-human performer? Are Shakespeare’s animals still
conceived as sacrificing objects for mere “sport’s” sake, close to commodified
stage properties? Conversely, are they able to inspire a form of sympathetic
affinity with human condition? How does their presence affect their fictive
master’s expressiveness? To what extent do the players manage a cooperative
balance between disciplined training and unpredictable improvisation for
animal attractions, once staged in professional theatres?
The Hamlet Project in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Thomas
Kullmann, University of Osnabrueck)
Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, published in 1795, provides a
fictional account of a theatrical production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Is initiator is
young Wilhelm, whose experiences with this project, in the context of the novel,
mark a decisive stage in his education and personal development. To realise his
project Wilhelm has to negotiate with his manager and his fellow-actors; these
negotiations reflect both individual character and cultural aspirations and
constraints of late 18th-century Germany:
– The project itself, as represented by Wilhelm, appears to be informed a cultural
movement towards an emancipation from French culture: The character of Hamlet
was interpreted as representing a role model for young Germans.
– Informed by a theatrical practice based on French conventions, the manager
objects to the lack of dramaturgical coherence of the Shakespeare play. As a
compromise, Wilhelm composes an adapted version in which references to
Wittenberg, Poland, France and England as well as several minor characters are cut,
but the Hamlet scenes and speeches are retained.
– The actors’ interests as well as the audience’s preferences are taken into account.
From the vantage point of the 21st century we can look at the Hamlet project in
Wilhelm Meister as a case study as to what kinds of collaborative work are required
to bring a Shakespearean text to life hundreds of years after its first performance,
and in a country with a cultural environment quite different from that of
Renaissance England.
'Receptive Emotion’: Stoker and Irving – collaboration, hagiography, self-
fashioning (Rui Carvalho Homem, Universidade do Porto)
This paper will look into the role played by Shakespearean drama – on the page and
in the lecture theatre, but above all on the stage and as a key element in British
public culture – towards the delineation of Bram Stoker's intellectual and writerly
identity. Particular attention will be given to Stoker's dramatic criticism and his
Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, to be read against the broader context of late
nineteenth- century Shakespeare scholarship, with a particular focus on Stoker's
rapport with Edward Dowden. Late Victorian bardolatry will be explored as a
discursive environment that Stoker found congenial, in light of the idiosyncratic
traits that mark his writings. Stoker's much discussed personal and professional
collaboration with Henry Irving, and his hagiographic processing of the actor, will
be considered in tandem with Stoker's understanding of the theatre as a space for
enlightenment through emotional intensity – on the basis of the supposed bonds of
necessity between character and truth, drama and experience.