Download Independent Research 2 World Shakespeares Shakespeare in North

Independent Research 2
World Shakespeares
Shakespeare in North America
 On the 2nd of June 1752 the ship called The Charming Sally arrived on the
harbor in Virginia with 12 adult actors and their three children. They were
organized in London by William Hallam, who was the owner of a small
theatre in London.
 The company of players waited for 3 months to get permission for
performing plays.
 On the 15th September 1752 they played “The Merchant of Venice” in a
playhouse near Williamsburg. This was the first significant professional
staging of Shakespeare in America.
 For a number of years, after the arrival of the Hallams, the theatre in
America and the small Shakespeare theatre within was a small society
presenting the English culture.
 During the next years, Shakespeare theatre in the United States made its
own unique cultural identity.
 After the death of Hallam the company was named “The American
Company”.
 Hallam’s son (Lewis Hallam Jr.) became America’s first Hamlet in
Philadelphia on 27th July 1759; within a few years he became one of the
leading Shakesperean interpreters in America.
 The American Company faced a lot of problems due to religious
objections to theatre in general and in 1774 the Continental Congress
prohibited the theatre. The company of players settled in Jamaica.
 In 1783 the company settled in New York and again could perform plays.
The leading actor was Lewis Hallam Jr.
 By that time there were a lot of emigrants from England and many of
them were star actors in the motherland who found great appreciation for
the American public.
 One of the most successful actors from that time was Thomas Abthorpe
Cooper. He was raised in London, but at the age of 19 he came in
Philadelphia where he made a strong impression with his roles as
Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and several more.
 In 1790 new theatres were opened where new improvements were made
in the Shakespearean scenery and effects.
 Between 1810 and 1822 one of the best England’s tragedians came on
American land and made a huge impression. Some of them were George
Cook (Richard III, Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Henry VIII), Edmund Kean
(Richard III, Hamlet, Lear, Othello and Shylock) and Junius Brutus Booth
(spent nearly all his acting career in America).
 America’s first native born tragedian was Edwin Forrest. He made his
first great success as Othello.
 America’s first native born actress was Charlotte Cushman. She made her
debut in New York performing the role of Lady Macbeth.
 The years between 1860 and 1900 were a golden age of American
Shakespeare performance.
 The son of Junius Booth, Edwin Booth, became a theatrical legend with
his Hamlet.
 Mary Anderson, born in America, performed her first play as Juliet and is
known as one of America’s finest actresses.
 By the end of the 19th century, the American Shakespeare performances
were appealed to all classes of society. Typically the plays were presented
with contemporary songs between the acts and comic afterpieces. This
had changed after the end of the civil war, when Americans were
reminded that a level of education was needed in order to appreciate these
plays. That was the time of class distinctions and the division between
refined and popular entertainment.
 During the 20th century Shakespeare became a theatrical tradition.
American actors and actresses, no matter native or not, faced critiques as
well as great applauses for their performances on stage. Famous actors
and actresses from that time were John Barrymore, Arthur Hopkins,
Robert Edmond Jones, Raymond Massey, Maurice Evans,
 The most significant Shakespeare production in America during the years
of the Second World War was Othello (1930), performed by Paul
Robertson (title role).
 The period after the Second World War is famous with the rapid growth
of Shakespeare theatre in America. There were regional Shakespeare
festivals and multicultural castings. There were more than a hundred
festivals in the United States and Canada which presented Shakespeare’s
plays.
Shakespeare in Asia
 Japan
 During 1888-1912 Japan opened its doors to the West and to
modernity. The first adaptations and translations of Charles and
Mary Lamb called “Tales from Shakespeare” were used in Japan
during the period called Meiji.
 By that time theatre in Japan was Kabuki style and was known as
indigenous theatre involving speech, song and dance.
 Sakuradoki Zeni no yononoka (Life is as fragile as a cherry
blossom in a world of money) was an 1885 Kabuki adaptation of
The Merchant of Venice. In terms of cultural production, Zeni can
be seen as an attempt to fashion a positive image of adaptation to
western monetary values.
 Shakespeare’s texts can be adapted and translated, but still they
were too foreign for the traditional Kabuki.
 In 1903 Hamlet and Othello were performed in a new style,
different from the traditional. It was called Shimpa, or “new school
theatre” where contemporary events and adapted western plays
were staged.
 Then came the “canonical” Shakespeare, which was always foreign
for the Japanese people and had different cultural act of translation.
 In 1911 Hamlet was staged by Shoyo Tsubouchi, who made one of
the first local performances of a translated text. He was also the
first to employ actresses for the female roles. His translations were
on stage until the 70s.
 Shakespeare’s next incarnation on the Japanese stage was in the
form of Shingeki, or ‘new drama’, which was modern European
realism transplanted to Japan. This differed from Shimpa in its
more educated grasp of the text, its appreciation of western
naturalism, and its dedication to the modernising ethic of writers
such as Ibsen and Chekhov.
 Because of the war, Shakespeare performances were stopped, but in
1955 there was a new play – Hamlet, a production by Tsuneari
Fukuda.
 In 1988 the Tokyo Globe Theatre was opened. It gathered
international theatre companies.
 Shakespeare is on the Japanese stage even today – the plays are
now more indigenous, than cosmopolitan and are closer to the
people.
 China
 Shakespeare’s introduction in China is very similar to this is Japan.
The early favorite play is The Merchant of Venice, adapted in 1913
under the title “The Contract of Flesh”. Here, too, the source was a
local translation/adaptation of Lamb’s Tales From Shakespeare.
 The the two major performative modes in which Shakespeare
appeared in China are Huaju (or ‘spoken drama’ on the modern
western model) and Xiqu (a generic term for all 300 varieties of
indigenous theatre).
 Shakespeare’s works had made a great influence on two of the most
important dramatists and intellectuals in China - Tian Han (1898–
1968) and Cao Yu (1910–96). They translated Shakespeare form
Japanese and English originals and made their own plays as well.
 There were many adaptations which were not well performed,
which were a mixture form two plays, or just very far from the
original, but Xu Xiaozhong’s 1980 production of Macbeth at the
Central Academy of Drama in Beijing was a good example.
 In 1986, during the Chinese Shakespeare Festival the play Macbeth
was on stage. The play was again adapted rather than translated, but
this time there could be seen the cultural dialogue.
 India
 India had experienced the western colonial power in all ways.
Shakespeare is sponsored into India by the full colonial apparatus:
specifically as a mainstay of the entertainment programme for
English residents of Bombay and Calcutta from about 1775.
 Shakespeare’s plays are comfortably accommodated within a
modern English-style theatre sponsored by David Garrick.
 This was actually the model for the indigenous theatre called
Prasanna Kumar Tagore’s Hindu Theatre, which opened in Calcutta
in 1831 with scenes from Julius Caesar and a Sanskrit play
(Uttarramcharitam) in English translation. The Hindu Theatre was
one of several new theatres financed by Indians in Calcutta and
Bombay during the 1830s.
 In 1835 English became the language of administration and
government-funded education. Shakespeare’s plays became the
centre of a curriculum designed to produce ‘a class of persons
Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in
morals and in intellect’. School performances constitute an
important part of the early performance tradition.
 In 1848, Barry Lewis staged Othello at the Sans Souci Theatre in
Calcutta.
 Around 1848 on the stage of Indian theatre we could see the pairing
of white English women and dark Indian men, which was at first
shocking and complex. For example, Othello was first staged in
India by a dark unpainted actor.
 Translations begin to appear in print and on the stage from the
1850s. Of greater popularity were the adaptations.
 In every early adaptation Shakespeare’s plays were totally changed:
names and places were changed, plots were rearranged, and were
liberally embellished with Indian songs and dances.
 There were times when Shakespeare was traditionalized. The
earliest known example is the adaptation of As You Like It to the
genre of Yakashagana in 1860. In 1878 The Tempest was adapted
as a Marathi Sangeet Natak, as later were Romeo and Juliet and A
Midsummer Night’s Dream. Musical Marathi versions of
Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale were staged with some success
in 1880 and 1906 respectively. In 1906 A Midsummer Night’s
Dream was adapted as a Sanskrit play in Malayalam, with generic
music and dance.
 In 1979 Barnam Vana was the first full-scale adaptation of a
Shakespeare play (Macbeth) into Yakshagana (a traditional genre
of the south-western state of Karnataka). The adaptation included
acrobatic leaps and pirouettes during the battle scenes and
projection of shadow effects.
 In 1997, Lokendra Arambam adapted Macbeth as “Stage of Blood”.
In it we could see martial arts, dances and acrobatics.
Shakespeare in Africa
 There are reports form 1607 of performances of Hamlet and
Richard II by British sailors off the coast of Sierra Leone.
 In 1800 there had been an African amateur theatre in Cape
Town where the British soldiers made a performance of Henry
IV
 Since then there were many amateur entertainments of colonial
officers and tours of professional actors from England to South
Africa. The plays were adapted or translated in English.
 In the 18th century the west coast of Africa was colonized by
Britain. Liberated slaves were settled there. They were people
from different places and this made Sierra Leone a cosmopolitan
center. The indigenous people and the resettled slaves created a
common language, Krio, which had strong influence from
English. Shakespeare was translated in Krio. In 1964 the Krio
theatre was defined and with translations of Julius Caesar and
As you Like it.
 Shakespeare was translated or adapted to the many African
languages. For example, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, The
Tempest and Julius Caesar have all been translated into
Kiswahili – a language spoken extensively throughout East
Africa.
 One of the most important translations were made by the first
president of independent Tanzania, Julius Nyerere (1960).
 Student companies travelling in Nigeria and Uganda (1950s –
1960s) often brought ‘pidgin’ – a lingua franca built from
elements of colonial and indigenous languages – to their
adaptations of Shakespeare, in order to make their performances
both accessible and popular.
 In the Francophone part of Africa there were French versions of
Shakespearean plays. For example, Macbeth (1965), Romeo and
Juliet (1990), Macbeth (adaptation, 1993).
 In Egypt Othello was translated and performed early in the 20th
century.
 There are Arabic versions and translation of King Lear from
1927 to 1970.
 Often when a Shakespeare’s play is performed on African stage
we could see specific indigenous elements – verbal, visual and
aural. These include tribal dances, leopard skin robes and
warrior attributes.
 Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin is Ethiopia’s most famous playwright
and he is the only one who translated Shakespeare into local
language. In the 1960s and 1970s, Tsegaye translated and
adapted in various formats Othello, A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, Macbeth, King Lear and Hamlet, which were performed
in the theatre in Ethiopia.
 Dev Virahsawmy is a major figure in Mauritius theatre. He has
translated Julius Caesar as Zil Sezar(1987), Much Ado About
Nothing as Enn ta Senn dan Vid (1995), Macbeth as Trazedji
Makbess (1997) and rewritten The Tempest into a highly
subversive and dynamic version entitled Toufann (1991).
 Wale Ogunyemi (1939–2001) was one of Nigeria’s longestestablished playwrights, his plays ranging from popular
domestic comedies to reworkings of the myth and history of the
Yoruba people of western Nigeria. In 1968 he presents his play
A’are Akogun, which is a version of Macbeth. The play is
performed in both English and Yoruba language.
Used sources:
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage