Introduction: Contemporary Shakespeare: Dislocations and Disjunctions

Abstract

Introduction: Contemporary Shakespeare:Dislocations and Disjunctions Line Cottegnies, Gordon McMullan, and Sabine Schülting I What is “contemporary” Shakespeare? And where might it be found? The most straightforward answer to the first question is a negative. “Contemporary Shakespeare” is not simply Shakespeare performed now: the bringing into the present of Shakespeare does not necessarily make the experience of an audience member contemporary in any strict sense, simply because so much of Shakespeare in the now has been shaped by various readings of the past. A further problem of the contemporary is that it is only recognizably “contemporary” after the event, not in the now: the present moment enables us (whoever, or whenever, “we” are) to look back at past events (in, say, the East Germany that has gone or in a festival experience that is ephemeral even in respect of theater’s intrinsic fleetingness) and see them as contemporary, or rather as having been contemporary. As to the “where” question, the answer—to judge at least by the essays in this special issue—is not straightforwardly “in the theater.” The contemporary is, rather, often to be found beyond the theatrical stage, in performance in the broadest sense of the term, or in an expanded form of theater in the street, on the web, during the festival, in the marginal or decentered nation. [End Page 1] Arguably the best way to think about Shakespeare and the contemporary—though it might seem counterintuitive—is to begin not with a contemporary performance but with an early modern image of a performance. The Peacham drawing reproduced below (Figure 1) is a sketch dated 1595, presumably by an audience member, of what appears to be a staging of Shakespeare and Peele’s Titus Andronicus. It is the most striking extant image of performance on the Shakespearean stage.1 In the words of Eugene Waith, “the gestures and costumes give us a more vivid impression of the visual impact of Elizabethan acting than we get from any other source” (27). Elizabethan it may (probably) be, but the drawing is in striking ways both contemporary and proleptic, usefully reminding us of the con-temporaneity of Shakespearean theater: the extent to which Shakespeare’s theater puts into dialogue different presents. The Peacham drawing is an image of hybrid temporality, and one that foregrounds elements that we would now associate with the global. The image is of clashing cultures, Goths and Romans, showing actors wearing clothes that are a mishmash of ancient Roman (Titus), medieval (Tamora), and early modern Continental European (the guards). It features a scene of violence shaped according to logics of class, race, gender, and conflict between aggressively colonizing nations, as primarily represented by a dominant male making an authoritative gesture, prisoners awaiting execution, a suppliant woman, and a sexualized Black man. The image can therefore be instructive in an attempt to move beyond a traditional meaning of the word “contemporary,” which is generally taken to designate a subject coterminous with a collective of other subjects alive at a given moment. Such an understanding was suggested by Jan Kott in his Shakespeare Our Contemporary, published in English translation in 1964. “Every historical period finds in [Shakespeare] what it is looking for and what it wants to see,” Kott stressed (5). Writing in Poland under (post-)Stalinist rule, Kott used Shakespeare to comment on the specific political situation in his own country as well as on the destructive forces of modern warfare and authoritarian regimes in more general terms. In the 1960s, Shakespeare Our Contemporary hit the pulse of the time, and was inspiring for those who rebelled against tradition and conservative Bardolatry, famously including Peter Brook. But Kott’s approach does not lend itself to a general theorization of “contemporary Shakespeare.” There is a twofold problem with Kott’s proposition of “our” Shakespeare: one, he was writing at and for a very different historical moment, meaning that “we” are not his contemporaries; and, two, a collective “we” is an impossibility—or an imperialist or essentialist construct, as critical accounts [End Page 2] of globalization have made very clear. Moreover, Kott’s conflation of actualization and contemporaneity is not how we understand this term in our...