Shakespeare and Latinidad ed. by Trevor Boffone and Carla Della Gatta (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Shakespeare and Latinidad ed. by Trevor Boffone and Carla Della Gatta
• Dennis Sloan

SHAKESPEARE AND LATINIDAD. Edited by Trevor Boffone and Carla Della Gatta. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021; pp. 236.

In Shakespeare and Latinidad, editors Trevor Boffone and Carla Della Gatta join twenty-three additional contributors to highlight the underexamined relationship between Shakespeare and Latine theatre. Building on Della Gatta’s earlier work on the subject, which itself extends Bernice Kilman and Rick J. Santos’s research on Latin American Shakespeares, this volume argues that studies of Latine theatre and the production of Shakespeare in the United States are inextricably intertwined. Citing the growing number of artists and productions that adapt or reimagine the Shakespearean canon using Latine methods and perspectives, Boffone and Della Gatta contend that any discussion of either is incomplete without consideration of the other.

Boffone and Della Gatta structure Shakespeare and Latinidad in an introduction followed by four parts, each of which features four to six essays of varying lengths and methodologies. While some pieces, including Katherine Gillen and Adrianna M. Santos’s “The Power of Borderlands Shakespeare: Seres Jaime Magaña’s The Tragic Corrido of Romeo and Lupe,” offer heavily sourced theoretical explorations, others, such as Migdalia Cruz’s “What I Learned from My Shakespeare Staycation with Macbeth and Richard III,” provide richly personal accounts of the authors’ individual production experiences. This combination is one of the book’s strengths, even if the editors’ delineation between “scholars” and “artists” seems somewhat outdated.

Gillen and Santos’s essay appears in part 1, “Shakespeare in the US Latinx Borderlands.” This section explores how Latine artists use the US-Mexico border, as well as borders between languages, cultures, and genres, to challenge Anglo ownership of Shakespeare’s works in ways that trouble broader colonial and hegemonic structures and make space for diverse epistemologies. In “Passion’s Slave: Reminiscences on Latinx Shakespeares in Performance,” Frankie J. Alvarez recounts his experiences as a Latine actor performing in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and in a bilingual production of Nilo Cruz’s Hamlet: Prince of Cuba. In “¡O Romeo! Shakespeare on the Altar of Día de los Muertos,” Olga Sanchez Salt-veit describes the process of devising and directing a production for a two-year Shakespeare celebration in Portland, Oregon. Faced with combining the celebration’s goals with Milagro Theatre’s commitment to showcasing Latine playwrights, Sanchez Saltveit brought together disparate characters from across the Shakespearean canon to both demonstrate and critique colonial influences on Shakespeare’s works as well as contemporary celebrations of a syncretized Spanish and Indigenous holiday.

Part 2, “Making Shakespeare Latinx,” extends part 1’s focus on the ways in which Latine artists adapt, reimagine, and reconfigure Shakespeare’s plays—a theme that remains prevalent, in fact, throughout the volume. In separate essays (“In a Shakespearean Key” and “Caliban’s Island: Gender, Queerness and Latinidad in Theatre for Young Audiences,” respectively), Caridad Svich and Diana Burbano describe how early experiences with Shakespeare influenced their own later works. Svich traces her relationship with Shakespeare from a fourth-grade encounter with A Midsummer Night’s Dream to her queering of Hamlet in 12 Ophelias, while Burbano details using her classical training and love of Shakespeare’s language to write Caliban’s Island as a TYA play when acting roles in professional productions of the Bard’s work proved unavailable to a Latina.

In one of a handful of “diálogos” spread throughout the book, Della Gatta facilitates a conversation between Henry Godinez and José Luis Valenzuela about their early encounters with Shakespeare as well as their conflicting feelings on adaptation. Authors in this section also explore the fraught encounters Latine students and actors can often have with Shakespearean language. In “La Voz de Shakespeare: Empowering Latinx Communities to Speak, Own, and Embody the Text,” vocal coach and director Cynthia Santos DeCure rejects any notion of a unified, “correct” way of speaking Shakespeare and advocates instead for Latine actors to take simultaneous ownership of both Shakespeare’s language and their own accents, rhythms, and voices. [End Page 249]

Part 3, “Shakespeare in Latinx Classrooms and Communities,” continues the theme of early experiences to focus on...