{"title":"Shakespeare’s Accents: Voicing Identity in Performance by Sonia Massai (review)","authors":"Carla Della Gatta","doi":"10.1353/shb.2022.0047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/shb.2022.0047","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":304234,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Bulletin","volume":"143 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127396276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Live at the Porpentine: A Comedy of Errors (review)","authors":"R. Kello","doi":"10.1353/shb.2022.0045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/shb.2022.0045","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":304234,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Bulletin","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127797086","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Local Habitations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream","authors":"Alexa Alice Joubin","doi":"10.1353/shb.2022.0037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/shb.2022.0037","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The metatheatricality of A Midsummer Night’s Dream has invited recent directors to tell particular kinds of socially progressive stories. This article uses the notion of social reparation to theorize remedial uses of Shakespeare in adaptations that give artists and audiences more moral agency. By imagining more inclusive local habitations for Dream, these socially progressive adaptations seek to remedy injustices in our times and the power asymmetries that inform Shakespeare’s play. My research indicates that place and social space feature prominently in reparative adaptations. To examine the significance of place in performances of Dream, this article analyzes the queer film Were the World Mine, the cross-cultural mime-dance production Dreamer, and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s pandemic-era, interactive, digital performance. All three adaptations draw on the dynamics of their newly created localities to perform various social or artistic mediations.","PeriodicalId":304234,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Bulletin","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122646363","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Much Ado About Nothing (review)","authors":"Michael W. Shurgot","doi":"10.1353/shb.2022.0046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/shb.2022.0046","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":304234,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Bulletin","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126461199","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Appropriating Shakespeare in Brazil: Cultural Anthropophagy in Nós do Morro’s Dream","authors":"A. S. Camati","doi":"10.1353/shb.2022.0036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/shb.2022.0036","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Cultural Anthropophagy, a pioneering concept developed in 1928 by the Brazilian Modernist poet and thinker Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954) in his Manifesto Antropófago, is a fundamental approach for understanding the aesthetic practices of Brazilian collaborative theater groups and their work on Shakespeare. The notion of anthropophagic appropriation is anchored on the idea of creative freedom, assimilating rather than rejecting foreign artistic legacies and mixing them with Brazilian culture—a process which allows the co-existence of self and other in a new interactive relationship. The theater group Nós do Morro [We from the Hillside], based at the Vidigal favela in Rio de Janeiro, approaches Shakespeare from an anthropophagic perspective, reimagining his plays through the lens of local and global traditions. The present essay addresses Nós do Morro’s first Shakespearean production, Sonho de uma noite de verão: uma intromissão do Nós do Morro no mundo de Shakespeare (2004), which highlighted the communal dimensions of the troupe’s theatrical activities, mainly issues of social transformation and ecological concerns. Nós do Morro’s Dream staged a metatheatrical invasion of the performance by proletarian waste collectors from the theatre company’s 2003 production, titled Burro sem rabo [Tail-less Donkey]. The waste collectors invaded the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, the elitist downtown theater where Dream was taking place, to kidnap the Shakespearean mechanicals and take on their roles themselves. This inventive device symbolically and literally constitutes an act of exchange and sharing, expressing their intent to approach Shakespeare according to their own aesthetic agenda.","PeriodicalId":304234,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Bulletin","volume":"63 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132508838","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Realizing a Subaltern Dream: The Politics of Language and Translation in Habib Tanvir’s Kamdev Ka Apna Basant Ritu Ka Sapna","authors":"A. Rao","doi":"10.1353/shb.2022.0035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/shb.2022.0035","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Habib Tanvir (1923–2009) was a noted Indian playwright who combined different influences to create what Anjum Katyal has termed “inclusive theatre.” In 1993 he translated and directed a version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream entitled Kamdev Ka Apna Basant Ritu Ka Sapna [The Love God’s Own, A Springtime Dream]. This article demonstrates how the language and class-based hierarchies within postcolonial India play out in Kamdev, in which the fairies and the elite characters speak Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani, and the mechanicals speak the Chattisgarhi dialect. I interweave a close reading of Tanvir’s published translation and a video recording of a performance of the play, directed by Tanvir, which is archived in the MIT Global Shakespeares Archive. Since Tanvir both translated and directed the play, I read the archived performance and the published text as extensions of each other, and view them as existing in a “reciprocal relationship” with “the Shakespearean ‘work’” (Kidnie 5). This approach allows me to move beyond existing scholarship on Tanvir’s adaptation, which has considered his work only in tandem with other Indian productions, and focus instead on how Tanvir uses the specific affordances of Dream to challenge class- and language-based hierarchies. Ultimately, I show how Kamdev affords its actors, members of a subaltern community, the space to make Shakespeare, once a tool of colonization, a tool to resist neocolonial cultural and linguistic hegemonies.","PeriodicalId":304234,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Bulletin","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131358687","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Cheerful, carefree, beautiful life”: The Trouble with Staging A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Early Soviet Theater","authors":"Natalia Khomenko","doi":"10.1353/shb.2022.0034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/shb.2022.0034","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article re-examines the scholarly assumption that the theater of early Soviet Russia saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream as an ideologically unobjectionable and unproblematic play. Tracing how Russian productions of Dream were reviewed from 1919 throughout the 1920s, the first section of this article examines comments on the play’s potential usefulness for building a proletarian theater and concerns about the interpretative challenges it posed. The second section moves to address the expectations for Shakespearean comedy as a genre in the 1930s, framed by Shakespeare’s new position as a cult writer within the cultural policy of socialist realism, and shows that Dream was interpreted as a humanist vision of an idyllic, egalitarian, and conflict-free future. Finally, the article analyzes the 1941 production at the Central Red Army Theater in Moscow, focusing on the director’s assistant’s rehearsal notes, which were eventually published as an essay. Both the initial notes and their final, published version reveal Soviet theater practitioners’ battle with the recalcitrant play-text as they attempted to force the play into alignment with its official interpretation. By charting how staging Dream challenged early Soviet Russia’s idealized vision of Shakespearean comedy and, by extension, of Shakespeare as a proto-socialist playwright, this article proposes that, when translated into performance, this comedy proved no less ideologically insidious and destabilizing than did Hamlet.","PeriodicalId":304234,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Bulletin","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125912160","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}