“[A] time / Of pell-mell havoc and confusion”: Shakespeare and the 2016 Paris Protests

Abstract: This article looks at several graffiti based on translated quotations from Shakespeare’s plays which appeared on the walls of Paris in the spring of 2016, during the many protests against the government’s proposed labor law. After a discussion of Shakespeare’s own sense of the importance of visual communication strategies and painterly media in times of insurrection, it then moves on to the particularly tense political context in which these French graffiti were staged on the city surfaces. Based on detailed descriptive coding of these acts of writing, this article analyzes them as a modality of radical performance, showing that these words from The Tempest or Romeo and Juliet were staged as part of a visual political theater, and thereby allowing audiences to rediscover the full affective power and scope of such graffiti. The article finally turns to a close reading of the translated quotations in order to better grasp their time/site-specificity and topical relevance. Considering the parallel occupation of Paris’s main theaters at the time, it reassesses the growing gap between theater and protest as well as between performance and drama, while trying to account for Shakespeare’s ubiquitous presence in such contemporary discussions.