Shakespeare beyond English: A Global Experiment

Description

Tackling vital issues of politics, identity and experience in performance, this book asks what Shakespeare's plays mean when extended beyond the English language. From April to June 2012 the Globe to Globe Festival offered the unprecedented opportunity to see all of Shakespeare's plays performed in many different world languages. Thirty-eight productions from around the globe were presented in six weeks as part of the World Shakespeare Festival, which formed a cornerstone of the Cultural Olympics. This book provides the only complete critical record of that event, drawing together an internationally renowned group of scholars of Shakespeare and world theatre with a selection of the UK's most celebrated Shakespearean actors. Featuring a foreword by Artistic Director Dominic Dromgoole and an interview with the Festival Director Tom Bird, this volume highlights the energy and dedication that was necessary to mount this extraordinary cultural experiment.

Susan Bennett is University Professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary, Canada. Her interest in contemporary performances of Shakespeare's plays dates back to her 1996 monograph Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past. Her latest book is Theatre and Museums (2013). A current research project is concerned with the circulation of performance in global markets where Shakespeare, not surprisingly, is a premium brand. She hopes to see some of the Globe to Globe Festival performances again at different international venues and with other audiences. Christie Carson is Reader in Shakespeare and Performance in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is co-editor of The Cambridge King Lear CD-ROM: Text and Performance Archive (2000) and the Principal Investigator of the AHRB-funded research project Designing Shakespeare: An Audio-Visual Archive, 1960-2000. She has published widely on the subject of contemporary performance and co-edited Shakespeare's Globe: A Theatrical Experiment with Farah Karim-Cooper (2008) and Shakespeare in Stages: New Theatre Histories (2010) with Christine Dymkowski. She hopes to continue to document international gatherings of this kind from a vantage point that takes in both the onstage action and the audience response.

'With a foreword by the Globe's artistic director, Dominic Dromgoole, a chapter by Globe to Globe director Tom Bird, generous endnotes for the essays, a performance calendar (noting language, company size, and other data), 23 halftones and 16 colour plates, the book serves as both a flavourful impression and a complete documentary record of the 'big, simple, stupid idea' (as the editors describe it in their introduction) that piqued audiences with political and gender issues and at the same time exhilarated them as well as the performers.' Choice 'Of lasting use to anyone interested in Shakespeare our contemporary.' The Times Literary Supplement