Abstract
On 15 July 2002, I stayed behind with members of the audience at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, for a ‘question and answer’ session with the actors. They had just performed John Fletcher’s The Island Princess (1621), directed by Gregory Doran, the first full professional production of the original play since the seventeenth century.1 The relevance of Fletcher’s play about colonial encounters between the Portuguese and Indonesian islanders with its emphasis on a struggle between faiths (Christianity and Islam) was not lost on contemporary playgoers. One audience member (obviously thinking of global politics after 11 September 2001) remarked that Fletcher had penned ‘prophetic’ lines in a speech by the play’s villain, the Governor of Ternata, to the island princess, Quisara:
The Portugals like sharp thorns (mark me Lady)
Stick in our sides; like razors, wound religion,
Draw deep, they wound, till the life blood follows,
Our gods they spurn at, and their worships scorn,
A mighty hand they bear upon our government. (4.3)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
John Fletcher, The Island Princess, edition prepared for the Royal Shakespeare Company (London: Nick Hern Books, 2002), p. xiv. All references to this edition.
Imelda Whelehan, ‘Adaptations: the Contemporary Dilemmas’, in Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text, ed. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 3–19 (p. 3).
Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt, ‘Totally Clueless? Shakespeare Goes Hollywood in the 1990s’, in Shakespeare, the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video, ed. Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 8–22 (p. 11).
Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (London and Sydney: Pluto, 1985), pp. 111–25 (p. 125).
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt; trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 218.
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann; trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: The Athlone Press, 1997), p. 228.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
In his extensive work on the subject, Hugh Grady reminds us that the origins of ‘modernity’ have also been ascribed to the late medieval period and the Enlightenment. See Hugh Grady (ed.), Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 2.
See Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993, in association with Blackwell Publishers).
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 5.
Peter J. Smith, Social Shakespeare: Aspects of Renaissance Dramaturgy and Contemporary Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), writes: ‘there is still a reluctance to consider the political efficacy of modern Shakespearean production’ (p. 6).
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 6.
Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 2.
Ronaldo Munck, Marxism at 2000: Late Marxist Perspectives (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 139.
J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): a Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Maiden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 264.
Kiernan Ryan, ‘Measure for Measure: Marxism before Marx’, in Marxist Shakespeares, ed. Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 227–44 (p. 228).
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin, 1992), p. xii.
Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: the Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), p. 6.
Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), p. 83.
Alison Findlay, A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999).
Barbara Hodgdon, The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare’s History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 3.
Barbara Hodgdon, ‘Looking for Mr. Shakespeare after “The Revolution”: Robert Lepage’s Intercultural Dream Machine’, in Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance, ed. James C. Bulman (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 68–91 (p. 69).
See Alan C. Dessen, Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
Michael Bristol and Kathleen McLuskie, with Christopher Holmes (eds), Shakespeare and Modern Theatre: the Performance of Modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 2.
Lisa Jardine, Reading Shakespeare Historically (London and New York: Routledge, 1996);
James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Colombia University Press, 1996); and Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden.
V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (New York and London: Seminar Press, 1973), p. 95.
The writings of Vološsinov, Bakhtin and Pavel Medvedev are sometimes treated under separate authorship. See Pamela Morris (ed.), The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev and Voloshinov (London and New York: Edward Arnold, 1994). Sometimes the work of the three authors is attributed to ‘Bakhtinian thought’.
See Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London and New York: Routledge, 1990).
Michael D. Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), esp. pp. 203–34.
R. W. Vince, ‘Theatre History as an Academic Discipline’, in Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, ed. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), pp. 1–18.
Hodgdon, ‘Katherina Bound; or, Play (K)ating the Strictures of Everyday Life’, PMLA, 107:3 (May 1992), pp. 538–53.
Kiernan Ryan, Shakespeare, 2nd edn (London and New York: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1995), p. 25.
Alan C. Dessen, Rescripting Shakespeare: the Text, the Director, and Modern Productions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
H. R. Coursen, Shakespeare: the Two Traditions (Madison Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; and London: Associated University Presses, 1999), p. 32.
Bernard Lewis, Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims and Jews in the Age of Discovery (Oxford: Oxford University, 1995), p. 30.
Frances Teague, Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London and Toronto: Associated Universities Press, 1991), pp. 15–34.
Paul Alpers, What Is Pastoral? (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
See Robert Weimann, ‘Representation and Performance: the Uses of Authority in Shakespeare’s Theatre’, in Materialist Shakespeare: a History, ed. Ivo Kamps (London and New York: Verso, 1995), pp. 198–217.
Copyright information
© 2003 Maria Jones
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jones, M. (2003). Introduction: Performing Shakespeare’s Culture. In: Shakespeare’s Culture in Modern Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597167_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597167_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-42959-2
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-59716-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)