Abstract
The 2012 London Olympics ushered in a new era of global Shakespearean appropriation. The Globe-to-Globe festival, held in conjunction with the Olympics, brought theater companies from many parts of the world to the United Kingdom to perform Shakespeare in their own languages (“37 plays in 37 languages”). Globe-to-Globe suggested the ethical aspirations of such ambitious Shakespearean events as well as their conflicts and contradictions. Self-conscious about international politics and the guilty pleasure of festive cosmopolitanism, Globe-to-Globe’s website promised that the festival “will be a carnival of stories,” including inspirational ones of the companies “who work underground and in war zones.”1 By giving expression to marginalized, oppressed, and disenfranchised cultural voices, Shakespeare becomes a vehicle of empowerment, an agent to foster the multicultural good. Yet the global reach of this festival and others of its kind also invites pressing questions: How does Shakespeare make other cultures legible to Anglo-American audiences? What does it entail for the British media to judge touring productions of Shakespeare from around the world? What roles do non-Western identities, aesthetics, and idioms play in the rise of Shakespearean cinema and theater as global genres? To what extent do non-Western Shakespeare productions act as fetishized commodities in the global marketplace?
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Notes
On this definition, see Nicholas Ridout: “We might think of ethics, then, as the thought and practice of acting in keeping with who we think we are. Ethics is about acting in character.” Nicholas Ridout, Theatre & Ethics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 10. See also Kwame Anthony Appiah, who follows the philosopher and legal scholar Ronald Dworkin in distinguishing ethics as speaking to lived practice and morality as speaking to principle.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), xiii.
Diana Henderson, Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare across Time and Media (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Touchstone / Simon & Schuster, 1970), 60.
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 114, 117.
For references to appropriation as a form of hostage-taking (Fischlin and Fortier), a “hostile takeover” (Sanders), an abduction (Cartelli), or taking by force (Marsden), see Fischlin and Fortier, “Introduction,” 3; Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 9; Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare, 17
and Jean I. Marsden, “Introduction,” The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth, ed. Jean I. Marsden (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 1.
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977).
Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory,” Critical Inquiry 8.4 (1982): 723–42
and Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 10.
Joseph Margolis, Selves and Other Texts: The Case for Cultural Realism (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 156.
Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 161.
Alice Crary, Beyond Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 137.
Michael Bristol, “Introduction,” Shakespeare and Moral Agency, ed. Bristol (London: Continuum, 2010), 2. See also Shakespeare’s Sense of Character: On the Page and From the Stage, ed. Yu Jin Ko and Michael W. Shurgot (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012).
Ridout, Theatre & Ethics, 69; Michael Bristol, “‘A System of Oeconomical Prudence’: Shakespearean Character and the Practice of Moral Inquiry,” in Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Peter Sabor and Paul Yachnin (Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 26.
For the latter argument, see Gary Taylor, “Revising Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1945–2000, ed. Russ McDonald (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 280–95.
Barbara Johnson, “Taking Fidelity Philosophically,” in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 145.
Ibid., 146, 148. See also Jacques Derrida and Lawrence Venuti, “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?,” Critical Inquiry 27:2 (2001): 169–200.
Emily Apter, “Translation with No Original: Scandals of Textual Reproduction,” in Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, ed. Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), 166–67.
Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 7.
Michael Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 144.
Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
Alex Huang, Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 28.
Sonia Massai, “Introduction,” World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance, ed. Massai (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 8.
On Othello and fears of American racial miscegenation, see Celia R. Daileader, Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Inter-racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Rustom Bharucha, The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalization (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 107–27.
Karl Popper, “The Myth of the Framework,” The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality, ed. M. A. Notturno (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 35.
Charles Taylor, “Comparison, History, Truth,” in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 151.
Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 52.
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Huang, A., Rivlin, E. (2014). Introduction. In: Huang, A., Rivlin, E. (eds) Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Reproducing Shakespeare: New Studies in Adaptation and Appropriation. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375773_1
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