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Article Excerpt
Local Shakespeares: Proximations and Power By Martin Orkin London and New York: Routledge, 2005
World-wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance Edited by Sonia Massai London and New York: Routledge, 2005
I
DO THE LOCALITIES of literary works and their critics matter in literary criticism? With the historical hindsight of such cases as Erich Auerbach and Paul de Man, the answer is a resounding yes. (1) But how do these localities relate to one another? The question of where we are now in what might be called studies of Shakespeare's textual and performative afterlife is ultimately connected to the question of where the critics and audiences are located, as the vicissitudes of Shakespearean localities are intimately connected to the localities of Shakespeare studies. Michael Neill, among other critics such as Edward Said, has argued for the importance of recognizing the fact that "reading is always done from somewhere." (2) These localities constitute the crux of criticism and Shakespeare's extensive posthumous encounters with the world.
At stake is not simply the temporality but also the locality of these encounters, for to study the presence of "Shakespeare" is to study the "arts of transmission" (Francis Bacon's term from a different context), the practices of appropriating and transmitting location-specific Shakespearean epistemologies. By locality criticism and local "Shakespeare" I mean interpretations that are inflected or marked by specificities of a given cultural location or knowledge derived from a specific geocultural region. Locality, in the full sense of the word, denotes the physical and allegorical coordinates of Shakespearean performance, appropriation, and criticism. While it has now been recognized that "Shakespeare has occupied an international space" from the beginning (in terms of the settings of the plays and their sources), (3) the theoretical implications of the international space of representation and criticism remain unclear. (4) Constituting these localities are physical performance venues, criticism, editorially mediated modern editions, and translations.
I would like to begin with the troubled relationship between performance studies and Shakespeare studies. The fact that Shakespeare has been "made the touchstone ... of the surety and verification of issues of our--or any--time," as theorized by Marjorie Garber, (5) has prompted scholars to forsake classical character criticism as practiced by A. C. Bradley and G. Wilson Knight, and turn to a number of different modes of interpretation, lodging a Shakespearean play script in its social networks, thereby multiplying its interpretive possibilities. Early modern stage is one of the fields that are transformed by New Historicism, cultural materialism, and the renewed attention to the interplay between the different social forces present at the sites of performances. Elizabethan "local" knowledge has been perceived to constitute important social and ideological forces that define Shakespeare's theater. (6)
However, the same cannot be said of the contemporary counterparts of these performances. The local knowledge generated by an informed contemporary performance has remained marginal in the theoretical reflection on the meanings of "Shakespeare," for these contemporary localities--Anglophone or not--are often seen as obscure bits of Shakespeariana and therefore detached from what has been perceived as the core of Shakespearean knowledge. Robert Shaughnessy speculates, among other scholars, that as opposed to the early modern stage's perceived "amenability to critical appropriation," contemporary Shakespearean performance "may be less inviting on these terms," thereby remaining "peripheral to the concerns of theory" until relatively recently. (7)
Similar problems plague reception studies, despite its recognized status as an integral part of a vast field that encompasses postcolonial criticism and theater practice. Shaughnessy's observation anticipates Linda Hutcheon's more recent proposal to "interpret an adaptation as an adaptation," to treat adaptation as "what Roland Barthes called, not a 'work,' but a 'text,' a plural 'stereophony of echoes, citations, and references.'" (8) Performance criticism and reception studies are not exempt from the pitfalls in various versions of "morally loaded discourse[s] of fidelity" that lead to what Alan Dessen terms "the Blame Game, the academic process of fault finding wherein the director becomes a vandal sacking the sacred text." (9) Recent work has shown an acute awareness of these perils. For example, William Worthen's Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (2003) and others in the same line of work problematize the relationship between script and theater, treating the specificities of performance--"stage behaviors" (10)--not as appendages that give way to the literariness of the Shakespearean script but as agents that participate in defining the play.
However, performance onstage and performance on-screen met different fates. Although a genre with a considerably shorter history than theater, (11) Shakespeare on film has quickly established itself as a viable and vital subfield in Shakespeare studies, with an abundance of theoretically informed filmographies, monographs, and collections, as well as "well attended sessions on [the topic]" at major conferences, as observed by Peter Donaldson. (12) Further, cinematic Shakespeare has had an intimate connection to pedagogy, because rather than theatrical production, filmed Shakespeare is how most nonspecialists, especially high school and college students, come to know Shakespeare's plays.
The opposite is true of studies of dramatic adaptations or translations deriving from and designed for decidedly local and even foreign contexts. Granted, due to the ephemeral nature of theater works and their contexts--even the most commercially successful and the most extensively toured--live theater can never be as accessible as film (and the cultural barrier may be prohibiting), but two of the main forces that propel this segregation are closely connected to politics of the field and problems in methodology: (1) the misconception of the referential stability of performances and appropriations from familiar centers, such as England, Canada, and the United States; and (2) the prevailing reportage mode deployed on panels and in articles dealing with Shakespearean appropriations, which reduces their subjects of study to temporary news items. These days both translation studies and reception studies panels abound, and many more scholars are engaged in related fields. (13) Publications in major venues now regularly feature articles and reviews on related topics. However, until recently many of these contributions amount to nothing more than factual reports without theoretical reflection. (14) The reportage mode--rather than a lack of relevant publications--has accounted for the disinterest by the Shakespeare studies community at large, furthering the ghettoization of reception studies. Paradoxically, as the cultural practice of appropriation and an increasing number of adaptations are "familiarly known," they become ornamental, if not predictably exotic, objects for exhibition that invite only brief glances and...
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