Latin American Shakespeares (review)

This is an extraordinary book that compiles various approaches to the influences of Shakespeare in Latin American literary, dramatic and performative acts ranging from the nineteenth century through the present. The book is divided in three parts: Stages, Pages and Screens, preceded by an introduction and concluding with an expansive bibliography by José Ramón Díaz Fernández. However, the predominance of the essays reveals the overwhelming interest in Shakespeare's theatre and performance. Thus, eleven of the fifteen essays reflect issues on performance, theatre adaptations and translations. In the introduction, Rick Santos presents the idea of the "mestizo" Shakespeare through the manifestation of "cultural cannibalism," well known through the "Manifesto Antropófago" (1928) by Oswald de Andrade. With cultural cannibalism in mind, the studies in the book explore the extent of Shakespeare in the high and low cultures in Latin America.

In part I, José Roberto O'Shea questions popularization of Shakespeare introduced by João Caetano dos Santos. He was Brazil's first Shakespearean actor/manager and founder of a national company of national theatre, who paradoxically produced Shakespeare but did no such thing for national playwrights and productions. Roberto Ferreira da Rocha does a close analysis of the failure of Paulo Pontes' project, Coriolanus (1974) under Brazil's dictatorship. He finds that even though Pontes' ideal of theatre was "national" and "popular," Coriolanus was a "contradiction" since it was performed in theatres for the middle class excluding the lower classes. Jesús Tronch-Pérez focuses on the issue of theatre adaptation and the freedom that Mexican writers of late 19th century have taken in making Hamlet an "arreglo." Even though it makes this play more accessible to Mexican audiences, this adaptation is full of melancholy and romanticism, taking away Hamlet's "revenging task and becom[ing], instead, an unavenging prince" (68). In "Strategies of Deletion in Pablo Neruda's Romeo y Julieta," Gregary Racz comments on the intentional omissions that Pablo Neruda did in his translation of Romeo y Julieta to be staged at the ITUCH. He attests that even though Neruda's adaptation had in mind the Chilean society of 1964 "both political ideology and aesthetic engagement should have indelibly shaped his strategies of deletion" (72).

With an emphasis on translation and paraphrasing of Shakespeare's work, Juan Zaro offers us a meticulous article on the work of political exiled Spanish poet, León Felipe as a loyal translator of Shakespeare's work. Catherine Boyle focuses on the importance of lyrical connections that Chilean poet, Nicanor Parra created between his translation of King Lear and his play La Negra Ester, emphasizing how popular language brought the necessary "Chilean-ness" to the stage in 1992, a transitional period after Pinochet's military regime. In "Guilherme Schiffer Durães's Caliban: From Canonical Text to Resistance," Margarida Gandara Rauen writes an excellent investigation of the creative process of the adaptation of The Tempest in a monologue called A-tor-men-ta-do Calibanus (2000) staged in an urban and globalized contemporary Brazil. She emphasizes that Durães's vision of Calibanus challenges colonialism's figure of "mestiço" as the victim and creates a "hybrid of the miscegenated Americas" (133) who has an "anarchic spirit with a clear sense of contemporary social and political dilemmas" (132).

In Part II, Grace Tiffany examines Borges's fascination with Shakespeare in his writings of plays, his versatile English and his creation of dramatic characters that could "enter eternity" (162). In "Othello and Hugo in Machado de Assis," José Luiz Passos traces back the influence Shakespeare, especially Othello, and Victor Hugo had on this realist writer, commenting that "Shakespeare's impact on the development of the nineteenth-century Brazilian novel has much to do with Machado's conviction that a novel should portray character development through a plausible construction of action and motive" (176). Lorena Terando explores the possibility of an indirect thematic connection between The Tempest and Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos...