In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Shakespeare Quarterly 54.2 (2003) 232-235



[Access article in PDF]
Shakespeare, Brecht, and the Intercultural Sign. By Antony Tatlow. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. Illus. Pp. x + 297. $59.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Antony Tatlow's Shakespeare, Brecht, and the Intercultural Sign is a quirky, ambitious, contentious, and ultimately rewarding book that tackles what Dennis Kennedy has [End Page 232] identified as "the most important task Shakespeareans face": developing "a theory of cultural exchange that might help us understand what happens when Shakespeare travels abroad" (quoted in Tatlow, 35). For Tatlow, however, the question is not (only) what happens to Shakespeare when his plays are reconfigured to fit a foreign theatrical tradition but what happens to that tradition as it reconfigures itself to accommodate alien material. As Tatlow sees it, intercultural adaptations stage a process of two-fold defamiliarization in which both the culture of the script's origin and the culture of its reception confront a provocatively odd spectacle that is essentially "other" to both—a complex hybrid rather than a simple transmutation. Tatlow contends that artists turn to foreign performance traditions, whether consciously or not, as a means of redressing a lack in their own; thus East Asian theatrical artists import Shakespeare's complex stories to address dimensions of experience unexplored in their own formulaic plots. Similarly, the Western spectator discerns in East Asian adaptations of Shakespeare an intensely disciplined gestural language and sophisticated visual poetry signally missing from Anglo performances constrained by conventions of mimetic realism and character-drawing.

From Tatlow's perspective, such aesthetic dislocations have ideological import. Exposing representational paradigms as arbitrary and alterable in the material theater can implicate them as comparably contingent in the theater of cultural experience, exposing "reality" as an effect of representation, as a sociopolitical construct. Because this construct maintains itself by repressing oppositional energies and epistemes, it creates what Tatlow calls (following Foucault and Erich Fromm) "the social unconscious," a repository of forbidden, potentially transformative impulses perpetually in tension with the dominant ideology. To the extent that foreign expressive forms fill the void created by cultural prohibition, they bring the social unconscious to consciousness. Cultural otherness thus becomes a screen for freed repressions, the foreign an image of native desire. Tatlow employs the phrase "intercultural sign" to denote the aesthetic combustion that enables this destabilizing return of the repressed.

In the first half of the book, Tatlow elaborates this concept in distinctly nonlinear fashion, champions Ariane Mnouchkine's intercultural productions of Shakespeare, and focuses on Brecht as exemplary practitioner of a radically deconstructive theater. Brecht sampled the East Asian anti-mimetic aesthetic and thereby created a hybrid style that, in turn, enabled East Asian directors to adapt Western scripts. Tatlow's own task here is to uncover the historically conditioned anxieties that a text or performance unconsciously circulates, employing a critical method merging psychoanalytic and ethnographic approaches that he calls "textual anthropology." Tatlow identifies the advent of capitalism as the principal stimulus to cultural repression and locates a master narrative in the struggles of the new bourgeois subject, free of feudalism's immobilizing stratifications, to instantiate a cultural fiction of autonomous selfhood.

Because Tatlow regards historical periods as foreign cultures and intercultural performances as historicized texts, the chapters that comprise the second half of the book offer a bracingly eclectic examination of intercultural—and interhistorical—Shakespearean transactions: Shakespeare's own adaptation of Plautus's Menaechmi, otherwise known as The Comedy of Errors; Brecht's adaptation of Coriolanus; and a Chinese production of Macbeth, retitled The Story of the Bloody Hands, done in the style of Kunju, [End Page 233] the oldest surviving form of Chinese opera. Because Tatlow opposes readings that misrecognize the "self" as a site of meaning, his assessment of these adaptations runs somewhat contrary to critical orthodoxy.

He regards the Menaechmi not as a crude, farcical precursor of a more sophisticated Shakespearean comedy but as a vigorously subversive depiction of the instabilities of the constructed self—and thus as a more unmediated register of the tensions attending a new mercantile economy. Similarly, Brecht's adaptation of Coriolanus is...

pdf

Share