Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment ed. by Susan Bennett and Christie Carson (review)

Paraphrasing Antonio’s exchange with Shylock about the proposed terms of his bond, we might sum up the audacious project of the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival thusly:

Ay, ay, thirty-seven plays in different languages.    And in six weeks.And Venus and Adonis, and the Sonnets in still more languages.    Ay, ay, all in six weeks.

In one of the three introductions to this volume’s essays, Tom Bird, the Festival’s Director, outlines the three criteria for inclusion in this international event. First, the project was aimed at the city of London and its varied population which speaks many different languages—the idea being to attract new audiences to the Globe by presenting Shakespeare in “their” language. The second criterion was languages in which Shakespeare had been produced for a long time, even though they might not have a strong population base in London. Third, an inevitably mushy category of “heartfelt, genuine, and mouth-watering” productions that were too hard to turn down (14). English-language theaters were excluded; thus, for better or for worse, the Stratford Festival Theatre of Canada, performing Shakespeare since the early 1950s, had no place in this international venture. Coinciding with the celebratory year of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the World Shakespeare Festival, and nestled within the framework of the Cultural Olympiad, itself a side-kick of the Olympics (by nature both internationalist and nationalist), the Globe to Globe Festival aimed to appeal both to urbi et orbi, the city and the world. It also inevitably reflected the tensions inherent in its positioning within such frameworks.

Edited by Susan Bennett and Christie Carson, Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment attempts to make sense of the Globe to Globe project. As the dust jacket informs us, the volume offers “the only complete critical record” of the Festival. The essays in this book are prefaced by three introductory pieces: a foreword by Artistic Director of the Globe, Dominic Dromgoole, an introduction by scholars Bennett and Carson, and an introduction to the Festival by Tom Bird. The volume concludes with two afterwords by Shakespeare scholars, one by Abigail Rokison, the other by Bridget Escolme. In between, we have forty short chapters by various scholars and a clutch of well-known British actors (Janet Suzman, Samuel West, Harriet Walter); these take the reader chronologically through the six weeks of performances. In some cases we have two short essays about the same production. As well as twenty-three black and white photos, the volume also includes sixteen colour plates, and makes frequent reference both to the blogs written by some of the contributors on the same topics as well as to the accompanying volume’s website. In other words, this handsome, substantial volume expands its wake of potential readers and interpreters beyond the study into the widest possible audience, that of the worldwide web. Rather than attempting “simply” to document the individual productions of the Festival, this book is focused, as its extensive apparatus makes clear, on its role as a platform for debate. Indeed, a few of the chapters provide less detail about the particular production under discussion than they do theoretical speculation and analysis.

Ever since Dennis Kennedy first addressed the question of the power of Shakespeare without his language (Foreign Shakespeare, 1993), there has been a steady stream, still continually growing, of publications on the topic of Shakespeare in other cultures and languages, expanding our understanding, perception, and interpretation of the uses of Shakespeare in various countries and periods, while, at the same time, forcing us to reexamine our relationship to these cultures, pasts, Shakespeare’s works, the values they have represented, and represent today. Flowing into this already-large stream of politically-inflected studies is a tributary of more recent vintage, one created by the implications of globalization, which have brought to the fore the complex, often fraught, interrelations of the “global” and...