Globe to Globe: 37 Plays, 37 Languages

The Offer and the Experience

Seeing thirty-seven Shakespeare plays in thirty-seven languages is probably something you do only once in a lifetime. The chance to do this in the space of six or seven weeks is rare. So the offer from Shakespeare's Globe Theatre—"If you're prepared to stand, you can see every play of Shakespeare's, each in a different language, for only £100"—was too good to miss.¹ And now that I have stood through every production, here are some observations.

Of the wider experience, I will say almost nothing: nothing about London Bridge and the walk past Southwark Cathedral, the Golden Hind and the rose window of Winchester Palace. I will pass over what it is like to stand in the open-air theater; the smell of the wet wood after or during rain when you press your nose to the stage; and the feeling in the interval when you nip out and rest your leg muscles, sitting on Bankside wharf, marveling at the tidal range of the Thames, letting your eyes wander across the skyline to the dome of Saint Paul's. Nor will I mention my fellow theatergoers: the proto-community of groundlings, eccentrics, and enthusiasts. All that is the baseless fabric of experience and will melt into air, into thin air. The play's the thing.

What Is the Point of Watching King John in Armenian?

Unless you are a prodigious polyglot, then seeing thirty-seven plays in thirty-seven languages means that most of the time you don't understand the individual words, although you hope to follow the sense. It is like watching a foreign language movie without subtitles, or listening to opera in an arcane dialect of Chinese. Or like being a child at an early stage of language acquisition, intuiting meanings by gesture, intonation, and an intelligent grasp of context and probability.

What is to stop the whole experience becoming boring? First—to be basic— most plays were abridged to fit "the two hours' traffic of our stage" (plus a quarter of an hour's interval).² Second, the Globe Theatre helped out with two digital screens discreetly positioned above and at the sides of the stage, so as not to interfere with the main sightline onto the stage. These screens summarized the action; their synopses, particularly during less-well-known plays, were handy. The main hold on our interest, however, was the quality of the productions, which is my focus in this essay.

I did learn a few individual words and could now tell you the Lithuanian for "quintessence" and the Swahili for "Mistress Ford." But insofar as poetry is what gets lost in translation, then watching Shakespeare in a foreign language means encountering the plays less as verse and more as a collection of recurrent plot devices, stock characters, and narrative structure. Not knowing the language, you focus more on the paralinguistic: tone of voice and body language, helped along by your general knowledge of Shakespeare and your particular knowledge of the play being performed. Never mind the claim that only seven percent of communication is transmitted through the words themselves. (That spuriously precise statistic is a misrepresentation of research by Albert Mehrabian.)³ An electrifying production is, in any language, an electrifying production.

The Language of the Stage

Think of each stage production as a new language whose "grammar" of rules, devices, and conventions—visual vocabulary and repertoire of movements and gestures—must first be established and then deployed with coherence and panache. So the Israeli production of The Merchant of Venice began with the gentile Venetians, decked out in fetching creams and pinks to suggest their urbane frivolity, dancing a joyous masque.⁴ Shylock and Tubal entered, dressed in somber reds, and then the high-spirited male masquers returned, flown with insolence and wine, to humiliate, bind, and beat up a frightened Shylock. Before a line was spoken, the production had established themes of two-facedness and masked aggression, revelry, violence, and revenge. ("The villainy you teach me, I will execute" [3.1.71-72].) Some characters were...