World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance (review)

That Shakespeare has now become not merely a British, European, or Anglo-American cultural icon but a genuinely global phenomenon poses considerable challenges to those concerned with his cultural afterlife. The complex relationship between Shakespeare's status as a worldwide cultural lingua franca and the dizzyingly various "local" contexts in which Shakespeare has been coaxed to speak is the subject of World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance.

This ambitious collection serves several purposes at once. First, the volume offers a judicious sampling of recent Shakespearean appropriations, many of which have not been addressed before by scholars. The sheer range of cultures addressed in the seventeen core essays is remarkable for a relatively short book. Examples are drawn from North America, Latin America, Europe, the Indian subcontinent, Asia, and the South Pacific; only Africa, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union go unrepresented. Second, all the contributors seek to situate their chosen appropriations in the specific histories, practices, and concerns of local cultures, often stressing how Shakespeare has become a means to address issues of national or subcultural identity through a global medium. One of the great strengths of the collection is how clearly and concisely the essays sketch out the local contexts they examine. Third, throughout the volume are fascinating theoretical reflections upon the complex ways in which the global and local reshape each other through intercultural performance. Too often, the global is aligned with homogenizing corporate or multinational interests, while the local is aligned with the embattled but heroically sustained indigenous culture of the subaltern. Here, such alignments are not assumed. As this volume represents the field, no clear overarching politics or aesthetic governs Shakespearean appropriation worldwide. Some appropriations are in service of conventional, even reactionary, values; others are oppositional; still others elude easy political categorization. Although the theoretical framework of postcolonialism and cultural materialism informs nearly all of the essays, the majority seek to problematize the dichotomy between globalist and localist Shakespeares without erasing their differences.

Sonia Massai's introductory essay—one of the strongest in the collection— situates the tension between global and local Shakespeares within recent debates about interculturalism. Using Bourdieu's notion of "field," Massai conceives of global Shakespeare as "the sum of the critical and creative responses elicited by his work" (6), which consists of a matrix of forces and struggles constantly modified by local contributions to the whole. "By stressing the fluidity of the field, its lack of any unilateral hierarchization and the permeability of its boundaries," she writes, "Bourdieu provides a powerful model to describe not only the impact which worldwide appropriations of Shakespeare have on their audiences, but also the raison d'être of a project like World-wide Shakespeares" (7). Among much else, the collection highlights appropriations otherwise not widely known, providing them with an added measure of cultural force to change the very global field they engage.

For the most part, the essays adopt a similar, very effective rhetorical pattern. Each offers a concise overview of a particular local context against which a handful of appropriations are read in close detail. Ruru Li discusses how Much Ado about Nothing and Romeo and Juliet were reshaped by director Jiang Weiguo to accommodate, respectively, the conventions of huangmeixi (a Chinese song form) and huaju (modern Chinese spoken drama). With several recent Indian productions of Macbeth, Poonam Trivedi traces how Shakespeare has moved "from being an instrument of imperial coercion to becoming a voice against post-colonial oppressions" (48). Marcela Kostihová argues that several recent productions of The Taming of the Shrew on the Czech stage reveal "a deeply rooted reluctance to accept social changes inspired by feminist movements in the West" (72). Lukas Erne demonstrates how Friedrich Dürrenmatt reshaped Titus Andronicus into a protest against postwar ideological constructions of Swiss patriotism and fatherland. Robert Shaughnessy deftly chronicles several London productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream in...