Edwin Landseer,(1848)

 
 
I spend a lot of time thinking about Shakespeare.

One of the reasons I spend a lot of time thinking about Shakespeare is that, like everything I enjoy, Shakespeare, or, to be more precise, the things we do with Shakespeare, often pulls me in conflicting directions. Attending a performance of Elizabethan or Jacobean theatre brings me genuine pleasure. At the same time, however, I also recognise that the cult of Shakespeare arose in concert with the colonial agenda of the British Empire. Today Shakespeare remains the archetypal dead white man who continues to dominate the literary canon and the reverence with which he is routinely treated, I believe, is less to do with his literary brilliance and more to do with the repackaging of the colonial myth of Western artistic dominance. I love watching Shakespeare, but I also love seeing people thumb their nose at Shakespeare in clever ways.

I do not like to see Shakespeare reduced. When I encounter Shakespeare adaptations or reinterpretations in the wild I recognise that the fact that I am familiar with something does not give me any authority over how it is used. Shakespeare belongs to everyone equally and I have no right to tell someone else what to do with his works. At the same time, I do not like the idea that Shakespeare needs to be reinvented, particularly when the reinvention occurs on the ground of ‘accessibility’.

One of the reasons why making Shakespeare ‘accessible’ irks me is that I feel it demeans the audience. Last year, while living in Indonesia, I taught A Midsummer Night’s Dream to both of my English Literature classes. Most of my students were born and raised in Jakarta and spoke Indonesian (or in a small minority of cases Dutch or Chinese) at home. They were all in their mid-teens. We spent several months working our way through the play. We stomped our way around the classroom to understand meter, we wrote messages to each other in early modern English, we performed short scenes, memorised monologues, watched sections from films, summarised readings of the play, wrote essays, flew to Singapore to watch Shakespeare’s Globe perform and, finally, performed a full version of the play as our annual school production. (Over the course of the year I made sure we challenged the myth of Shakespeare as being without peer, and I also made sure that female authors and writers of colour were well-represented in the rest of the syllabus.)

They loved it. In fact, they loved Dream more than any other text we looked at. They struggled with the language but they were up to the challenge. I was extremely proud of all they accomplished. The experience left me convinced that my love of Shakespeare was transmissible, and that teenagers are often a lot smarter than some would give them credit for.

It is because of this experience that I can empathise with those such as James Shapiro, Bitter Gertrude, or the numerous scholars on the listservs to which I subscribe, who have voiced concerns over the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On project to ‘translate’ all of Shakespeare’s plays (at least, all which are available and currently considered a part of the canon) into modern English. The grounds for this reinvention, it seems, is to make the works more readily understandable for actors and audiences. The idea that Shakespeare needs to be ‘translated’ conjures for me images of audiences who want to feel cultured, but also don’t want to have to work as hard as my students and I did.

My objections are, of course, horribly presentist. Those who, like me, hold that OFS are giving in to lazy audiences tend to see this as a departure from the ways in which we have always approached Shakespeare. We are wrong. There is good reason to assume that, during his lifetime and beyond, Shakespeare’s plays have been subject to revision, rewriting, and shifting fashions in theatre based upon audience tastes. Until the early eighteenth century the idea of textual fidelity as we understand it today simply did not exist. Companies frequently added to, edited, and completely reinvented Shakespeare’s plays. During a large part of its performance history, King Lear, for example, was played with a happy ending. Our modern way of giving Shakespeare (even with Elizabethan dress on the stage at The Globe and with original pronunciation) is not a pure transmission from the Elizabethan stage, but the product of editing, shifting fashions in performance, convention, and guesswork. So much of Elizabethan and Jacobean stagecraft has been lost to history that even when we deliberately seek to present ‘authentic’ Shakespeare today, we are at a loss as to what, exactly, that would look like.

Historically Shakespeare’s editors have altered the plays in ways which would seem somewhat daring, if not profane, today. To cite just a few pertinent examples, in 1807 James Bowlder published the first volume of The Family Shakespeare which omitted and rewrote words and passages which, in Bowlder’s view, were unsuitable for young minds. In the same year Charles and Mary Lamb published Tales from Shakespeare which used very little language from Shakespeare and, similarly, was aimed at children. Significantly, both of these volumes were instrumental in disseminating Shakespeare and elevating him to his modern standing. Modernising and rewriting Shakespeare in print, clearly, is not a new phenomena. In modern times Shakespeare-inspired films such as Scotland PA, and the No Fear Shakespeare study texts have continued to be popular. Indeed, the possibility of adapting Shakespeare has given rise to texts which seek to challenge the myth of Anglophone cultural dominance perpetuated through Shakespeare. Suzuki Tadashi’s King Lear, for example, forges an intercultural space which draws liberally upon both Shakespeare and Asian theatrical traditions without feeling the need to adhere completely to either. We might also note Inoue Hidenori’s overtly irreverent pop adaptations of Shakespeare or the intercultural texts Kathkali King Lear or Welcome Msomi’s uMabatha.

I would argue, then, that the question is not why we (I) do not like to see Shakespeare being ‘translated’ to suit audience tastes, but why now? What makes OFS’s departure from modern conventions around Shakespeare particularly repugnant? When we consider all that has been done to Shakespeare over the centuries we have had his works, the idea that a particular fashion of modern performance needs to be protected is, if anything, an aberration. After centuries of reinvention, we can safely assume that Shakespeare and Shakespeare adaptation is not a zero sum game.

If my apparently ill-founded annoyance at the idea of Shakespeare being adapted to suit audience tastes is to hold any legitimacy then perhaps the question I need to ask, then, is not if we should rewrite Shakespeare, but why? OFS write ‘[i]t is our hope and expectation that these translations will inspire audience members to return to Shakespeare’s original words, ideally with even greater understanding and enjoyment’ and as I read these words, even with history against me, I cannot help but feel uncomfortable. Will these modern translations be a bridge to the ‘original’? Or will they, for certain audience members, be a substitute? Will OFS deprive audiences of the pleasure and sense of accomplishment my tenth and eleventh graders felt? Given that Shakespeare’s plots were, themselves, almost entirely borrowed, if we take away his language then what we are left with is not what he created but what he preserved. OFS’s Play On project might, then, be effectively described using Dennis Kennedy’s eminently applicable term ‘Shakespeare without Shakespeare’; the final version of the Play On plays may be infused with the plots that made Shakespeare famous but empty of his language to the point that they constitute little more than an extended Shakespeare reference. To rid Shakespeare of Shakespeare for the sake of ‘understanding and enjoyment’, I still think, is an insult to one’s audience.