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3.2 Shakespeare in performance

Many of the translators of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets are major figures in the world of letters in and beyond their own cultures: August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Paul Celan in Germany, Boris Pasternak in Russia, Tsubouchi Shфyф in Japan, Liang Shiqiu in Taiwan, Julius K. Nyere in Tanzania, Aimй Cйsaire in Martinique, Rabindranath Tagore in India, Voltaire in France, Elyas Abu Shabakeh in Syria, Wole Soyinka in Nigeria, Charles and Mary Lamb in England, and countless others. Some cultures have canonical, received versions for readers and actors, such as Zhu Shenghao’s Chinese translation of The Complete Works, but the audience in other cultures, notably France, cannot claim to have any set of standard translations (Morse 2006, 79). There are numerous stage and film directors, painters, composers, choreographers, and artists, who engage and transform Shakespeare, as discussed in other chapters in this volume. The proliferation of Shakespeare in translation, especially in non-European languages, makes nonsense the notion of a homogenized, authenticated Shakespeare in British English.

Translation is far from a one-way street from the English text to a foreign one. Rewritings of Shakespeare sometimes refer to and borrow from one another, resembling the process of cross-pollination. Examples include Chee Kong Cheah’s Chicken Rice War, a Singapore film that parodies Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, and Wu Hsing-kuo’s reading of Macbeth in his The Kingdom of Desire, a Beijing opera play, that alludes to Akira Kurosawa’s film Throne of Blood. These borrowings have enriched our understanding of Shakespeare and world cultures. It is noteworthy that Shakespeare was not always translated directly from English into foreign languages. Because of historical or political reasons, double or triple filtering was not uncommon. When composing the choral symphonyRoméo et Juliette, Hector Berlioz worked from Pierre Le Tourneur’s French translation of David Garrick’s English adaptation of Shakespeare’s play. French neoclassical versions were the foundation for early Russian translations of Shakespeare, while the first Shakespearean performance in colonial Korea was a Japanese version of Hamlet in 1909. Teodoro de la Calle’s 1802 Spanish translation of Othello was based on Ducis’s French version. As a result, Shakespeare in translation has been used as the proving ground of translation theory, and it is the core of the Shakespeare industry.
Genres have a role to play in translation as well. The tragedies and some comedies are more frequently translated, staged, and filmed around the world, because of their capacity to be more easily detached from their native cultural settings and the self-reinforcing cycle of familiarity. In India, for example, Hamlet and the Merchant of Venice have been translated more than fifty times and The Comedy of Errors has over thirty versions in different languages in India, but the only history plays to have been translated into Hindi are Henry V and Richard II, and only one version each. While Shakespeare’s global reputation may seem to be driven by translations of his tragedies, comedies, and the sonnets because of the sheer number of performances and translations since the seventeenth century, the history plays have their own histories of global reception beginning with a 1591 Polish performance of Philip Waimer’s stage version ofEdward III in Gdansk. Laurence Olivier’s wartime film version of Henry V in 1944 is far from the only or the earliest translations–interlingual, intralingual, or intersemiotic–of the history plays, though each instance of translation focuses on different articulations of national histories.
British performances, understandably, are more frequently geared toward constructing a coherent national identity in relation to Britain’s friends and foes on the European continent (Hoenselaars, 2004, 9–34). Non-anglophone translations of history plays, on the other hand, often use the plays to interrogate the notion of national history. One of the better-known examples in the West is Richard III: An Arab Tragedy by Sulayman Al-Bassam of Kuwait, a production that has toured widely around the world. Plays such as Henry V that polarizes the English and the French have a contentious reception in France and Europe, serving as a forum for artistic experiment and political debates. Still farther ashore, plays from both the first and second tetralogies, excluding King John, found new homes in nationalist projects of modernization and school performances in Japan, Taiwan, China, and elsewhere. While the Asian translators and adaptors’ interest did not always lie in medieval English history (or Shakespeare’s imagination thereof), such as the feud between the Houses of York and Lancaster, they drew parallels to inspire analogous reflections on local histories. Kinoshita Junji’s translations of Henry VI and Richard III echoes The Tale of the Heike, a thirteenth-century Japanese literary masterpiece chronicling the clashes between the Heike and the Genji clans. Henry IV appeared in prose as a serialised story in The Short Story Magazine in early twentieth-century Shanghai. It was soon published as a volume and prominently advertised. Its appeal was due in no small part to the Chinese discourse of modernity and unified national identity in a time of national crisis as the country was threatened by Japanese and European colonial powers. The Chinese intellectuals of the time looked outward for other nations’ experiences. More recently, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 were adapted into a play for the Taiwanese glove puppet theatre in 2002, a hybrid genre blending elements of Chinese opera, marionette theatre, and street theatre.
By the twenty-first century, all of Shakespeare’s plays, followed by the Sonnets, have had long histories of translation. 2009 witnessed the publication of a 748-page critical anthology with a title that parallels and talks back to the 69-page quarto of 1609: William Shakespeare’s Sonnets for the First Time Globally Reprinted: A Quartercentenary Anthology with a DVD, containing samples of the sonnets translated, performed, or parodied in more than 70 languages and dialects. Since Shakespeare’s sonnets in translation have been discussed extensively in the anthology, this chapter will focus on the plays. The spread of Shakespeare’s work has accelerated due to the rapid localisation of globally circulating ideas and with the globalisation of local forms of expression, fuelled first by trade and slavery, and now by the digital and Internet culture. A new age of Shakespeare in translation is upon us.
Thousands (perhaps even millions) of performances of William Shakespeare's plays have occurred since the end of the 16th century. While Shakespeare was alive, many of his greatest plays were performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men butKing's Men acting companies at the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres. [1] [2] Among the actors of these original performances were Richard Burbage (who played the title role in the first performances of Hamlet, Othello, Richard III and King Lear), [3] Richard Cowley, and William Kempe.
Shakespeare's plays continued to be staged after his death until the Interregnum (1642–1660), when most public stage performances were banned by the Puritan rulers. After the English Restoration, Shakespeare's plays were performed in playhouses, with elaborate scenery, and staged with music, dancing, thunder, lightning, wave machines, and fireworks. During this time the texts were «reformed» and «improved» for the stage, an undertaking which has seemed shockingly disrespectful to posterity.
Victorian productions of Shakespeare often sought pictorial effects in «authentic» historical costumes and sets. The staging of the reported sea fights and barge scene in Antony and Cleopatra was one spectacular example. [4] Such elaborate scenery for the frequently changing locations in Shakespeare's plays often led to a loss of pace. Towards the end of the 19th century, William Poel led a reaction against this heavy style. In a series of «Elizabethan» productions on a thrust stage, he paid fresh attention to the structure of the drama. In the early 20th century, Harley Granville-Barker directed quarto and folio texts with few cuts, [5] while Edward Gordon Craig and others called for abstract staging. Both approaches have influenced the variety of Shakespearean production styles seen today. [6]
It is not clear for which companies Shakespeare wrote his early plays. The title page of the 1594 edition of Titus Andronicus reveals that the play had been acted by three different troupes. After the plagues of 1592–3, Shakespeare's plays were performed by his own company at The Theatre and the Curtain in Shoreditch, north of the Thames. Londoners flocked there to see the first part of Henry IV, Leonard Digges recording, «Let but Falstaff come, Hal, Poins, the rest…and you scarce shall have a room». When the company found themselves in dispute with their landlord, they pulled The Theatre down and used the timbers to construct the Globe Theatre, the first playhouse built by actors for actors, on the south bank of the Thames at Southwark. The Globe opened in autumn 1599, with Julius Caesar one of the first plays staged. Most of Shakespeare's greatest post-1599 plays were written for the Globe, including Hamlet, Othello and King Lear.
After the Lord Chamberlain's Men were renamed the King's Men in 1603, they entered a special relationship with the new King James. Although the performance records are patchy, the King's Men performed seven of Shakespeare's plays at court between 1 November 1604 and 31 October 1605, including two performances of The Merchant of Venice. After 1608, they performed at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre during the winter and the Globe during the summer. The indoor setting, combined with the Jacobean fashion for lavishly staged masques, allowed Shakespeare to introduce more elaborate stage devices. In Cymbeline, for example, Jupiter descends «in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on their knees.»
The actors in Shakespeare's company included the famous Richard Burbage, William Kempe, Henry Condell and John Heminges. Burbage played the leading role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare's plays, including Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, among other characters. He was replaced around the turn of the 16th century by Robert Armin, who played roles such as Touchstone in As You Like It and the fool in King Lear. In 1613, Sir Henry Wotton recorded that Henry VIII «was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and ceremony». On 29 June, however, a cannon set fire to the thatch of the Globe and burned the theatre to the ground, an event which pinpoints the date of a Shakespeare play with rare precision.