Eating Shakespeare by Refskou Anne Sophie; Amorim Marcel Alvaro de; Carvalho Vinicius Mariano de

Author:Refskou, Anne Sophie; Amorim, Marcel Alvaro de; Carvalho, Vinicius Mariano de
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2019-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

7

Past and present trajectories for ‘Global Shakespeare’: Mark Thornton Burnett in conversation with Anne Sophie Refskou

ASR I would like to begin by addressing that ‘other word’ in Global Shakespeare: ‘global’. Although some scholars, such as Alexa Alice Joubin and yourself, have looked more closely at the implications of a ‘global’ rather than a ‘world’ or ‘worldwide’ Shakespeare, it seems worth re-evaluating the nomination of the discipline (if we can call Global Shakespeare a discipline) at this point in its life-cycle. This would, among other things, mean asking you to what extent you feel that Global Shakespeare has critically addressed globalization and globalization theories. Not least in terms of economics and capitalism.

MTB To an extent I think scholarship related to ‘Global Shakespeare’ has addressed globalization in thinking about questions to do with economics, capitalism and the market, but there is much more work to be done on critically necessary issues here. It is very interesting how globalization impacts on culture because it can operate in so many different and sometimes contradictory ways. And I believe that sometimes there is an assumption that Shakespeare is a non-fluctuating barometer of cultural capital: that he works as a kind of constant. But if you drill down a little into the various examples, a much more diffuse picture emerges. As much as Shakespeare is seen as a passport to global visibility, he can also operate as box-office poison, as some critics and directors have claimed. To produce a global Shakespeare film, for example, does not necessarily mean guaranteeing yourself the limelight on the festival circuit or in cinemas and digital media. To give two different examples: Vishal Bhardwaj’s films – the Shakespeare trilogy of Maqbool [2004], Omkara [2006] and Haider [2014] – now have their place assured in the Shakespearean film canon around the world. One needs to think about why that is. Is it to do with exposure? Is it to do with aesthetics and quality? Is it to do with Indian film industries and how these are plugged into other networks? And then there is such a film as An Athens Summer Night’s Dream [dir. Dimitri Athanitis, 1999], which is a Greek adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that seems to have vanished without a trace, at least as far as non-Greek circuits of communication are concerned. What this means is that whenever we are considering ‘Global Shakespeare’ we are dealing with an inevitably skewed and partial sample. And what that means in turn is that generalizations become difficult and complex: we always have to be careful and contextual, as a result. There are other questions, too. Who controls the circuits of visibility and invisibility, presence and non-presence, and why? All of this needs to be taken into account when we are thinking about the economic interstices of Shakespearean production.

That film – An Athens Summer Night’s Dream – belongs to a different context and film culture, of course, but the point remains that globalization works multifariously and unpredictably in terms of Shakespeare’s capital. There are the beginnings of very good scholarly work on this.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.