Intercultural Shakespeare Performance and Globe to Globe Hamlet
Dr Malcolm Cocks (Shakespeare’s Globe) is the convener of our Intercultural Shakespeare Performance symposium on 22 April.
On the 23rd April 2014, a company of twelve actors and four stage managers from Shakespeare’s Globe embarked on a world tour that would attempt to perform Hamlet in every single country in the world between the two Shakespeare anniversaries of 2014 and 2016. Remarkably, the company will have visited some 187 countries and played to audiences in starkly different conditions and venues - ranging from state of the art auditoriums to purpose built outdoor stages and humble sets assembled ad hoc on the side of a road. The scale of the tour is unprecedented, but the Globe-to-Globe World Hamlet tour can be situated within a long history of international Shakespeare performance and intercultural exchange.
Indeed, intercultural Shakespeare production predates the age of jet travel and digital communication. Between c.1590 and 1660, when the theatres were reopened in England, English players toured extensively in Europe, including France and Holland, present-day Germany, Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Poland and Russia. Local actors were sometimes recruited to their ranks, and local playing conventions and languages were sometimes incorporated into their productions. In 1607, in what might be the first Shakespeare performance outside of Europe, Hamlet was reputedly staged on board the Red Dragon - a merchant ship anchored off the coast of Sierra Leone for an audience of Temne leaders. The first printed translations and adaptations of Shakespeare appear in Europe as early as 1620.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, members of the plantocracy entertained English touring companies on their estates where performances were viewed by slaves and settlers alike. By 1825, Jamaican slaves had begun to interpolate scenes from the plays into their Joncanoe carnivals and in the third quarter of the 19th century, black actors in Tobago staged a full-length production of The Merchant of Venice for mixed audiences. The first local language performances and adaptations of Shakespeare in Asia appeared in India 1852 and Asian theatrical innovation continues radically to transform the plays and to extend the limits of what they signify.
Recent decades have seen a steep rise in the number and variety of performances, adaptations,
appropriations, and translations of Shakespeare’s plays around the world. If intercultural Shakespeare
performance is not new, globalisation has created a new critical awareness of the diversified contexts
of performance and reception of Shakespeare at multiple centres around the world. As networks of
cultural and economic exchange between nations expand, cultural production has become
increasingly inflected by a new syncretism. The significance of these changes and the complex, hybrid
meanings encoded in these new forms are the subject of this symposium.
This is an extract from Dr Malcolm Cocks’ essay for the symposium.
We’re pleased to announce the keynote speaks for the symposium will be
Professor Poonam Trivedi (University of Delhi) and Professor Ayanna Thompson (George Washington University). Find out more about the speakers and view the full programme.
Our Intercultural Shakespeare Performance symposium takes place from 9.30am - 6.00pm on 22 April.