Dear students: Welcome to the Spring 2017 semester and to our course blog. Please feel free to scroll or search through past years of this blog - it's a kind of archive of what your predecessors have found interesting about this topic, starting with the very first Kilachand class in the fall of 2010.
Dear visitors: this is a blog about Shakespeare appropriations written by students at Boston University. Citation format: "[Post author's name], blog post on BU Global Shakespeares blog, [date], [post URL].
Dear visitors: this is a blog about Shakespeare appropriations written by students at Boston University. Citation format: "[Post author's name], blog post on BU Global Shakespeares blog, [date], [post URL].
"That limited notion of historicism must always yield to the view that human beings are permanently involved in a continuing process of meaning-making, one to which all texts, as aspects of human culture, are always subject, and beyond which they may be conceivable but will remain ungraspable" (Hawkes 7). Essentially, Hawkes suggests that when people try to understand texts, they make meaning of them within a particular context or their time period. How people derive meaning today will be different than how people perceive the same texts in the future, since there exists no "real" end meaning. It is purely interpretive.
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ReplyDelete“Shakespeare doesn’t mean: we mean by Shakespeare." (Hawkes 3). Hawkes is exploring the idea of meaning within Shakespeare. Instead of a final, definite meaning occurring within his works, it is suggested that the meaning we create from the work is not a direct lesson from Shakespeare but instead what we got out of it.
ReplyDelete"That is why all French tragedies are parodies of themselves. How regulated everything is! They resemble each other like shoes..." (Goethe 164).
ReplyDeleteGoethe comments on how it is difficult to be truly original because story lines can be so similar they seem like sisters. Contemporaries will adapt old tales and tropes in their own ways but creativity comes from being able to raise the common idea to a great honor.
Goethe gives the example of how "[w]hether or not the honor of being the originator [of historical-political spectacles] falls to Shakespeare, it was he who raised..."(Goethe 164) the genre to popularity and great recognition.
"'He was, after all, a very English poet, and one can easily misinterpret the universal by misunderstanding the particular.'" (Bohannon 1)
ReplyDeleteThis quote and Bohannon's article address the misconception that Shakespeare's works have only a singular, and English, interpretation; instead, the work goes on to prove that different cultures can interpret plot points and themes through new lenses.
"In general terms, by the mid-1960s Shakespeare performance, both Anglophone and foreign, sought a message in the play; whatever the message may be, the production almost always achieved its utterance by limiting the manifold possibilities of the raw text" (Kennedy 13). This quote sums up Kennedy's point well in saying that Shakespeare's work lend themselves well to varied interpretations based on the context in which it is performed. This is a sentiment that better illuminates Bohannon's piece on explaining Hamlet to a tribe in Africa.
ReplyDeleteLaura Bohannon is an anthropologist who went to live with, and study, a remote part of a West African tribe, while reading Hamlet at the encouragement of one of her friends in England. In "Shakespeare in the Bush," she recounts how she does her best to explain Hamlet in the tribe's language, often having to explain why some things happened or why some situations' intentions were to be strange when they were normal for the tribe (and vice versa); the men listen and provide input and insights into the story that the people of her/our culture most likely would not have seen.
ReplyDeleteIn "Shakespeare Without His Language" Dennis Kennedy talks about how Shakespeare has been spread around the world for a few hundred years, and how those cultures have taken the essence of Shakespeare's plays and adapted them to their own culture and "current" situations. He also talks about how the English nations have changed how they presented and approached Shakespeare, with many insights from both their own nations and other places and people across the world.
“Thinking about Shakespeare has been influenced by circumstances entirely foreign to those that apply in the Anglo-American tradition, where greater political stability has robbed Shakespeare of some of the danger and force that other countries have (re)discovered in his texts. It is worth remembering that there is no phrase in English equivalent to coup d’etat.”(5)
ReplyDeleteRecognizing the dynamic differences in Shakespeare interpretation spanning time and country of origin, Kennedy explores the deeper social implications behind Shakespeare adaptations in Central and Eastern Europe post World War II. Compared to romantic renditions of Hamlet focusing on the youthful, poetic portrayal of Hamlet’s grief, foreign playwrights like Kott and Höchst revitalized the eerie, menacing qualities of Shakespeare’s plays, highlighting the cruelty of Shakespeare’s time and their own, folding “coded messages”(4) into their portrayals as a means of political activism.
“”But," put in one of the elders, “you must explain what we do not understand, as we do when we tell you our stories.”” (Bohannon, 2)
ReplyDeleteIn 'Shakespeare in the Bush', Bohannon foreshadows the education that is to come with this quote. By outlining the culture of storytelling and providing context she frames the following discussion of Hamlet and provides legitimacy for the opinions of the Tiv. Their thoughts on the play are not viewed as misguided ideas, but fully legitimate and insightful commentary. Bohannon sets up the narration by weaving in the story of the Tiv with the story of Hamlet and thus our knowledge of the Tiv people helps us better understand the discussion she shares with the chief and elders.
“I protested that human nature is pretty much the same the whole world over; at least the general plot and motivation of the greater tragedies would always be clear.” (Bohannon, 1)
Bohannon’s protests to her friend are in fact proving her friend’s point. She claims that human nature is the same, and she is right. The Tiv act and respond in a way that surprises her, but only because their customs are different. Their morality remains intact, they just choose to interpret certain actions differently.