Friday, January 20, 2017

Welcome to Global Shakespeares 2017!

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].

17 comments:

  1. "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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  3. “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.

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  4. "Shakespeare competes with Prometheus, imitating him by forming human beings feature by feature, but on a colossal scale -- that is why we don't recognize them as our brothers. Then he brings them to life by breathing his spirit into them. He speaks through them all, and we recognize the kinship" (Goethe 165).

    In this passage, I interpret Goethe's description as a salute to Shakespeare's duality as an artist and a communicator. Shakespeare was able to create narratives that are "totally beyond the imagination of most" but is also able to relay those stories in a way that allows "recognition of the kinship" (Goethe 164, 165). That quality is what transcends all of Shakespeare's work and subsequent adaptations.

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  5. "We try to make Hamlet mean for our purposes now: others will try to make it mean differently for their purposes then (or now)... but there is no final, essential or 'real' meaning at the end of. There is no end. There is only and always the business of 'meaning by'" (Hawkes 8).

    Hawkes views the meanings of Shakespearean works, more specifically Hamlet, as ever changing. While Shakespeare may have had a specific meaning behind the words it has become more important to view the words in your own way. The real question to the readers of Shakespearean works from any time and place is not a question of what was the true purpose of his words, but rather what are my and everyone else's interpretations.

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  6. "That is why all French tragedies are parodies of themselves. How regulated everything is! They resemble each other like shoes..." (Goethe 164).

    Goethe 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.

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  7. "I don't know who first had the idea of putting historical-political spectacles on the stage; that is a good question for anyone writing a scholarly treatise. Whether or not the donor of being the originator falls to Shakespeare, it was he who raised this type of drama to a level that we must still take to be the highest, totally beyond the imagination of most" (Goethe, 164).

    This quote credits Shakespeare with popularising the political spectacles as dramas.

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  8. "'He was, after all, a very English poet, and one can easily misinterpret the universal by misunderstanding the particular.'" (Bohannon 1)

    This 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.

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  9. "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.

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  10. In "Shakespeare in the Bush" Laura Bohannon recounts her experience sharing the story of Hamlet with the elders of an African tribe. In her article, Bohannon writes that one of the elders told her "I told you that if we knew more about Europeans, we would find they really were very like us. In our country also... the younger brother marries the elder brother's widow and becomes the father of his children. Now, if your uncle, who married your widowed mother, is your father's full brother, then he will be a real father to you" (Bohannon 3).

    Bohannon had been telling the story of Hamlet to the elders when she got to the part about Claudius marrying his deceased brother's widow when one of the elders said the above quotation. This quotation reveals the stark differences between the cultures that exist in this African tribe and in Shakespeare's Europe. For the tribesmen, Claudius' marriage to Gertrude seemed natural and expected, but to Bohannon and most Europeans, the marriage was seen as immoral and wrong. Claudius' marriage served as the catalyst to the main plot of the story for Shakespeare, but to the tribesmen it was just completely normal.

    This example shows how difficult it is to convey the stories and messages created by Shakespeare to people of different cultures. Even if the play can be translated perfectly, sometimes cultural differences can make key plot points confusing or misunderstood.

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  12. Laura 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.
    In "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.

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  13. "There was a murmur of applause. Hamlet was again a good story to them, but it no longer
    seemed quite the same story to me. "

    Bohannon highlights how her perception of Shakespeare was forced to change in order to prove that Shakespeare has a universal meaning– ironically, the culturally-demanded alterations to the original story line emphasise that the contrary may be true.

    "it was, ironically his very forgiveness that made him useful as a model for the Germanic future: unser Shakespeare was an outright appropriation, dependent upon the absence of an existing tradition. Shakespeare could be made to signify what no familiar literature could signify, and simultaneously serve to validate Schiller's own dramaturgy."

    Although there are variations of Shakespeare that have seeped into different cultures, Shakespeare's renown is such that he has become a touchstone of high quality theatre and writing across all cultures.

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  14. “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)

    Recognizing 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.

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  15. “”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)

    In '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.

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  16. "In these examples 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." (Kennedy 5)

    The author is making the insight on the limitations of conducting Shakespeare in his native tongue and land, as England is not always best suited to tell and understand his plays that are concerned with inferior nations and the roots of rebellion.

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  17. "In these examples 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." (Kennedy 5)

    The author is making the insight on the limitations of conducting Shakespeare in his native tongue and land, as England is not always best suited to tell and understand his plays that are concerned with inferior nations and the roots of rebellion.

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