Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-ph5wq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T15:07:46.534Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Post-Textual Shakespeare

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2011

Peter Holland
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame, Indiana
HTML view is not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the 'Save PDF' action button.

Summary

No tongue, all eyes! Be silent.

(The Tempest, 4.1.59)

In 2007, a curious billboard appeared in London advertising the move from Waterloo to St Pancras stations for the London hub of the Eurorail train to Paris. Above the logo ‘London is changing’ was featured the image of a skeleton kneeling on a stage, holding in his bony hand the fully fleshed head of a man who looked back at the skeleton's skull with astonishment. In 2004 and 2005, a poster campaign in Swiss cities advertised the Espace 2 channel of Radio Suisse Romande with the image of two teens kissing in a subway train filled with inattentive passengers, accompanied by the simple, one-word caption, ‘Shakespeare.’ These advertisements provoke a deceptively simple question: is this Shakespeare? In what sense Shakespeare? To ask the question ‘is this Shakespeare?’ is to ponder the nature of the boundaries that extend around the designation ‘Shakespearian’, laden though that designation is with cultural power and value. Like lines on a map, those boundaries may have the illusion of permanence at a given moment, but in reality they are always in flux, constantly being renegotiated in response to a variety of cultural forces. Here I will be discussing a particular kind of limit case that poses a challenge to one of the founding principles of Shakespeare studies. My claim, in a nutshell, is that both popular culture and avant-garde performance have transgressed and redrawn the boundary of what can constitute ‘Shakespeare’ with ever-greater insistence in the last twenty years, and that they have done so in response to a newly powerful cultural dominant in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Though I will eventually turn to two noteworthy recent performances of Shakespeare, I begin with examples from advertising because advertising stands at the intersection of popular culture and avant-garde aesthetics, amplifying (and thus making visible) ideological and representational strategies it borrows from elsewhere. Though the aims of the ads and the performances are quite different, what they reveal are the traces of processes at work in popular and performance culture more generally. I hope to suggest how, under the pressure of mass mediatization, contemporary Shakespeare may be undergoing something of a paradigm shift that raises foundational questions about how we, as Shakespearian professionals, conceptualize the ‘essential’ or ‘authentic’ Shakespeare and situate his cultural value.

Type
Chapter
Information
Shakespeare Survey , pp. 145 - 162
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

References

1801
1842
1839
1844
1858
1869
1913
Novak, PeterWhere Lies Your Text?’: in American Sign Language TranslationShakespeare Survey 61Cambridge 2008 74CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mitchell, W. J. T.Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual RepresentationChicago 1995 1Google Scholar
2005
Mirzoeff, NicholasThe Visual Culture ReaderLondon 2002Google Scholar
Sturken, MaritaCartwright, LisaPractices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual CultureOxford 2007Google Scholar
Elkins, StanleyVisual Studies: A Sceptical IntroductionLondon 2003Google Scholar
Crary's, JonathanTechniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth CenturyCambridge, MA 1992Google Scholar
Wells, StanleyStanton, SarahThe Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on StageCambridge 2002 58CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Appadurai, ArjunDisjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural EconomyModernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of GlobalizationMinnesota 1996 27Google Scholar
1968
Buchanan, JudithShakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb DiscourseCambridge 2009 119Google Scholar
Worthen, W. B.Shakespearean GeographiesShakespeare and the Force of Modern PerformanceCambridge 2003 117CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pavis, PatriceIntroduction: Toward a Theory of Interculturalism in Theatre?The Intercultural Performance ReaderPavis, PatriceLondon 1996 1Google Scholar
Murray, SimonKeefe, JohnPhysical Theatres: A Critical IntroductionLondon 2007Google Scholar
2007
1994
Derrida, JacquesThe Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of RepresentationWriting and DifferenceChicago 1978 232Google Scholar
Auslander, PhilipLiveness: Performance in a Mediatized CultureLondon 1999Google Scholar
Anderman, JoanMystery Theater: British Troupe Punchdrunk Teams with the ART to Explode Theatergoers’ ExpectationsBoston Globe 4 2009Google Scholar
O’Brien, GeoffreyThe Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the 20th CenturyNew York 1995Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×