Theatre Journal

As my first issue of Theatre Journal, I am delighted to bring together articles under the rubric of “Shakespeare and Theatrical Modernisms.”¹ At least since the advent of Gary Taylor’s Reinventing Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 1989), we have become well used to accounts of the multiple uses to which Shakespeare and his plays have been put and the twentieth century has been a particularly intense period of “reinvention.” The grouping of essays here points to the specifically modernist investments of so many of those twentieth-century recyclings.

Consideration of Shakespeare’s contribution to the aesthetic and ideological paradigm “Modernism” has, of course, attracted considerable attention, most notably books by Hugh Grady (The Modernist Shakespeare)² and Richard Halpern (the recent and provocative Shakespeare Among the Moderns).³ In this regard, Grady claims that modernism “has helped to define and organize how we have read Shakespeare for most of our century” (2). Certainly the trajectories of Anglo-American Shakespearean criticism in the first part of the twentieth century as well as of the role of Shakespeare in the ascendance of New Criticism in the North American academy are, indeed, well-known. Two articles here, Irena Makaryk’s “Shakespeare Right and Wrong” and Inga-Stina Ewbank’s “The Intimate Theatre: Shakespeare Teaches Strindberg Theatrical Modernism,” resituate Shakespeare’s modernist infiuence outside Anglo-American terrain. Makaryk discusses the work of Soviet Ukrainian director Les’ Kurbas’s 1924 production of Macbeth and shows how “modernist” style (in service of a “radical” agenda) brought furious moral critique. Interestingly, she observes that Ukrainian theatre historians today are still convinced that this Kurbas Shakespearean production was “wrong.” Ewbank describes Shakespeare as a “founding father” of Strindberg’s modernist practice and charts a changing, but never-ending impact on Strindberg’s ideas. We can see that Strindberg’s commitment to Shakespeare’s plays continued to shape his understanding of the potentialities of theatre and the kind of theatrical space that would best realize his ideas.

Dennis Kennedy’s essay on “Shakespeare and Cultural Tourism” takes us through the emergence of Shakespeare festivals (as he puts it, “[t]he Shakespeare of the postwar festivals was a modernist Shakespeare”) to a contemporary Disneyfication of Shakespearean production. The marketability of Shakespeare in a global economy knows no bounds, it seems; that this is well-established prior to what we recognize as our own “post-modern” moment reinforces the debts of postmodernity to the modernism it imagines itself to supercede. Similarly, Richard Paul Knowles, in “From Dream to Machine: Peter Brook, Robert Lepage, and the Contemporary Shakespearean Director as (Post)Modernist,” makes evident the modernist impulses in postmodernist directing (specifically Robert Lepage and his own Midsummer Night’s Dream and Elsinore). Knowles traces the continuities between Peter Brook’s seminal Midsummer Night’s Dream and Lepage’s to suggest that contemporary discourses and practices of Shakespearean directing bear a remarkable similarity to their modernist antecedents.

Finally, Barbara Hodgdon looks at stage-into-film versions of Richard III to emphasize the effects of the body. Ian McKellen’s Richard III (which started life as a Royal National Theatre production) drew explicitly on the rise of Fascism—this modernist reference, as Hodgdon [End Page iv] powerfully argues, has specific implications and consequences for the apparently queer bodies of postmodern performance. Al Pacino’s Richard III, on the other hand, takes us back to—and through—the modernist “organization” of Shakespeare in Anglo-American readings during the twentieth century.

Shakespeare is, of course, as popular as ever on our stages and screens. These articles provide a number of vistas where we can see how that popularity is sustained. In the twentieth century, Modernism and Shakespeare have belonged together; one of the “uses” of Shakespeare can be, then, to demonstrate the plurality, complexity and tenacity of modernist theory and practice.