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List of contents
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction Boika Sokolova (University of Notre Dame, London, UK) and Janice Valls-Russell (University Paul-Valéry, Montpellier, France)
PART ONE Relocating otherness: the Other-within
Induction 1 Lawrence Guntner (Germany)
1. ‘Venice’ is elsewhere: the Stranger’s locality, or, Italian ‘blackness’ in twenty-first-century stagings of Othello Anna Maria Cimitile (University of Naples 'L'Orientale', Italy)
2. Refracting the racial Other into the Other-within in two Bulgarian adaptations of Othello Boika Sokolova (Unoversity of Notre Dame, London, UK) and Kirilka Stavreva (Cornell College, USA)
3. Estranged Strangers: Krzysztof Warlikowski’s Shylock and Othello in African Tales after Shakespeare (2011) Aleksandra Sakowska (Shakespeare Institute, UK)
4. Drags, dyes, and death in Venice: The Merchant of Venice (2004) and Othello (2012) in Belgrade, Serbia Zorica Becanovic Nikolic (University of Belgrade, Serbia)
5. The Merchant of Venice in France (2001 and 2017): deconstructing a malaise Janice Valls-Russell (University Paul-Valéry, Montpellier, France)
PART TWO New nationalisms, migrants: imperfect resolutions
Induction 2 Lawrence Guntner (Germany)
6. ‘Barbarous temper’, ‘hideous violence’ and ‘mountainish inhumanity’: stage encounters with The Merchant of Venice in Romania Nicoleta Cinpoes (University of Worcester, UK)
7. Staging The Merchant of Venice in Hungary: politics, prejudice and languages of hatred Natália Pikli (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary)
8. Dutch negotiations with otherness in times of crisis: Othello (2006) and The Arab of Amsterdam (2008) Coen Heijes (University of Groningen, the Netherlands)
9. ‘Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago’: radical empathy in two Portuguese performances of Othello Francesca Rayner (Universidade do Minho, Portugal)
10. A tragedy? Othello and The Merchant of Venice in Germany during the 2015–2016 ‘refugee crisis’ Bettina Boecker (University of Munich, Germany)
PART THREE Performative propositions
Induction 3 Lawrence Guntner (Germany)
11. The Merchant in Venice in the Venetian Ghetto (2016): Director Karin Coonrod in conversation with Boika Sokolova (University of Notre Dame, London, UK) and Kirilka Stavreva (Cornell College, USA)
12. Inverting Othello in France (2019): Director Arnaud Churin in conversation with Janice Valls-Russell (University Paul-Valéry, Montpellier, France)
13. Migrant Othello in Bulgaria (2020): Professor Plamen Markov in conversation with Boika Sokolova (University of Notre Dame, London, UK) and Kirilka Stavreva (Cornell College, USA)
Coda: Staging Shakespeare’s Others and their Biblical archetype Péter Dávidházi (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Boika Sokolova teaches at the University of Notre Dame, USA, in England.Janice Valls-Russell is a retired Principal research associate of France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a member of the Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Neo-Classical Era and the Enlightenment (IRCL), a joint research unit of CNRS and University Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France. Her research interests lie in the early modern reception of the classics, and classical mythology, and 20th- and 21st-century adaptations of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The author of several articles, she co-edited Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (2017), Thomas Heywood and the Classical Tradition (2022) and Shakespeare's Others in 21st-Century European Performance: The Merchant of Venice and Othello (2022).David Schalkwyk is Director of Research at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C. and Professor of English at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is editor of Shakespeare Quarterly and his books include Speech and Performance in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays (2002), Literature and the Touch of the Real (2004), Shakespeare, Love and Service (2008).Silvia Bigliazzi is Professor of English at Verona University, Italy, where she specializes in early modern English theatre, with a focus on Shakespeare. She has published two monographs - on Hamlet and on the idea of non-being, besides translations into Italian of a number of Shakespeare's plays, including the Arden edition of Double Falsehood edited by Brean Hammond.
Summary
The Merchant of Venice and Othello are the two Shakespeare plays which serve as touchstones for contemporary understandings and responses to notions of 'the stranger' and 'the other'. This groundbreaking collection explores the dissemination of the two plays through Europe in the first two decades of the 21st-century, tracing how productions and interpretations have reflected the changing conditions and attitudes locally and nationally.
Packed with case studies of productions of each play in different countries, the volume opens vistas on the continent's turbulent history marked by the instability of allegiances and boundaries, and shifting senses of identity in a context of war, decolonization and migration. Chapters examine productions in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Italy, France, Portugal and Germany to shed light on wide-scale European developments for the first time in English.
In a final section, performance insights are offered by interviews with three directors: Karin Coonrod on directing The Merchant in Venice at the Venetian Ghetto in 2016, Plamen Markov on his 2020 Othello for the Varna Theatre (Bulgaria) and Arnaud Churin, whose Othello toured France in 2019.
In drawing attention to the ways in which historical circumstances and collective memory shape and refashion performance, Shakespeare's Others in 21st-century European Performance offers a rich review of European theatrical engagements with Otherness in the productions of these two plays.
Foreword
Explores productions of the two plays through Europe during the 20th and 21st centuries, tracing how each has reflected the changing conditions and attitudes to 'the other' or the 'stranger' locally and nationally.
Additional text
This rich and important synopsis of recent literary and cultural theory worked in and around particular interpretations of theatre practices is no mere esoteric study of a marginal corner of Shakespeare studies. It offers a great bank of ideas, images, and insights from which directors and scholars, in search of refreshment, in any part of the world, might, with great profit, draw out cultural capital. It supplements ‘ego-centred’ accounts of these with ‘place-centred’ analyses, and maps the ways that the foreign re-interprets the familiar. These anatomies of nationality, ethnicity, language, gender, migration, racial difference, marked and unmarked, demonstrate how those characters who have migrated into a Shakespearean heterocosm, virtual or theatrically rendered, provoke us to look beyond ourselves and probably uncover varieties of otherness within.
