Abstract
This chapter explores the notion that the greatness of Shakespeare’s works is independent not only of English as the language in which they were originally written but also of language more generally: the myth of Shakespeare’s linguistic transcendence. Drawing on Karin Beier’s multilingual A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1996), it analyses how this myth interacts (and sometimes conflicts) with the concept of Europe, especially with notions of a shared European heritage and the European Union’s irenic mission. While Beier’s Dream reflects the German enthusiasm for all things European—characteristic of the 1990s—some responses to the production also anticipate the populist/nationalist backlash the European idea faces today.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
The original plan was for the construction of an actual Globe Replica to be shipped from country to country, but for logistical and financial reasons this never came about.
- 2.
All translations from the German are my own.
- 3.
I have looked at some 30 productions, about two-thirds of them staged in Germany, others in France, Italy, Belgium, and so on. Some of the generalizations I make in this chapter will not be as applicable outside Germany as inside it, mainly because of the special role that Germany—for a variety of political and historical reasons—has played in the process of European Unification. Obviously, much more research would have to be done in order to verify this hypothesis.
- 4.
Beier is now one of the foremost German Shakespeare directors. After her engagement in Düsseldorf and a long spell at Schauspielhaus Köln (the municipal theatre of Cologne, where she produced a multilingual Tempest in 1997), she has held the directorship of Schauspielhaus Hamburg since 2013.
- 5.
Beier received 300,000 German marks from Kulturstiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen, a funding body of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia. In the already state-funded German theatre scene, multilingual productions have since proved a sure-fire way of securing more public money, a fact which testifies to the great enthusiasm that German funding bodies extend to all things European—or extended, until the start of the Euro crisis in 2008.
- 6.
The chapter on European Shakespeare in Schabert (2013) offers a far more conciliatory version of the Pan-European claim to the Bard.
- 7.
This of course has always been one of the central claims of the European Shakespeare Research Association. Increased awareness of the European dimension of Shakespeare’s works has spurred, amongst other things, a new interest in multilingualism both in Shakespeare’s London and on the early modern stage. See, for example, Montgomery (2012), Delabastita and Hoenselaars (2013), and Saenger (2014).
- 8.
An interesting manifestation of this principle, that is, the belief that the same “story”/plot being presented to various audiences in their respective mother tongue has some sort of irenic potential is the Young Europe: Multilingual Creation and Education in Theatre project. Supported by the Culture Programme of the European Commission, the initiative commissions plays that are then translated into various European languages and performed before school and other young audiences. The “multilingual” in the title refers not to the use of several languages within one and the same production, but to the existence of the same text in several languages. See European Theatre Convention n.d. My thanks to John Langdon for alerting me to this project.
- 9.
This of course is a staple of intercultural performance. Becky Becker writes of the Globe to Globe Festival 2012: “Perhaps, in the end, the festival was not a celebration of Shakespeare’s works so much as a celebration of our ability to make dialogue through bodies that share a remarkable connection via the acquisition of language and the metaphorical journey it entails - an embodied spectatorship like no other” (Becker 2013, 66).
- 10.
Perhaps the problem lies in the politicization of playing as such, and multilingual playing in particular. In this, as in many other respects, Tim Supple’s multilingual Dream of 2006 offers an interesting point of comparison to Beier’s project. Supple’s journeys through Asia in search of actors and explorations of Asian performance traditions were funded by the British Council. The project was thus clearly politically endorsed, yet reactions to the production, as far as I can see, focused almost exclusively on its aesthetics. Supple did not lay claim to political relevance the way Beier did; had his Dream been called “a Raj Shakespeare” (and perhaps had it been staged 60 years earlier), the public response would certainly have been different.
- 11.
I borrow this phrase from Stephen Purcell’s account of spectatorship at the Globe to Globe Festival 2012 (Purcell 2015). Other chapters in this volume refer to “expert spectators” at the festival, native speakers who translated and explained productions to non-native speakers in the audience. Needless to say, this is a role largely unavailable to audience members watching a multilingual production like Beier’s. Productions at Globe to Globe may have marginalized normative spectators, as Rose Elfman claims (2013, 167); Beier’s Dream, however, marginalizes every spectator, at least to a certain extent.
- 12.
The situation that audiences of Beier’s European Shakespeare found themselves in would then seem not unlike that of early modern audiences encountering a multilingual play on the London stage, which Marianne Montgomery characterizes as follows: “Early modern English playgoers were asked, as they enjoyed unfamiliar languages as part of the range of interesting sounds available in the playhouse, to hear, understand and at least temporarily imaginatively engage with speech communities that were not their own” (Montgomery 2012, 19). This, according to Montgomery, constitutes an (albeit incomplete) version of Bartolovich’s “utopian cosmopolitanism” (see Bartolovich 2007), a term that resonates with many of the ideas that inform Beier’s European Shakespeare.
- 13.
In particular, some commentators felt that the Dream’s alleged Europeanness constituted a claim to political relevance that the production in and of itself would not otherwise have had: “One could count this show among the less weighty finger exercises of the theatre, an evening of light entertainment – if it weren’t for the fact that it’s ‘multicultural’ and ‘multinational’ and hence evokes such hallowed ideas as peace, global understanding and goodwill toward men” (May 1996).
- 14.
Depending on the reviewer’s stance, this then leads to (un-)favourable comparisons with Peter Brook. On Brook and European Shakespeare, see Rayner (2008).
- 15.
Cf. Calvo and Hoenselaars (2008, 12): “As, on the one hand, we continue to weigh federal, transnational European values (irenic, cultural), and traditional, national values on the other, it is more important than ever to study how and why it is nearly always ‘Shakespeare’ who is invoked as a frame of reference.”
References
Bartolovich, Crystal. 2007. Utopian Cosmopolitanism. Shakespeare Studies 35: 47–57.
Becker, Becky. 2013. Pericles and the Globe: Celebrating the Body and ‘Embodied Spectatorship’. In Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment, ed. Susan Bennett and Christie Carson, 63–67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carson, Christie, and Susan Bennett, eds. 2013. Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Delabastita, Dirk. 2008. Anthologies, Translations, and European Identities. In Shakespeare and European Politics, ed. Dirk Delabastita, Jozef De Vos, and Paul Franssen, 343–368. Newark: University of Delaware Press.
Delabastita, Dirk, and Ton Hoenselaars, eds. 2013. Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Special Issue of English Text Construction 6(1): 176–200.
Dössel, Christine. 1995. Verstehst Du mich? Ich dich nicht! Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 3.
Dürr, Anke. 1995. Gut geschüttelt. Spiegel Extra 11: 11–12.
Edmondson, Paul, Paul Prescott, and Erin Sullivan. 2013. A Year of Shakespeare: Re-living the World Shakespeare Festival, The Arden Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury.
Elfman, Rose. 2013. Expert Spectatorship and Intra-Audience Relationships at Globe to Globe 2012. In Shakespeare on the Global Stage: Performance and Festivity in the Olympic Year, Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, ed. Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan, 163–190. London: Bloomsbury.
European Theatre Convention. n.d. Young Europe 2: Multilingual Creation and Education in Theatre 2011–2013. http://www.etc-cte.org/young_europe/. Accessed 13 Sept 2013.
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 1995. Euro-Shakespeare. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 2.
Genton, Bernard. 1993. Une Europe littéraire? In L’Esprit de l’Europe. Vol.3: Goûts et Manières, ed. Antoine Compagnon and Jacques Seebacher, 305–315. Paris: Flammarion.
Gschwend, Patrick. 2009. Von Shakespeare lernen – Projekt EuroGlobe sucht die Antwort auf Europas Probleme. http://www.radio.cz/de/rubrik/begegnungen/von-shakespeare-lernen-projekt-euroglobe-sucht-die-antwort-auf-europas-probleme.
Hoenselaars, Ton, and Clara Calvo. 2008. Introduction: European Shakespeare—Quo Vadis? In The Shakespearean International Yearbook 8: Special section, European Shakespeares, ed. Graham Bradshaw, Tom Bishop, Ton Hoenselaars, and Clara Calvo, 3–14. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Holland, Peter. 1997. [Review of Shakespeare in the New Europe], The European English Messenger VI.2/1997, quoted from: Forsyth, Neil. 2001. Shakespeare the European. In Translating/Traduire/Tradurre Shakespeare, ed. Irene Weber Henking, 5–20. Lausanne: Université de Lausanne.
Hortmann, Wilhelm. 1998. Shakespeare on the German Stage: The Twentieth Century: With a Section on Shakespeare on Stage in the German Democratic Republic by Maik Hamburger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2008. Hybridization: A New Trend in German Shakespeare Productions. In Shakespeare and European Politics, ed. Dirk Delabastita, Jozef De Vos, and Paul Franssen, 196–211. Newark: University of Delaware Press.
Huang, Alexander C.Y. 2013. What Country, Friends, Is This? Touring Shakespeares, Agency, and Efficacy in Theatre Historiography. Theatre Survey 54 (1): 51–85.
Kennedy, Dennis. 1993. Introduction. In Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance, ed. Dennis Kennedy, 1–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lan, Yong Li. 2005. Shakespeare and the Fiction of the Intercultural. In A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W.B. Worthen, 527–549. Malden/Oxford: Blackwell.
Leerssen, Joep. 2008. Making Shakespeare National. In Shakespeare and European Politics, ed. Dirk Delabastita, Jozef De Vos, and Paul Franssen, 36–55. Newark: University of Delaware Press.
Löhndorf, Marion. 1995. Völkermissverständigung. Neue Zürcher Zeitung (International Edition), November 7.
May, Rolf. 1996. Shakespeare als Slapstick. tz München, May 7.
Montgomery, Marianne. 2012. Europe’s Languages on England’s Stages, 1590–1620, Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate.
Prescott, Paul, and Erin Sullivan, eds. 2013. Shakespeare on the Global Stage: Performance and Festivity in the Olympic Year, Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury.
Purcell, Stephen. 2015. Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the ‘Olympic Spirit’. In Shakespeare on the Global Stage: Performance and Festivity in the Olympic Year, Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, ed. Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan, 133–162. London: Bloomsbury.
Reinelt, Janelle. 2001. Performing Europe: Identity Formation for a ‘New’ Europe. Theatre Journal 53: 365–387.
Rayner, Fran. 2008. Rearticulating a Culture of Links: Peter Brook’s European Shakespeare. In The Shakespearean International Yearbook 8: Special Section, European Shakespeares, ed. Graham Bradshaw, Tom Bishop, Ton Hoenselaars, and Clara Calvo, 71–81. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Risse, Thomas, and Daniela Engelmann-Martin. 2002. Identity Politics and European Integration: The Case of Germany. In The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union, Woodrow Wilson Center Series, ed. Anthony Pagden, 287–316. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Saenger, Michael, ed. 2014. Interlinguicity, Internationality and Shakespeare. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Schabert, Ina. 2013. Shakespeares: Die unendliche Vielfalt der Bilder. Stuttgart: Kröner.
Schumacher, Ernst. 1995. Gemeinsame Zunge oder Europa spricht Shakespeare! Berliner Zeitung, January 6.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Boecker, B. (2018). “Europe Speaks Shakespeare”: Karin Beier’s 1996 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Multilingual Performance and the Myth of Shakespeare’s Linguistic Transcendence. In: Mancewicz, A., Joubin, A. (eds) Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance. Reproducing Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89851-3_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89851-3_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-89850-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-89851-3
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)