What is it about?
The 2012 London Olympics ushered in a new era of global Shakespearean appropriation. The Globe-to-Globe festival, held in conjunction with the Olympics, brought theater companies from many parts of the world to the UK to perform Shakespeare in their own languages (“37 plays in 37 languages”). How does Shakespeare makes other cultures legible to Anglo-American audiences? What does it entail for the British media to judge touring productions of Shakespeare from around the world? What roles do non-Western identities, aesthetics, and idioms play in the rise of Shakespearean cinema and theater as global genres? To what extent do non-western Shakespeare productions act as fetishized commodities in the global marketplace?
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Why is it important?
At a time when Shakespeare is becoming increasingly globalized and diversified it is urgent more than ever to ask how this appropriated 'Shakespeare' constructs ethical value across cultural and other fault lines. Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation is the first book to address the intersection of ethics, aesthetics, authority, and authenticity.
Perspectives
To tackle the range of issues involved, this book is organized around the three words in our title: Shakespeare, ethics, and appropriation. The first refers to a biographically known person and his works, but also and especially important for our purposes, to a signifier with rich and unstable connotations. The second term, ethics, is notoriously difficult to define, but most people agree that ethics focus on how human beings should act and treat one another and, in particular, what constitutes a good action. In our contemporary context, ethics are often interpreted specifically in terms of a responsibility to cultural otherness. The third term, “appropriation,” introduces difficult questions about the relationship between Shakespeare and ethics. With its connotations of aggressive seizure and forced possession, it might suggest that Shakespeare is a signifier that can be seized and deployed—against Shakespeare’s will, as it were.
Ms Alexa Alice Joubin
George Washington University
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This page is a summary of: Introduction, January 2014, Nature,
DOI: 10.1057/9781137375773_1.
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