Every year at the end of February young men from small villages on Carriacou island in the Caribbean gather wearing colorful costumes made with crowns of ficus roots and masks of wire mesh screens painted with drawings of animals. Each participant in the ritual, like his father and grandfather before him, has prepared for this event by studying carefully his "book," a weathered edition of The Royal Reader, the grade school textbook used throughout the British West Indies from the 1880's through the 1950's. The famous speeches from Julius Caesar form the heart of the Carriacou ritual--the verbal duel known as the "Shakespeare Mas'"-- which requires each participant to perform as many key speeches from the play as possible. The "book," as it is called, has been appropriated into a piecemeal ceremony of Christian carnival and African-American folk ritual. In my paper, I will examine how the challenge match at the center of the Shakespeare Mas' can best be understood as a carnival that mirrors, or functions as a semiotic double, of dominant Western culture's "common place" use of Shakespeare as a compendium of great phrases for public speaking and elocution. The mode of rote literacy used by the British colonies privileged a Euro-centric worldview through its promotion of an Anglophone oratorical pedagogy. As a unique form of "mimicry," I argue, the Carriacou Mas offers an interpretation of Shakespeare's importance to the colonial project, and the contradictory ways his writing plays was used to interpellate subjects into an imperial system.
Craig Dionne
Eastern Michigan University
cdionne@emich.edu
My paper looks at the ways in which the characters in Othello were used in minstrel performances to propagate race/class distinction and hierarchy. Aside from the attempts at removing the import of his visage (by Kean, et. al.), Othello represents tragic black heroism in America (especially for audiences in the 20th century). He is a soldier who gallantly fights for his multi-ethnic country, and yet he is mocked—by Shakespeare’s own words—throughout the play. In English 19th century burlesques of Othello, the play is mocked in a number of ways, all amounting really to the anti-authoritarian stance of the Victorian “middling” class. In America, Othello is not only burlesqued but, moreover, it is made into a minstrel show, in which Othello is a “Negro” man who is not only contextualized for us today by abolition, war and America’s then-love of oration—but also he (Othello) is transformed, even more than the Bard seems to have intended, into the frivolous, audacious, murderous, gullible and naive black character which Shakespeare-loving Whites projected onto the entire African race in the 19th century in an attempt at cultural hierarchy post-bellum. I’m looking closely at the transcripts and circumstances (historical, social) contextualizing two shows, the anonymously written Desdemonum: An Ethiopian Burlesque In Three Scenes (published in 1874) and Othello: a Burlesque, which is presumed to have been written in 1866 by G. W. H. Griffin for Christy’s Minstrels. I may include more “renditions” of Othello, including, of course, performances of Shakespeare’s text.
Craig Carroll
University of Massachusetts
raisingwhats@juno.com
Author-centered criticism and popular hagiography have been lavished on William Shakespeare, it is safe to say, more than any other author in the English language canon. Borrowing from Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of cultural capital, this paper examines the use of Shakespeare as a cultural consecrator to confer legitimacy upon its many manifestations, focusing on the resurrection of the mass-market paperback in 1939. Effectively the clash of a lowbrow form with highbrow aspirations and a highbrow figure with lowbrow appeal, Pocket Books’ Five Tragedies navigated a rapidly expanding marketplace and increasingly college-educated American population, as well as a changing attitude towards Shakespearean production in theater and film. The amazing success of Pocket Books at winning both mass market and critical benevolence was almost unique (compared to other mass-marketed book imprints or other Shakespeare incarnations, like MGM’s Midsummer Night’s Dream), which speaks to the power of the authorial ‘ideology of creation’ but also serves as a primary example of the need to widen Bourdieuvian and other class-based criticism to include the class connotations of form as well as genre.
Heidi Kim
Northwestern University
heidikim@northwestern.edu
As early modernist studies examine
the “materiality of the Shakespearean text” and the historicity of Renaissance
textuality, the consequences of that work are becoming increasingly salient
in contemporary Shakespearean performance. When it officially opened in 1997,
voices in academia and the popular media proclaimed Shakespeare’s Globe an
important performance space that could potentially recover the conditions
of the Renaissance public theater while introducing theatergoers to Shakespeare’s
work in live performance. In other words, the Globe would provide Shakespeare
to the low-brow masses while also highlighting issues and concerns about Shakespeare’s
plays that would speak to an elite, high-minded academic audience.
This paper argues that a dramaturgical and ideological conservatism underwrites
the “original practices” productions that have become the hallmark of Shakespeare’s
Globe and contribute to the reification of Renaissance drama in the minds
of audiences. It naturalizes and essentializes dramatic production, and it
makes audiences more resistant to the experimental and the avant-garde. This
paper situates its argument by examining 1) the Globe’s role in the municipal
redevelopment along London’s South Bank; 2) theorizations of cosmopolitanism
and tourism and 3) an American conservatism and fetishization of England and
Englishness. In the end, this paper asserts that the best way to maintain
the theatrical and cultural relevance of Shakespearean and Renaissance drama
is to present it to modern transatlantic audiences with the most innovative
contemporary theatrical practices possible: Technocrat versus Luddite; Wooster
Group, Ex Machina, and Theatre de Complicite versus “original practices.”
Charles Joseph Del Dotto
Duke University
charles.deldotto@duke.edu