Dear Colleagues,

Shakespearean performance continues to push boundaries, whether involving internationalities, media, or innovations of casting, setting, and various forms of adaptation. This Special Issue is open to all contemporary perspectives on the subject: theater history, personal experience in the theater, stage history, and new approaches to performing early modern plays. Examples might include new findings about original stage directions or practices; the use of performance in teaching Shakespeare; performance of Shakespeare in non-Western countries or in languages other than English; current trends in historically traditional companies (e.g., the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of As You Like It in 2023, whose cast of main characters included no one under the age of 60); other issues of casting (e.g., race, gender, disability); the role of the First Folio in directing, teaching, and acting Shakespeare; direct experience in acting or directing Shakespeare’s plays or founding an acting company; and experimentation with performance in new or familiar media. Various types of essays are also welcome, whether personal narrative, literary journalism, or traditional scholarship. The final aim of this Special Issue is to distill a panorama of current practices, new research, and creative ventures through essays of 6000 to 10,000 words.

Prof. Dr. Cynthia Lewis
Guest Editor

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Title: Bad Shakespeare: Performing Failure

Abstract: The Shakespearean actor is a readily recognisable figure within the transatlantic cultural landscape. They may move regularly between the theatrical environs which garnered them the appellation and more mainstream fare in television or film, but they are always, somehow, Shakespearean. If easily identified, the Shakespearean actor is harder to define, though. For example, the multi-volume Great Shakespeareans shortlists individuals who, in their editors’ words, have had ‘the greatest influence on both the interpretation, understanding and reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally’ (Holland and Poole 2013, vii). But such scholarly endeavours consistently stop short of describing any social or cultural function which the Shakespearean may fill or any implicit ideological work at hand in the naming of actors as Shakespeareans. These omissions are all the more curious because, while its attribution is inherently positive in the examples above, popular culture also abounds with rather less illustrious Shakespeareans. Consider, for instance, as Niles and Frasier Crane watch appalled while their childhood icon, Jackson Hedley (Derek Jacobi), gurns and groans on stage. Playing a caricature of himself in Extras, meanwhile, Ian McKellen confides that he knew what to say in The Lord of the Rings because ‘the words were written down for me.’ Welcome to bad Shakespeare; a trope that has existed for as long as there has been the potential for ‘good’ Shakespeareanism. For evidence, one needs only consider Hamlet’s stubborn insistence that actors deliver their lines ‘trippingly on the tongue’. Bad Shakespeare has no such luck, however. From Mr Wopsle in Great Expectations to Alan Rickman’s frustrated thespian-turned science fiction star in Galaxy Quest (‘How did I come to this? I played Richard III. There were five curtain calls’), these Shakespeareans are hammy, self-congratulating and embarrassing; they exhibit what David McGowan calls ‘visible acting’ (2017, 219). Reversing a more typical focus on prestige and skill, this article will reflect on what it says about our relationship to Shakespeare that we take such evident and knowing pleasure watching highly respected performers apparently fail at their jobs. Building on film studies scholarship on badfilms, I will consider whether these fictional performances of failure only reify existing norms of ‘good’ performance, or if they offer more subversive possibilities.

Title: To Blanch an Ethiop: Motifs of Blackness in The Tempest and Ben Jonson's “Masque of Blackness”

Abstract: In the period between 2021-2022 immediately following the Covid-19 lockdowns, there were 38 professional or academic productions of The Tempest in the United States. The play was by far the most produced of Shakespeare’s works in this timespan, and those 38 productions represent a 290% increase over 2019, in which there were 13 such productions. Considering The Tempest’s hyper-popularity within the context of the Black Lives Matter Movement and the birth of We See You White American Theatre’s calls for reform in 2020, this paper seeks to understand anew the way in which Shakespeare constructs blackness in the play. Indeed for all of its beauty and magic, The Tempest stages a violent anti-blackness in its treatment of Caliban. In particular, I argue an unexplored connection between The Tempest and Ben Jonson’s 1605 court masque, “The Masque of Blackness,” itself an exploration of the construction of race for a particular early modern audience. My exploration here began as a partial answer to a question posed by Robin Alfriend Kello: “how do you balance [an] attraction to the richness of Shakespearian verse against these layered histories of racial violence and exclusion” (qtd in Little, 200). I argue that grounding Shakespeare’s version of blackness in The Tempest in the discourse and material production conditions of court masquing and performance may grant insights into areas of intervention for those theatres reaching for The Tempest amidst national calls for anti-racist theatrical work.

Title: Romeo and Juliet in Korea: The Gender of Division

Abstract: Romeo and Juliet remains one of the most frequently performed plays of Shakespeare in Korea, one reason for which is obvious: The feud between the Capulets and Montagues resonates with the continuing division of Korea into North and South. Indeed, many productions of the play in South Korea since the Korean War (1950-53) have made direct and indirect allusions to the political reality of division. However, Romeo and Juliet was also one of the very few plays of Shakespeare that was performed in Korea before the War, in part because the country has had a long history of divisions, including into separate nations for extended periods, which has left a legacy of fierce regional rivalries. Nothing defines Korea so much as division and the desire to overcome that division. With this context in mind, my essay will examine three representative but unique productions of the play from before the War to the twenty-first century: a women's musical theatre adaptation from shortly before the War that was a popular success; a production by the Mokwha Repertory Theatre from the early 2000s that alludes directly to the state of division into North and South, and which has toured the globe; and a 2009 musical theatre version by the National Changgeuk Company of Korea that emphasizes regional rivalries. However, while exploring the depiction of division in these productions, I will focus in particular on how gender is understood in relation to national division and the possibility of reconciliation. I will argue that the role played by Juliet in inducing and (possibly) resolving conflict stands as an index for evolving attitudes towards gender in modern Korea.

Title: Shakespeare’s Thinking Machine

Abstract: In this essay, I argue that AI chatbots are the latest innovations in a long genealogy of thinking machines. Shakespeare’s plays in performance, I suggest, amount to an exemplary Large Language Model (LLM) chatbot, a machine that has been a driving engine of creative, informative, and influential conversation about matters of shared concern over the past 400 years. The essay will have three sections: (1) an account of the capacities and the limitations of 21st-century chatbots and an argument about how ChatGPT is a descendent of both Shakespeare’s play-texts and those texts’ realization in theatrical performance; (2) a selective performance history of The Tempest, including performances of its adaptations, with a view toward showing how Shakespeare’s thinking machine works—the text of The Tempest and the theatre artists operating together as a neuronal network able to address urgent questions and able also to involve people in a transgenerational conversation—from first performances (1611) to Dryden and Davenant’s imperialist English adaptation The Enchanted Island (1667) to Aimé Césaire’s anti-colonialist La Tempête (1969)—about race, gender, power-knowledge, and empire; and (3) a reflection on how Shakespeare’s theatre and theatrical practice could help us make better and more socially creative use of 21st-century descendent information technology.

Title: The Untitled Othello Project: theoretical implications of untitling

Abstract: In 2021, Keith Hamilton Cobb, the author of American Moor, embarked on a project to “untitle” Shakespeare’s play, Othello. His frustration with the speed, greed, and racism of the American theatrical economy is exemplified in his two-person play, American Moor. However, he found that to wrestle with the racist implications of Shakespeare’s text, he needed to interrogate The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice himself. As an actor and a playwright Cobb immediately structured his interrogation through collaboration and engagement beyond the traditional theatre process which rehearses for three to five weeks, makes necessarily hasty decisions and rushes to production. Cobb calls this interrogation, “Untitling,” which is a process of slowly reading through Shakespeare’s play with an assemblage of people. “Untitling” recognizes that Shakespeare’s plays may be responsible for encoding and transmitting deeply racist, sexist, and ableist ideas that any assemblage of people will recognize within themselves. Cobb is not ready to argue as scholars such as Ayanna Thompson and others that the play should not be performed. He may come to that conclusion, but not without rigorous untitling. This act requires modern readers to look for Othello without the “Moor of Venice,” as the definition of a character. By dislocating the moniker from the man, Cobb calls for a radical re-vision of Shakespeare studies, in which we search not for the exaltation of human nature, but the human being freed from the trappings and webs of oppressive structures. As witnesses and collaborators to Cobb’s process, we will argue in this essay that “untitling” offers scholars and artists an opportunity to explore canonical texts, like Shakespeare, by valuing the humanity of the groups of people studying, performing, and writing about these texts above the texts themselves. To define and understand Cobb’s mission to “untitle” as a larger project, this essay engages theories of phenomenological hermeneutics in conversation with recent theoretical developments in RaceB4Race and #shakerace, and turns to Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reparative reading to articulate the method of untitling. Cobb’s tenacious engagement with the structures of Shakespeare performance and scholarship in the theatre and the university deserves a rigorous theoretical consideration.

Title: “Hidden Gems in The Two Noble Kinsmen”

Abstract: The Two Noble Kinsmen is curiously enough one of the least produced plays of William Shakespeare. After having had the chance to work on it not once but twice, I‘ve grown incredibly fond of the play and its many hidden gems. Much of the curiosity and intrigue of the play has to do with the co-authorship of Shakespeare and John Fletcher; this was to be their last endeavor together. This paper’s focus will move from a detailed textual focus on the curious lack of prose in Fletcher’s scenes to figuring out how to tell a story that focuses on the strong voice of a woman being ignored. Clearly both Shakespeare and Fletcher were interested in giving Emilia a three-dimensional character, giving her an enormous number of lines compared to their source, Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale,” from The Canterbury Tales. Exploring these hidden gems with testimonials from the actors in my production will give a first-hand perspective on this rarely seen play and its hidden textual gems.

Title: ‘How much Welsh does the Lady speak when The Lady speaks in Welsh? Language and representation in performances of Henry IV.’

Abstract: Act 3, scene 1 of Henry IV, Part One, with its stage directions The Lady speaks in Welsh, Here the Lady sings a Welsh song and so forth has offered much occasion for scholars to offer comment—from the possibilities of connections Shakespeare might have had with the nation, through the broader context of theatrical London at the turn of 17th century, to new historicist understandings of audience beliefs and cultural memory to explore Shakespeare’s figuring of Owain Glyndŵr. As much as these works, and the wider body of criticism they represent, have done for this sub-field of Welsh Shakespeare studies, the question of what Lady Mortimer and Glendower actually say remains. The Welsh stage dialogue of 1590s may be lost, but we may at least consider the ways that the Lady speaks in Welsh now. What does she say, how does she say it, and how do we react? How do we edit? How do we respond? Do we trust what Glendower is saying, or the reaction of Mortimer, Hotspur and Kate? These are serious questions, for as the history of Shakespeare performance has demonstrated, we can make a Shakespeare script mean almost anything. When Shakespeare, as in this scene, give the actor the freedom to simply speak, then that freedom and flexibility are dramatically increased. Lady Mortimer could say anything. What does she say? In this paper, I consider 20th and 21st century productions of Henry IV Part 1 to begin to address these questions. Using examples from Shakespeare’s Globe, The Hollow Crown, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, I show how companies have developed and maintained a ‘house script’ for the lines, and also how others offer a distorted representation of the Welsh language. By offering a close reading of the Welsh and its interaction with Shakespeare’s English, the paper explores the ways in which the play’s own representation of national identity has been manifested in this scene.

Title: Theatre Dybbuk’s Merchant of Venice (Annotated) and the Dramaturgy of Interruption

Abstract: What might The Merchant of Venice, with its foundation of vitriol and exclusionary social structure—so dependent on the boundary between Christian and Jew or alien and citizen—offer audiences in the present moment? How can Shakespeare’s late-Elizabethan preoccupations map onto such varied challenges as climate change, the rollback of reproductive rights, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the prevalence of conspiracy-driven and authoritarian politics? Theatre Dybbuk’s The Merchant of Venice (Annotated), or In Sooth I Know Not Why I am So Sad offers a response by working through its Shakespearean source text, scene by scene, while continually breaking the fourth wall to thread connections together between its moment and ours. This essay draws from Merchant (Annotated) and conversations with playwright and director Aaron Henne to examine its dramaturgy of interruption, which perpetually unsettles the pleasures of plot and suspension of disbelief to instead offer its audience an unexpected uppercut of both radical performance and political exigence. Developing a grammar of movement based on the key props of garbage bins and dollar bills—the trash and cash that suffuse the play as well as the world outside of it—the drama brings into relief the habits of thought that underpin political violence while also serving as a vital example of how Shakespeare’s work and legacy can be refashioned for a present theater of social commitment. This essay centers performance and strategies of adaptation and appropriation in a broader reflection of how we might continue to make Shakespeare new.

Title: No Small Parts (Only Speechless Women)

Abstract: On her experience rehearsing The Winter’s Tale in 1981, Gemma Jones declares: “Hermione is not a large part.” She goes on to explain: Practically, this means I have to share rehearsal time and my calls for attention are sporadic. I find this very difficult. My adrenalin is often dammed; progress is halting—one step forward and two steps back; and the time between one rehearsal and the next arid and frustrating. Ultimately, Jones concludes that “it is easier to play a large part,” clarifying that the “solitary state” in which she must craft her character hinders her “progress” with the role: “having exposed myself to my fellow actors in an open forum, the sounds I make on my own are hollow.”1 What Jones contemplates here, in part, generates questions about what constitutes “a large part.” Some practitioners or scholars may measure a role’s size by the number of or percentage of words spoken in the play; Jones seems to be getting at something else. That is, she points out that limited stage time for the character results in less rehearsal time for the actor, blocking off her artistic energy (“my adrenalin is often dammed”) and constraining her creative potential (“progress is halting”) in ways that presumably would not necessarily happen if she had “a large part.” She emphasizes here not how often Hermione speaks, but how often she rehearses Hermione’s speech “in a solitary state.” Between periods of isolation, she has the benefit of speaking in “an open forum” with her “fellow actors,” amplifying how “hollow” the “sounds” she makes alone seem to be. Though surely not representative of all actors’ experiences with this (or any other) role, Jones’s reflection on her Hermione alludes to the possibly shared experience that working without words in Shakespeare might mean working without other things as well: focused and frequent rehearsal time, collaborative contributions to and from the cast, and the opportunity for one’s “sounds” to be heard. At risk are the actor’s ability to do what actors are often employed to do: to be seen, to be heard, or both. That Jones ultimately emphasizes “sounds” over any other aspect of her artistry is telling, particularly given the historically persistent focus in Shakespeare training and performance on the voice. Equally revealing is her assertion that the perceived size of her role results in her “solitary state” and renders her speech “hollow,” mirroring the circumstances of Hermione herself when—in an “open forum,” between periods of isolation—she acknowledges that “it shall scarce boot” her to “say” her truth (3.2.24-25). In this essay, I will consider the ways in which women actors of Shakespeare must often play speechless—or play the unspeakable—and how this collides with critical calculations of central roles based on how much a character talks. In performance, if size matters, a measuring stick made of spoken lines will always favor Shakespeare’s men. It may also always be used to scoot women to the outskirts of the artistic process. What can happen when a woman’s body takes up space even if her voice does not is thus an important consideration in this conversation, along with creative approaches and critical reactions to women in Shakespeare who do make “sounds.”

Title: “King Lear” at Court and the Court in “King Lear”

Abstract: The title-page of the first quarto of King Lear (1608) foregrounds many things: Shakespeare’s name in the largest font used, an emphasis that this King Lear is “HIS“, the fascination with Edgar as “TOM of Bedlam” and that fact that this is the play “As it was played before the Kings Maiestie at Whitehall upon S. Stephans night in Christmas Hollidayes”. The particularity of that moment and its complex implications has been explored before, of course, but there are new ways to rethink, re-present that moment when the play met a particular gathering of spectators in a particular room on that crucial day in the Christmas holiday cycle. And from that interaction this article will move on to consider other performances that define such purposive positionings of the play. It is one thing to, say, play King Lear in the repertory of the Royal Shakespeare Company and something very different to play it, for example, to an audience of carers for the elderly as part of Theatre of War’s King Lear Project. As Lear holds court and King Lear holds court, so character and play court their chosen audiences, the ones the production chooses rather than the ones who choose which play to watch.

Title: An Introduction to Merry Conway’s Embodied Humors

Abstract: The Embodied Humors is a course of study that offers theatre artists new ways to inhabit Shakespeare’s characters. Developed over the past two decades by movement teacher Merry Conway, the progression of exercises presents actors with a step-by-step approach for allowing their physical imagination to be first affected and then expanded by energies that are suggested by a Humoral (rather than Cartesian) view of the natural world. This viewpoint comes from the classical Humoral theory, still firmly in place during the Elizabethan era, which encapsulated the philosophical, medicinal, and spiritual understanding of life. In August of 2023, the author traveled to Santa Fe, New Mexico to experience the Embodied Humors workshop. Composed of both narrative description based on the author’s experience of the work and excerpts of interviews conducted with Merry Conway in the spring of 2024, this article explores some of the ways in which the Embodied Humors approach can offer theatre practitioners new and exciting entry points to Shakespeare's plays.