The dialogues between Shakespeare and his modern interlocutors are driven by ethical claims and the use of Shakespeare for political expediency. While artists and critics alike gravitate toward inspirational narratives, there is the risk of selling out on art’s impact on social justice. Advertising trends—or cultural paratexts around performances—are one area where artists’ ethical claims are sometimes countered by marketing shortcuts especially in relation to presentations of racial and gender diversity. In some cases, what appear to be multiethnic performances based on the casts turn out to be aesthetically incoherent, while in other cases queerness is framed as a defining feature when a production does not actively engage with gender diversity.
Here are highlights of my paper delivered at the Shakespeare Society of South Africa conference on "Shakespeare and Social Justice" in Fugard Theatre, Cape Town, May 16-18, 2019.
In 2018, the independent film company Shanty Productions debuted their film, Twelfth Night, with a multiethnic cast. Sheila Atim’s black Viola is one of several refugees washed ashore on a pebbled beach in the film. Film director Adam Smethurst drew on the idea of using Shakespeare as an other within during an interview: “With the widespread rise of anti-immigrant populism and governments actively encouraging a hostile environment for refugees, telling the story of the outsider surviving in an alien world on her wit, charm and ingenuity became and remains compellingly urgent” (“Olivier Award winner” 2018).
Global Shakespeare seems to conveniently offer answers to competing demands from both conservative and neoliberal societies. Namely, the demands that we become more transnational in outlook while simultaneously sustaining traditional canons. For both conservatives and innovators, the genre of global Shakespeare is politically expedient in a neoliberal economy.
With increased media attention to whiteness and gender identities, theatre companies from all-female and genderqueer groups to original practice troupes have led a new advertising trend to emphasize a queer vibe. As Sawyer Kemp points out, companies do this without actually employing trans-identified performers or substantive engagement with the trans community, which is ethically problematic. The gender-fluid paratext around a performance builds expectations or enhances a work’s perceived social justice quotient. What theoretical models could we deploy to better understand such original practice performances as Mark Rylance’s all-male Twelfth Night or “post-gender” casting practices such as Michelle Terry’s Globe productions where gender is not treated as a meaningful denominator? Are all-female productions of Shakespeare always empowering?
Many screen and stage adaptations are informed by a philosophical investment in Shakespeare’s reparative merit, a preconceived notion that performing the Shakespearean canon can improve not only local art forms (such as attracting a larger audience or securing invitations for international festivals or tours) but also personal and social circumstances (such as addressing issues that are otherwise difficult to discuss publicly). Shakespeare is imagined to have a reparative effect on the artist’s or society’s outlooks on life when the time is “out of joint” (Hamlet, 1.5.190) or during identity crises.