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Stage(d) Reconciliations: Romeo and Juliet and the Politics of Bilingual Shakespeare Productions in Germany
| Content Provider | Scilit |
|---|---|
| Copyright Year | 2015 |
| Description | Book Name: Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, and Civic Life |
| Abstract | Romeo and Juliet is a play with a strong political agenda, demonstrating as it does the high personal price that has to be paid by the individual in a society torn by internal strife. The deaths of the two young lovers have been interpreted in a number of ways – as the ultimate step towards individuation and personal freedom (Kottman 2012, 1-38), as a version of Liebestod (Kamps 2000, 37-46), as a manifestation of the play’s queerness (Freccero 2011, 302-8), and so on. On a rather more basic level, the death of the young lovers is, of course, a side effect, albeit unintended, of the feud between their parents, a feud that has detrimental effects on the entire community of Verona. A ‘pacist’ reading of the play hence suggests itself, though this is an interpretation that has, somewhat surprisingly, received less attention from academic critics than it has in actual performance and in lm versions of the play. Representative instances include a 1994 joint Israeli-Palestinian production of the play by the Khan and El-Qasaba theatres in Jerusalem, Clare Stopford’s 2000 Romeo and Juliet set in gang-ravaged Cape Town and most recently, during the World Shakespeare Festival in 2012, Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad. The play’s iconic status and the perceived ease with which its central conict can be mapped onto the political situation of such diverse geopolitical regions as South Africa, Iraq or the West Bank have made Romeo and Juliet a rm favourite with directors seeking to make a political impact – so much of a favourite as to have spurred its own spoofs, such as the 2005 West Bank Story, a Romeo and Juliet set among rival falafel sellers in the West Bank (Fischlin 2007). The play’s mapping of civic space and civic strife in “fair Verona” has thus proved supremely transferable to other locales. The crises that shape Romeo and Juliet have provided a vocabulary with which the conicts and grievances of geographically and temporally distant societies may be articulated, as well as their longing for resolution and reconciliation. As a commentary on and intervention in the politics of their own day and age, such ‘translated’ Romeo and Juliets are a supreme example of civic Shakespeare. They present an engagement with public issues, frequently in a contact zone and almost always in the context of a conict between two opposing political and/or social groups. |
| Related Links | https://api.taylorfrancis.com/content/chapters/edit/download?identifierName=doi&identifierValue=10.4324/9781315733104-22&type=chapterpdf |
| Ending Page | 296 |
| Page Count | 13 |
| Starting Page | 284 |
| DOI | 10.4324/9781315733104-22 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited |
| Publisher Date | 2015-09-16 |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Subject Keyword | Book Name: Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, and Civic Life Literary Studies Theater Society Strife Romeo and Juliet Reconciliation Verona Diverse |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Chapter |
