From Messina to Delhi: Much Ado about Staging Global Shakespeares in Olympic Times

Sederi ◽  
2013 ◽  
pp. 57-78
Author(s):  
Sofía Muñoz-Valdivieso
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Present Article ◽  
International Performance ◽  
Royal Shakespeare Company ◽  
Much Ado About Nothing ◽  
The World ◽  
Performance Issues ◽  
The Uk

The present article discusses one of the contributions of the Royal Shakespeare Company to the World Shakespeare Festival, a celebration of the Bard as the world’s playwright that took place in the UK in 2012 as part of the so-called Cultural Olympiad. Iqbal Khan directed for the RSC an all-Indian production of the comedy Much Ado about Nothing that transposed the actions from early modern Messina to contemporary Delhi and presented its story of love, merry war of wits and patriarchal domination in a colourful setting that recreated a world of tradition and modernity. Received with mixed reviews that in general applauded the vibrant relocation while criticising some directorial choices, this 2012 Much Ado about Nothing in modern-day Delhi raises a number of questions about cultural ownership and Shakespeare’s international performance – issues that are particularly relevant if we see the play in relation to other productions of the World Shakespeare Festival in this Olympic year but also in the context of the increasing internationalization of Shakespeare’s cultural capital in contemporary times.

Starlings, Whales and Herring: Animals as Portents in Early Modern England

2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (1 (241)) ◽  
pp. 45-58
Author(s):  
Paweł Rutkowski
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The World ◽  
Future Events

The present article explores the early modern preoccupation with omens – extraordinary occurrences observed both on earth and in the sky – which were universally believed to presage some future events and/or provide humans with providential signs and messages. Animals apparently formed a category of particularly common portents, due to their ubiquity and traditional links with the supernatural. Numerous examples of such omens demonstrate that animals and their behaviour were capable of evoking a variety of interpretations (moral, political, religious, etc.) and were indispensable in upholding the emblematic vision of the world, which, providentially, was supposed to be full of signs that could be deciphered by careful observers for their own benefit.

Engaging Diaspora in Reconciliation Efforts in Sri Lanka: Lessons Learnt

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-16
Author(s):  
Amjad Mohamed-Saleem
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Trust Building ◽  
Social And Cultural Capital ◽  
Engagement Strategies ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Lessons Learnt ◽  
The World ◽  
Conflict Reconciliation ◽  
National Framework

With nearly three million Sri Lankans living overseas, across the world, there is a significant role that can be played by this constituency in post-conflict reconciliation.  This paper will highlight the lessons learnt from a process facilitated by International Alert (IA) and led by the author, working to engage proactively with the diaspora on post-conflict reconciliation in Sri Lanka.  The paper shows that for any sustainable impact, it is also critical that opportunities are provided to diaspora members representing the different communities of the country to interact and develop horizontal relations, whilst also ensuring positive vertical relations with the state. The foundation of such effective engagement strategies is trust-building. Instilling trust and gaining confidence involves the integration of the diaspora into the national framework for development and reconciliation. This will allow them to share their human, social and cultural capital, as well as to foster economic growth by bridging their countries of residence and origin.

International Listening Post report summary: the world at the dawn of 2019

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-124
Author(s):  
Sandy Henderson ◽  
Ulrike Beland ◽  
Dimitrios Vonofakos
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Faroe Islands ◽  
The South ◽  
The World ◽  
The Uk

On or around 9 January 2019, twenty-two Listening Posts were conducted in nineteen countries: Canada, Chile, Denmark, Faroe Islands, Finland, Germany (Frankfurt and Berlin), Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy (two in Milan and one in the South), Peru, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey, and the UK. This report synthesises the reports of those Listening Posts and organises the data yielded by them into common themes and patterns.

“All in a Garden Green”: Shakespeare's Staging of Garden Imagery

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-252
Author(s):  
Deborah Solomon
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Audience Interaction ◽  
The Many ◽  
Green World

This essay draws attention to the surprising lack of scholarship on the staging of garden scenes in Shakespeare's oeuvre. In particular, it explores how garden scenes promote collaborative acts of audience agency and present new renditions of the familiar early modern contrast between the public and the private. Too often the mention of Shakespeare's gardens calls to mind literal rather than literary interpretations: the work of garden enthusiasts like Henry Ellacombe, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, and Caroline Spurgeon, who present their copious gatherings of plant and flower references as proof that Shakespeare was a garden lover, or the many “Shakespeare Gardens” around the world, bringing to life such lists of plant references. This essay instead seeks to locate Shakespeare's garden imagery within a literary tradition more complex than these literalizations of Shakespeare's “flowers” would suggest. To stage a garden during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries signified much more than a personal affinity for the green world; it served as a way of engaging time-honored literary comparisons between poetic forms, methods of audience interaction, and types of media. Through its metaphoric evocation of the commonplace tradition, in which flowers double as textual cuttings to be picked, revised, judged, and displayed, the staged garden offered a way to dramatize the tensions produced by creative practices involving collaborative composition and audience agency.

Divine Machines

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin E. H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Theoretical Interest ◽  
Living World ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Generation Theory

Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of G. W. Leibniz. This book offers the first in-depth examination of Leibniz's deep and complex engagement with the empirical life sciences of his day, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. The book shows how these wide-ranging pursuits were not only central to Leibniz's philosophical interests, but often provided the insights that led to some of his best-known philosophical doctrines. Presenting the clearest picture yet of the scope of Leibniz's theoretical interest in the life sciences, the book takes seriously the philosopher's own repeated claims that the world must be understood in fundamentally biological terms. Here it reveals a thinker who was immersed in the sciences of life, and looked to the living world for answers to vexing metaphysical problems. The book casts Leibniz's philosophy in an entirely new light, demonstrating how it radically departed from the prevailing models of mechanical philosophy and had an enduring influence on the history and development of the life sciences. Along the way, the book provides a fascinating glimpse into early modern debates about the nature and origins of organic life, and into how philosophers such as Leibniz engaged with the scientific dilemmas of their era.

La transposition profane de l’Exode dans Moïse fiction de Gilles Rozier

2013 ◽  
pp. 174-183
Author(s):  
Piotr Sadkowski
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
The Other ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Jewish Origin ◽  
French Writer ◽  
The World ◽  
Jewish Writers

Throughout the centuries French and Francophone writers were relatively rarely inspired by the figure of Moses and the story of Exodus. However, since the second half of 20th c. the interest of the writers in this Old Testament story has been on the rise: by rewriting it they examine the question of identity dilemmas of contemporary men. One of the examples of this trend is Moïse Fiction, the 2001 novel by the French writer of Jewish origin, Gilles Rozier, analysed in the present article. The hypertextual techniques, which result in the proximisation of the figure of Moses to the reality of the contemporary reader, constitute literary profanation, but at the same time help place Rozier’s text in the Jewish tradition, in the spirit of talmudism understood as an exchange of views, commentaries, versions and additions related to the Torah. It is how the novel, a new “midrash”, avoids the simple antinomy of the concepts of the sacred and the profane. Rozier’s Moses, conscious of his complex identity, is simultaneously a Jew and an Egyptian, and faces, like many contemporary Jewish writers, language dilemmas, which constitute one of the major motifs analysed in the present article. Another key question is the ethics of the prophetism of the novelistic Moses, who seems to speak for contemporary people, doomed to in the world perceived as chaos unsupervised by an absolute being. Rozier’s agnostic Moses is a prophet not of God (who does not appear in the novel), but of humanism understood as the confrontation of a human being with the absurdity of his or her own finiteness, which produces compassion for the other, with whom the fate of a mortal is shared.

IDIOMS WITH A FLORAL COMPONENT AND DIFFICULTIES OF THEIR TRANSLATION

2019 ◽  
pp. 144-153
Author(s):  
Kamola Alimova
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

This article is devoted to the study of English idioms with flora component, their meaning and use in speech. The aim of the work is to define the concept of "idioms", the history of idioms with the component of flora, centuries-old human observations of the world of flora and the attitude of people to this area of reality. The article also reveals the peculiarities of English idioms with flora component important for translation and considers the problem of adequacy and equivalence in translation, as well as the ways of translation of English idioms into Uzbek. The present article is devoted to investigation of idioms with the component of the flora, their importance and use in speech. The aim of the work is to define the concept of "idiom". The history of occurrence of idioms with flora component is considered. Identify the features of idioms that are important for translation and methods of translation of English idiom with the component flora. Ушбу мақола флора компонентига эга бўлган инглиз идиомаларининг мазмуни ва уларни нутқдаги аҳамиятини ўрганишга бағишланган. Мақоланиниг мақсади флора компонентига эга бўлган инглиз идомаларининг моҳияти ва келиб чиқиш тарихини ўрганиш ва флора дунёсининг кўп асрлик инсон томонида кузатилиши ва унга муносабатини кўриб чиқишдан иборат. Шунингдек, мақолада флора компонентига эга бўлган инглиз идиомаларининг ўзбек тилига таржима қилиш жараёнидаги муҳим жиҳатлари, айниқса, таржимада адекватлик ва эквалентлик муаммоси ҳамда таржима қилиш усуллари кўриб чиқилган. Cтатья посвящена изучению английских идиом с компонентом флора, их значению и употреблению в речи. Целью работы является определение понятия идиома, история идиом с компонентом флора, многовековые наблюдения человека за миром флоры и отношение людей к этой области действительности. В статье также раскрываются особенности перевода английских идиом с компонентом флора, рассматривается проблема адекватности и эквивалентности в переводе и способы перевода английских идиом на узбекский язык.

Exploring Attendance at a Traditional Cultural Event: The Case of a Holy Week Celebration

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-168
Author(s):  
Víctor Lafuente ◽  
José Ángel Sanz ◽  
María Devesa
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Count Data ◽  
Data Model ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Social Nature ◽  
The World ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
The City ◽  
Complex Expression

Holy Week is one of the most important traditions in many parts of the world and a complex expression of cultural heritage. The main goal of this article is to explore which factors determine participation in Holy Week celebrations in the city of Palencia (Spain), measured through the number of processions attended. For this purpose, an econometric count data model is used. Variables included in the model not only reflect participants' sociodemographic features but other factors reflecting cultural capital, accumulated experience, and social aspects of the event. A distinction is drawn between three types of participants: brotherhood members, local residents, and visitors, among whom a survey was conducted to collect the information required. A total of 248 surveys were carried out among brotherhood members, 209 among local residents, and 259 among visitors. The results confirm the religious and social nature of this event, especially in the case of local participants. However, in the case of visitors, participation also depends on aspects reflecting the celebration's cultural and tourist dimension—such as visiting other religious and cultural attractions—suggesting the existence of specific tourism linked to the event. All of this suggests the need to manage the event, ensuring a balance is struck between the various stakeholders' interests and developing a tourist strategy that prioritizes public-private cooperation.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document