Context and Co-text in Bernard Ogini’s Hamlet for Pidgin (Oga Pikin)

This article examines a phenomenon that may trigger a resurgence in the pleasure of reading or watching performances of Shakespeare’s plays in Nigeria: adaptation and translation into Naija (previously Nigerian Pidgin). Specifically, it examines how the Naija translation Hamlet for Pidgin (Oga Pikin) is prototypical for such a revival. The study adopts a comparative approach and explicates how anaphoric reformulation (AR), cataphoric reformulation (CR) and exophoric reformulation (ER) condition the translation’s peculiar lexico-semantic choices in terms of borrowing, reduplicatives, calquing and the like. These forms enter a networked relationship within the co-text and context to bring about a contemporary equivalent to Hamlet. Readers and audiences extract meaning through clues such as collocation, background knowledge and other linking strategies provided consciously or unconsciously by the author/translator. The article concludes that this translation is also significant for its shift away from the cathartic effect of Shakespearean tragedy and towards a comic mode that has greater popular appeal.

Crossings with Jatra: Bengali Folk-theatre Elements in a Transcultural Representation of Lady Macbeth

This paper examines a transcultural dance-theatre focusing on Lady Macbeth, through the lens of eastern Indian Bengali folk-theatre tradition, jatra. The wide range of experimentation with Shakespeare notwithstanding, the idea of an all-female representation is often considered a travesty. Only a few such explorations have earned recognition in contemporary times. One such is the Indian theatre-dance production Crossings: Exploring the facets of Lady Macbeth by Vikram Iyenger, first performed in 2004. Four women representing four facets of Lady Macbeth explore the layered nuances that constitute her through the medium of Indian classical dance and music juxtaposed with Shakespearean dialogues from Macbeth. This paper will argue the possibilities posited by this transgressive re-reading of a major Shakespearean tragedy by concentrating on a possible understanding through a Hindu religious sect —Vaishnavism, as embodied through the medium of jatra. To form a radically new stage narrative in order to bring into focus the dilemma and claustrophobia of Lady Macbeth is perhaps the beginning of a new generation of Shakespeare explorations. Iyenger’s production not only dramatizes the tragedy of Lady Macbeth through folk dramatic tradition, dance and music, but also Indianises it with associations drawn from Indian mythological women like Putana (demoness) and Shakti (sacred feminine).

Sobreposições: Shakespeare, Bene e Deleuze em agenciamento | Overlays: Shakespeare, Bene and Deleuze in agency

ResumoVersa-se sobre o agenciamento de criadores de pensamento realizado por Deleuze como elemento fundamental de sua filosofia. Coloca-se em foco o processo de minoração da tragédia Ricardo III, de Shakespeare, realizado por Bene via a composição de uma nova peça. Intenta-se evidenciar o caminho percorrido por Bene à luz da perspectiva deleuziana. Para tanto, apresenta-se a importância de se agenciar pensamentos entre a filosofia e outras áreas do conhecimento; realiza-se uma breve análise do núcleo dramático da tragédia shakespeariana; e estuda-se o Ricardo III de Bene e o ensaio de Deleuze, Um manifesto de menos. Como resultado, salienta-se que o processo de agenciamento se trata de um potente método de criação de conceitos.Palavras-chave: Impersonagens. Linhas de variação. Devir minoritário. AbstractIt deals with the agency of thought creators carried out by Deleuze as a fundamental element of his philosophy. The process of lessening Shakespeare's tragedy Ricardo III, carried out by Bene through the composition of a new play, is brought into focus. The aim is to highlight the path taken by Bene in the light of the Deleuzian perspective. To this end, the importance of agencing thoughts between philosophy and other fields of knowledge is presented; a brief analysis of the dramatic core of the Shakespearean tragedy is carried out; and we study Ricardo III, by Bene, and the essay by Deleuze, Um manifesto de menos. As a result, it is emphasized that the agency process is a powerful method of creating concepts.Keywords: Impersonagens. Variation lines. Becoming a minority.

“Far more fair than black”: Othellos on the Chilean Stage

This article reviews part of the stage history of Shakespeare’s Othello in Chile and, in particular, it focuses on two performances of the play: the first, in 1818, and the last one in 2012-2020. By comparing both productions, I aim to establish the exact date and theatrical context of the first Chilean staging of the Shakespearean tragedy using historical sources and English travellers’ records, as well as to explore how the representation of a Moor and of blackness onstage evolved both in its visual dimension — the choice of costumes and the use of blackface—, and in its racial connotations alongside deep social changes. During the nineteenth century Othello became one of the most popular plays in Chile, being performed eleven times in the period of 31 years, a success that also occurred in Spain between 1802 and 1833. The early development of Chilean theatre was very much influenced not only by the ideas of the Spaniards who arrived in the country, but also by the available Spanish translations of Shakespeare; therefore, I argue that the first performances of Othello as Other — different in origin and in skin colour — were characterised by an imitative style, since actors repeated onstage the biased image of Moors that Spaniards had brought to Chile. While the assessment of Othello and race is not new, this article contrasts in its scope, as I do not discuss the protagonist’s actual origin, but how the changes in Chilean social and cultural contexts can reshape and reconfigure the performance of blackness and turn it into a meaningful translation of the Shakespearean Moor that activates audiences’ awareness of racism and fears of miscegenation.

‘I was your slave’: Revisioning kinship in Toni Morrison and Rokia Traoré’s Desdemona

This article offers a critical reading of Desdemona (2012), a cross-cultural theatre adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello staged by American theatre and opera director Peter Sellars, with texts by African American Nobel laureate Toni Morrison and music and lyrics by Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré. By drawing on early modern race studies and Marshall Sahlin’s notion of ‘mutuality of being’, the article discusses Morrison’s lyrical prose as well as Traoré’s songs and performance to show how they merge and amplify one another in Sellars’ meditative staging to jointly rearticulate early modern notions of race, kinship and family embedded in Othello. By questioning what lies dormant, unseen and unheard in the Shakespearean tragedy, Desdemona supplements it with what Imtiaz Habib has termed ‘imprints of the invisible’ and invites its readers and audiences to ponder the onset of European colonialism, the slave trade, colour-based racism and their global aftermath, positing theatre as a metaphor for other civic, shared spaces where honest conversations about race, gender and class inequalities can open up a path to healing and reconciliation.

Shakespearean Tragedy and the Death of Humanism

This concluding chapter explains how Hamlet has endeavoured to demonstrate the extraordinary pains that William Shakespeare took to represent the cultural world of humanism as fundamentally indifferent to things as they really are, and as one in which the pursuit of truth is therefore all but an impossibility. Precisely because Hamlet is a post-humanist work of tragedy, it is not confined to the strictures that Shakespeare brings to bear on superficially imitative neo-classicism. In place of preordained moral reflections that show the world as the playwright and his authorities think it should be, Hamlet provides its readerly and theatrical audiences with the prompt to examine themselves, their presuppositions, and their beliefs about the status of humankind within the moral and physical universes. The audacity of Hamlet is to show by example, rather than theoretical disquisition, that in the humanistic world of which Shakespeare and his work were a part, dramatic poetry is the medium best fitted to telling the truth. Best fitted to revealing that in its attachment to various forms of theatrum mundi, humankind not only propagates its own ignorance and self-alienation, but ensures that it will remain unable to devise a better way in which to live.

Shakespearean Tragedy, Ethics, and Social Justice

How can the study of literary form shape students’ understanding of ethics, justice, and community? This chapter describes a course that yokes Shakespearean tragedies to ethical philosophy from Aristotle to Patricia J. Williams. Through these pairings, students compare the benefits of cognitive and affective learning, consider questions of epistemic injustice, reasoning, and belief in historical moments of epistemological crisis, and question the roles of individuals and collectivities in precipitating tragic outcomes. Detailing her approach to teaching Othello alongside Williams’ “The Obliging Shell,” the author illustrates the importance of historicizing the construction of whiteness in order to illuminate the effects of systematized injustice.