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papers:
Dana Chetrinescu (University of Timisoara, Romania):
"Shakespeare, the Film Tycoon - Pleasure or Necessity?"
abstract
/ paper
Paul Franssen (University of Utrecht, The Netherlands): "The
Bard and the Time Machine" abstract
/ paper
Eugenia Gavriliu ("Dunarea de Jos" University, Galati,
Romania): "Shakespeare As A Romantic Icon In Early Modern
Romanian Culture" abstract
/ paper
Krystyna Kujawinska Courtney (University of Lodz, Poland):
"From Jan Kott to Commerce: Shakespeare in Post-Communist
Poland" abstract
/ paper
Theodora Mavropoulou: "Shakespeare as high culture in Greece
and the specificity of the Greek social class system"
abstract
/ paper
Sokolyansky, Mark. (University of Odessa, Ukraine):
"Shakespearean Themes and Motifs in Anton Chekhov's
Works"
abstract
/ paper
abstracts:
Dana Chetrinescu (University
of Timisoara, Romania)
Shakespeare, the Film Tycoon &endash; Pleasure or
Necessity?
The story of Shakespeare on big screen is a tale of visual
investigation, of the collective, mass consumption of a type
of imagery that has been offered for centuries through the
written text. The modern cultural and intellectual life
emphasizes on experience and knowledge through imagery, on
the conversion for the sake of simplification of the printed
sign into image. The regimes of gaze in the 20th century
have changed the traditional approach towards art, by
creating the illusion of proximity and complicity with the
cultural products consumed.
The paper means to discuss Shakespearean adaptations for the
cinema from the point of view of how they are answering new
expectations of cultural consumption. Shakespeare
commodified satisfies the tastes, aesthetic and intellectual
standards of the public of the post-Gutenberg Galaxy. Ever
since the 1929 Hollywood production of "The Taming of the
Shrew", Shakespeare has become a pop icon. Showbiz has
transformed the literary canon according to the need for
entertainment and information of the contemporaries. The
paper is looking at cinema adaptations as products meant to
facilitate comprehension, explain symbolism, to digest, in a
way, Shakespeare's work or to offer topics addressing
current issues that the public can accept as their own. The
fact that contemporary film criticism and the press claim
that Shakespeare created as if for the "movieland" and that
the Bard had "a keen nose for box-office trends" may seem an
anachronistic remark, but may also mean that Shakespeare is
a "survivor" whose topics can be forever readdressed. The
paper intends to discuss the expectations and the background
of the Elizabethan and the contemporary public comparatively
and see what has happened in the four hundred years in
between. Without being a sociological research or a market
survey, it will look at older or newer meanings revealed by
the outbreak of on-screen Shakespeare, aspects that can be
enjoyed, sided with, assumed, internalized by the 20th or
21st ever-consuming and recycling audience.
Paul Franssen (University of Utrecht, The Netherlands)
The Bard and the Time Machine
My paper is part of a larger project on the deployment
of Shakespeare as a fictional character to promote a variety
of discourses. For this conference, I propose to investigate
the subgenre within fiction about Shakespeare that uses time
travel to bring the national icon into direct contact with
twentieth-century values and (literary) judgments, not in
the last place about his own supposed paramount importance
as the greatest writer ever. Many of such fantasies turn on
time travel devices, loosely based on The Time
Machine by H. G. Wells. My working hypothesis is that
this kind of fiction is more likely to deflate the image of
Shakespeare, under the influence of the technocratic
framework suggested by this method of time travel, whereas
alternative fictional strategies by which Shakespeare can be
confronted with his modern readers (e.g., Shakespeare as a
Ghost, time travel through magic) tend to build up the
Shakespearean myth, or at least leave it intact.
In my paper I will deal with short stories by Isaac Asimov,
Bill Pronzini and Barry Malzberg, E. Bertrand Loring, and
Anthony Burgess, as well as Hugh Kingsmill's novel The
Return of William Shakespeare. I will contrast these
Wellsian time-travel fantasies with appearances of
Shakespeare's ghost (on which see Michael Dobson, The
Making of the National Poet, passim) and the magical
time-travel device of Erica Jong's Serenissima.
One aspect of the rift between technological and alternative
modes of time-travel is the geographical dimension: the USA
being the world leader in technological developments, in
many such fantasies the Bard is confronted with Americans
and/or an American democratic culture. In the alternative
traditions, by contrast, and not just in the older examples,
a European setting (Britain, Italy) seems to guarantee a
more dignified reception for Shakespeare--even if, as in the
case of Erica Jong, the author as well as the protagonist
are Americans.
Eugenia Gavriliu ("Dunarea de Jos" University, Galati,
Romania)
Shakespeare As A Romantic Icon In Early Modern Romanian
Culture
This reception study examines Shakespeare's early career
in the three Romanian historical provinces of Transylvania,
Wallachia and Moldavia, a process that could be identified
in the latter half of the 18th century to reach a climax
during the 1830s and 40s when Romanian culture was embarking
upon its Romantic stage. This was marked by the selective
assimilation of such works of the European Romanticism that
best suited the historical commandments within. Under these
conditions the works of the English Pre-Romantics Young,
Gray and Macpherson and of the Romantics Byron and Scott met
their Romanian success due to their capacity of enhancing
pre-existing tendencies. Concurrently, as the era continued
to be sensible to the need of literary models, exemplary
works belonging to the most various literary epochs and
doctrines would become part of the Romanian literary
background. Shakespeare was such a literary model 'par
excellence' while his works would continue as the object of
uncritical devotion for many a literary enthusiast till late
by the turn of the 19th century.
The moment of Shakespeare's reception in Romania has proved
a seminal direction of enquiry and this paper is gratefully
indebted to remarkable pioneering comparative scholarship
which, beneath the diversity of approaches, reveals the
researchers' consensus that the investigation of the
specific ways in which Romanian culture has responded to
Shakespeare's work will give the extent to which our culture
has integrated itself within the European cultural
mainstream. Shakespeare's early success in the Romanian
Countries was surely not different from that in Europe where
he became known at the heights of the Enlightenment and
reached the climax of his popularity with the Romantics'
claim for an ancestry able to sustain their allegiance to a
new poetics. However, what distinguishes the Romanian
appropriation of Shakespeare is the perception of the
process as an intellectual challenge, a provocative
encounter meant to test the nation's intellectual
maturity.
The paper is structured upon what can be termed the 'stages'
in Shakespeare's Romanian reception, from individual cases
of non-mediated contacts identifiable among the intellectual
elite through overt, public manifestations of iconicity in
the periodical press and the first published translations,
though mediated by French and German intermediaries.
The case that is being made is that all along the period
Shakespeare's name was invoked as supreme argument and
Shakespearean characters were selected as prototypes of
human condition during the literary doctrinal debates that
marked the gradual crystallizing of the Romantic concepts in
an era growing even more intellectually nature and sensible
to the forces that were operating towards Romanticism.
Krystyna Kujawinska Courtney (University of Lodz,
Poland)
From Jan Kott to Commerce: Shakespeare in Post-Communist
Poland
The paper will pursue the artistic and cultural
implications of the Polish popular interpretation of
Shakespeare in Post-Communist Poland. It is my assertion
that under the Communist regime he held the position of a
political custodian of patriotic and democratic values and
that nowadays, after a decade of independence, Shakespeare
has regained his position of cultural authority and
celebrity under the capitalist Market regime, newly emerged
in Poland. He has come back as a platform for a range of
cultural goods and enterprises that carry his name as their
trademark (e.g. TV commercials, campaigns for new products,
commercialized adaptation of his plays). Though Western film
versions of his works and other avantgarde productions have
contributed to the Polish commercial exploitation of
Shakespeare, his Polish circulation as a mass-cultural icon
collocated with indigenous new artistic and aesthetic
appropriations of his works in theatres, and academia. The
paper will conclude with observations on the issues of
social continuity and sustained cultural authority of art in
the context of new ways of "contemporizing Shakespeare" in
Poland. I would like to use slides, video and tapes during
my presentation.
TheodoraMavropoulou (Aristotle
University, Thessaloniki)
Shakespeare as high culture in Greece and the specificity of
the Greek social class system
The reception of Shakespeare's plays on the Greek stage,
from the very first moments of their encounter with the
Greek audience, can be analyzed along the lines of the
country's particular socio-political and cultural agenda.
Due both to the country's geography and to its tradition,
the Greek nation was nurtured in an environment comprising
two oppositional traits. On the one hand there was the
influence from the East and the consequent nostalgia for the
Byzantine era while, on the other, there was the 'romantic
Hellenism' advocating the western European aspect of Greece
and the superiority of ancient times.
The conjuncture of those two, antithetical aspects in the
identity of the Greek nation has informed the reception of
the Shakespearean plays in so far as it prevented the
formulation of the basic conditions necessary for the
consolidation of a genuine educated middle class ideology in
the country. The lack of a rudimentary context for the
development of a strong urban voice constitutes one of the
main reasons for the development of a culturally specific
coalition between the Greek lower classes and the then Royal
circles. Along the lines of this peculiar coalition the
royalty and the aristocrats sought to appropriate the
classics in general and Shakespeare in particular in order
to perpetuate their own values and ideas. Shakespeare was
represented as the bearer of an allegedly permanent cultural
value which constituted 'high culture' versus an
axiomatically 'debased' mass culture. In this way, however,
the potentiality of the English poet was almost nullified
since he was considered to be an important means through
which the particular set of social relations could be
thought as a natural hierarchy.
Mark Sokolyansky (University of
Odessa, Ukraine)
Shakespearean
Themes and Motifs in Anton Chekhov's
Works
The traces of Shakespearean impact on Anton Chekhov's
dramaturgy was repeatedly and sometimes rather uncommonly
underlined by various writers (from Lev Tolstoy to Arthur
Miller) and well-known stage directors (from Konstantin
Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold to Jean-Lois Barrault).
These traces were noticed and commented by some explorers of
Chekhov's works, but the peculiar character of the Russian
writer's approach to and interpretation of some
Shakespearean themes, motifs, and images has not yet been
investigated thoroughly.
In spite of the great historical and geographical distance
between the Elisabethan England and Russia of fin de
siècle, numerous Shakespearean allusions and
wandering quotations can be read in Chekhov's short stories
and tales, as well as in several dramatic works (The
Swan-Song, The Wood-goblin, Platonov, Ivanov, The Seagull,
Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard). His
conviction that the contemporary Russian stage "had to be
cured by Shakespeare", lead him to a very specific way of
carrying on the theme of the so-called Russian
hamletism. The references to Hamlet in the
tragi-comic world of Chekhov's writings are rather
different. The role of irony in the playwright's
interpretation of Hamletian theme in The Seagull and
other plays is of special importance and interest.
(read the paper)
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