Contemporary Shakespeare: Dislocations and Disjunctions
Résumé
What is “contemporary” Shakespeare? And where might it be found?
The most straightforward answer to the first question is a negative. “Contemporary
Shakespeare” is not simply Shakespeare performed now: the
bringing into the present of Shakespeare does not necessarily make the
experience of an audience member contemporary in any strict sense, simply
because so much of Shakespeare in the now has been shaped by various
readings of the past. A further problem of the contemporary is that it
is only recognizably “contemporary” after the event, not in the now: the
present moment enables us (whoever, or whenever, “we” are) to look back
at past events (in, say, the East Germany that has gone or in a festival
experience that is ephemeral even in respect of theater’s intrinsic fleetingness)
and see them as contemporary, or rather as having been contemporary.
As to the “where” question, the answer—to judge at least by the
essays in this special issue—is not straightforwardly “in the theater.” The
contemporary is, rather, often to be found beyond the theatrical stage, in
performance in the broadest sense of the term, or in an expanded form
of theater in the street, on the web, during the festival, in the marginal
or decentered nation.