Reflect on how an understanding of the variability of performance
challenges our understanding of what constitutes literary ‘authenticity’.
At what point does a
text pass from being Shakespeare to being something different? What is Shakespeare?
Thinking of the discussions we have had over the last few units, how might you respond
to these questions?
Scholars offer a number of perspectives:
1. Shakespeare the Brand: Sonia Massai suggests that since the rise in
Shakespearean appropriations and their significance in mass culture as well as
traditional or conventional cultural production “Shakespeare has effectively become
a successful logo or brand name”.
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2. Shakespeare the Cultural Text: Piere Bourdieu’s idea that “the producer of a
work of art is not the artist but the field of production as a universe of belief which
produces the value of the work of art as a fetish”
20 offers the possibility of thinking
of Shakespeare as the product of responses to his work.
For Kennedy, intercultural performance reminds us ultimately that:
Shakespeare is foreign to all of us…in English the language will always be
important to our appreciation, yet our ability to reach the plays directly in their
original language lessens year by year […] reflecting on performances outside of
English, we can see more clearly how Shakespeare is alien, as well as what we
continue to find indigenous or domestic about him. What is it that endures when he
is deprived of his tongue? It is a question that will haunt the future.
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This question is also one which clearly haunts receptions of intercultural Shakespeares.
Being both familiar and alien, performances like Kathakali King Lear foreground the
question of authenticity, challenge a cultural construction of Shakespeare and,
ultimately, force us to question Shakespeare as a national text. These concerns are
played out no-where more clearly perhaps than in critical responses.
