Non-Catalyst and Marginal Shakespeares in the Nineteenth-Century Revival of Catalan-Speaking Cultures

Summary

My contribution to this volume on Shakespeare as a ‘cultural catalyst’ will take this term in the broad sense of an agent speeding up a reaction, without implying that the agent remains unchanged in the process, and will consider one type of ‘cultural reaction’, that of writers of a minority (or ‘minorized’) language that seek to restore its social use and literary prestige. The language I will refer to is Catalan and the specific ‘reaction’ is the revivalist movement known as la Renaixença (‘rebirth’ or ‘renascence’), initiated in the 1830s in the Spanish regions of Catalonia and Valencia, and later in the Balearic Islands and in the French region of Roussillon.

After exploring whether Shakespeare was a catalyst in, and in what ways Shakespeare's works contributed to, the revitalization of Catalan-speaking cultures in Spain in the nineteenth century, I will show that, contrary to the preconceived idea that translations and adaptations of Shakespeare infuse social and literary prestige in the minorized culture, most of the early Shakespeares in Catalan constitute marginal forms of literary and theatrical use that bespeak other kinds of contributions to the recovery of cultural identity or simply disregard such an aim.