Shakespeare Translation as Cultural Exchange

Summary

In August 1994 the Guardian’s drama critic concluded his review of Peter Zadek’s production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Edinburgh Festival by claiming that its value to him lay in its not being in English: ‘Shakespeare in a foreign tongue’, he wrote, ‘becomes an analogue to the original that gives the director new freedom’, and ‘it will be hard’, after this, ‘to go back to traditional productions’. While it could be argued that Michael Billington, in journalistic haste, is confusing the strength of a ‘startling, radical, Brechtian’ production with the alienation effect of a foreign language, this was not so with Clement Scott, the formidable Daily Telegraph reviewer, when nearly a hundred years ago he praised Sarah Bernhardt in his book on Some Notable Hamlets of the Present Time (1900). Amazingly he manages to go into raptures over Madame Bernhardt's performance without once commenting on her gender; but he is explicit about the language of this Hamlet: 'With the French version of the immortal text I was charmed. It conveyed Shakespeare's idea in a nutshell' (p. 51). Both then and now, it seems, drama reviewers can be Sentimental Travellers: 'They order this matter better in France' . . . or in Germany . . . or Japan.

But I wonder, when it comes to thinking about the implications of Billington's and Scott's proclaimed positions, if academic critics are such travellers? And, how seriously do we think about those implications? I wonder, that is, whether to the immensely fertile body of current Shakespeare studies, the study of translations might not be a stepchild — 'an interesting and harmless occupation for researchers abroad', as the editors of the recently published and excellently thought-provoking collection of essays on European Shakespeares put it, lamenting the lack of reciprocity between their discipline and English and American Shakespeare studies.