2 - Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage

Summary

“You go not till I set you up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you” (Hamlet 3.4.19-20) Peter Holland concludes his book English Shakespeares by praising foreign productions for 'rightly showing us that not everybody's Shakespeare is the one we possessively think we know' (p. 269). Several recent publications show the effects of Shakespeare's transposition within German, French, Russian and Irish cultures, past and present. In Redefining Shakespeare: Literary Theory and Theatre Practice in the German Democratic Republic, J. Lawrence Gunter and Andrew M. McLean have brought together an illuminating range of essays and interviews with theatre practitioners which chart the changing production styles in the former East Germany in relation to their political contexts. For me at least, much of this was undiscovered country. A useful chronology of key productions and events from 1945 to 1990 sets a historical framework for the development of a tradition in which the German Shakespeare Society, and the work of Brecht and Robert Weimann are shown to be important influences. Weimann's own lucid essay gives 'a personal retrospect' of how 'Shakespeare' has been redefined over the period, assessing the 'uncanny threshold between unorthodoxy and complicity' (p. 137) unique to theatre practice in the GDR.