literature and performance

Order Description 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”. 19 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.