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With the aid of a specific (or idiosyncratic) understanding of the concept of appropriation that suggests that appropriations are reciprocal manoeuvres of hybridisation that negotiate and construct both their subjects and their objects at the same time, this article explores Shakespeare as a cultural hybrid. In closing, it deploys the preceding theoretical considerations to investigate the cultural and temporal aspects of an anecdote about the Hungarian theatre director Arthur Bárdos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2016 Paapa Essiedu, a British actor of Ghanaian ancestry, starred as Hamlet in Simon Godwin's lauded Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production, set in a post-colonial African state whose non-specificity nonetheless irritated some reviewers. We contend, however, that the production mixed multiple referents of blackness (Eastern African, West African, Caribbean, South African, 1970s African American) in order deliberately to create an imaginary post-colonial domain where these different kinds of diasporic blackness engaged with each other through the figure of Hamlet and his art. We therefore examine how the concept of race changes with the transatlantic or transnational movement among spaces in this production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Jan Pappelbaum, what fascinated him and Thomas Ostermeier about 'reconstructed' Globe Theatres is that '[i]t becomes impossible to ignore the presence of the audience; actors are particularly exposed and entirely at the mercy of the spectators'. This article investigates the spatial politics that emerge from/within the 'quasi-reconstructed' Globe for Ostermeier's production of Richard III. Examining a 2017 performance of the play at London's Barbican Theatre, I consider how audience interaction (and the potential for theatrical failure in that interaction, specifically through performative silence) becomes the site of political resistance in the context of theatrical performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

2002: three months, three Palestinian women, three bombs. That same year, Sulayman Al-Bassam premiered The Al-Hamlet Summit, his political appropriation of Hamlet, Mahmoud Darwish's Palestinian poetry, and Heiner Müller's Hamletmachine, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Mapping the politics of anger and despair onto Shakespeare's play, he suggests that terrorism from Palestine to the United States is rooted in colonialism and Western military interventions in the Middle East. Hamlet is a jihadist, Horatio becomes a British Arms Dealer and Ophelia, a suicide bomber. This article explores the politics of representation in the body of Ophelia, who is anatomised as she detonates herself under the palace orange trees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the construction, operation and scholarly usefulness of electronic resources of Shakespeare translations. In particular, it offers an overview of several existing European digital resources of Shakespeare translations by singling out trends, challenges and new vistas of research; describing the content, editing policies and functionalities of selected European projects, already in operation or currently assembled; and discussing the aims and major difficulties faced by the researchers, the choice of navigation and search tools, the possibilities of integrating national repositories with other resources and the relation of translation e-resources to adjacent disciplines, including corpus linguistics or stylometry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Act 2 Scene 2 of Richard II, Bushy advises the Queen against 'looking awry' upon the King's departure, comparing her gaze first to a perspective glass and then to a perspective picture that appears distorted unless viewed at an angle. I rely on this metaphor of anamorphosis to examine two recent productions of Richard II in Athens, both of which 'distort' the text and situate it in a bleak context. Viewed from the angle of the current political discontent, the 2014 and 2016 adaptations, directed by Elli Papakonstantinou and Efi Birba respectively, assume distinct meaning for the Athenian audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2016 BBC television production of A Midsummer Night's Dream (directed by David Kerr) illustrates that the provocative representation of gender issues, commented on by most reviewers, effectively overshadowed the film's real topicality: its depiction of a tightly controlling post-panoptic regime, relying on technological surveillance systems, in which observed and observer are equally implicated. However, the film's spectacular visuality and the liberal gender politics of the adaptation, which are all but compulsory in contemporary theatrical adaptations, have allowed viewers to focus on the carnivalesque comedy of the finale, rather than the darker undertones of its social criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of hybridity is profoundly ingrained in logocentric epistemologies that assert such cultural constructs as the unity of a text, authorship, ownership or an identity of sorts. This article aims at hybridity that takes place in the act of the audience's perception and understanding of the play. On the example of Shakespeare's plays, I address the question of (1) truth value and fiction in performance, (2) the propositionality of the stage and (3) the shift in performance as an oral medium from logocentric textuality to human interaction as social act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]