Abstract
Does Shakespeare, through his plays, talk to us, or do we, through reading and performing Shakespeare, merely talk to ourselves? In 1993 a Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, proclaimed Shakespeare to be a Tory.1 Nearly thirty years earlier the distinguished Labour Party Minister, Richard Crossman, had regarded the dramatist as a mentor for modern political history and perceptive sensibility.2 Critical schools of every spectrum of Western belief have seemingly acquired him for themselves since the 1960s. He has been pro-Semitic and anti-Semitic, pro-feminist and anti-feminist, racist and anti-racist, Catholic and Protestant, believer and agnostic. The question of interpretation, as Terry Hawkes in particular has demonstrated, depends more on the interpreter than the interpreted.3
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Notes and References
The Independent on Sunday, 3 January 1993.
Quoted by Peter Hall in the Introduction, The Wars of the Roses, adapted from Shakespeare’s Henry VI Parts I, II, III and Richard III by John Barton in collaboration with Peter Hall (London: BBC, 1970), p. x. See Michael Scott, ‘Truth, History and Stage Representation: The Henry VI Plays at Stratford-upon-Avon’, in Shakespeare and History, ed. Holger Klein and Rowland Wymer, Shakespeare Yearbook 6 (Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter, 1995), pp. 75–90.
See Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1992).
James C. Bulman, ‘Introduction’, in Shakespeare, Theory and Performance, ed. James C. Bulman (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 3–4.
Michael Attenborough’s production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 1999, with the black actor Ray Fearon as the Moor, was the first production on the main stage at Stratford-upon-Avon since 1985, although the black actor/singer Willard White played the role at the studio theatre, The Other Place, in 1989, in a production by Trevor Nunn.
See Michael Scott, Shakespeare and the Modern Dramatist (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 44–59 for a discussion of Arnold Wesker’s The Merchant and Charles Marowitz, Variations on The Merchant of Venice. Wesker’s play was later retitled Shylock.
All quotations from Shakespeare’s works are from The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
Edward Bond, Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death (London: Methuen, 1974), p. 27.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972), p. 103.
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 5.
George Bull, ‘Introduction’ to Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (rev. ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 14.
I discuss the relationship of Castiglione’s work on Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Michael Scott, ‘Hamlet, Castiglione and the Renaissance Courtier’, Italian History and Culture 4 (1998): 29–38.
Charles Marowitz, An Othello, in Open Space Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), pp. 292–3.
John Webster, The Duchess of Malf, ed. Elizabeth M. Brennan, New Mermaids (2nd ed. London: Ernest Benn, 1983).
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© 2001 Michael Scott
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Scott, M. (2001). Talking Shakespeare. In: Cartmell, D., Scott, M. (eds) Talking Shakespeare. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-333-98574-8_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-333-98574-8_2
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