Schedule / Horaire
Panel A: Tuesday 22 April 2014, 11h-12h30.
Panel B: Wednesday 23 April 2014, 9h-10h30
Room: V106A.
Leaders / Organisatrices
Erica Sheen, University of York (UK) and Isabel Karremann, University of Würzburg (Germany)
Participants
Respondents:
- Adam Piette, University of Sheffield (UK)
- Geoff Cubitt, University of York (UK)
Panelists:
- Erica Sheen, University of York (UK)
‘Zu politisch’: Berlin and the Elizabethan Festival, 1948 - Nicole Fayard, University of Leicester (UK)
Shakespeare’s Theatre of War in 1960s France - Keith Gregory, University of Murcia (Spain)
Coming out of the cold: the celebration of Shakespeare in Francoist Spain - Isabel Karremann, University of Würzburg (Germany)
Shakespeare in Cold War Germany: The Split of the German Shakespeare Society in 1964 - Krystyna Kujawinska Courtney, University of Łódź (Poland)
A Story of One Publication: Commemorating the Fourth Centenary of Shakespeare’s Birth in Poland - Irene R. Makaryk, University of Ottawa (Canada)
1964: Shakespeare in the USSR - Veronika Schandl, Pázmány Péter Catholic University (Hungary)
‘Memory holds a seat in this distracted globe’: Shakespeare productions in Hungary in 1976
Abstracts / Résumés
1. Erica Sheen, University of York (UK)
‘Zu politisch’: Berlin and the Elizabethan Festival, 1948
In summer 1948, at the height of the Berlin airlift, the powers presiding over the divided city flexed their muscles in competing shows of cultural power. The Russians sent Cossacks to sing in Alexander-platz; the British Council send a troupe of students from Cambridge to play Shakespeare – amongst them Noel Annan, a young academic who had worked for Control Commission on the ‘re-education’ of the Germans and was now a Fellow in politics at Kings. In a later memoir, he would comment, perhaps a little disingenuously, ‘What these activities did for the moral of the Berliners I cannot imagine’. In this paper I will try to do the job for him.
2. Nicole Fayard, University of Leicester (UK)
Shakespeare’s Theatre of War in 1960s France
This paper explores one of the strategic ways in which Shakespearian performance challenged the orthodox binary logic of cold war politics of the times in 1960s French theatre festivals. Focusing on Roger Planchon and Marcel’s work, it demonstrates how the productions bring together marginal spaces and the dimensions of the local and domestic conflict as well as the more global ones. The directors produced hauntingly deterritorialised and fragmented theatrical landscapes which appear to be on the periphery of the bipolar conflict. The grip of cold war ideology appears unsettled, enacting an ambivalent view and theatrical ‘depolarisation’ of Cold War political realities.
3. Keith Gregory, University of Murcia (Spain)
Coming out of the cold: the celebration of Shakespeare in Francoist Spain
The quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth coincided with a crucial period in recent Spanish history in which the country’s right-wing dictatorship attempted to establish its eligibility for foreign, especially US, aid in return for its loyalty to the Western Alliance. A further beneficiary of this rapprochement was, I argue, William Shakespeare, whose work had gone relatively unnoticed in Spain until his ‘discovery’ by producers, academics and critics in the early to mid-60s. The relaxation of censorhip which had dogged the production of classical drama was a further boost to the reception of that work, a reception that reached a peak in the anniversary festivals held (especially) in Madrid and Barcelona.
4. Isabel Karremann, University of Würzburg (Germany)
Shakespeare in Cold War Germany: The Split of the German Shakespeare Society in 1964
When the Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft celebrated its one-hundredth birthday in 1964, it did so in the shadow of the Wall that divided Berlin and that had been built only the year before. Echoing this political division, the Gesellschaft was also split: two separate societies producing two separate yearbooks, and celebrating the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth in two different locations, Bochum and Weimar. My paper will explore the different strategies of self-authorization each used, as well as the political and ideological alliances invoked respectively with England and the Soviet Union during the anniversary celebrations and in related publications.
5. Krystyna Kujawinska Courtney, University of Łódź (Poland)
A Story of One Publication: Commemorating the Fourth Centenary of Shakespeare’s Birth in Poland
My paper demonstrates strategies of containment practiced by Polish authorities to marginalize the commemoration of the fourth centenary of Shakespeare’s birth (1964). After World War II, the rebirth of Polish culture was celebrated through Shakespeare, the most popular of “Polish” playwrights; however, imposition of Social Realism (1949) relegated his plays to cultural fringes for representing capitalist values. Later subversion of the totalitarian ideology through theatrical political allusions and metaphors during the Post-Stalinist “Thaw” (1956) did not last long. As Kott noticed, the Grand Mechanism of Power reinstated the Communist cultural hegemony. The bleak 1964 didn’t encourage paying homage to Shakespeare.
6. Irene R. Makaryk, University of Ottawa (Canada)
1964: Shakespeare in the USSR
The 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth was marked by an outpouring of books, articles, and productions in the USSR. Two “voices” may be simultaneously discerned in the documents of the time: the first, a future-oriented discourse of universal harmony and idealism linked directly to the works of “The Great Realist”; and the second, a strident voice of attack and disparagement of Western critics, scholars, and associations. Together, these “voices” marked the culmination of the cultural and political “Thaw” and presaged its imminent demise. They also reflected the continuing Soviet view of culture as one of the primary spheres of power and contestation.
7. Veronika Schandl, Pázmány Péter Catholic University (Hungary)
‘Memory holds a seat in this distracted globe’: Shakespeare productions in Hungary in 1976
1976 may not seem to be a year of much importance in the history of Shakespeare anniversaries, but it was a year of unprecedented theatrical richness of Shakespearean productions in Hungary. All major theatres of the country put on a Shakespeare play, but it is only with the benefit of hindsight that we can see how the nine shows that premiered that year, unintentionally, but interestingly, represent almost all facets of Hungarian cultural politics and Shakespeare’s role in them. Instead of describing the shows in detail, my aim with this paper is to show how this cross-section of 1976 Hungarian Shakespeare-interpretations illustrates reception patterns that go beyond simple subversion and containment.