The relationship between tragedy and race in the critical history of Othello has been nearly as fraught as that between the play's romantic protagonists, and for many of the same reasons. The play's earliest critic, Thomas Rymer, found the black Othello so improbable a tragic hero and his relationship with Desdemona so inappropriate as to render the play incapable of producing the requisite tragic effect. Later critics like Coleridge, endeavouring to defend Shakespeare's reputation and the play's status as tragedy, often did so by denying Othello's blackness in order to preserve his plausibility as tragic hero and romantic lead. By the mid-twentieth century, most critics had come to accept both Othello as black and Othello as tragedy, and turned to consideration of what sort of tragedy, and tragic hero, the play offered. Those who read it as the tragedy of a noble hero and a great love destroyed by a treacherous villain often did so not by denying but by downplaying Othello's race and emphasizing instead the universality of his feelings and responses, while those who stressed the hero's own culpability in his downfall frequently did so in terms that evoked his ‘barbarous’ origins and the consequent incommensurability of his marriage. With the increased cultural and critical attention to ideologies of race in the 1960s and 1970s came the now commonplace argument that Othello is a tragedy not of race but of racism, exposing and condemning not Othello's race-based inadequacies but rather Iago's destructive use of racial stereotypes and prejudices. This pointed refutation of racial essentialism was often supported by an appeal to universalism, arguing that racist processes of differentiation function, for psychological, political or economic reasons, to obscure a common humanity that the play finally affirms.

In recent years, however, tragedy and race have suffered a separation, if not a divorce, in Othello criticism: while in keeping with the historicist and materialist turns in early modern studies, much has been learned about the historical circumstances and cultural data that inform the play's racial imaginary, little has been said about the role of tragic form in its ideological or affective use of those materials. In the argument that follows I seek to redress this lack by demonstrating the reciprocal roles of racial ideology in the complexity of Othello's formal structure and of formal expectations in the play's depiction of racial otherness. The key to this reciprocity is the concept of identification. Central to early modern and subsequent understandings of both genre and race, identification structures the play's activation as well as its thematization of tragic affect and racial ideology: Othello's formal and racial enticements and anxieties come to a head in an audience's ability – or inability – to identify with its characters. As the play's critical history suggests, however, the results of this dynamic are not universal, but depend upon the reader/viewer's critical and ideological positions. In examining the origins and history of the play's identificatory dynamic, I aim neither to recapture originary meaning nor to correct a history of misreadings, but to reunite race and tragedy in an Othello that speaks to our own critical and cultural circumstances.

English publicly funded theatre in the twenty-first century, in which Shakespeare plays a considerable role, is becoming increasingly focused on the processes and products of innovation. The term ‘innovation’ has developed into something of a buzzword amongst cultural economists, policymakers and practitioners. Yet, notwithstanding the proliferation of cultural policy and think-tank documents discussing its merits, it is not always clear what form such innovation should take or even what constitutes innovation in the first place. In aesthetic terms innovation is not the same as ‘novelty for its own sake’. Instead, as defined by the OED, it is ‘the alteration of what is established by the introduction of new elements or forms’. Idealized cultural innovation within publicly funded theatre thus operates as an alteration of established modes of production and the subsequent reinvigoration of resulting products. This understanding of innovation – as opposed to the alternative ‘introduction of novelties’ – is what permeates the policy work of John Holden (researcher for think-tank Demos), Brian McMaster (former artistic director of the Edinburgh Festival) and Arts Council England (the arms-length funding body for the arts). The process of innovation is assumed to be radical and risky, but, most importantly, value-generative. It is thus part of an idealized process of production which ensures both aesthetic excellence and cultural value creation.

Cultural economists remind us that innovation is not the same thing as variety or diversity of work. If a theatre simply produces a multitude of plays by different playwrights they are not necessarily innovating. However, if the Royal Shakespeare Company only produces plays by Shakespeare but constantly reworks and redevelops the form and presentation of those plays it has the potential to be innovative. Innovation can thus occur within the performance of an established cultural product:

Writing in July 1949, after a week of ‘Hamlet mania’ on the BBC's Third Programme, the radio drama critic of The Listener was led to wonder whether ‘Hamlet, as social and psychic portent, has come home to roost in our day and age’. He was responding not only to the quirks of one programme's scheduling, but to the way in which Hamlet had come to be widely acknowledged, as a Times editorial put it, as ‘the Play of Plays’ in Britain in the years during and immediately after World War II.

What is significant here is the emphasis on the reordering of the play, whether by ‘scenes transferred’ or ‘outlandish convention’, together with the confidence that, such is its intrinsic and enduring modernity, some essence of Hamlet will survive to be recognized and enjoyed by a contemporary mass audience.

If Hamlet was now to be viewed as a site of infinite adaptation, a modernist text in process rather than inviolable holy writ, the medium of radio had played a significant role in this new conceptualization. When sound broadcasting first developed across the world in the 1920s, it was regarded primarily as a means to relay and comment on events, performances and subject matter produced by pre-existing cultural institutions such as theatre, publishing and the cinema. However, radio practitioners almost immediately began to explore the possibilities for original sound-based art forms and genres, in ways that often aligned it with modernist ethics and aesthetics. Radio held out the promise of a new type of drama, no longer tied to the history and conventions of theatre but capable of evolving its own styles of fluid, intimate dramaturgy and internalized modes of performance to create a ‘stage of the mind’. Shakespeare's appeal to an audience's ‘imaginary forces’ in the opening Chorus speech of Henry V was often invoked as an analogy to support radio's claim to make ‘better pictures’ than theatre. However, there are also specific obstacles that radio adaptation must overcome, notably the need to find aural equivalents, such as sound effects or narration, for visual aspects of the original play, and the avoidance of too many characters in a scene, since radio has only a few means of focalizing a speaker compared with the resources of theatre, film and television. Both of these potential problems, together with the assumption that listeners can only hold concentration for set periods of time, mean that most radio productions of Shakespeare have been radically cut or rearranged, while a variety of techniques such as distance from the microphone, use of echo chambers, multiple studios and ‘radiophonic’ sound effects have been employed to clarify, reinterpret and intensify the aural experience of the plays. In short, radio has been arguably the most adaptive of mediums, one in which the listener subjectively creates the Hamlet that she hears.

In any production of a Shakespeare play what we hear and see is largely determined by the text, but individual productions can and do make surprising and sometimes enlightening choices that bring the text to life in unexpected ways. Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) added visual images (through video and staging techniques) and sound effects to a text that, with almost all the unfamiliar words and images cut, rarely could trouble even a novice audience. By cutting the text in decisive ways, director David Esbjornson shaped a clear interpretation of a play that has seemed to contain too many possible interpretations. Esbjornson's was not, however, a heavy-handed imposition of a director's perspective on the play but a subtle enactment of the play's potential within a modern context. The production avoided the problematic Hamlet proposed by much critical literature from the eighteenth century through to the present and the potentially less than admirable Hamlet exposed in passages that undercut the character's nobility. It was a production that could please those who praise Hamlet as one of the most admirable characters in literature; it required no excuses for his inaction. Nevertheless, this Hamlet was as complex and deeply layered as the actor Christian Camargo could make him. Greeted by most reviewers as one of the best Hamlets seen in many years, the production had at its heart superb acting and an innovative group of designers.

Entering the theatre, the Duke on 42nd Street, in New York City, audiences were immediately struck by the intimacy of the venue (180 seats for Hamlet). Arranged on three sides of a black, tiled platform stage, the audience was close to the action but shielded from each other most of the time by extreme darkness. The choice of a mixture of modern-dress costumes fitted the neutral setting. Penetrated by spotlights, the darkness focused attention where it was needed. The script eliminated lines that invite actors to speak directly to the audience, keeping Elsinore hermetically sealed within that black space. For example, Polonius does not urge the audience to share his perception of Hamlet's madness with lines often interpreted as asides, such as ‘How say you by that’ (2.2.189) and ‘I’ll speak to him again’ (2.2.193). The darkness of the production precluded any such intimacy between the actors and the audience and made the production insular and pressurized.

Using shakespeare

The noun ‘Shakespeare’ has a variety of meanings: it can denote an historical figure, a body of literary texts, a kind of narrative, a style of writing, an historical moment, a literary character and so on. When writers use Shakespeare (in any of those senses), they are doing something that takes a wide variety of forms. They may employ the historical figure in a scholarly work (as in Samuel Schoenbaum's Shakespeare's Lives), as an historical figure about whom the writer sometimes speculates (as in Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World), or as a fictional character (as in the film Shakespeare in Love). Writers may borrow a phrase in a citation to be profound or, to avoid stuffiness, they may seek a more playful allusion. Writers may employ a setting that is consciously Shakespearian: seventeenth-century London, fifteenth-century Verona, first-century Rome or an atemporal island. Newspaper accounts of suicides, murders and political downfalls can describe these events as Shakespearian. Shakespearian characters people non-Shakespearian plots, while Shakespearian plots undergird non-Shakespearian narratives, whether in The Sandman graphic novels or Kurosawa's films. In writing about the way that films use Shakespeare – filmed works and nothing more, no literature, painting, ballet, opera, radio, nor advertisements – Kenneth Rothwell and Annabelle Meltzer developed an elaborate taxonomy that shows the complexity of the whole enterprise. They distinguish among adaptations, modernizations, abridgements, musical and dance versions, travesties, excerpts and documentaries, as well as between motion-pictures and videos. In Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture, Douglas Lanier is careful to include a separate chapter on allusion and citation, as opposed either to homage, adaptation and parody, or to works that invoke the biography and mythology of Shakespeare. Examples proliferate, but the phenomenon itself is undisputed: many works use something that can be labelled as ‘Shakespeare’. As Douglas Lanier has remarked after cataloguing all the ways that scholars study Shakespeare adaptations, the field ‘has emerged as one of the most robust areas of Shakespearean criticism’. Robert Shaughnessy would agree:

As other articles in this volume suggest, the extent to which Shakespeare is a true catalyst, a substance that is chemically unaltered by the reaction that it initiates or speeds up, is a concept that deserves critiquing. Jonathan Bate, for instance, argues that Shakespeare is a ‘catalytic converter’. This article seeks to expand the critique, problematizing the possibility that Shakespeare is a cultural catalyst. Narratives of Shakespeare as a cultural catalyst involve him unilaterally conferring kudos onto individuals, corporations and other organizations that associate themselves with his person, life and works, or acting as a spur to further creativity and greatness. However, I will demonstrate that Shakespeare is altered by the interaction between his works, institutions and audiences. Furthermore, this article examines the way in which the phrase, ‘Shakespeare as cultural catalyst’, fails to acknowledge that not all reactions are naturally occurring, unaided by human intervention. It contends that the phrase attributes Shakespeare – a body of literary works or a long-dead playwright, poet and person (to name but a few of the labels ascribed to him) – with agency while obscuring the power of those who act on him. These agents include editors, directors, conservators, teachers and the institutions to which they belong, as well as independent scholars, Shakespeare enthusiasts and bloggers. I argue that these organizations and individuals, like chemists, facilitate reactions, or processes, around Shakespeare by bringing together the necessary ingredients. These might include Shakespeare and readers, Shakespeare and students, as well as Shakespeare and tourists, among others. Furthermore, the phrase neglects the different subjectivities, contexts, objectives and assumptions of those contributing to the catalytic process.

In Cultural Selection, Gary Taylor argues that an author such as Shakespeare cannot survive, let alone continue to dominate vast areas such as English education, without the help of what he terms a ‘survivor’: ‘Culture is not what was done but what is passed on. Culture therefore depends not only upon the maker who stimulates but upon the survivor who remembers, preserves, and transmits the stimulus.’ If it is envisioned at all in Taylor's conception, the catalytic role is shared between the work's author and a survivor or survivors. Like many successful ‘makers’, Shakespeare has had multiple survivors or carriers who have promulgated his value – early examples include Heminges and Condell, editors of the Folio, as well as contributors to the volume, such as Jonson. In turn, they recruited new guardians of Shakespeare's value through their readers, through inspiring other editors, other eulogizers, and so the cycle continues. This is necessary, explains Taylor, ‘Because the dying of human carriers never ceases, the need to pass on memories to new carriers never ends.’

If one were to name the most significant and abiding legacy of the British Empire in India it would not be parliamentary democracy, nor cricket, but the English language. Though, at a generous estimate, only 8 per cent of the people can read and write English even now, the impact of its introduction since the early nineteenth century has been incalculable. Because with the English language came not just its literature and Shakespeare but, for better or worse, the whole intellectual tradition of the West, interaction with which has had a far-reaching effect on Indian society and culture. Yet, if catalysis is the introduction of a foreign element to precipitate a transformative change or development, it was neither English nor Western thought, but colonialism which produced a paradigm shift. In the cultural history of modern India, it is colonialism which has been the main cause of cataclysmic change and since English language and literature, with Shakespeare at its centre, came in its wake, their role and impact are intertwined and tainted with that of colonialism.

This relationship of over four hundred years between India and Britain has been an evolving one: from one of mercantile trade, to territorial expansionism, to imperial domination, to equity in a ‘commonwealth of nations,’ to today a tentative reinventing towards a more meaningful sharing and exchange as voiced by the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, on 30 July 2010, during his first visit to India, in his wish to see more British students enrolling for study in India! The fortunes of English literature and Shakespeare in India have also undergone similar shifts. This India–Britain relation, politically fraught and socially and intellectually contested, has been copiously written about, and dissected too. One need not recapitulate these debates – most are well known. This article will narrow down to some key moments which have been bypassed in the more socio-political debates to focus on the linguistic and literary impact of colonialism with Shakespeare as its centre, its repercussions on the theatre and on the pedagogic and literary-critical sphere. In short, a look at the literary, performative and critical languages we were ‘taught’ or imbibed through colonialism.

6 January 2010. Snow in Stratford-upon-Avon. Thick snow. Snow such as hasn't been seen for thirty years. Drifts down Sheep Street. Black ice along Waterside. The town in grey gloom and muffled silence except for the hooting of boys from Shakespeare's grammar school, let out from classes early to get home before the next ice age sets in, pelting snowballs at each other, setting off mini-avalanches from snow-laden bare-branched chestnut trees in the Bancroft Gardens. I’m positioned on the tramway footbridge, looking across the frozen boat basin at a white wilderness towards the construction project I reported on two years ago (Shakespeare Survey 62). I’m taking stock. Then, I described the site of the demolished Royal Shakespeare Theatre as a rubble-strewn wasteland that put me in mind of post-war Warsaw. Now I’m looking at something like present-day Bruges, where twenty-first century architecture must fit a conservation agenda in a medieval town substantially invented in the 1900s with neo-Gothic in-fills, extensions and retro-renovations. I’m looking at pastiche and can't decide whether it represents a triumph of best-of-British provincial conservatism or a world-class failure of nerve. Left, beyond the snow-plastered construction hoardings, the ‘new’ riverside elevation is brand spanking old, restored to Elizabeth Scott's 1932 design, complete with metal-frame windows built to original specifications. Looking that way, I’m in the past. Looking right, though, towards the town-side, there's the future, ultra-modernity, an attention-seeking brick and glass observation tower, set slightly ‘off’ the main building, thrusting up higher than the theatre's new fly tower, with multi-level connecting corridors still open to the weather where workmen in yellow waterproofs are busy. (On a day like today, I muse, construction is a ‘dreadful trade’, worse than gathering samphire.) And between these two, facing me, the new RST's front façade is an architectural cut-and-paste job. The preserved ground floor and two storeys of Scott's foyer and dress circle are topped with a final half storey lifting the roof line, a postmodern flourish in glass, steel and brick. It's an odd cap on a matronly head – as though my twenty-something daughters had talked fifty-something me into an Amy Winehouse quiff.

The forest in literature has a long humanist history. It dates from classical Greek and Roman writers to Hellenistic/Jewish philosophers and is reiterated through subsequent Christian texts and allegories. The space of the forest as a setting was a popular place on the Elizabethan stage. The anonymous Mucedorus, in which the forest is central to the drama, was played frequently during the 1590s and revised in 1610; there are numerous references to ‘trees’ in the accounts for the Office of the Revels; and the tree or collection of trees often appears in plays that do not demand such scenic props. Many of the allusions in Shakespeare's forests are Ovidian and particularly refer to Books iv and vi of the Metamorphoses and the tales of Pyramus and Thisbe and Tereus and Philomel. But the forest can also represent a version of the pastoral, as exemplified in Mucedorus, as a place that supports the exploration of antithesis (the savage and the civilized), and the juxtaposition of containment and imagination. Although Shakespeare's forests are much indebted to this tradition and its translation by other contemporary Elizabethan writers, including Spenser, this article argues that there is something more parochial, more urgent, at work in Shakespeare's forests on stage. Such parochialism draws us back to how Elizabethan forests were being used, as well as abused, and how the forest stood in relation to the rest of the social community. The forest is not a comprehensive landscape; rather, it emerges as a habitat for multiple voices, which occupy a transitional space – literally and metaphorically – between action and thought. This space is haunted by the forest's history of danger, punishment and pleasure. The following argument maintains that the Elizabethan forest is defined not as a physically bounded space but as a discursive construct, a linguistic practice that was subject to shifting civil and legal pressures. An examination of an influential Elizabethan treatise on the forest suggests that the concern is primarily with the use of and behaviour within the forest, rather than its organic matter. Shakespeare's shady landscapes are not dependent on their allegorical precedents but belong to an emerging, Elizabethan preoccupation with language: of orientation, of order, of emotion and of possession. The forest space trials a moral economy that will, as we move into the seventeenth century, become much more defined as a social landscape. For the Elizabethans, however, the forest was a place of exploration that stood in conversation with the social world but also in conflict with it.

Speaking in advance of the Montréal performances of his Cycle Shakespeare, staged at international venues between 1992 and 1994, Robert Lepage described the tour stop in his home province as a response to the double colonization that Québec has historically experienced within Canada. Explaining that, in an effort to defend French culture, Québécois theatres have traditionally staged Molière and Racine more frequently than Shakespeare, Lepage remarked, ‘Shakespeare, jusqu’à présent, était réservé au Canada anglophone. Il nous était toujours présenté comme un auteur de luxe que l'on pouvait lire mais pas monter’ [Shakespeare, until now, has been reserved for Anglophone Canada. He has always been presented to us as a de luxe author who can be read but not staged]. As he would later relate, his solution to this situation, in which loyalty to one former colonial power compounds the inequalities caused by obedience to another, was to redeploy Shakespeare as a product of transnational culture. He believed that, by including performances at Montréal's Festival de Théâtre des Amériques (FTA) in the Cycle tour, he was allowing ‘the French-speaking public [to] discover a repertoire that it virtually never gets to see’, and thus he could bring global culture to Québec through Shakespeare. At the same time, by touring the Cycle – comprised of Coriolan, Macbeth and La Tempête – to numerous countries, he implicitly validated an outward-looking image of Québec while incidentally helping to ensure the viability of international Shakespeare theatre.

The tone of Lepage's comments actually seem, politically, rather moderate, considering that the Cycle's two-year tour overlapped with the highly charged political events of the early 1990s, events that harked back to Québec's nationalist movement of the 1970s in their divisive effect on Canadian federalism. In October 1992, shortly after the Paris run of the Cycle, Canadians voted in a bitterly debated referendum, rejecting the national government's Charlottetown Accord, which would have enshrined in the Constitution Québec's status as a distinct society within Canada. The following autumn, at the mid-point between the Montréal Cycle performances and the Québec City tour stop, the Bloc Québécois party, newly formed to defend Québec's interests, became the official opposition in Parliament, sitting across the floor from Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, a man disliked by many Québécois for his strong centralizing approach to federalism. Within two years, Canada seemed poised to come apart: in September 1994, Québec's provincial government promised to hold a referendum on negotiating sovereignty from Canada; one year later, Québec voters turned down this proposal by a margin of only 1 per cent.

It might seem somewhat perverse of me to open with a discussion of a study that is in most respects not about Shakespeare, but Andrew Gurr's Shakespeare's Opposites, which offers a ‘biography’ of the Admiral's Company that played at the Rose and at the Fortune, rival playhouses to those used by Shakespeare's King's Men, is in some sense rich proof of Emma Smith's point in another essay this year (on ‘Shakespeare and Early Modern Tragedy’ in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy, ed. Emma Smith and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr) that Shakespeare is always the ‘elephant in the room’ (p. 132) when talking about early modern drama in its wider sense.

Gurr has of course written many of the seminal works of recent decades on the early modern playhouse and its playing and staging practices. Shakespeare's Opposites is an elegant disquisition on one particular company, echoing in its focus the move of recent repertory studies to turn our attention to the company and its repertory as categories for understanding. Gurr draws our attention with consummate skill to the ways in which the Admiral's Company dealt with the ‘daily routine of performing a different play each day to much the same body of customers’, facing ‘the fact that the same familiar faces had to appear on stage each playing a different role every afternoon’ (p. 1). Thinking in particular through the charismatic and entrepreneurial performances of Edward Alleyn (contemporary responses and accounts indicate as much), Gurr explores how doubling and also knowing use of disguise became a positive tactic or strategy in the company's approach to this practical dilemma. Leads were constantly given roles involving quick-change disguises and audiences in turn became well trained in the art of noticing and understanding these swift transformations of identity and costume. Gurr's stress is very much on novelty and innovation within the Admiral's Company's repertoire; other innovations made by the company included the introduction of contemporary London as a setting for plays, an approach inaugurated by William Houghton's Englishmen for My Money. What is brilliant about this book is that it connects with the stage in such real ways, with the fragmentary records of ‘theatrical brilliance’ rather than just linguistic pyrotechnics on the page, and in this way it does offer new modes for understanding and reabsorbing Shakespeare (not least as a collaborative and entrepreneurial author) within the wider early modern context. In this respect, Gurr's book connects in important ways with Emma Smith's aforementioned essay which speaks about the problematic ways in which institutional culture has caused the separation of Shakespeare and his plays from their time of production, as if texts like Hamlet were somehow produced sui generis rather than from within the complexities of the revenge drama tradition (p. 132). Smith's essay, which focuses in on issues of form, character and tone, demonstrates the relationship of Hamlet to The Spanish Tragedy and the kinships of Othello and Macbeth with domestic tragedy. In a striking comparison of Webster's The Duchess of Malfi and in particular its deployment of soliloquy, she also draws out differences between Shakespeare's reputation for soliloquies that confide and build shared intimacies with audiences and Webster's ‘alienating tragic aesthetic’ (p. 141), which means that the Duchess herself conceals as much as she reveals in these peculiar moments of ‘aloneness’ on the stage. Nevertheless, Smith makes the crucial point that this version of Shakespeare is itself only partial and does not account for the radical dissonances of early tragedies like Titus Andronicus, which she explores partly through the lens of modern performances and interpretations. This is a smart-thinking essay which does important work in terms of repositioning Shakespeare's plays ‘in dialogue, forward and back, with other contemporary tragedians’ (p. 134). Gurr's book, too, I think achieves this ‘repositioning’ dialogue as we are forced, by studying his ‘opposites’ and rivals, to understand Shakespeare from within the societal contexts of early modern crowds, plague and touring regimes, and commercial enterprise. There is, in the process, a superb analysis of the collaborative writing practice (pp. 104–6) as well as expert analysis of the archaeological finds from early modern theatre sites and what they might tell us about the staging practices and conditions within which Shakespeare worked and wrote.

‘East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’, wrote Rudyard Kipling in 1892, at a time when Japan was not yet familiar with Shakespeare. Shakespeare's work began to be introduced to Japan in this period, one in which ‘Japanese contemporary theatre’ was identified with Kabuki. Inevitably, when a Shakespeare play was first successfully translated into Japanese by Shoyo Tsubouchi in 1884, it was in the Kabuki style, under the Kabuki-like title, The Strange Tale of Caesar: The Sword of Freedom and the Echo of its Sharp Blade. This version captured the public's fancy so much that many translators followed suit. Robun Kanagaki, the first Japanese to publish a section of a Shakespeare play (Hamlet) in translation (in 1875), adapted Hamlet in a Kabuki style in 1886. Keizou Kawashima, the first Japanese to translate an entire Shakespeare play, Julius Caesar, in 1883, adapted Romeo and Juliet in 1886, also in a Kabuki style. The first of Shakespeare's plays to be performed in Japan was a Kabuki adaptation of the trial scene from The Merchant of Venice, renamed after Issa Kobayashi's haiku, Money is Everything in This World, No Matter Which Cherry Blossoms are in Bloom (Sakuradoki Zenino Yononaka), performed in Osaka on 16 May 1885. It was and continues to be a common practice in Kabuki to perform only one scene from a long play.

Thus, the reception of Shakespeare's plays began through adaptations and it took some time until Shakespeare's plays were properly translated without Japanizing characters’ names. Hamlet and Ophelia were first given their names in the 1907 production of Hamlet. Japan has since assimilated Shakespeare's work and the Shakespeare of the West has become an integral part of the East. As is shown by Akira Kurosawa's films Throne of Blood (1957) and Ran (1985), which are prime examples of Japanese Shakespeares, Shakespeare has functioned as a cultural icon to adapt and appropriate. So many variations currently exist in Japan that one may, in effect, choose one's own Shakespeare. From manga Shakespeare to rock'n'roll Shakespeare, we have witnessed abundant appropriations and adaptations that prove the ways in which Shakespeare can be cooked and served on any cultural plate.

My contribution to this volume on Shakespeare as a ‘cultural catalyst’ will take this term in the broad sense of an agent speeding up a reaction, without implying that the agent remains unchanged in the process, and will consider one type of ‘cultural reaction’, that of writers of a minority (or ‘minorized’) language that seek to restore its social use and literary prestige. The language I will refer to is Catalan and the specific ‘reaction’ is the revivalist movement known as la Renaixença (‘rebirth’ or ‘renascence’), initiated in the 1830s in the Spanish regions of Catalonia and Valencia, and later in the Balearic Islands and in the French region of Roussillon.

After exploring whether Shakespeare was a catalyst in, and in what ways Shakespeare's works contributed to, the revitalization of Catalan-speaking cultures in Spain in the nineteenth century, I will show that, contrary to the preconceived idea that translations and adaptations of Shakespeare infuse social and literary prestige in the minorized culture, most of the early Shakespeares in Catalan constitute marginal forms of literary and theatrical use that bespeak other kinds of contributions to the recovery of cultural identity or simply disregard such an aim.

It is nothing new to state that Shakespeare's Sonnets have enjoyed a diverse set of attentions, reworkings and responses from the moment of their first circulation in the late sixteenth century. As Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells have previously remarked, the Sonnets are ‘[h]yper-productive of new meanings, in wildly different contexts’, noting in turn how these fourteen-line miniature dramas continue to inspire ‘an inexhaustible catalogue of praise and modification’. Michael Schoenfeldt makes a similar claim when he observes that ‘the Sonnets have frequently functioned as a mirror in which cultures reveal their own critical presuppositions’. The most recent of these interventions is poet Don Paterson's personal commentary on these sequenced poems, a composite and engaging melding of his own critical and creative talents.

Adaptation studies has long since familiarized itself with the critical rhetoric of cultural context and with the idea that texts adapt themselves to speak to and find purchase in alternative times, spaces and places. It would be natural enough, then, and not without critical interest, to offer a survey of the rich history of reception that Shakespeare's Sonnets have enjoyed, from ad hoc literary adaptations by seventeenth-century manuscript compilers to the more overt responses and reconfigurations of John Milton through to Oscar Wilde to Anthony Burgess, and from musical and artistic responses as diverse as Igor Stravinsky and Benjamin Britten to Rufus Wainwright; such a survey might also encompass visual culture in the work of artists as juxtaposed as Sidney Nolan and Eric Gill. What this particular essay seeks to do, however, is argue that the Sonnets constitute and in effect have always constituted an ‘open source initiative’ and to interrogate the reasons for this claim. This availability for reinterpretation and commentary dates from the moment of the Sonnets’ first composition and circulation. The Sonnets’ status as artistic product has inspired and encouraged innovative uses by numerous reading publics. Is there, then, something intrinsic to the form and function of sonnet sequences in early modern culture that lent itself in particular ways to the kinds of re-visioning and ‘re-mediations’ that we are perhaps more accustomed to thinking about in response to contemporary literary, aesthetic and cultural forms?

Introduction

Natasha Distiller, in her article ‘Shakespeare and the Coconut: Close Encounters in Post-apartheid South Africa’, argues that Shakespeare continues to be deployed within a framework reliant on ‘a particular display of English literariness understood to exist in a binary relation to a putative Africanness’. Whereas the persistent applicability of the trope of the coconut to the image of Shakespeare is an indication of ongoing hierarchies of social and economic power in the South African context, I explore an alternative way of engaging (with) Shakespeare off the East coast of Africa in the post-colonial context of Mauritius where a putative Africanness is a creolized one. Uninhabited until the end of the sixteenth century, Mauritius underwent several waves of colonization which brought together European settlers, slaves from various parts of the African mainland, Madagascar, India and indentured labourers from various parts of India and China. A Creole language developed in the seventeenth/eighteenth century on the sugar cane plantations during French settlement, partly drawing from the French dialects spoken at that time and based on a different grammatical system, arguably influenced by an African substrate. This lingua franca has by now also acquired a vocabulary drawing from several of the Asian languages spoken in Mauritius and increasingly from English and remains the main spoken language. It is within this context of creolization, which already indicates a practice of border crossing, that I consider the appropriation of Othello by Dev Virahsawmy, linguist, political activist, creative writer and translator who writes exclusively in the local language, Creole. Whereas Shakespeare accessed in English in his traditional associations of Britishness and tradition survives, just about, through an elitist English-medium education system inherited from colonial days in Mauritius, it is as Virahsawmy's Shakespeare deployed to complex multivalent ends that the Bard thrives. If fathoming out the various points where a catalysis may lie in the complex two-way traffic between the source text and Virahsawmy's appropriation were not complex enough, Dev Virahsawmy also moves away, in Prezidan Otelo, from the post-colonial writing back project, itself constrained by the problematic binaries of colonial thinking. In an attempt at charting diffuse and manifold catalyses, which, by definition, operate in the untidy framework that Nancy ascribes to culture, I look at the dynamics of branding in Virahsawmy's works and the development of his theory of Creole cosmopolitics.

In 2005 The Arts and Humanities Research Council granted the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC) funding to establish a three-year research project which would create An International Database of Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio (www.bufvc.ac.uk/Shakespeare). It would employ two full-time researchers and a target was set of 4,000 titles describing films, television programmes and radio broadcasts with Shakespeare-related content. An important proviso was that archival holdings and current distribution and retail information would be cited and updated so that scholars, researchers and students would know where to go to look and to listen. The Database can be searched at no cost and with no registration formalities.

Had the BUFVC bid for money to create a database, for example, of media materials on Jane Austen, Harold Pinter or any one of Shakespeare's contemporaries it may not have been so successful. The name Shakespeare and his association with nation, culture, the national curriculum and civilisation itself has become stronger in post-colonial times. In recent years critical research into Shakespeare and popular culture, particularly by Richard Burt in his edited work Shakespeares After Shakespeare, has examined how Shakespeare is both canonized and rejected in the media – how, for example, Shakespeare, and what his work signifies, is used in advertising, popular song, television variety sketches and porn films. Believing Shakespeare the signifier to be as relevant as Shakespeare the author, the Database had to capture and reflect as many of these appropriations as it could.

The twenty-first century began with a much anticipated – and, by most measures, disappointing – musical production of Love's Labour's Lost on film. Five years later, a much more successful musical adaptation of the play called The Big Life: The Ska Musical provided a breakthrough in theatre history, becoming the first ‘British black musical’ to reach London's commercial West End. This play's recollection of the Windrush immigrants and its integration of ska rhythms with an updated script seemed fresh and transformative; by contrast, most critics and scholars deemed the film musical's use of history nostalgic or superficial, and the deployment of its artistic genre partially successful at best. Nevertheless, a decade on, Kenneth Branagh's film is available on DVD and has gained a more positive overall response from IMDb (Internet Movie Database) respondents, at least, than its early reception might have predicted. Numerous critical articles have examined its nuances and relationship to the Hollywood musical tradition. Meanwhile, Paul Sirett and Paul Joseph's West End hit, despite rave reviews, a BBC Radio adaptation, and even the enduring presence of its opening number on YouTube, has as yet failed to ‘cross over’ to Broadway or to screen production, and thus to more lasting and international success. It has not gained acknowledgement in recent critical editions of Love's Labour's Lost, nor generated discernible scholarly analysis. Beyond merely lamenting the primacy of film/video over ‘live’ theatre or decrying the necessity for celebrities in artistic production, what might we say about this turn of events?

Im anfang war die tat

This article offers an account of the theory, practice and relevance of the Royal Shakespeare Company's recent work with schools in England and the implications that this might have for creating a foundation for internationalizing a pedagogy for teaching and learning Shakespeare based in the practices of the ensemble and the rehearsal room. We argue that there is something distinctive about this approach that takes the artistry and critical engagement of its pedagogy beyond the conventional uses of ‘active methods’ in the teaching of Shakespeare. It begins with a commitment to the idea that engagement with Shakespeare and his plays should be a cultural as well as a curriculum entitlement for children of all ages and abilities.