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Modern ‘Theatrical’ Translations of Shakespeare
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- By Rudolf Stamm
- Edited by Allardyce Nicoll
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- Book:
- Shakespeare Survey
- Published online:
- 28 March 2007
- Print publication:
- 02 January 1963, pp 63-69
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- Chapter
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Summary
Many historians of the theatre and drama have been attracted by the study of stage versions because they certainly are the most important relics of the performances of the past. They contain thousands of details characteristic of the taste of the artists who used them and of the audiences that enjoyed them. With the necessary tact and caution they can be interpreted as first-rate period pieces from which inferences concerning general tendencies can be drawn.
Studies of this kind have left the present writer with one very strong impression: Shakespeare's plays cannot only be considered as theatrical material to be given a new shape and stage reality by every succeeding generation. Nor are they merely a passive measuring rod by which we can recognize the stature of an age; they are mute, but strict, judges pronouncing sentence on the imaginative grasp and the sensibility of every generation of artists and spectators. Like the stage versions, the translations accepted by a considerable number of theatres can be viewed as period pieces. The German translation by Schlegel and Tieck is a supreme example of one; it is a period piece, however, which has long outlived its fashion and its age. It continues the most frequently acted version in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in spite of its shortcomings, discussed by many a critic, only recently by Margaret Atkinson.1 Among them we may recall the facts that these versions are based upon the limited scholarship of the eighteenth century, that they contain obsolete and old-fashioned expressions and, finally, that they are a perfect expression of the poetic mode of the Goethe-Zeit.
Elizabethan Stage-Practice and the Transmutation of Source Material by the Dramatists
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- By Rudolf Stamm
- Edited by Allardyce Nicoll
-
- Book:
- Shakespeare Survey
- Published online:
- 28 March 2007
- Print publication:
- 02 January 1959, pp 64-70
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Harley Granville-Barker, in his study of Hamlet, says of Shakespeare: “The play as it leaves his hands is not a finished product, only its performance makes it that.” This conception of a text as a kind of theatrical score requiring the actor and the producer to bring it to life has practical consequences for the student of Shakespearian as well as many other kinds of drama. The study of dramatic structure, speech patterns, imagery, characters, ideas, and meanings in a play cannot be independent, but demands a clear idea of the play-in-performance in the reader’s mind. A similar awareness should direct those investigating such practical matters as stage-structure and methods of acting and production. The play-in-performance as a governing idea renders impossible both the purely literary interpretation of a theatrical text and the purely technical interest in matters of theatrical research. Considering the present state of our knowledge of the texts and of the methods of production in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres, it now seems particularly promising and necessary to study the relationship between the playwright’s words and stage events, to correlate what the actors spoke and did, what the spectators heard and saw. It leads to the comprehension of what we may call a play’s theatrical physiognomy—the ensemble of all those features of a text that define, explicitly or implicitly, its realization on the stage for which it was originally written. This article can only glance briefly at the most important features.
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