From Fair Verona to the Great Globe Itself: Romeo and Juliet and the Reformation of Cultural Traditions
At the end of the play, the Prince holds out some meagre hope that the death of the young lovers might prove an impetus to repair Verona’s social institutions—the same ossified traditions and grudges that led to the tragedy. The widely diverse productions canvassed in this roundtable are perhaps more auspicious about the play’s ability to foment amelioratory cultural change. Our papers suggest that adaptations of what is likely Shakespeare’s most familiar play in very distinct regions have served a recuperative function throughout the world, that there is something about the story of this localized ancient grudge that resonates with global audiences and serves as a catalyst to develop, reimagine, or reform cultural traditions and institutions, whether theatrical, cinematic, national, or social.
Many of the adaptations addressed in this panel retell the story through the innovative interplay of image, music, and text. How do these forms of representation converse and cross-fertilize? How can we ethically register site-specific adaptations that traverse digital, multimedia, and acoustic categories? What is the effect of such generic crossings, and how do they bear witness to the leverage of Shakespearean adaptation across time and space? In addressing these issues, we demonstrate the valences of a work which, in its myriad iterations, has consistently shown itself hospitable to speaking to social responsibility, the institutional faces of sexuality, identity formation, civic behaviors, commercial enterprise, confessional differences, and intra-ethnic conflicts.
Our papers suggest that there is indeed something prescient about the story of Verona’s tragic lovers, capable of producing tangible reform not within the world of the play, but in real-world environments, but only after it is transplanted and transformed into vastly different indigenous settings. This roundtable, therefore, is not just about some compelling adaptions of Romeo and Juliet, but more importantly about what these adaptations have wrought: whether a durable set of commercial theatrical institutions in Cairo; consternation over nationally-driven technology in Japan; alteration in the heavy classical theatre training of actors in Puerto Rico and Cuba; a conduit for social commentary in Indian films; or imagining new possibilities for female same-sex desire in the Philippine cinema.
Theorizing adaptation practices, problematizing Shakespeare’s hegemony in non-white cultures, and attending to the nuances of translation in foreign Shakespeares are all conversations that have contributed greatly to our field. This roundtable wishes to shift the focus away from what it means to adapt Shakespeare to advance a conversation on what adaptation of Shakespeare means for planetary cultural traditions, especially as these institutions develop and take on a life of their own, their Shakespearean progeny gradually falling away.
By placing these discrete locations in conversation, we seek to interrogate how a play that is premised on division has served as a stimulus for reform—and perhaps, healing—within each culture. Limiting the scope to Romeo and Juliet, a singular play with a rich production history, facilitates a methodology that enables a tighter focus not usually available in broader studies of Shakespearean adaptation, and one that aligns with sociological and anthropological practices of cultural comparison.
PAPER ABSTRACTS
The Martyrs of Love and the Birth of the Arabic Commercial Theatre (Mark Bayer)
Around 1890, Romeo and Juliet became the first Shakespeare play translated into Arabic and staged at a public theatre. The Martyrs of Love, as it was known, proved exceedingly popular among theatregoers in Cairo and remained in repertory for an astounding 25 years. The production was a collaboration between George Abyad (a classically trained theatre impresario) and Sheik Salama Hijazi (a former muezzin turned pop star). Largely because Shakespeare was not imposed on these new audiences but allowed to percolate with indigenous cultural and religious traditions, the play helped create both the physical infrastructure and consumer habits necessary for a vibrant and durable theatrical culture in Egypt and across the Middle East.
Ninja, War and Robots: Adaptations of Romeo and Juliet in Japan (1950s-2020s) (Yukari Yoshihara)
Four image-inflected adaptations of Romeo and Juliet express Japan’s anxiety over its political, economic and cultural status in Asia. Futaro Yamada’s ninja novel (1958-59) is an allegory of the Korean War. Osamu Tezuka’s robot Romeo and Juliet manga (1977) criticizes Japan’s robotics as a part of military technology. The television drama, Mirai Seiki Shakespeare (2008), suggests Japan’s xenophobic nationalism against China. A 2020 play by a third generation Korean Japanese, Wui Shin Chong, sets the scene in Japan at the time of the Korean War, where hatred between the ethnic Koreans and the lower-class Japanese precipitates the tragedy.
Romeo y Julieta and the Rebirth of Actor Training in Puerto Rico (Carla Della Gatta)
Puerto Rico’s position as both Caribbean Island and U.S. territory foreground its rich bilingual culture. The 1964 translation of Romeo y Julieta by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda became a foundational text in the primary actor training school in Puerto Rico. This paper attends to the consistency of Spanish-language Shakespearean performance at Universidad de Puerto Rico and its effect on acting styles in both Spanish and English in Puerto Rico. I argue that the training for Romeo y Julieta has imbued not only the acting styles of generations of star performers, many of whom later performed in classical theatre on the mainland, but also Puerto Rican vocal and acting methods as evidenced in television, film, and other genres.
Romeo and Juliet and Social Critique in Indian Popular Cinema (Taarini Mookherjee)
Romeo and Juliet has proved an enduringly popular source text for Indian popular cinema. I trace a history of these filmic adaptations suggesting that the changing frameworks for the play’s “ancient quarrel” serve as a barometer for the shifting political concerns of the post-colonial nation state: from class conflict in Bobby (1973) to the language divide in Ek Duje Ke Liye (1981) to the patriotic fervor of 1942: A Love Story (1994). I suggest that these early adaptations informed a new generation of films, including Ishaqzaade (2012), Dhadak (2018), and Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (2019), that even more aggressively tackle the lived social issues of religious difference, caste discrimination, and LGBTQ rights.
Queering Desire and Romeo and Juliet: Philippine Encounters / Textual Revisions (Mark Thornton Burnett)
Centred around Rome and Juliet (dir. Connie Macatuno, 2006), and associated world cinema examples, this paper argues for the significances of a woman-helmed Filipino adaptation that repurposes Shakespeare’s text in an exploration of female same-sex desire. Manila-set, the film mediates Shakespeare via an object-heavy mise-en-scène comprised of bracelets, flowers, diaries and badges to unmoor ideologies, and forms of identification, premised on older oligarchies. Crucially, in the relationship between pre-school teacher, Juliet, and florist, Rome, the film rewrites in a vernacular soundscape the poetic register of the ‘original’, thereby offering a distinctive and institution-free reading of queered futurities.
Chair: Jyotsna Singh
PANELISTS
Mark Bayer is Celia Jacobs Endowed Professor of British Literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He is the author of Theatre, Community and Civic Engagement (University of Iowa Press, 2011) (a finalist for the 2012 George F. Freedley Memorial Award), coeditor (with Joseph Navitsky) of Shakespeare and Civil Unrest in Britain and the United States (Routledge, 2022), and editor of Shakespeare, Bob Dylan, and the Bardic Tradition (forthcoming, Cornell University Press). His work has also appeared in venues including Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare, and Comparative Drama.
Mark Thornton Burnett is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture: Authority and Obedience (Macmillan, 1997), Constructing ‘Monsters’ in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture (Palgrave, 2002), Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (Palgrave, 2007; 2nd ed. 2012), Shakespeare and World Cinema (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and ‘Hamlet’ and World Cinema (Cambridge University Press, 2019). He is editor of the Arden Shakespeare series, ‘Shakespeare and Adaptation’.
Carla Della Gatta is Associate Professor of Theatre Scholarship at University of Maryland. She is a performance theorist and theatre historian whose work explores the intersections of aurality, ethnicity, and performance. She is author of Latinx Shakespeares: Staging US Intracultural Theater (2023) and co-editor of Shakespeare and Latinidad (2021). She built and created the online theatre archive, LatinxShakespeares.Org. Della Gatta is on the Steering Committee for the Latinx Theatre Commons and serves on the boards for Shakespeare Survey and the Arden series, Shakespeare and Social Justice.
Taarini Mookherjee is a Newton International Fellow, sponsored by the British Academy, at Queen’s University Belfast. Her current book project examines contemporary Indian adaptations of Shakespeare in theatre, film, and fiction. She previously taught literature at Columbia University, New York, and SUNY, New Paltz. Her most recent publications include “ ‘Motherhoods and Motherlands: Gender, Nation, and Adaptation in We That Are Young’” in Shakespeare and Cultural Appropriation (Routledge, 2023) and “‘Vandana Kataria’s Noblemen: Global Frames of Interpretation’” in Recontextualizing Indian Cinema in the West (Bloomsbury 2023).
Jyotsna G. Singh is Professor Emerita of English, Michigan State University. Published work includes The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics (Blackwell, 1994), co-authored; Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: ‘Discovery’ of India in the Language of Colonialism (Routledge, 1996), authored; Travel Knowledge: European ‘Discoveries’ in the Early Modern Period (Palgrave, 2001), co-edited with Ivo Kamps; A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, 1559–1660 (Blackwell, 2009), edited; The Postcolonial World (Routledge, 2016), co-edited with David D. Kim; Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory (Arden Shakespeare, 2019), authored.
Yukari Yoshihara, Professor at the University of Tsukuba, works on the politics of global Shakespeare adaptations. Her publications include ‘Japanese novelizations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth: The culture of hon’an as adaptational practice’ (2022), ‘Bardolators and Bardoclasts: Shakespeare in Manga/Anime and Cosplay’ (2020) and ‘Toward “Reciprocal Legitimation” between Shakespeare’s Works and Manga’ (2020).