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“You have served me well:” The Shakespeare Empire in Central Europe

Drábek, Pavel

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Abstract

Shakespeare has often served as an instrument of cultural colonialism. In this essay I argue that the current practice of Shakespeare studies in many ways replicates this pattern. By priming the discourse through Shakespeare, it perpetuates logocentric regimes of knowledge that tend to impose reductive perspectives-such as the binaries of Shakespeare's original-adaptation and that of the author-adapter, but also scripture-exegesis, London-province or London-Continent, centre-periphery and empire-colonial subjects. Drawing on case studies from five centuries-of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travelling performers, through eighteenth-century German theatre, to twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing and performance, I argue for a need to revisit the logocentric and colonial epistemology. I call for breaking away from the critical heritage of the “Shakespeare Empire,” for reconceptualising how we use Shakespeare, and for refocusing our critical attentions to the thick descriptions of cultures and crafts that make and host Shakespeare.

Citation

Drábek, P. (2023). “You have served me well:” The Shakespeare Empire in Central Europe. Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance, 28(43), 109-140. https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.28.06

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jan 24, 2024
Online Publication Date Dec 30, 2023
Publication Date Jan 1, 2023
Deposit Date Jan 29, 2024
Publicly Available Date May 10, 2024
Journal Multicultural Shakespeare
Electronic ISSN 2300-7605
Publisher De Gruyter
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 28
Issue 43
Pages 109-140
DOI https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.28.06
Keywords Shakespeare in Europe, travelling actors, Shakespeare in performance, Shakespeare in translation, adaptation, historiography, logocentrism, decolonisation, recrafting
Public URL https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4448177

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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© by the author, licensee University of Lodz –Lodz University Press, Lodz, Poland. This articleis an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)






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