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- For more information on global Shakespeare studies at Queen Mary University of London, please contact Professor David Schalkwyk, Chair in Shakespeare Studies at QMUL.
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Shakespeare Transgenred
I’m currently attending a conference arranged by the Institute of Modern Languages Research at the University of London entitled “Adapting, Performing and Reviewing Shakespearean Comedy in a European Context”, where the opening speaker, Michael Saenger (Southwestern, Texas) offered a strong argument for the instability of genre. Just as well, because in a conference ostensibly about comedy the first four speakers talked about two tragedies: Othello and Romeo and Juliet.
And so it has been in the London theatre scene. I had the unusual experience of seeing Antony and Cleopatra (at the Globe) as a comedy: at the end of 4.8 (“Cleopatra Lord of lords, / O infinite virtue, com’st thou smiling from / The world’s great snare uncaught? Antony My nightingale, / We have beat them to their beds”) it was announced that due to the sudden illness of one of the actors the show could not go on. So we filed out, a little dazed, but happy in the great couples’ unexpected reprieve.
At the Rose Playhouse, just around the corner, which is staging a much less well-known series of enterprising plays, readings and even operas on a tiny stage backed by the cavernous pit of the original theatre’s foundations, I was surprised to see that in Gluck’s Orpheus and Euridice, desire is not death, as it is in Ovid and Shakespeare, but that the tragic story ends as a comedy. Amore reads Orpheus’s fatal compulsion to look at his wife as he leads her from Hades as a sign of his undying love, and rewards him by restoring her to life. They live in happy harmony, and the audience was invited to share the celebratory cake at the end (also for Gluck’s 300th birthday, I suppose, and perhaps also Shakespeare’s 450th), though not the champagne.
Back at the Globe there would seem to be nothing comic in an especially gory production of Titus Andronicus, now notorious for the number of audience members who succumb to fainting or vomiting (at least three on the night I went). Except that the youthful groundlings cackled and roared gleefully throughout, and greeted the ending with as much appreciative applause as I’ve ever seen.
David Schalkwyk, 13 June 2014