The History Of European Theatre

Episode 233:

Did you know that in 2023 you could have seen the play at Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London presented in Juba Arabic using a translation by Joseph Abuk which he had produced for the South Sudan Theatre Company in 2011? Cymbeline like all Shakespeare plays has been translated and performed in many languages and productions and publications using translations account for a large part of global reach. In his book ‘If This Be Magic’ Daniel Hahn explores the world of translating Shakespeare and looks at the challenges and benefits of Shakespeare in translation. By examining some of the very big and very small decisions a translator has to make when faced with a Shakespeare text Daniel takes the reader into a world or words and meanings and ponders the question of how does Shakespeare remain Shakespeare when every word has been changed?

Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator. His recent work alongside ‘If This Be Magic: the unlikely art of Shakespeare in translation’, include translations of fiction from Argentina, Mexico, Guatemala and Peru. He is currently co-editing (with Padma Viswanathan) The Penguin Book of Brazilian Short Stories, and re-translating a French children's classic.

Daniel very kindly fitted me into his very busy schedule, so I spoke to him over a zoom call from his hotel room in Nepal where he is about to hold some workshops for translators.

Links to ‘If This Be Magic:

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/If-This-Magic-Shakespeare-Translation/dp/1805301624/ref=sr_1_1?

Amazon USA: https://www.amazon.com/If-This-Magic-Shakespeare-Translation/dp/0593801660/ref=sr_1_1?

UK Publishers Website: https://canongate.co.uk/books/5026-if-this-be-magic-the-unlikely-art-of-shakespeare-in-translation/

USA Publishes Website: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/743377/if-this-be-magic-by-daniel-hahn/

Support the podcast at:
www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com
www.patreon.com/thoetp
www.ko-fi.com/thoetp

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Episode 232:

Although ‘Coriolanus’ is officially Shakespeare’s last Roman tragedy his next play, ‘Cymbeline’, is set in the Roman period, but in England, and suggests that Shakespeare was still deeply attracted to Roman history, although in this case his plundering of Roman history was not directly from Plutarch, but another of his favourite sources. There are some themes in ‘Cymbeline’ that you will find familiar from ‘Coriolanus’ and will encounter again in ‘The Tempest’, but once again we have a play from Shakespeare that is not quite like any other of his, despite some shared themes with the later plays. For many Cymbeline remains an enigmatic play, or a flawed experiment, or an example of the work of a playwright growing tired with his work, and perhaps something of all of that is present in the play, but there is, I think, a good argument that Shakespeare was in fact still experimenting with form and content and responding to concerns of his time in his plays just as he always had done.

The dating of the play
The early printing of the play
‘Innogen’ Vs ‘Imogen’
The sources for the play
A summary of a complicated plot
‘Cymbeline’ as a tragicomedy
The comic character of Cloten
James 1st as represented by King Cymbeline
The historical Britain represented in the play
The nobility of the British characters in the play
Iachimo, the other Roman characters and the English attitude towards Italians
The sons of Balarius
Imogen – a great Shakespeare heroine or slightly unsatisfying?
A brief critical history of the play
The later performance history of the play

Support the podcast at:
www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com
www.patreon.com/thoetp
www.ko-fi.com/thoetp

You can find an advertisement free version of the latest podcast episodes by joining on Patreon at the lowest paid tier level – that’s for just £1 per month.
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Episode 231:

Shakespeare in noted for the diversity of deaths in the plays and the way that he represents the mechanics of those deaths. My guest for this episode has written a book on this very subject, ‘Death by Shakespeare’, who’s subtitle ‘Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts’, gives just a hint of that diversity. In the book Kathryn Harkup casts a scientific eye over the varied and creative ways that Shakespeare’s characters die and both questions and admires the accuracy of the portrayals of death in the plays and looks at how Shakespeare’s audience would have received these events, and much more.

Kathryn Harkup is a former chemist turned writer and science communicator. Her interests are in anything gothic, gory and geeky, and preferably all three. She has written several books on the crossover between science, literature and pop culture including The Secret Lives of the Elements, The Secret Lives of Molecules, A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie, Making the Monster: The Science of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Death by Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts, Superspy Science: Science, Death and Tech in the World of James Bond and Vampirology: The Science of Horror’s Most Famous Fiend. Her latest book is V is for Venom: Agatha Christie’s Chemicals of Death.

I spoke to Kathryn over a zoom call

Links to ‘Death By Shakespeare’

Katherine’s Website: https://harkup.co.uk

Amazon.co.uk: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B084RG3PXD

Publisher’s website: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/death-by-shakespeare-9781472958204

Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Shakespeare-Snakebites-Stabbings-Broken/dp/1472958209/ref=sr_1_1

Support the podcast at:
www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com
www.patreon.com/thoetp
www.ko-fi.com/thoetp

You can find an advertisement free version of the latest podcast episodes by joining on Patreon at the lowest paid tier level – that’s for just £1 per month
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 230:

Shakespeare probably did not realise it, but his next offering would be his last tragedy and his last Roman play, but for this one he reached back into a much earlier Rome than the world of Caesar, Mark Anthony and Cleopatra that he had previously mined. ‘Coriolanus’, the choice of the story of the legendary Caius Martius, a 5th century BC Roman general who was both fated and vilified during his political career and who was also known for his antipathy towards a hungry Roman population, might have been inspired by recent events in England. We can’t be certain of that, but whatever the case there it is quite clearly one of Shakespeare’s most political tragedies which has become a play that perhaps more than any other in the cannon has been used to make political points, particularly when we consider productions in the last century.

The dating of the play
The play at the Blackfriars Theatre and in the First Folio
The sources for the play
A summary of the plot
Coriolanus as a political play, but not representative of his own views
The question of how power should be granted
The character of Coriolanus
The use of language as an expression of character
The character and speech of Menenius
The character and speech of Volumina
The pivotal moment of silence in the play
The performance history of the play
A final word on the play from Willian Hazlitt

Support the podcast at:
www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com
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Episode 229:

It has been long recognised that Shakespeare included a lot of sex references in his plays, many of which are now quite obscure to the modern viewer. Recently a book called ‘Shakespeare on Sex’ caught my eye and I had an entertaining time reading it and thinking on the different perspective it offers on Shakespeare when seen through the lens of how Shakespeare thought about sex for his plays.

I was very pleased when author Marc Berley agreed to come on the podcast to discuss the book, although it did throw up a question immediately about how we could speak frankly about this subject on the podcast. As you will hear we were still struggling a bit with that question as we spoke. I hope we got the balance right, but be warned we talk about the language and mechanics of sex as they appear in the plays and hence I have marked this episode up as ‘explicit’.

Marc Berley was professor of English at Rutgers and Barnard/Columbia. His fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in the Iowa Review, the Threepenny Review, Lit Hub, and newspapers nationwide. He has appeared on BBC and PBS and been covered by Reuters, USA Today, the Washington Post, and ABC’s The View. He holds a BA, MA, and PhD in English and comparative literature from Columbia. The author of ‘After the Heavenly Tune’ and editor of ‘Reading the Renaissance’, he is founding editor of the award-winning literary magazine LitMag. He lives in New York.

Find out more about Marc and his work at: https://marcberley.com/

Amazon UK link to 'Shakespeare on Sex: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Shakespeare-Sex-Wills-Shaped-Liberated/dp/1510786465

Amazon US link to 'Shakespeare on Sex': https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Sex-Wills-Shaped-Liberated/dp/1510786465

Publishers website link: https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/9781510786462/shakespeare-on-sex/

Support the podcast at:
www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com
www.patreon.com/thoetp
www.ko-fi.com/thoetp

You can find an advertisement free version of the latest podcast episodes by joining on Patreon at the lowest paid tier level – that’s for just £1 per month.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.