By JAMES BOWMAN [New Criterion] – the real luck belongs to those who, speaking English as their native tongue, are privileged to be able to appreciate, with a little study, real Shakespeare rather than approximate Shakespeare. How ironic that Wanamaker, who devoted so much of his life and energies to reproducing in authentic detail Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, should have taken such a slapdash attitude towards the authenticity of Shakespeare’s language. I am reminded of the production of Troilus and Cressida I saw at the Globe in 2005 which presented the play in what purported to be the authentic Elizabethan pronunciation of its language but then cast women in the roles of several of the Greek warriors at Troy — as if the absence of the most basic sexual authenticity was or ought to have been beneath the notice of the audience.
Yet that kind of thing is very much taken for granted today, both in the custom of Shakespearean production and in that of Shakespearean scholarship. Authenticity is up for grabs when so much of Shakespeare, like the Bible, as it has been historically understood is inconsistent with feminist or otherwise politically correct beliefs about the world…And there’s another splendid irony for you — in the suggestion that Shakespeare himself could not have been an elitist “in the country of his birth” by using words that any English speaker could not readily have understood at the time.
Continued at The New Criterion | Also in The Fortnightly Review: Shakespeare, well and truly said. | More Chronicle & Notices.
