Rewriting Shakespeare’s Plays For and By the Contemporary Stage

Why have contemporary playwrights been obsessed by Shakespeare’s plays to such an extent that most of the canon has been rewritten by one rising dramatist or another over the last half century? Among other key figures, Edward Bond, Heiner Müller, Carmelo Bene, Arnold Wesker, Tom Stoppard, Howard Barker, Botho Strauss, Tim Crouch, Bernard Marie Koltès, and Normand Chaurette have all put their radical originality into the service of adapting four-century-old classics. The resulting works provide food for thought on issues such as Shakespearean role-playing, narrative and structural re-shuffling. Across the world, new writers have questioned the political implications and cultural stakes of repeating Shakespeare with and without a difference, finding inspiration in their own national experiences and in the different ordeals they have undergone.How have our contemporaries carried out their rewritings, and with what aims? Can we still play Hamlet, for instance, as Dieter Lesage asks in his book bearing this title, or do we have to “kill Shakespeare” as Normand Chaurette implies in a work where his own creative process is detailed? What do these rewritings really share with their sources? Are they meaningful only because of Shakespeare’s shadow haunting them? Where do we draw the lines between “interpretation,” “adaptation” and “rewriting”?The contributors to this collection of essays examine modern rewritings of Shakespeare from both theoretical and pragmatic standpoints. Key questions include: can a rewriting be meaningful without the reader’s or spectator’s already knowing Shakespeare? Do modern rewritings supplant Shakespeare’s texts or curate them? Does the survival of Shakespeare in the theatrical repertory actually depend on the continued dramatization of our difficult encounters with these potentially obsolete scripts represented by rewriting?