Introduction

Abstract

The chapters in this section are concerned with Shakespeare’s plays and poems read, translated or staged in times of conflict rather than with conflicts staged in Shakespeare’s plays and poems, though, of course, these two perspectives are closely related to each other in that frequently the conflicts staged are turned into tropes, metaphors or analogical models of the conflicts that solicit their restaging. Many of them lift Shakespeare out of his natural English habitat and take us to continental venues such as Poland, Romania or France, or to what Foucault would call heterotopes in England; they wrest Shakespeare from the hands of the English and hand him over to foreigners or persons whose Englishness, though they were born in England, did not go unchallenged by their compatriots. More importantly still, they take us outside the official sites of encounters with Shakespeare, the theatre and the classroom, confronting us with sites less sheltered than these cultural institutions and more directly exposed to the whips and scorns of times of savage conflict and war: prisons and detention or internment camps, the displacement of incarcerated dissidents, political exiles or prisoners of war. Read, translated or performed under such circumstances of extreme social duress and personal trauma, Shakespeare’s texts and the conflicts they stage take on a particular poignancy and offer themselves to pointed rewritings or appropriations.