'Base, common, and popular' : elements of the popular in contemporary Shakespearean performance

This thesis examines the recent upsurge in Shakespearean performances which incorporate elements of ‘the popular’. In many cases, this takes the form of an apparent restoration, taking a historically-located or text-centred ‘authentically’ popular Shakespeare as its model. In others, a more subversive attitude is implied, suggesting that popular culture might provide a challenge to Shakespeare’s perceived cultural authority. Often, these contradictory attitudes may be found existing side-by-side and incompatibly within one piece of work.

Chapter One puts the term ‘popular’ itself under close scrutiny: it often has commercial connotations, but in a theatrical context it is more frequently used to signify something ‘of the people’. As this chapter shows, however, this is a problematic concept. Chapter Two analyses the use of anachronism in popular Shakespearean theatre, suggesting that it has the potential both to assimilate the past to the present unproblematically, and to disrupt the tendency to universalise. Chapter Three extends this analysis to the practice of departing from the Shakespearean text: its historical precedents, its possible ‘textual’ justifications, and its potential for transgression of the ‘sanctity’ of Shakespeare’s words.

In Chapter Four, a variety of parodic appropriations and adaptations of Shakespeare are considered; I examine the numerous versions of the relationship between Shakespeare and popular culture constructed in them, and suggest the emergence of a performance trend which is characterised by intertextuality and defiant of traditional cultural hierarchies. Chapter Five examines a similar topic from the opposite angle, looking at constructions of the popular Shakespearean audience which are promoted as ‘authentic’, and deconstructing these from a materialist perspective. Chapter Six looks at the implications of theatre space on a Shakespearean production’s ‘popular’ elements, and in my conclusion I draw together the ideas about Shakespearean cultural authority and transgression which permeate the thesis.