http://hdl.handle.net/11089/47683 2026-04-03T19:01:26Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/47714 Theatre Reviews Mitsui, Takehito; Georgopoulou, Xenia 2022-12-30T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/47713 Book Reviews Xie, Guixia; Laskowska-Hinz, Sabina; Motohashi, Ted; Tang, Jie; Wang, Yuying 2022-12-30T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/47712 Utopia, Arcadia and the Forest of Arden Paterson, Ronan In Utopia (1516) Thomas More created a humorous world with a serious purpose. His invented republic was a place where existing conventions and structures did not exist, allowing the positing of alternatives. The creation of alternative worlds which satirise or critique contemporary society is a technique employed by writers in most genres, in most periods and in most cultures. More’s work is interesting for us in this context at least in part because of the likelihood that Shakespeare was familiar with it. When he created The Forest of Arden in As You Like It, for some of the characters there are utopian elements in their experience of that place. But Arden is not only a putative Utopia. Arden also contains elements of the pastoral Arcadia, again drawing upon ancient precedents, but more recently explored by English poets Edmund Spenser in The Shepherd’s Calendar (1579) and Philip Sidney in The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1593). This article interrogates the use of Utopian and Arcadian elements in the creation of one of Shakespeare’s most complicated plays. Like More’s Utopia its intention is comic. Like Sidney’s poem it is romantic, but unlike both of them it is ultimately about returning to a real world, with new perceptions of who we are, not as a society but as individuals. 2022-12-30T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/47711 “Nor doth this wood lack worlds of company:” the American Performance of Shakespeare and the White-Washing of Political Geography Meyer, John M. The paper examines the spatial overlap between the disenfranchisement of African Americans and the performance of William Shakespeare’s plays in the United States. In America, William Shakespeare seems to function as a prelapsarian poet, one who wrote before the institutionalization of colonial slavery, and he is therefore a poet able to symbolically function as a ‘public good’ that trumps America’s past associations with slavery. Instead, the modern American performance of Shakespeare emphasizes an idealized strain of human nature: especially when Americans perform Shakespeare outdoors, we tend to imagine ourselves in a primeval woodland, a setting without a history. Therefore, his plays are often performed without controversy—and (bizarrely) on or near sites specifically tied to the enslavement or disenfranchisement of people with African ancestry. New York City’s popular outdoor Shakespeare theater, the Delacorte, is situated just south of the site of Seneca Village, an African American community displaced for the construction of Central Park; Alabama Shakespeare Festival takes place on a former plantation; the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia makes frequent use of a hotel dedicated to a Confederate general; the University of Texas’ Shakespeare at Winedale festival is performed in a barn built with supports carved by slave labor; the Oregon Shakespeare Festival takes place within a state unique for its founding laws dedicated to white supremacy. A historiographical examination of the Texas site reveals how the process of erasure can occur within a ‘progressive’ context, while a survey of Shakespearean performance sites in New York, Alabama, Virginia, and Oregon shows the strength of the unexpected connection between the performance of Shakespeare in America and the subjugation of Black persons, and it raises questions about the unique and utopian assumptions of Shakespearean performance in the United States. 2022-12-30T00:00:00Z