Shakespeare in the Romanian Cultural Memory

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Shakespeare in the Romanian Cultural Memory

Monica Matei-Chesnoiu

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press


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Monica Matei-Chesnoiu With a Foreword by Arthur F. Kinney

Madison • Teaneck Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

䉷 2006 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [0-8386-4081-8/06 $10.00 Ⳮ 8¢ pp, pc.]

Associated University Presses 2010 Eastpark Boulevard Cranbury, NJ 08512

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Matei-Chesnoiu, Monica, 1954– Shakespeare in the Romanian cultural memory / Monica Matei-Chesnoiu ; with a foreword by Arthur F. Kinney. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8386-4081-8 (alk. paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Translations into Romanian—History and criticism. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Stage history—Romania. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Appreciation—Romania. 4. English language—Translating into Romanian. 5. Translating and interpreting— Romania. 6. Theater—Romania. I. Title. PR2881.5.R6M38 2006 822.3⬘3—dc22

printed in the united states of america

2005014324

To my daughter, Joanna


Contents List of Illustrations Foreword Arthur F. Kinney Acknowledgements 1. Mapping Shakespeare’s Globe in a Global World 2. Early Translations of Shakespeare in Romania 3. Shakespeare’s Decalogue: English Histories in Romania 4. Romanian Metamorphoses: Comedies 5. Shakespeare, Communism, and After: Tragedies 6. Staging Revenge and Power: Masks of Romanian Hamlets 7. Romanian Mental and Theatrical Maps: Romances

15 19 27 67 96 158 194 220

Notes Bibliography Index

237 254 266

7

9 11


Illustrations Richard III dircted by Ion S¸ahighian at the Nottara Theater (1964). Richard III directed by Horea Popescu at the Bucharest National Theater (1976). Twelfth Night directed by Anca Ovanez-Doros¸enco at the Bucharest National Theater (1984). Twelfth Night (The Kings’ Night or What You Will) directed by Andrei S¸erban at the Bucharest National Theater (1991). Hamlet directed by Vlad Mugur at the Cluj National Theater (2001).

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76 77 121 140 214


Foreword Arthur F. Kinney

A catwalk traversed the stage; and lots of ropes hung from the state canopy, like lianas in a tropical forest. Like in a simple sentence, this setting made a visible statement: the world was a jungle. This homo homini lupus motto became an ad litteram declaration when the audiences could see kings, princes, cardinals, and attendants hanging from these ropes like monkeys, and jumping into the political world of the stage. As a theater critic noticed about this production, ‘‘had we lived during King John’s reign, we would have felt avenged.’’ This was an exceptionally daring statement, because the critic clearly transposed the political situation from British history to the contemporary Romania, regardless of the Communist censorship.

MONICA

MATEI-CHESNOIU IS DESCRIBING A PRODUCTION OF SHAKE-

speare’s King John at the Comedy Theater in Bucharest in 1988; and she notes that the reviewer escaped without harm because the Communist regime in Romania was already at the verge of collapse. But it was anyone’s call at the moment. For her, the ‘‘moral rectitude’’ and ‘‘verticality’’ of the play and this staging of it exposed ‘‘the incredible heights of worldly ambition and political power.’’ At the end of the performance, a ‘‘memorable ending’’ created by ‘‘pure directorial invention,’’ four of King John’s followers were left in obscurity, ‘‘sequestered by the higher conspiracy of history,’’ vanishing into the darkness of the stage. This is only one of the countless memorable performances which Matei-Chesnoiu records that illuminate what she calls ‘‘a liminal space at the cultural margin of Europe, . . . a place somewhere near the Black Sea and the Danube, where Shakespeare has been performed, translated, and interpreted successfully for almost two centuries.’’ The three provinces that constitute this margin—the Romanian provinces of Wallachia, Moldova, and Transylvania—are the focus of this rich, substantial, and transformative study of the potential meanings of Shakespeare and the political uses and social purposes to which his plays have been put in our time. In the cur11

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FOREWORD

rent critical climate, where cultural forces and performance theory dominate our research and writing, this essentially groundbreaking book expands our horizons, revealing to us in stark yet illuminating detail just what Shakespeare has meant to Eastern Europe in the dark days of World War II, its Communist aftermath, and, finally, its liberation—and how, throughout this time, it has managed to keep a hold, however tenuous, on the Western world it has held up as informant and paradigm. For Matei-Chesnoiu, Romania remains an ineluctable site of cultural memory which, like the ghost in Hamlet, seizes our attention and will not let us go. She finds that Shakespearean performances did vital and indestructible, if often indirect, cultural work because Shakespearean performances were always interpretations negotiating the England of the 1500s and 1600s and the Romania of today as well as the larger Eastern European network of countries. Geographically, she points out, many of the lands which we think of as classical and which provided Shakespeare with substance, myth, and metaphor were what we now know as East European soil, something made clear in the maps of Ortelius circulating in the Tudor period. Often exotic and eccentric facts and lands then were facts and lands Romanians know all too well. Shakespeare’s utilization of them— indeed, his very intervention—gives Romania a kind of just cause to deploy his works metamorphosed through Fascist and Communist regimes. Postwar Romania’s view of Tudor England, she argues, ‘‘was seen as a passive form of resistance against the communist ideology,’’ and was one that, in time, ‘‘the disintegrating regime was propagating every more feebly.’’ The forces of history, dominated by the liberation of eastern Europe by the West, caused Communism to come to an end; but this engrossing study suggests that Shakespeare too played a part. Early on there was a need for a kind of escapism, an exorcism of what she terms ‘‘the spiritual demons of the totalitarian political pressure’’; later, there was an investigation (through Shakespeare) of those very demons. Initially, Shakespeare’s comedies were appropriated to stress their abstraction, their theatrical self-referentiality, as subtle means of critiquing the Romanian society and exposing its shortcomings. In 1964, for instance, Twelfth Night, renamed Noaptea Regilor (The Kings’ Night) turned the world upside down into a kind of carnival showing the fickleness of power in a disturbing and unpredictable world. In 1978, As You Like It became politically parodic by stressing uncertainty. The Taming of the Shrew, where ‘‘complex personalities were buried in the incredible amount of cheap horseplay,’’ showed, underneath its surface, a process not unlike brainwashing,

FOREWORD

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which left the characters addicted only to the circus of farce. But by 1986, the banished Duke Senior began to look very much like the Romanian dictator Ceausescu; as the political economy began to fragment, the comedic attacks began to coarsen. The incisive survey of Shakespearean comedy in the postwar years finds its parallels in the deployment of the histories, tragedies, and romances. It is no surprise that Shakespeare’s histories, especially the Henriad, were at once the most decisive and the most dangerous, often escaping punishment because they were constructed by showing competing explanations of political events. Yet even here they were forcing an audience to exercise choice. The tragedies at first seemed to support ideological and Socialist oppression, showing the force of power and the need for clear rule; they were performed in ways that seemed to signify the superiority of Communism over capitalism by applying idealized Marxist theories involving class struggle. But they were also made to display consequent social decline, and to take such weakening of the state and disintegration slowly. By as early as the 1970s, imaginative directors were seizing on new ways to present Shakespeare’s works: Macbeth, for instance, in a 1976 production, had no weird sisters, but instead had the predictions and prophecies as Macbeth’s own secret thoughts that haunted his consciousness as they haunted his conscience. ‘‘The ‘king hereafter’ prophecy became one of his multiple inner voices.’’ In this way, Macbeth both enacted and deconstructed the mind of the tyrant and so educated playgoers in the forces of politics and its governmental and social aftermaths. As the red curtain began to come apart, Romanian actors increased their performances of the Roman plays, showing the excesses in Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and, especially, Titus Andronicus. Nor are the romances exempt. Caliban’s cries for liberty were staged against an autocratic Prospero and, more tellingly, Gower became the autocrat of Pericles, no only telling the story of Pericles but commanding the audience when to sit and how to behave. The extraordinary strength of this book rests, finally, in the life of the author herself. She has seen many of these productions and she speaks from firsthand experience and knowledge. But she also shows a canny way of recording earlier productions by seeing through the censorship that caused reviewers, even those most sympathetic to the cause of freedom, to mask their commentary. With painstaking care and admirable caution, Matei-Chesnoiu picks through the recent past cries of her own beloved country to show Shakespearean inflections in another place, but in our time. The observations can be unnerving; but they are also energizing. If we

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FOREWORD

are ever to plumb the depths of Shakespeare, the performances recorded in this book will have to be a part of how we do it. They tell us possibilities about the plays, and about ourselves, which we ignore at the cost of inexcusable ignorance. And the final lesson implied in this book is that the subject is not the political and social forces of Romania, or of eastern Europe, alone. As Matei-Chesnoiu says explicitly at one point, they were just as true of an England personified by a torturer like Topcliffe and an absolutist king like James I. A study, then, which seems to travel so far from Tudor and Stuart England always has that period, too, in its sights. Arthur F. Kinney

Acknowledgments THIS BOOK HAS BENEFITED FROM SUGGESTIONS AND COMMENTS ON EARLY drafts of specific portions by Frances Barasch and Douglas Brooks. My thanks go to each of them for their time and efforts. In addition, the comments and reactions of colleagues to papers based on sections of this study were also helpful. I have included in this book, in somewhat different and re-contextualized form, the papers presented at the World Shakespeare Congress (Valencia 2001), the International Shakespeare Conference in Stratford-upon-Avon (2000, 2002, 2004), and the Shakespeare in Europe conferences (Four Centuries of Shakespeare in Europe, Murcia, 1999; Shakespeare in European Culture, Basel, 2001; Shakespeare in European Politics, Utrecht, 2003). The final version responds to the comments and criticism of anonymous readers for Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, whom I thank. I am also grateful to Harry Keyishian, Director of FDU Press, for the benevolent guidance in the final stages of abridgement of the manuscript, and especially for the much-needed urging to trim the book for its gratuitous bulk and its infelicities of style. Many of these still remain, I am afraid, despite my efforts, and these things of darkness I acknowledge as mine. The early research and initial drafting of this study were greatly facilitated by a Jubilee Education Grant for research at the Shakespeare Centre Library and Shakespeare Institute Library in Stratford-uponAvon and by some research time at the Shakespeare Library in Munich. I was especially aided by a Fulbright Scholar Grant for the World Shakespeare Bibliography at Texas A&M University. My special thanks go to Roger Pringle, Susan Brock, Ingeborg Bolz, and James L. Harner, without whose help none of this would have been possible. Arthur F. Kinney has a special place in my appreciation order, and this is not only for having accepted to write the foreword to this palimpsest-like book, which is the result of extensive collaborative activity. Most of all, I am grateful to my family, who have been proud and supportive of my academic successes, though at times they found it hard to accept the apparently stronger relationship with my com15

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

puter. I thank all the people, Shakespeare colleagues and friends, who have been beside me and have helped in the fashioning of ideas and in sorting out the relevant matter. There is a significant name for my approach to Shakespeare in almost each country of Europe, and I must mention Werner Bro¨nnimann, Ton Hoenselaars, Jonathan Bate, Mariangela Tempera, Angel Luı´s Pujante, Andreas Ho¨ffele, Manfred Pfister, Krystyna Kujawinska, Holger Klein, and Ina Schabert. My apologies to those I could not mention and to my Romanian colleagues. The Bucharest National Theater, the Cluj National Theater, and the Nottara Theater (Bucharest) provided me with the copyright for the illustrations of Romanian Shakespeare productions, for which I am very appreciative. For what I have stumbled upon and found, I am grateful to all.



1 Mapping Shakespeare’s Globe in a Global World THIS STUDY SEEKS TO EXTEND THE VIEW OF TRADITIONAL SCHOLARSHIP regarding Eastern European space and the products of national cultures by considering ‘‘Shakespeare’’ as a location of specific cultural history, particularly in the Romanian configuration. As Stanley Wells pointed out when writing about the integration of Shakespeare in European culture, ‘‘the study of Shakespeare’s impact in languages other than those in which they originated can . . . be a two-way process, blessing those who give as well as those who receive.’’1 The benefit of studying Shakespeare, whose plays, for during at least the last two centuries, have gradually permeated European culture in forms and accents until recently yet unknown, can be equally rewarding to Anglo-American scholars as it is to researchers whose native language is not English. By partaking in the intellectual feast constructed around the Shakespearean paradigm, the diversified European cultures and academics all over the world could experience a sense of unity while speaking the same language of the theater and sharing a similar set of values. The result is, as Wells observed in quoting Balz Engler, that ‘‘Shakespeare takes on the status of a maker, sometimes a transmitter of myths, in plays relating no more directly to their ancestral texts than his own plays do to Homer, Ovid, or Boccaccio.’’2 In studying the representation of Shakespeare elsewhere, we apply the same refurbishing and assimilation method that he had used when constructing his dramatic representations of the region of Eastern Europe under scrutiny. The effect is a different structure, which would be as unrecognizable to Shakespeare and his contemporaries as their understanding of these regions must have been to their sixteenth-century inhabitants. However, this conceptual system of reconsidering cultural boundaries using the Shakespeare criterion is a mental construction that grows into something of great constancy. Unable to resist the chiastic formulation of this chapter’s title, and 19

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SHAKESPEARE IN THE ROMANIAN CULTURAL MEMORY

aware of the ‘‘inflationary usage of this semiotic concept’’3 in current critical discourse, I consider mapping as a cognitive attempt at describing the theatrical world of Shakespeare both physically, through an account of productions, and mentally, by critical interpretation. The abstraction and materiality inscribed in the cartographic activity is aligned here to the theatrical action. With similar permeable boundaries between the metaphorical and the material, the theater has a special way of negotiating physical and intellectual space, showing, if needed, that a disconcerting infinity of angels can be seen dancing on the point of a pin. In the introduction to the collection of essays debating the politics of space and its negotiation in early modern Britain, the editors document the significant changes in European spatial consciousness brought about by the exceptional development of cartography from the fifteenth century onwards. As Gordon and Klein observed, ‘‘A spatial model that required a geographical centre, an omphalos, in order to describe, in degrees of civilization, its difference from a diffuse periphery, was slowly replaced by a framed geometric image fully available for European inscription.’’4 During the process of ‘‘slowly’’ replacing a classical and medieval conceptual paradigm of concentric spatial relationship with a more liberal mental organization of human space, there appear certain cultural shortcuts. The theater is one of these instructive bypasses because it helps audiences visualize distant places instantly, with the help of some trick of imagination. When trying to define the area of Southeastern Europe where Romania lies, I have encountered a serious difficulty. The author of a comprehensive Web page about this region seems to share my confusion, which he/she intends to alleviate by invoking the plurality of readings. K. Feig wonders about the different English names given to what I will call generically Eastern Europe when he/she writes, Eastern Europe? Central Europe? East Central Europe? Southwestern Europe? Southeastern Europe? The Balkans? What name shall we use? The ‘‘groupings’’ are illusive and changing—based on myth, tradition, dreams, treaties, geography, trade-offs, history, symbols, perceptions, prejudice, power politics, arrogance, ignorance, and HOPE. The concepts of ‘‘Balkans’’ and ‘‘southern’’ bring erroneous or incomplete images of unique civil wars, hatred, barbarism, primitive, poor, irredeemable. The concept of ‘‘central’’ brings the same erroneous or incomplete images of uniquely civilized, developed, ‘‘western’’ values. Is it any wonder that the nations bordering the ‘‘western’’ and ‘‘civilized’’ nations such as Germany and Austria exert enormous effort to link themselves to them and distance themselves from ‘‘the other?’’ Is ‘‘it’’ a region? What is ‘‘it?’’ The reader will need to make his/her own distinc-

1: MAPPING SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE IN A GLOBAL WORLD

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tions. Whatever else, the ‘‘civilized’’ nations of the world in the 20th century have treated this area with disdain, indifference, frustration, and reacted with ignorance, hubris, cruelty, and discrimination.5

Despite the radicalness of such a statement, this is how things stand about definitions and global assertions at the beginning of this millennium. Therefore, Eastern Europe and Romania, in my acceptance, are not necessarily exact geographic places. Rather, they are sites, or areas set aside for some precise purpose, and more specifically sites of European cultural memory conserved for the study of Shakespeare. Whatever the early modern British playwrights and theatergoers knew about the south-eastern European territory containing the Carpathians, toward the lower end of the Danube where it flows into the Black Sea, was initially conditioned by the ancients’ writings about these places. How these classical discourses were transferred into the domain of common knowledge for the Elizabethans and Jacobeans is still a matter of debate. However, the general idea for the early modern readers and theatergoers was that this area of Eastern Europe, under Turkish domination at the time, was off-limits for the civilized nations. John Gillies applies a phenomenological critique to the scene of cartography in King Lear, linking map-reading in the early modern period to ‘‘the creation of a new experience of the bourgeois domestic interior.’’6 This ‘‘expansive interiority,’’7 as Gillies puts it, can explain the dominantly positive mood of reception and the popularity of cartography in this period, but I see it as the inherent source of many misconceptions. Since ‘‘the far-seeing body is comfortably at home,’’8 much of the information conveyed through the maps cannot be verified. Therefore the facts are often unreliable, and some data is generally derived from the classics. Absorbing indiscriminately the information proceeding from the abundant translations of the classics and spicing it with some extravagant reports from the travelers in those regions, the majority of the British developed a dogmatic and vague notion about much of the land that lay beyond their immediate center of vision. Despite the abundance of geographical information and the plethora of discourses digesting the works of the classics, early modern readers and audiences still considered the distant Eastern European spaces as marginal, a land of ‘‘elsewhere’’ full of dangers and disagreeable surprises. Travelers and geographers only apparently succeeded in dissipating this informational obscurity. In defining the spatial and cultural coordinates of distant regions more or less accurately, the travelers, cartographers, and historiographers implicitly circumscribed their

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concepts to a strict delimitation between ‘‘home’’ and ‘‘foreign.’’ In addition, not many of those who provided cartographic or ethnographic data ventured farther than Western Europe, except for those who did business with these countries or were involved in some sort of extraordinary adventure in the region. Most early modern instructive accounts about Eastern European places, including the popular Theatrum Orbis Terrarum by Ortelius, were inspired from the writings of the classics and contained practical information about this area of Eastern Europe adorned with splendid maps.9 Little attention was given to the fact that the references to these regions were those used in classical Latin cartography, or that the names of the peoples inhabiting them were extracted from ancient texts. It seems that the visual component and the attraction of the interestingly designed maps were more likely to determine the canon of relevance for Shakespeare’s contemporaries than the accuracy of authentic information. Similarly, the exotic and eccentric facts about the foreign Eastern European territories, including the three Romanian provinces, as derived from the classics, were more attractive to the early modern mind than the reality of those places and the people who inhabited them. Thus, a myth-making process instantly came into being, and the activity of mentally rewriting conventional illusions about faraway places often replaced the accurate report. Unlike his contemporaries, who wrote apparently informative essays about various parts of the world, Shakespeare had the ability of making foreign spaces immediately tangible to his audiences through the materiality of the theater. Moreover, his plays show how all the cultural or racial preconceptions can only be deceptive, obliquely warning everyone not to take too much stereotypical information for granted. The study of Shakespeare’s integration into modern Romanian culture shows that the people in this part of Europe, like the other European nations, were ready to welcome the Shakespeare concept almost at the same time and mostly for the same reasons. Essentially, three kinds of questions are raised here. Does the presence of Shakespeare in the discourse of various cultures cast a light on both the history of Shakespeare production and the respective cultures? How, in certain cases, did the process of cultural influence—if any—operate? Was there an action of intervention, propagation, and transformation of the itemized and standardized icons provided by the perception of Shakespeare at the level of a particular country? If the theater is a site for the accumulation of traditional symbols and metaphors, were these particularly


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relevant for the Romanians’ understanding of ethnic, social, and political relations at a given time? This informative theatrical tour documents the modern Romanian perception of ‘‘Shakespeare,’’ seen as a prototype of British cultural identity. A general account of Romanian cultural products and stage history attempts to show how early translations from Shakespeare or productions of plays belonging to each genre have contributed to the shaping of a national theatrical selfhood that was intimately related to the European reception of the English poet. In analyzing the ‘‘re-production’’ of Shakespeare in Europe, Balz Engler calls the early phase of Shakespeare reception ‘‘Shakespeare beyond the rules.’’10 Linking the early history of European Shakespeares with the increased significance of what the English playwright stood for, Engler comments, ‘‘The national, even nationalistic, dimension of Shakespeare re-production is certainly characteristic of Europe, having to do with the association of language and nation and the need to translate his works.’’11 In surveying the nineteenth-century translations of Shakespeare in Romania, it becomes visible how various translators interpreted the allusions extant in the Shakespeare text. The underlying inference is that the early Romanian translators addressed the complex philosophical issues in the tragedies in a particularly orthodox mode. Despite the popularity of the Roman plays with the theatrical audiences in the three provinces, and later in the unified Romania, the four tragedies, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear, provided material that could satisfy the public’s need for interiority. In addition, the cultural authority of the Shakespeare figure was perceived as a means of facilitating the country’s exit from the status of a marginalized Balkan elsewhere. By promoting mostly the translations of Shakespeare’s plays that they perceived to raise the universal issues of humanity, Romanian intellectuals during the 1848 revolutionary period and later hoped to advance the people’s cultural interests and integrate them in the European family of nations. Considering the association between theater and history, my discussion follows the Romanian productions of Shakespeare’s history plays during the 1980s and ’90s. Seeing the theater as an escape from the adversities of life, as well as a cultural space where pent-up frustrations and fears could be exorcised, the Romanian audiences in the Communist period expected political theatrical readings of Shakespeare’s histories. During the eighties in Romania, there was a severe split between what people thought and what they were told to think. An unstable and officially constructed illusion of reality collided with the social and moral disaster obvious to everyone. The

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Communist ideologists could no longer control people’s minds by providing their fabricated version of history, in conflict with an increasingly unstable reality. The public developed an illicit taste for resistance and subversion, which could be materialized in the theatrical encounter between author, director, and audience. In this period, producing Shakespeare, and especially the plays about England’s past, was seen as a passive form of resistance against the Communist ideology, which the disintegrating regime was propagating ever more feebly. The ensuing democratic mutation of the nineties in Romania brought an increased interest in the production of Shakespeare’s English histories by the theatrical companies. Being no longer encumbered by the need to avoid political censorship or to provoke latent disruptive meanings, Romanian directors focused on staging the histories as effective cultural conjunctions between nations. Directors in the nineties saw the international language of the theater and politics as a convenient form of emerging from the status of former cultural isolation. Consequently, the plays drawing on English history tended to represent a form of multinational theatrical export. They became apolitical and ahistorical aesthetic means of communication rather than instruments of political sabotage. In examining how Shakespeare has been initially appropriated and gradually localized in Romanian theater, we see that he shaped the national dramatic arts while his plays were being internalized. ‘‘Shakespeare’’ becomes a paradigm of cultural evolution and the theatrical maturity of this nation. In the early hard Communist period (1949–60), when the power wanted to legitimize its control over Romania’s past and present in every possible way, producing Shakespeare extensively was a form of elevating accreditation. In this period, the production of the comedies was a viable cultural project from the perspective of the authorities, because these plays were less concerned with political issues and could be dramatized successfully in social modes. In the decades of Communist rule between 1970 and 1990, however, Shakespeare was transparently put to ideological uses, and directors at local and central theaters became more involved in undermining the collapsing Communist regime by reshaping mentalities about the prerogatives of power. In this period, the productions of Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies disclosed specific political agendas and were used explicitly with subversive purposes. I would like to think that the Romanian theaters’ dissident influence over two decades of producing Shakespeare had somehow induced the psychological mood that led to the 1989 political displacement of autocracy in the real world. In


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the nineties, liberated from the straight jacket of political meanings, theaters and directors concentrated on what the productions of Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies represented for the Romanian theater. In an intensifying self-reflexive enthusiasm, directors paraphrased previous theatrical styles of producing Shakespeare and devised their own translations and adaptations of the plays. Thus, many productions have become sophisticated affairs that must be decoded by specialists, armed with refined deciphering systems. The history of producing Hamlet on the Romanian stage goes parallel with the reception of Shakespeare in Romania in different periods. However, a cogent discussion about this play needs a separate chapter, not being included in the series of productions of tragedies, because of the exceptional popularity of this play with Romanian audiences ever since the beginning of its translation and production. The early twentieth-century productions replicated the romantic-hero vogue derived from the French and German interpretations, and the declamatory style of the actor interpreting the main hero was directly proportional with the star’s fame and position in the national theater. Interpreting Hamlet at that time was equivalent to an international passport to recognition and fame. Producing ‘‘Shakespeare’’ in general, and Hamlet especially, came to be regarded as a rapid way of emerging from the marginal status of cultural provincialism. Entering through the grand gate of Hamlet could secure a lasting place in the patrimony of world culture. During World War II, productions of Hamlet were scarcer than ever, because of the war crisis. However, the play’s political cargo was exploited in a barely recorded production of the play in a political war prison, where anti-Nazi allusions were evident. The story of the postwar Communist Hamlet in Romania, however, is a matter of cultural sophistication, even audacity. The early Soviet-influenced Communist authorities thought that by producing Shakespeare’s most admired play, they would gain the emblem of nobility in cultural matters. In later years of totalitarian domination, however, directors used Hamlet to suit their personal political tentative of undermining the Communist regime through the doublespeak of Shakespeare’s tragedy. The Romanian Hamlet of the nineties, in a period when political pressure and the need for subversion were no longer valid, became once more a theatrical passport through which a smaller culture intended to bring its tribute to the larger world cultural heritage. Moreover, in a 2001 Romanian production of Hamlet by Vlad Mugur, the director faced his own mortality in direct relation to this play, thus introducing an element of intimately indi-

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vidual approach to Hamlet in the most eloquent, even aporetic, ‘‘presentist’’ mood. It is no wonder that a country belonging to a marginalized Eastern European space has attempted to exit the peripheral status of a relatively insignificant romance culture by adopting the literary values of the Western world. Voting for Shakespeare in its Romanian appropriations meant advancing toward the enriching caliber of a refined Western culture, which had always regarded its Eastern relative as alien and barely ‘‘civilized,’’ a thing of darkness that they could hardly acknowledge as theirs. Ancient travelers noted that the lands in the parts of the Black Sea were extremely unfriendly. Early modern writers highlighted the social, moral, and cultural decay of the inhabitants of the three Romanian provinces because of the Ottoman domination. The wars of the twentieth century and the calamity of Communism did nothing to change this condition of a secondrate place and culture among the nations of Europe. However, the complex way in which this nation chose to adopt the cultural legacy of Shakespeare’s dramatic formula has been an efficient manner of exiting the marginal status and approaching the cultural and social level of other countries of Europe. Dennis Kennedy calls Shakespeare a ‘‘cold warrior’’ when he demonstrates that ‘‘Shakespeare was used in Western and Central Europe as a site for the recovery and reconstruction of values that were perceived to be under threat, or already lost’’12 in the years from 1945 to 1965. Likewise, by adopting the banner of Shakespeare, Romania has intended and tended to be no longer a liminal space at the cultural margin of Europe, but a place somewhere near the Black Sea and the Danube, where Shakespeare has been performed, translated, and interpreted successfully for almost two centuries. Moreover, by evidencing close similarities in the adoption of Shakespeare with the other countries of Europe, Romanian culture received Shakespeare as a passport to European integration long before the international visas were abolished politically.

2 Early Translations of Shakespeare in Romania ENGLISH TRAVELERS AND GEOGRAPHERS IN THE RENAISSANCE PERCEIVED the European zone around the Carpathians, the lower end of the Danube, and the western side of the Black Sea as alien territory. Here, dangers seemed to lurk from every corner of the rugged and often inaccessible country, or monstrous and savage natives who showed evil habits made any civil exchange impossible. Moreover, this was the dominion of the Great Turke, and, therefore, most inauspicious for Westerners. All these cultural and racial preconceptions were derived from or capitalized on the classical stories about these places, available in a multitude of early modern translations. The plethora of popular geographical texts and atlases, which mostly took over the information about these regions from the classics, offered factual details and some basic data about a country that signified next to nothing for the English traveler or theatergoer. The merchants and adventurers, who had all sorts of experiences in the eastern Mediterranean and went as far as the Black Sea or Russia, brought back and related especially the stories of wonder and excess. They looked to the marketable value of their accounts in the publishing business, which could only be increased if the title page announced that the story was ‘‘The true and most wonderful report.’’ In the meantime, the majority of the inhabitants of these Eastern European regions had little knowledge of what happened beyond the local area they lived in, and even less about the distant British Isles. The local population in the three provinces of modern Romania—Walachia, Moldova, and Transylvania—was busy farming the land, extracting the gold from the mountains, or tending to their sheep, and did not leave many written records of their activities. In a post-Kleinian psychoanalytical study on ‘‘Race as Projection in Othello,’’ Janet Adelman writes about a ‘‘contaminated’’ inner world of envy in the play. According to Adelman, in Iago, ‘‘Shakespeare gives motiveless malignity a body’’1 by incorporating the ele27

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ment of envy and frustration of the morality tradition. In the case of the anomalous and most always negative reports about the geographic area under discussion appearing in early modern texts, we could speak of a cultural and ideological ‘‘contamination’’ of the discourses about these places. Writings in the period were largely contaminated with information from the classics about the customs and habits of peoples in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, generally either inexact or taken for granted from hearsay. Geographers and historians in ancient times had few means of verifying the veracity of the reports about this area, and they recorded information filtered through other people’s consciousness. When certain classical men of letters, such as Ovid, for example, had firsthand knowledge of the western side of the Black Sea and the inhabitants of these regions, they did not report favorably on them at all. Moreover, the fact that these provinces were in the Ottoman Turks’ extending power in early modern times, at the margins of their empire, was an additional source of anxiety and negativity in the perception of these places by Western Europeans. Daniel J. Vitkus documents that ‘‘the fear of the Islamic bogey was well established in the European consciousness’’2 in the period. In this paradoxical geography of exclusion, Shakespeare had no choice but to perceive this area as marginal, when he did at all. The Shakespearean plays’ unusual topography incorporates a note of liminality, which he adapted from the classical and early modern geographical texts. Analyzing the impact of foreigners on the early modern community and culture in a study on ‘‘Elizabethans and foreigners,’’ G. K. Hunter notes the large amount of information on physical geography accessible to the Elizabethans, almost similar to the modern availability of such knowledge. However, in point of the framework of social, psychological, and cultural assumptions concerning foreigners and distant regions, Hunter observes an ‘‘overlap’’3 in the early modern period’s perception of people from other countries. The medieval conception of the zones of the earth, centered on a spiritual Christian geography as well as a physical one, converges with the modern worldview. Hunter considers the fact that geography was a marginal subject in comparison to classical history and literature in grammar schools, and that throughout the period there was a strong ‘‘ambivalence’’ in the attitude to travel.4 This overlap of radically different and almost incompatible modes of thought in the domain of geographical knowledge ‘‘allows Shakespeare to explore, swiftly and coherently, the image of the foreigner, the stranger, the outsider in a dimension which is at once terrestrial and spiritual.’’5 Similarly, A. J. Hoenselaars focuses on Hamlet in his examples of

2: EARLY TRANSLATIONS OF SHAKESPEARE IN ROMANIA

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Shakespeare’s perception of foreignness,6 asserting that Shakespeare makes careful distinctions between nationality and national character. Hoenselaars argues that Shakespeare relies on stereotypes of national character for stage characterization only. In addition, I notice that Shakespeare demonstrates a special potential for staging the tangibility of the national attributes of peoples in the world through the physicality of the individual places, whether central or marginal to the English shores. The stereotypes of national character are subtly dismantled and turned to mean differently, in significant contrastive modes, while the audiences are given a glimpse of the foreign spaces from the interior, from their inhabitants’ perspective. All the knowledge the early modern English audiences and artists had about the farther Eastern European space where Romania lies was through the accounts of travelers (firsthand or reported) and historians (classical and contemporary), and through the maps about these places. Arthur F. Kinney discusses the impact of the rapidly growing chorography on mid-sixteenth-century European imagination of foreign places. Seeing that maps, like poems, work with images functioning as symbols, Kinney notes, ‘‘Beyond the selfreferentiality within the map—the chiasmus of meanings in its symbolic corners, for instance—there is referentiality to the culture that produces it, and to the reader who reads it.’’7 Like in the art of the surveyor or map-maker, in referring to foreign spaces, Shakespeare produces a spatial triangulation including the mention of a distant location, some vague knowledge his audiences might have about it (gathered from classical or early modern sources), and a possible allusion to his contemporary England. This is proleptically appended to the play’s social and historical context, giving the audiences a real glimpse into distant places that many would never be able to see. It is perhaps attractive to speculate on the fact that all the romantic comedies, with the exception of The Merry Wives of Windsor, are set in extrinsic locations with an exotic flavor of elsewhere. So are the romances, even Cymbeline, since this play’s ancient Britain is as eerie and displaced as many other items of Shakespeare’s errant geography. This may be a way of attracting his audience’s attention to the existence of the marginal territories, by making them as real and tangible for the people coming to the theater as the encircled space of the Globe they occupied. Considering the island space as a potently image-making factor induced by the atlases and chorographies of that period, Jonathan Bate sees the island as ‘‘a special enclosed space within the larger environment of geopolitics, per-

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haps like the enclosed space of the theatre within the larger environment of the city.’’8 Similarly, distant spaces from Eastern Europe, Asia, or Africa function in Shakespeare as so many islands of geographic imagination, triggering connotations of alterity. Unlike the hypothetical and highly conceptualized locations of the otherwise very popular maps, chorographies, and atlases, or the repetitive and often obscure geographical descriptive discourses, Shakespeare’s theater shows the audiences that there are other particular, concrete, though distant, places to think or imagine about. This process of theatrical geographic projection and visualization, more efficient than any Mercator scientific system, will always work on increasingly numerous and multinational audiences in the centuries to follow. Each individual production of a Shakespeare play brings on stage an often-exotic space of Europe or the Mediterranean basin, but it also projects the audiences’ cultural assumptions about that space. The larger the sphere of the spectators’ geographical and historical knowledge extends, the more efficient the theatrical projection is. According to this imaginative spatial expansion, like in Blaise Pascal’s9 graphic image representing the extent of human knowledge, we have a circle whose center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. Such diffuse and multiple visualizations of foreign spaces in the productions of Shakespeare’s plays can be paralleled with a no less complex appropriation of Shakespeare in Eastern European cultures. Before analyzing how the Shakespeare myth is implicated in the fashioning of Romanian national culture, a survey of various performance paradigms and their inflection in the production history of national cultures in the eastern area of Europe is required. Susan Bassnett spoke about the new transformation and enculturation of Shakespeare when she wrote, ‘‘Shakespeare, that great national icon, has been made and remade as often as ideas of Englishness and Britishness have been refashioned.’’10 Similarly, shedding light on the category of quotation with relevance to Shakespeare, John Drakakis noted that ‘‘Shakespeare now is primarily a collage of familiar quotations, fragments whose relation to any coherent aesthetic principle is both problematical and irremediably ironical.’’11 In the current context of Shakespearean appropriations in Europe and the world, a large number of publications demonstrate that each cultural milieu has attempted to redefine and interpret Shakespeare within their existing terms by injecting historical and local aspirations, anxieties, and distancing motivations into the production of plays. Joseph G. Price12 treats Shakespeare as the cultural phenomenon of the post-Renaissance world, which now extends be-


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yond Western boundaries to comprise every culture, including popular culture. Only in the last decade, more than twenty book-length studies, collections, and monographs have appeared to testify to the interesting issue of various national appropriations of Shakespeare. Dennis Kennedy’s collection of essays entitled Foreign Shakespeare13 and the collection of articles edited by Michael Hattaway, Boika Sokolova, and Derek Roper14 opened the way for many creative critical responses to Shakespeare in different cultures. Shakespeare and National Culture edited by John J. Joughin15 continues the project begun by cultural materialists of uncovering the political and social uses according to which the Shakespeare text has been appropriated, adapted, and reinvented. Part I of the collection of essays refers to colonial and anti-colonial appropriations of Shakespeare, with focus on the Indian and South-African cultures, and Part III (‘‘Shakespeare at the heart of Europe’’) is an extension and sharpening of the debate concerning the question of nationhood and its associate fantasies. The meaningful contributions by Thomas Healy16 and Francis Barker17 focus on finding the fault lines and continuities between past and present in the representations of the protean Shakespeare in Europe. Robert Weimann18 gives an account of the contradictory uses to which Shakespeare was put in postwar Germany, establishing the vexed relations of intellectual authority and political power of Shakespeare’s appropriation in the German Democratic Republic. Weimann argues that the Enlightenment roots of a classicized version of Shakespeare resulted in a literary intellectualized presentation rather than a popular interpretation of the plays. The conservative approach became a national icon that was employed by the Marxist-Leninist authorities of the GDR to promote the idea of Shakespeare’s works as splendid prefigurations of their own Socialist-humanist ideals. This confiscation practice is largely similar, I would add, to the postwar reconsideration of Shakespeare in the other Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, including Romania. Speaking of the resistant and subversive significance of a mimed production of Romeo and Juliet in Bulgaria, in the same collection of essays edited by John Joughin, Thomas Healy makes the analogy with the hole in the Romanian flag during the 1989 revolution. As a symbol of their rejection of the old Communist order, the Romanians had cut the Communist coat of arms out of the center of the flag. However, as the old order appeared in new guises only months later, the signal of change was beginning to look increasingly suspect. In asking about the significance of a hole in the flag, a declaration of change, a denial of the past, the answer Healy suggests is ‘‘an

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acknowledgment of absence’’19 and an uncertainty of meaning. I would extend the analogy of absence by suggesting a Shakespearean model of the ‘‘cipher,’’ which stands in a high place, but only appears to be nothing in itself, because its presence raises the value of the unity neighboring it. Similarly, in the histories of incorporation or, rather, dislocation and displacement of the Shakespeare text by various national cultures, the vacuity, partial irrelevance, or even total absence of the literary side of the plays’ texts only adds to the dramatic eminence of performativity inherited from and inherent in this theater. As Healy puts it, ‘‘the multiple Shakespeares have developed their own hegemonic practices which silently assume Shakespeare as a civilizing force, whose continuing presence, whether drawn from English Renaissance, French Enlightenment, or German romantic traditions, illustrates cultural advancement.’’20 In moving forward on this practice-paved theatrical way toward Romania, one of the inglorious areas of Eastern Europe once referred to as ‘‘elsewhere,’’ it is increasingly evident that the way this country appropriated Shakespeare, in both the theater and literature, qualifies Romania as a landmark for European Shakespeare theater. Russian Shakespeare scholarship and theater designates another area of Eastern Europe that inherited and transformed the associations and inflections of the Shakespearean tradition. The collection of essays edited by Alexander Parfenov and Joseph G. Price21 explains the origins of Shakespeare’s significance to Russian theater in the nineteenth century and his pervasive influence through decades of Communism. Alexei Bartoshevitch’s essay on Soviet Shakespearean productions in the 1960s and 70s charts how vigorously during that period the Russian theater re-read Shakespeare in terms of present-day Soviet life. Bartoshevitch states that, after the 1970s, Russian theater de-romanticized Shakespeare and instead offered politically charged productions of his plays.22 The study interprets Waldemar Pqnso’s Richard III (1975) as depicting an anarchic world, ‘‘stripped of all signs of lofty tragedy,’’ in which ‘‘the stage is completely dominated by ruthless grotesques.’’23 This theatrical deromanticization of Shakespeare grew out of the traditions of Brecht and Beckett and out of Jan Kott’s Grand Mechanism of history, seen as a cynical sequence in which the end is the beginning and one villain replaces another. In this implacable machinery, ‘‘Richmond follows in the footsteps of Richard, Macbeth is reincarnated in Malcom, Fortinbras takes over after Claudius.’’24 The study is energized by its vivid descriptions of sets, costumes, characters, and actions in the Russian productions of Richard III, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear by Pqnso and Robert Sturua. This collection of essays provides


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a commendable summary of evolving Russian interests in Shakespeare in the twentieth century, and points to the fascinating range of the ideological collisions between the post-Revolutionary Soviet establishment and the popular resistance, as each has co-opted Shakespeare for its own purposes. In a study tracing the reception of Shakespeare in Eastern Europe, Zdenek Strı´brny´25 explains how writers, translators, critics, musicians, and theater personnel have contributed to the knowledge and appreciation of Shakespeare and how his plays have been appropriated for political purposes. The author pays extensive attention to Czech, Russian, and Hungarian productions, but this meritorious study deals with the Romanian substantial contribution to Eastern European Shakespeare in only three or four pages. Moreover, in an article published earlier, Strı´brny´ argues for a cultural definition of Eastern European spaces mentioned in Shakespeare, which points toward their perception as alien territory. Examining Shakespeare’s allusions to Eastern Europe, the author makes the case that this area appears mostly as a cold and mysterious wilderness or otherness.26 This peculiar land of indeterminate location, however, has adopted Shakespeare in a most uncompromising way, whatever nation acted as a foster parent. Whether Czech, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Serb, or Bulgarian, all Eastern European nations have encoded Shakespeare in their national performative and literary presence. An admirable study by Alexander Shrubanov and Boika Sokolova27 examines the appropriation of Shakespeare in Bulgaria between 1944 and 1989. Attention is given to the impact of Soviet aesthetics on productions, the creation in textbooks of a stereotyped Shakespeare and its relation to the suppression of literary criticism, the ideological use of productions of the tragedies and comedies, and the debate about modernizing Shakespeare in the theater. The authors present Bulgarian productions of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet as a Shakespearean mirror held to the fortunes of new Bulgaria, and the early reception of a children’s version of The Merchant of Venice as illuminating the perception of the Jew in this country. After a presentation of the teaching of Shakespeare in Bulgarian schools, the authors focus intensely on East European uses of the great tragedies and the comedies in the Bulgarian context. The recent collection of essays entitled The Globalization of Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century28 explores the way in which Shakespeare’s international reputation was constructed through the appropriation and subversion of the plays in the canon to suit national demands and a variety of political and cultural agendas. In

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the foreword to this edition, Peter Holland gives an overview of the nineteenth-century Shakespeare in England and abroad, noting that ‘‘the senses in which ‘Shakespeare’ existed worldwide continually changed as each country reinvestigated its own relationship with Shakespeare.’’29 We could detect, therefore, a continual process of readjustment in the reception of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century. While in Britain the bard was gradually growing into the most precious of all British cultural objects and a symbol of national achievement, in Europe and elsewhere in the world, each national culture was redefining itself by adopting the English national factor as a criterion of cultural accomplishment. As the editors put it briefly and eloquently, ‘‘Everyone, in short, wanted a piece of Shakespeare, and these appropriations, in turn, created a tradition of bardolatry that continues in many quarters until our own day.’’30 The various essays in this collection show how in Romania, as in Flanders and also in Argentina and Brazil in the early nineteenth century, the neoclassical French adaptations were used to introduce Shakespeare’s plays to the respective national cultures. The history of Shakespeare’s adoption by Romanian culture is as rich as any country’s in the Eastern European area. The domains of Shakespeare scholarship/criticism, translations, literary adaptations, and especially the theater have yielded impressive cultural products. An early twentieth-century study by Marcu Berza31 examines the causes of the attraction of the Romanian public for Shakespeare’s plays. Undoubtedly, the elements of folklore contained in the plays, some of which are taken over even from Balkan oral literature, constituted, as the author points out, one of the factors explaining the success of Shakespeare among the mass of the playgoing public in Romania. Alexandru Dut¸u32 gives a comprehensive study of Shakespeare’s reception in Romania and delineates stages in this process of appropriation, namely, penetration through intermediaries, contact with original texts, and original interpretation of producers and critics. Dut¸u concludes that throughout these stages Shakespeare contributed toward the development of a taste for drama and of cultural progress in Romania. Aurel Curtui,33 in a book monograph, examines the reception of Hamlet in Romania with emphasis on translations, criticism, and influence on Romanian literature and intellectual life. The Romanian critic and translator Dan Grigorescu34 studies Shakespeare in the context of modern Romanian culture and traces Romanian responses to Shakespeare’s plays and their significance, pointing to the specificity of Romanian culture within the framework of European art. Leon Levit¸chi’s name has long been connected with Shakespearean criticism35 and transla-


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tion,36 and he edited the first scholarly edition of the Complete Works37 in Romanian. A little while before ‘‘Shakespeare’’ had come to be perceived as the epitome of Western culture and civility in modern Romania, in early nineteenth century, the three provinces that formed this country had learned about the plays via the German and Viennese troupes touring their capitals. The cultured elite in these cities, especially in Walachia and Moldova, were still influenced by the Turkish customs, but a fresh influx of Western values, especially the French and German cultures, was a special way of affirming a national identity in the making. This nation has always aspired to the values of Western cultures, while the vicissitudes of geography and politics kept its legs of clay firmly glued to the viscous soil of Levant. However, along the more than a century and a half since the theatrical and literary dissemination of Shakespeare in the land around the Carpathians and the Danube, the name has come to signify diverse but always important issues related to a Western European aspiration. Through the early translations and productions, the national Romanian literature and the theater partially came to define themselves and emerge as pillars of national culture adhering to Western European values. In the cultural momentum between the two world wars, when Romania steadied her cultural pace, the positive and abundant reception of Shakespeare was always there to witness and ascertain the authorized notion of high cultural achievement. In the half-century interval of dire Communist oppression, the plays were used as sophisticated tools of subversion. In times of democracy, however, the Shakespeare emblem has become an epitome for the theater in its excellent abstraction and international neutrality. Insofar as modern Romania can be seen as a special place ‘‘somewhere,’’ in which Shakespeare is being played meaningfully and actively, the following pages will try to point out only a few milestones in this heterogeneous theatrical atlas.

Early History of Romanian Translations: Appropriation In sketching the process by which ‘‘their’’ Shakespeare became ‘‘our’’ Shakespeare in Romania, a non-English-speaking and Latinorigin culture, the focus is on the appropriation, assimilation, and transformation of Shakespeare’s language through translations in the nineteenth century. When dealing with early translations, a number of essential questions can be raised. How does Shakespeare

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‘‘translated’’ into other cultures reveal dimensions of the plays not apparent in their early modern origins? Is Shakespeare outside English still Shakespeare? How have the early translations of the plays served as a vehicle for cultural domination and the dissemination of ideas? In these terms, translation means both verbal literary treatment, which is the object of this chapter, and more broadly, translation and interpretation in the theater. Early nineteenth-century Romanian poets saw in Shakespeare a good vehicle for promoting their revolutionary ideals, one of the insertion points of cultural strategies within the political setting of the 1848 revolution. Moreover, the multiple questionings and the ethical issues raised in the plays, explored mainly in the tragedies, were good ways of raising the people’s awareness and developing a sense of national identity. In a period when the three Romanian provinces were still under the waning influence of Ottoman rule, a strong moral discernment, derived from the reading and dramatic encounter with Shakespeare, could only help develop a sense of national identity. The Romanian people’s sentiment of belonging to the Christian religion was a form of defending their national identity against the centuries-old offensive of Islam. So was the appreciation of this people’s Latin origin as an asset against the influences of both the Islamic south and the Slavic East. Examining the current situation of Shakespeare studies and translation, Dirk Delabastita makes the already famous comment that translation was the ‘‘Cinderella of Shakespeare studies,’’38 which had remained the almost exclusive property of the Anglo-American academic establishment. While subscribing to the idea of the marginalization of translation studies in general, it seems important to mention Delabastita’s comment inscribing the interest in translation within a larger romantic concept in the nineteenth century, which posited the text as a transparent self-representation of the author’s intention. From this perspective, the nineteenth century in Europe was the period when Shakespeare gradually became ‘‘international property,’’39 playing a major role in the development of national identities. Translations in this interval were essential for the dissemination of Shakespeare all over the world, and by translating the plays, many European nations learned the lesson of intercultural communication and civil tolerance. Delabastita explains the ‘‘undisputed and indisputable canonized status of Shakespeare as the ultimate icon of literary art,’’40 arguing that many nations bestowed on this literary figure a kind of wisdom and authority of almost metaphysical depth, thus attributing his plays a transcendental quality. I have identified a similar situation when surveying the state of nine-


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teenth-century translations in Romania, since the translators, probably involuntarily, identified the moral issues dramatized in Shakespeare’s tragedies with a universal ethical paradigm. This led them to prefer mostly the four tragedies in their first translation approaches, probably considering that these plays addressed general human issues that were essential in the nation’s cultural advancement during the crucial period of the mid and late nineteenth century. The European context of nineteenth-century translations is immensely rich and has been the subject of extensive scholarship.41 In the circumstances of the Shakespearean translations in Western Europe, the French and German versions have played an important role in the documentation of early Romanian translations, because most nineteenth-century translators drew on these interpretations. The early and popular Ducis versions of Hamlet (1769), Romeó et Juliette (1772), Le Roi Lear (1783), Macbeth (1784), Jean sans Terre (1791), and Othello (1792) did not influence early Romanian translators as much as Le Tourneur or Alexandre Dumas. Just as Ducis drew on Le Tourneur and Antoine de La Place, Romanian translators did the same. However, since the Ducis versions were adapted for the theater, notable nineteenth-century Romanian directors drew on these French versions to forge their own translation of the Shakespeare text in performance. These Romanian directors’ translations are not recorded in print, but there is evidence in the theatrical journals of the time referring to their creation of personal texts for the theater, or sometimes only for recitation in literary circles. Le Tourneur’s Shakespeare traduit de l’Anglois (1776–83) in prose is not of very high quality, but compared with that of La Place (1645) and other contemporary efforts, it marks a considerable advance. Voltaire’s Brutus and La Mort de Ce´sar (1731) is inscribed in the French vogue of adaptations from Shakespeare, while his translation of Jules Ce´sar (1769) was at the basis of a few Romanian translations of fragmentary texts from this play. François Guizot republished Le Tourneur’s translation in a revised form (Oeuvres comple`tes de Shakespeare 1821), enabling the younger generation of poets and critics to investigate further those enthusiastic eulogies of Shakespeare they found in German romantic writers. Seduced by English romanticism, Alfred de Vigny greatly contributed to the discovery of Shakespeare in France. In an admirable translation, he transported the English success of Othello to the stage of the Theáˆtre Français (1829). During his exile in England, Benjamin Laroche studied Shakespeare with great enthusiasm, and spent many years devising a translation into French. His Oeuvres com-

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ple`tes (1839) was a success, and he received a prize for the best version of Shakespeare. The result of a similar exile to Guernesey, François-Victor Hugo’s translation of Shakespeare’s Oeuvres comple`tes (1857–72), written with an introduction by his father, Victor Hugo, and especially his Hamlet, were important source texts for Romanian translators. The French literary critic Emile Monte´gut produced the Oeuvres comple`tes in ten volumes between the years 1868–73. His opus is another landmark of inspiration for Romanian translators of Shakespeare. The version of Hamlet by Euge`ne Morand and Marcel Schwob (1899), despite being in prose, was considered to have a remarkable fidelity to the original. It influenced Romanian early twentieth-century theater directors in forging their translations for performance, when they did not use the already published literary versions. Like the French, the domain of nineteenth-century German criticism and translation of Shakespeare is an extensive source for scholarship in the history of the appropriation of Shakespeare in Europe, though it is manifested in less decorative forms. I cannot hope to comprehend the entire province of German translations of Shakespeare, but I will try to point out those translators that are likely to have played a role in the selection of the inspiration source texts for the Romanian Shakespeare translations. Most of these German translators are not acknowledged on the front pages of the Romanian versions. Extensive research is still needed to identify the exact text on which each Romanian version is based. However, it is reasonable to assume that some German translations were at the basis of early Romanian productions of Shakespeare in the three provinces, especially in Transylvania, where the German and Austrian influences were preeminent. Wieland (1762–66) and the Austrian Franz Heufeld (1772) first translated Hamlet into German. In 1776, Germany’s greatest actor, Friedrich Ludwig Schro¨der, produced Hamlet in Hamburg, he himself playing the ghost. In the same year followed a production of Othello, in 1777 The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure, and in 1778 King Lear, Richard II, and Henry IV. Macbeth was produced in 1779 and Much Ado about Nothing in 1792. The chief impression we obtain from Schro¨der’s Shakespearean versions nowadays is their inadequacy to reproduce the poetry of the originals. However, compared with the travesties of Ducis a little later, they may be seen as examples of scrupulous translation. Schro¨der adapted the Wieland and Heufeld translations of Hamlet, but he gave way to public pressure in adding a sixth act. This contains, among other things, the gravediggers’ scene, which had formerly been suppressed, presumably because it was felt to be out


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of keeping with the tone of high tragedy. Schro¨der was obviously still not fully comfortable with the additional scenes, because they are dropped from the second edition (1778). Comparison shows that Heufeld’s version is heavily indebted to Wieland, just as Schro¨der’s is to Heufeld. However, Wieland’s text is more urbane than the other translations, which are redolent of the incipient Sturm und Drang movement. This literary trend, in its turn, owed much to the influence of Shakespeare. These early German translations of Shakespeare were the models for the Romanian early nineteenthcentury versions, especially of the tragedies. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, Wolf Graf von Baudissin, and Friedrich Schiller’s Macbeth (1801) and Goethe’s Romeo und Julia (1812) are only two products of some of the renowned German scholars who translated Shakespeare in the nineteenth century. Their books must have existed in the private libraries of those Romanian intellectuals who had been educated in the universities of Germany and Austria. Other German translators are J. H. Voss, Jr. (1806), Bauernfeld (1825), Otto Benda (1826), Joseph Fick (1827), Joseph Meyer (1829), Lachmann (1829), Kaufmann (1830), Dorothea Tieck (1832), Ludwig Hilsenberg (1835), Heinrich Do¨ring (1836), Julius Ko¨rner (1836), Ernst Ortlepp (1839), Leopold Petz (1839), Carl Heinichen (1861), and Herman Ulrici (1871). Although, the interpretations of these translators are not likely to have influenced the Romanian versions of Shakespeare, they testify to the exceptionally influential German contribution to this domain. In a collection of essays on Hamlet in European culture, Maria Del Sapio Garbero writes on the naturalization of Shakespeare by European countries. Garbero notes that the extensive marginal annotations, adaptations, and improvements administered on the Shakespeare text by various cultures are the result of a problem of ‘‘foreignness’’ (estraneita`) and a never-complete ‘‘translatability’’ (traductibilita`) of Shakespeare.42 On the note of multiculturalism opened by this exceptional collection centered on the European faces of Hamlet, we could say that the nineteenth-century Italian translations of Shakespeare go parallel with the great opera adaptations of some plays. These translations, used mainly for the opera librettos, show how literary and theatrical meanings are encoded and circulated in various national cultures for diverse purposes. Italian Shakespeare nineteenth-century translations are marked by names such as Alessandro Verri, with Hamlet and Othello (1769– 1816), Michele Leoni, with versions of the tragedies in verse (1814– 15), and Carlo Rusconi, with the complete works in prose (1831). Francesco Maria Piave translated Macbeth for Verdi in 1847, and Ar-

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rigo Boito wrote the libretto of Amleto for Franco Faccio in 1865, of Otello for Verdi in 1887, and of Falstaff for Verdi in 1893. Boito also translated the parts in Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet for the actress Eleonora Duse. Giulio Carcani translated an important complete edition of Shakespeare in the period 1874–82. These Italian versions had an impact on the early productions of Shakespeare in Romania, because the itinerant Italian theatrical companies performed Othello or Hamlet, for example, in Italian for the Romanian public. Most spectators could understand Italian without a formal education in this language, because of the similarity between Romanian and Italian. The Romanian translations, however, were not much influenced by the Italian versions of Shakespeare’s plays. The first published translation into Spanish of Shakespeare’s Hamlet was by Ramoń de la Cruz in 1772. It was a secondhand verse translation based on the Ducis French version, comprising only some scenes. The first translation directly from English in Spain was the prose version of Leandro Fernańdez de Moratıń, published after his stay in London as ambassador of Ferdinand VII, in 1798. Since then, it has been reedited thirty-three times throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the nineteenth century, Antonio Alcala´ Galiano, Manuel Garcıá (1818), Jose´ Marıá Blanco-White, Juan Nicolas Bo¨hl de Faber, Teodoro La Calle (1802), Matıás de Velasco Rojas (1872), Pedro Antonio de Alarcoń, and Manuel Mato´ses (1895–97) increased the Spaniards’ interest in Shakespeare’s plays and made him more accessible to them. Two Englishmen living in Spain, Jaime Clark and William Macpherson, tried to make Shakespeare better known to Spanish readers and theater audiences. Before he died, Clark translated ten plays which where published as a five-volume edition in Madrid between 1872 and 1876. Macpherson’s eight volumes published in Madrid in 1873 contained the twenty-three plays he translated into Spanish, observing the polarity between verse and prose, as did Clark’s version. Clark’s use of the hendecasyllabic verse forced him to break the rhythm and sometimes to alter the original. Rich as the history of nineteenth-century Spanish Shakespeare translations is, however, these texts had little or no influence on Romanian translations. Nor were the westernmost Spanish troupes of actors too eager to visit this marginal territory of Eastern Europe, so we cannot speak of much effect from this direction. Northern Europe encountered Shakespeare in the early nineteenth century, and like in the case of other European countries, the translations abounded in this period. Shakespeare first entered


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the Danish stage with Hamlet (Copenhagen in 1813). The translator was the actor Peter Foersom, who was influenced strongly by Schro¨der. By his death in 1817, he had published four volumes of what was intended to be a complete translation of Shakespeare, which was completed later by Peter Wulff and Edvard Lembcke (1861–73). Georg Brandes,43 Valdemar Østerberg, and Holst Reitzel were important nineteenth-century figures who transcribed Shakespeare’s text into the Danish culture. Holland and Scandinavia learned the skill of translating Shakespeare from Wieland and Schlegel and the art of playing him from Schro¨der. Like other European countries, Holland possessed satisfactory and complete translations late in the nineteenth century, namely, those by Abraham Kok (1873–80) and Leendert Alexander Johannes Burgersdijk (1877–88). Earlier translations were by P. Boddaert, Macbeth: treurspel (1800), P. J. Uylenbroek, Othello, of De moor van Venetie¨n (1802), both translated from the Ducis French version, and Jacop van Lennep, Romeo en Julia (1852) and Otello (1854). Finnish nineteenthcentury translators were Paavo Cajander, Macbeth (1885) and Pietari Hannikainen (1813–99). Swedish translations in the nineteenth century published names such as Olof Bjurba¨ck (Hamlet, 1820), Fredrik Dahlgren (Romeo och Julia, 1845), and Eric Gustaf Geijer (1812), a Swedish poet, writer, historian, and composer who translated Macbeth from Schiller’s German version. Bishop Sven Lundblad translated Lear (1818) and Georg Scheutz, a Swedish publicist, writer, and engineer translated Julius Caesar (1816). Johan Henrik Thomander (1825) was an important translator, but the chief Swedish translation of Shakespeare was that by Carl August Hagberg in twelve volumes (1847–51). Just like the Spanish western side of Europe, the Scandinavian and Dutch translations and productions of Shakespeare did not have a direct impact on Romanian culture. The situation regarding cultural imports changes when we refer to Eastern Europe and its countries’ appropriations of Shakespeare in translation, but mainly in production. Though the Slavic linguistic foundation in all the former Communist countries can be seen as having little relevance to the romance-oriented Romania, still these countries were interconnected in a commonly shared partnership of territorial, political, and cultural extraction. With Hungary, Romania shared borders, and many local Transylvanians who were of Hungarian origin. In the main cities of this region, the late nineteenth century, but especially the early twentieth century, saw the establishment of Hungarian theaters producing plays by Hungarian translators. With Bulgaria, Romania shares not only the Danube border but also a common past of former Turkish domination, reflected

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in the spirituality of the two nations and in their cultural products. The Russian influence in Eastern Romania existed even before Communism, and it was manifested in the cultural life of the city of Ias¸i, where many of the first translations from Shakespeare originated. In addition, most of the early nineteenth-century translations of Shakespeare, though in Romanian, were printed in the Cyrillic alphabet. Romania’s relations with the Polish culture were strong in the past centuries, and so were the contacts with the Czech, Slovak, Serb, and Croatian regions. The social and political conditions these countries shared, even before the advent of the Communist domination, have inscribed Romanian translations in the cultural brotherhood of the formerly marginalized Eastern European nations. During Communism and after, the official cultural policies, the theaters’ resistance to the dominant ideology, and the subversive practices in these countries look like cloned bodies of the same structural design, where only the language of expression varies. In Russia and Poland, the interest in Shakespeare is no less great than in the western countries of Europe. Here, the influence of France seems to have predominated in the earlier period, Ducis introducing Shakespeare to the Russian and the Polish stages. Several plays were translated into Russian in the eighteenth century, and the empress Catherine II had a share in adaptations of The Merry Wives of Windsor. The standard Russian translation of the complete works in the nineteenth century was that of Nikolai Gerbel and Nikolaj Nekrasov (1865–68), but there was an earlier King Lear by Nikolai Ivanovich Gnedich (1807) and one translated by Alexander Druzhinin (1862). The Russian poet Alexander Ostrovsky showed his hand in the translation of The Taming of the Shrew (1865) and was working on a translation of Antony and Cleopatra when he died. In Poland,44 where Shakespeare was a favorite dramatist both with actors and public, the Adam Mickiewicz translated Hamlet. Stanislaus Kozmian, who lived for a time in England, set to translating Shakespeare into Polish, a work that occupied him for thirty years and was not complete at his death in 1885. Krystyna Ostrowskiego translated Antoniusz i Kleopatra (1872), while it is known that Jo´zef Paszkowski’s translations widely introduced Shakespeare onto Polish stages (1817–61). Like in Romania, Russian and Polish translators endeavored to give their cultures the sanction of the Shakespearean stamp, and they acted out of a social command requiring more Shakespeare to be performed on their stages. Just like Romanian culture, these nations also defined their cultural boundaries in relation to Shakespeare. Like most Central and East European countries, Czech45 and Slo-


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vak Shakespeares have a history of translation starting in the nineteenth century, with timid and imperfect beginnings in the latter part of the eighteenth. The first anonymous translation of Hamlet into Slovak is from about 1790–1800 and it derived from the popular German adaptation of F. L. Schro¨der and F. Heufeld with an alternative and happy end. This version emerged from the modifications of the German translations of Wieland and Eschenburg, Heufeld, and Schro¨der, and the Hungarian translation of F. Kazinczy. The first Czech translation was of Macbeth by Karel Hynek Tha´m (1786), and it was equally influenced by German sources. In the nineteenth century, there were two translations of Hamlet in Slovak, by Michal Bosy (1810–30) and by P. Dobsinsky (1850). Michal Bosy, a student of A.W. Schlegel at the University of Jena, made a translation of Hamlet into archaic Czech, seasoned with current Slovak words. Pavol Dobsinski became famous as a writer and collector of fairy tales and his work inscribes him in the group of the first two authors who achieved complete translations of Shakespeare in the Czech and Slovak cultures. The Czech poet Josef Vaćlav Sla´dek spent two years in the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and he produced versions of thirty-two of Shakespeare’s plays, beside translations from other English and American poets. Josef Kajetan Tyl was a playwright, actor, director, and organizer of the Czech theater, and he translated Shakespeare for the theater. In his survey of Shakespeare’s reception in Eastern European cultures, Zdenek Strˇ´ıbrny´ advances an interesting hypothesis regarding the nineteenth-century reception of Shakespeare in these countries. He writes of the emergence of the so-called national revivals in the course of the nineteenth century. In these movements, many Central, Southern, and Eastern European nations claimed a cultural and political independence from old feudal empires, such as Austria and Turkey, or from domineering early modern cultural influences like French classicism, or, later, German-language culture. In the new nations’ need for cultural affirmation, Shakespeare had a very high status. His work was invested with universal value, whose possession in the form of translations, productions, and influences was considered to justify the right of nascent or revived cultures for the confirmation and esteem of European cultural and political powers.46 Strˇ´ıbrny´ gives the example of the 1790 Hungarian adaptation of Hamlet by Ferenc Kazinczy, who transformed the play into a transparent allegory of liberation from the Austrian domination. Similarly, the Austrian authorities suppressed the 1786 Czech rendering of Macbeth by Karel Hynek Tha´m for fear of disseminating dissension among the subjected Czech nation. Strˇ´ıbrny´’s argument points

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to a situation of social and political marginalization of Eastern European countries in the nineteenth century, which they hoped to exit by adopting Shakespeare as an epitome of Western cultural value. Among the Hungarian nineteenth-century translators, Janos Arany’s name is linked to the translations of King John, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Hamlet (1864–78). Gabriel Do¨brentei produced the first Hungarian translation in verse of Macbeth (1830) and Michael Vo¨ro¨smarty translated Julius Caesar (1840), King Lear (1852–53), and Romeo and Juliet (1855). In 1845, Emilia Lemouton translated, among others, The Tempest and Measure for Measure in prose, relying on Le Tourneur. The Hungarian romantic poet and 1848 revolutionary Sandor Peto¨fi translated Coriolanus (1848), probably as part of his insurgent political agenda. In the period 1864–78 Athanazius Tomori organized the first complete edition of Shakespeare’s plays, translated by Arany, Peto¨fi, and Vo¨ro¨smarty. In the history of Hungarian nineteenth-century translations of Shakespeare, the cultural historian can discern an element of dissension and rebellious spirit in relation to the period before and around the 1848 revolution. Like in the provinces of Romania, the revolutionary poets and writers inscribed Shakespeare translations in their political agenda. By adopting the British bard into their respective national cultures, the Hungarians, like the Romanians, asserted that they were an independent nation, free to choose their cultural main road, independent of the political domination of the Turkish or Austrian empires. Shakespeare was not only the epitome of theatricality and popular success, but also an acknowledged Western cultural voice. In speaking with his voice to the emerging Hungarian or Romanian nations in the early nineteenth century, the translators of Shakespeare indirectly conveyed the message that they wanted to be independent and a part of the Western community of values. A Serbian romantic poet, Laza Kostic, displayed a similar interest in translations of Shakespeare as part of his program of inscribing his nation in the common European circuit of values and preparing the educational conditions that would enable his people to emerge from the Turkish domination. Kostic was the most educated Serbian poet of the time, because he knew classical and modern languages, translated Shakespeare, was a writer of aesthetic and philosophical treatises, and was the most significant thinker of Serbian romanticism. Among the Croatian translators of Shakespeare, Milan Bogdanovic and Vladimir Geric are important names. The Balkans in the nineteenth century appropriated Shakespeare for cultural emancipation reasons, as well as for the popularity of his plays. Greek cul-


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ture also adopted Shakespeare, and the first Hamlet in Greek appeared in 1856. Dimitrios Bikelas translated the most important Shakespeare plays in Modern Greek verse. In addition, the Austrian Empress Sissi translated Hamlet, King Lear, and The Tempest into Modern Greek in 1897. Like with the other Balkan nations, Shakespeare appeared on the Turkish stage in the nineteenth century. Although a number of European, Greek, and Armenian troupes had performed some of his works earlier, the first Turkish-language production of a play by Shakespeare took place in 1860 with Othello. The earliest Turkish translations to come out in book form were The Merchant of Venice (1885) and The Comedy of Errors (1886). In 1887–88 Mehmed Nadir published forty-two of the Sonnets in prose versions. Writers and scholars in modern Turkey, like those in all the countries in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, felt that by attaching their culture’s colors to the shared symbols of the Shakespeare flag, their advancement toward the high cultural values would be furthered even more. Approaching early Romanian translations of Shakespeare, we need to explore a related question, namely, how has Shakespeare become so much a part of a certain non-Anglophone culture that it has almost come to consider this author as its own? In the case of Romania, one reason is the early penetration of Shakespeare through the over-crowded and bardolatrous French and German channels. By adopting a British author so much appreciated by the Western cultures that made the literary fashions in that century, the cultivated Romanians felt they belonged more consistently to the Western community of nations, from whence all the civilizing factors emerged. As Michael Mullin points out, different cultures ‘‘first perceived Shakespeare as ‘foreign.’ In these cases, it was the poets who first discovered Shakespeare.’’47 Intellectuals in the three Romanian provinces perceived instinctively that moral illumination and culture came from the west of Europe, because the Slavic east and the Ottoman south had caused them only troubles, poverty, and political conflicts in the past centuries. Translations from Shakespeare and other Western writers became a means of helping this particular Eastern European country, which was still fragmented into three provinces until mid-nineteenth century, to depart from the status of an external and placeless ‘‘elsewhere’’ and become integrated in the family of European nations. Shakespeare reached Romania at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth with the German theater groups that toured Transylvania and arrived as far as Bucharest. The theaters set up in Transylvania in this period housed companies led

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by well-known actors who performed plays from the world classic dramatic repertory of the Viennese stage. When Shakespeare was first discovered in Romania, through French and German translations, he found a receptive audience there. His plays used language that was familiar to Romanians, since they spoke of fairy tales, Alexander the Great, the story of Troy, ancient Roman history, and the Biblical allegories. Speaking about Shakespeare’s relation to folklore, the early twentieth-century Romanian Shakespeare scholar Marcu Berza argues that Shakespeare handled matter already known to the Romanian public. This partly accounts for their understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare. Berza finds Romanian folk-tales that are similar to some Shakespearean plots because they are part of the European heritage. Among these ancient texts with deep roots in Romanian oral culture, Berza mentions The Lives of the Saints and the Hellenistic romance as channels of penetration for European stories into Romania. For a long time The Lives of the Saints enjoyed such favour amongst the people of Romania that to this day some of them are told as regular folktales with no relation whatever to the printed work which first put them into circulation. But, besides The Lives of the Saints, there were once other books of wide popularity both in England and Romania: as, for instance, Alexander the Great and the Story of Troy. The latter came into Romanian literature through a Byzantine medium and also through the versified romance of Benoıˆt de Saint-Maure.48

As a Marcu Berza points out, ‘‘Shakespeare tales in Romania were long spread either by word of mouth or through popular books introduced from the Levant. They could not have been seen on the stage. Up to a very late date, these parts of the world were altogether cut off from the West. Nor had any of the English touring companies ever ventured farther than Poland and Austria.’’49 This Shakespeare scholar acknowledges the marginalized situation of the three Romanian provinces, Walachia, Moldova, and Transylvania, with regard to the penetration of itinerant theatrical troupes in these regions. As far as the theater was concerned, this was still considered a distant land of elsewhere, probably thought to be peopled with many Calibans incapable of being civilized by the theater. Moreover, the national language was not considered polished enough to sustain the force of the Shakespearean verse, and therefore most of these early productions were in German or Italian. The province of Transylvania enjoyed a privileged status in this respect because it was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and had a large number of German-


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speaking inhabitants, so the influences from the West were easier to penetrate. The Shakespeare plays performed here by the German and Austrian troupes found an audience that could understand the language and could enjoy the text of these plays. In Walachia and Moldova, the Italian opera companies introduced Shakespeare later. They presented Cordelia, Montechi and Capuletti and Othello on the Bucharest and Ias¸i stages in 1842–43. The Italian theatrical companies brought Shakespeare’s plays on the Romanian stage and exerted an influence upon the style of acting of the Romanian players. These actors ‘‘passed their first test’’ before the public in 1834 in Bucharest and in 1837 in Ias¸i.50 In the public and private libraries of the period, Shakespeare’s works, and those of other English writers, were only available in French and German versions. Besides the translations, the writings of French and German literary historians and critics were instrumental in introducing Shakespeare’s plays into Romanian culture. In Austria, Franz Grillparzer and in Switzerland, Gottfried Keller wrote Shakespeare criticism. In France, Germaine de Stae¨l, Stendhal, Chateaubriand, Alfred de Vigny, Alfred Me´zie`res, Victor Hugo, H. Taine, and Jules Lemaıˆtre approached Shakespeare in translations, critical writings, and lectures. In Germany, Lessing, Cristoph Martin Wieland, Johann Gottfried Herder, Schiller, A.W. Schlegel, and Friedrich Schlegel, or Goethe, Heine, G. G. Gervinus, Friedrich Hebbel, and Otto Ludwig published extensive Shakespeare studies. In the three Romanian provinces, and after the union of 1859 in the country called Romania, the nineteenth century was a period of transformation, when scholars, animated by the spirit of the French revolution, combined the principles of Enlightenment and romanticism, attempting to open new ways to their native culture. Among the twentieth-century Romanian scholars who contributed to the construction of a valid history of the Shakespeare translations in Romania, I must mention Petre Grimm, Professor at the Cluj University,51 Ion Horia Ra˘dulescu,52 C.S. Checkley,53 and especially Leon Levit¸chi and Alexandru Dut¸u, professors at Bucharest University. Dut¸u gives a well-documented and almost exhaustive account of translations and early productions of Shakespeare in Romania. The motto of Alexandru Dut¸u’s study is his English translation from the introduction of one of the first translations of Shakespeare into Romanian by Gheorghe Barit¸ in 1840 and it sounds as follows: ‘‘Are we, I wonder, really ripe enough to read Shakespeare?’’54 Many men of letters raised the question of the nation’s maturity in the reception of Shakespeare’s plays at that early stage in the nineteenth century. The Romanian national romantic poet Mihai Eminescu

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wrote a critical pamphlet in a popular literary journal published in Transylvania, which was entitled Familia. With an acute critical spirit, the poet remarks that, when Romanian playwrights draw on Shakespearean models in their historical plays, the result is desultory, because the approach is negligent and superficial. According to Eminescu, ‘‘Shakespeare must not only be read, but studied, so that one may understand what lies in their power to imitate from him.’’55 He recommends authors to pay attention to the capacity of ‘‘absolute abstraction’’ in Shakespeare, considering that the dramatist has the talent ‘‘to raise the public to his height and still to be understood completely by them.’’56 When such a playwright addresses any public, the question of whether a certain national audience is or is not prepared to understand him becomes irrelevant. The essence of Eminescu’s argument is that Romanian playwrights must study attentively the dramatic structure and profound symbolism of Shakespeare’s plays before being able to draw on him effectively. In emphasizing the need for careful consideration of Shakespeare’s plays by Romanian writers, Eminescu adduces, in an indirect manner, the problem of translation of the Shakespeare opus. For an author to be understood at such profound level by the writers of a nation there would be a high demand of good translations. Nineteenth-century Romanian writers were educated at French and German schools, and their English proficiency was almost nonexistent. Only good translations could give them the opportunity of studying Shakespeare intensely, paying special attention to symbols, dramatic structure, motifs, and style. Eminescu’s manuscripts, now in the Romanian Academy Library, show that he was an assiduous reader of Shakespeare (probably in German translations), and that he even intended to translate Timon of Athens. Moreover, Leon Levit¸chi argues that in Eminescu’s translation, 132 lines in Timon of Athens are translated from English, not from German or French.57 Certainly, the Romanian romantic poet internalized the essence of Shakespeare’s impact on his century. In a poem entitled ‘‘Ca˘rt¸ile’’ [The Books], Eminescu acknowledges Shakespeare as his literary model, but deplores the poor reception of the play’s intense message in the didactic nineteenth century: Shakespeare! I often think of you with woe, You, gentle friend of my tormented soul; The brimming fountains of your verses show Food to my mind, repeating them is my goal. So cruel you are, and yet so soft you glow Your voice is tempest, and yet gentle toll;


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Like God, you show yourself in thousand frames, And teach an age that cannot learn your names. Had I but lived when you did, would I still Have loved you so—as much as I do now? All that I feel, be it all good or ill, —Enough to feel—I have but you to bow. You opened my eyes to the light, you will Teach me to read this world as you allow. To err with you, I’d love my oversight: To be like you is all my pride and might.58

Shakespeare’s plays entered Romania in the epoch when the revival of his canon had roused interest in all European literary circles. The rising tide of romanticism had claimed the English dramatist as its illustrious forerunner, and Shakespeare’s drama imposed itself both on the stage and the great literatures. It became ever since the object of divergent opinions, of eulogy and criticism, lasting over the centuries. The Romanian critic and writer Cezar Bolliac published in 1836 an article entitled ‘‘S¸akspear,’’ in a literary journal entitled Curiosul [The Inquirer]. Bolliac names ‘‘S¸akspear’’ ‘‘the greatest genius of English theater’’59 and ‘‘the poet of all peoples, because of the energetic and truthful depiction of passions.’’60 This article reiterates many confirmed facts and the ulterior confabulations regarding Shakespeare’s life, including the marriage to ‘‘Ana Hatvai.’’ The reason of the poet’s going to London to write plays is stated to be the need to escape the revenge of a small local baron, and the report was that he played the role of the Ghost in Hamlet. What is important about this eclectic early nineteenth-century presentation of Shakespeare’s life and his plays is that it gave the readers of the journal a general view of the Stratford playwright, including the situation of the Shakespeare properties and the monument in the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford at that time. This informative text was meant to familiarize the readers with Shakespeare’s life and plays, attracting their attention to this author and the translations that were to follow. In mapping out a representation of the first Romanian translations of Shakespeare’s plays in the nineteenth century, an important question can be raised, namely, was there a specific pattern according to which the plays to be translated were selected? If this was not the case, did the literate audience of the time favor, even unwittingly, certain Shakespeare plays to others? Some translators preferred the classical plays, especially Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, because they alluded to a period in Roman history that was

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most familiar to the educated Romanian public. There was an early fragmentary version of Julius Caesar in 1840, followed by three subsequent translations, one in 1879 by Adolf Stern, in 1892 by Barbu Lazureanu, and in 1896 by Scarlat Ion Ghica, who had translated Antony and Cleopatra for the first time in 1893. However, translators did not seem to favor these classical plays to others, despite the historical material that was more familiar to Romanian audiences. It is more likely to believe that the four tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear, probably The Merchant of Venice, and even Richard III and King John were very popular with the Romanian readers and theatergoers. The strongly religious resonance of the message included in the four tragedies, the biblical connotations of some passages, and the general ethical exercise involved in their reception at a certain level of interpretation could have caused a special preference for these plays. Moreover, it must be noticed that the educated Romanian audience’s taste for Shakespearean tragedy in this period replicated the Elizabethans’ interest in the problems of conscience advanced by the theater in their age of religious and social transition. Unlike the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, the Romanian nineteenth-century audience and readers were more homogeneous in point of religious beliefs. Regarding the Elizabethan audience, Kenneth Muir finds that although Shakespeare was writing for a secular audience with diverse religious beliefs, he remained intensely interested in the metaphysical conflict between good and evil, but was unfettered by having to conform to a dogmatic position.61 As for Romanian readers and audiences, their loyalty to the Christian Orthodox religion was indisputable. It was a marker of their national identity, especially in a period of extensive social and political upheavals in the Europe of their time. The majority of Romanians are Eastern Orthodox. The Romanian Orthodox Church is not dependent hierarchically on the Russian Church or the Orthodox Church in Constantinople. The Romanians have no exact date of becoming Christians. Since the southern part of Romania was a Roman colony in the first century AD, and then it was part of the Byzantine Empire, there are Christian traces dating as early as the fourth century AD. The three Romanian provinces, Walachia, Moldova, and Transylvania, were still separated at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Walachia and regions of Moldova were under Ottoman rule, while Transylvania was still in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. However, the common Eastern Orthodox religion was an important issue that counted in the movement for national sovereignty and subsequent political unity. Eventually, Walachia and Moldova were united in 1859, but Transylvania joined only later, after World War I, in 1918.


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The absence of religious conflicts in the three Romanian provinces and the apparent unity of faith do not automatically imply that there was no ideological division. Like the Elizabethans in Shakespeare’s time, the Romanians of the early nineteenth century were experiencing a social and mental transition from a Christian feudal to a secular, capitalist culture and economy. The studious young people were educated at universities in Paris, England, and Vienna, and they brought back an interest in the cultural values of Europe. They combined the practical spirit acquired in the West with the natural inclination toward metaphysics and spirituality characteristic of the Eastern Orthodox religion. There is no rigorous method to describe the protean social phenomenon of the development of Christian beliefs in Eastern and Western Europe. However, I incline to say that the Orthodox Church in the eastern part of Europe is mostly concerned with salvation, mystical devotion, and the protection of tradition rather than with reform and the active participation of the individual in the spiritual community. Because of this inward-bound spirituality centered on individual salvation at the expense of social integration, the adepts of Christian Orthodox faith have developed an imperfect sense of community values and are more inclined to direct their spiritual activity toward the interior. Additionally, centuries of political domination, including, at that stage in the nineteenth century, the Ottoman power, have articulated a stronger inner convergence of social energies toward the inner self. There is a prevalent—and no doubt healthy—tendency in current criticism to avoid discussing religious issues in literary matters, unless they are explicitly raised by a particular literary text. However, the impact of Shakespeare’s tragedies in his age depended in large measure on the confidence of his contemporaries that the eternal salvation of the individual soul was a matter of utmost concern for everyone. The playwright’s personal conviction is still a matter of debate,62 but it is irrelevant in this discussion. I am not among those who posit Shakespeare’s covert Catholicism, but we must admit that both Protestant and Catholic variants of Christianity generated a strong sense of community values, and a preoccupation with individual salvation correlated with observance of social ethics in the Western European populations embracing these faiths. The intensity of the Christian Orthodox believers in salvation was no less effective with nineteenth-century Romanians, especially since they had been in and out of the Turkish rule for centuries. The only way of affirming their Christian identity against the spiritual assault of Islam was to persist in their common religious convictions. Thus, the early Romanian reception of Shakespeare can be viewed as the record of a

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secular affiliation whose intimate psychological framework may reveal a latent religious mode connected with issues of resistance. The translators’ preference for the four major tragedies could be linked to the fact that these plays responded to the educated reader’s need for transcendent metaphysics and interiority, probably to a larger extent than, for instance, the classical tragedies. The spiritually inclined audience tended to be more sympathetic with the inwardly self-reflexive heroes of these tragedies than with the more familiar figures of ancient classical Rome.

Early Nineteenth Century: Assimilation G. Barit¸ produced the first fragmentary translation of Shakespeare into the Romanian language in 1840. It is a passage from The Merchant of Venice, act IV, scene 163 and one from Julius Caesar, act I, scene 2.64 It is relevant that the first Romanian version of a segment from a Shakespeare play contains Portia’s commendation of mercy, with its allusions to scriptural ethics. The attentive readers of the literary journal in which this translation was published may well have been aware of the biblical framework. The text concludes with a brief comment; the translator asks the often quoted question, whether the time was ripe for approaching Shakespeare. He replies that Romanian culture could only gain from the encounter with Shakespeare.65 A similar desire to expand the knowledge of Shakespeare’s dramas prompted the poet Ion Barac to translate Hamlet after a text adapted by Schro¨der. Barac was a learned burger of Bras¸ov, a town in Transylvania where the German influences were prominent because of the predominant population of German origin. The translation cannot be dated exactly because scholarly opinion varies. Some earlier Romanian researchers date it as late as 1840, while Vladimir Streinu66 maintains that Barac’s version was written in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Barac follows exactly the structure of Schro¨der’s adaptation. The dramatis personae feature Germanized names, such as Polonius, appearing as Odenholm. Although the Schro¨der version is entirely in prose, Barac translates some passages, especially the soliloquies, in verse form. The style of this translation is archaic and slow, studded with many regional phrases and alliterations. When read aloud, the translation seems an ancient chronicle text come to life. Despite the poor quality of the early nineteenth-century translations of Shakespeare in Romania, the interest for the English author is evident and it points to the Romanians’ need of justifying their cultural projects by contrast to


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and in comparison with the works of the accredited Western European artists. A prominent romantic poet, Ion Heliade Ra˘dulescu, demonstrated his intention of spreading the knowledge of Shakespeare in ever-wider literary and academic circles. Under the influence of his friend, the painter and revolutionary Ion Negulici, he decided to translate most of Shakespeare’s plays as part of a wide-ranging project of creating a universal library. An entire group of Romanian revolutionaries embraced this project. On the eve of the historic year 1848 appeared a complete version of one of Shakespeare’s plays, the first full-text translation to be brought out in print, Julius Caesar, A tragedy in Five Acts, translated by Captain S. Stoica. This translation further demonstrates that the adoption of Shakespearean interpretations played an important part in the cultural movement preparing the revolution of 1848. A subsequent translation of two plays, printed in 1848 by Toma Alexandru Bagdat, entitled The Biography of Viliam G. Sekspir after Le Tourneur; Followed by Romeo and Juliet and Othello; Tragedies in Five Acts Each, Composed by Viliam Ghiuilom Sekspir67 appears not to have served the same ends. The comments accompanying the plays draw a number of moralizing conclusions that disclose an obviously religious problem manifested in the relationship between the self and the other. The translator advised his readers to look into Shakespeare for a good lesson as to the dangers of unrestrained love, ambition, and trust in women. The translation is of consequence, however, as it offered the readers a general outline on the dramatist’s life and some of his plays. The text of this Romanian translation is in Cyrillic alphabet, characteristic of most religious publications at the time. The political conditions prevailing in the early nineteenth century did not favor the publication of the whole range of translations from Shakespeare, even in a mediated foreign version. The revolutionaries were unable to carry out their extensive and superb plans, despite their aspirations for a culturally united Romania. Political and especially material constraints were drastically prohibitive. However, the fact that a group of progressive writers, all enthusiastic pioneers of Romanian culture, admired and promoted Shakespeare determined those who were associated with the theatrical life to come forward and encourage the production of Shakespeare’s plays by Romanian actors, for the benefit of the public at large. In the next three decades following the 1848 revolution, translators focused only on Shakespeare’s great tragedies, probably responding to the audience’s need for the transcendental significance these plays may assume. The rhetorical texture of these tragedies suggests a meta-

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physical logic that would have appealed to the sophisticated readers of the time. They were already familiar with the scriptural symbolic language not only from customary church attendance, but also because of the various translations of the Bible and other religious texts. Ever since the first printing press was brought in to Walachia (1635) and Moldova (1643), a large number of religious books in Romanian were published in these provinces; in Transylvania, Genesis and Exodus were printed even earlier, in 1582. The first full-text Bible in Romanian was printed at Bucures¸ti in 1688.68

Late Nineteenth Century: Transformation Macbeth appeared in 1850 in a translation from French by St. Baˆgescu in Bucharest. In 1858, there was a collaborative translation by M. A. Canini and I. G. Valentineanu, and in 1864, P.P. Carp translated the tragedy from English in blank verse. This translation was published in Ias¸i, followed by a second edition in 1886. During the sixties and seventies, a group of young men newly returned from abroad, where they had completed their studies, founded at Ias¸i, in the province of Moldova, a literary society called Junimea, which had subsequently a great and direct bearing on Romanian literature. Its members used to meet at each other’s houses and discuss, or read from, various authors. At the very first meeting, members were invited to hear the reading of a translation of Macbeth by Peter Carp, who was to become leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister. He published it afterwards (1864), together with another one of Othello (1868). Both translations had the merit of being written in rather good, clear Romanian and of having closely followed the original. It is interesting to consider how the banquet scene in Macbeth might have conjured up reversed intimations of the Last Supper in the minds of the religiously educated Romanian theatergoers or readers. A smaller and more exclusive group of the erudite audience could have been aware of the ethical problems of conscience related to Macbeth’s reaction of guilt after murdering Duncan; Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking and the scriptural ramifications of her femininity; or the implicit analogy of Macbeth to the traitor Judas. However, it is only a very select party of erudite readers of the translations who could discern Macbeth’s references to ‘‘dusty death’’ (Psalm 22:15), to life as a ‘‘walking shadow’’ (Psalm 39:6), and to ‘‘a tale told by an idiot’’ (Psalm 90:9). Such analogies are clear to the introspective mind, though everyone is aware that, like the Bible, Shakespeare


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cannot be forced to mean anything; he can only be the cause of wit in others. Hamlet’s early history in Romania is primarily linked with the romantic perception of its hero in Europe. The translation of Hamlet in Europe is an important touchstone by which various European cultures have tested their alighting into modernity. Along with the larger area of the translations from Shakespeare, the transition of Hamlet into other European languages was made by stages, and it signified every particular nation’s aspiration towards a modern cultural status. Just like in the Elizabethan period, when the translations and borrowings from various literatures contributed to the fashioning of a national modern culture, in the nineteenth century the translations from Shakespeare, and particularly Hamlet, were the markers of a modern language’s consistency and maturity. This was an important step toward the shaping of modern national identity. A significant study edited by Maria Del Sapio Garbero, La traduzione di Amleto nella cultura europea, traces the history of the translations and productions of Hamlet in Italy, France, Portugal, Spain, Germany, and Hungary. Jacqueline Risset69 documents the presence of Hamlet’s figure in the letters of the French romantic poet Mallarme´, who sees the Shakespearean hero as an emblem of the modern theater of the mind, an archetype of the universal creative myth. According to Cesare G. De Michelis,70 Hamlet, or at least his name, arrived in Russia in the first half of the eighteenth century through the intermediary of a reference in an English publication taken over via a German and then a French translation, and the play was mentioned as a comedy. The first Russian translation appeared fifteen years later, with a theatrical text written by Alexander Sumarokov, an important figure of Russian theater, and it was derived from the French version of La Place. This play has a happy end, which features Polonius committing suicide in prison and Hamlet getting married to Ophelia and living happily ever after. Sergej Viskovatov translated a second nineteenth-century Russian Hamlet (Gamlet 1811) after the Ducis version. Michail Vroncˇenko, who was the translator of the 1828 Russian Hamlet, was the first to point out the necessity of translating strictly from the Shakespeare text, following the verse and the prose passages accordingly and not interfering with the significance or the succession of scenes.71 Another Russian translation of Hamlet for the theater appeared in 1837 by Nikolaj Polevoj, which established the Hamlet figure on the Russian stage. In 1844, the translation by Andrej Kroneberg initiated in the Russian cultural life not only the establishment of Shakespeare as one of the greatest writers of world literature, but of Hamlet in particular as the author’s

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most significant play. As is the case with other European nations, Russian modern culture defined itself through the unmediated contact with Shakespeare, and especially with the translations of Hamlet. The nineteenth-century Russian versions of Hamlet did not influence the Romanian translations, but the Russian cultural influence is evident in the fact that most early nineteenth-century translations of Shakespeare into Romanian were printed in the Cyrillic alphabet, as was the custom with all early writings. In a period when the revolutionary spirit was dominant in Romania and the nation’s hopes were directed toward union and independence from Turkish rule, a hero who would debate the question of raising arms against a sea of troubles was definitely very popular. D. P. Economu translated Hamlet, Prince of Denmark in 1855, and this translation was the first published version of this play in Romania. It is a translation in verse after Alexandre Dumas and Paul Meurice, whose stage version was considered the best of Hamlet in French. The Dumas-Meurice version was intended exclusively for the stage, and the text shows remarkable performance potential, though it deviates largely from the original. Like the French version, the Economu translation is divided into five acts and eight parts, some scenes are cut or displaced, the Fortinbras episode is omitted, and Hamlet is not sent to England but hides after killing Polonius. In 1881, the actor Grigore Manolescu translated Hamlet after Le Tourneur as a tragedy in five acts and thirteen tableaux. The manuscript of this unpublished translation for performance exists at the Library of the Romanian National Theater. Manolescu’s version, though in prose, displays an efficient dialogue and suggestive phrasing, and the fluency of speech recommends it for performance. The translator shows a preoccupation with disentangling the text from the confusing inadvertence of the French model, so he transposes ideas and images into Romanian, rather than isolated words and phrases taken from French. Manolescu’s language in this translation shows higher fluidity than the Economu version in all the areas of imagery, rhythm, and syntax. The eighth decade of the nineteenth century represented a breakthrough in point of the Romanian translations of Shakespeare. This was the period when the theatrical conception suffered a radical shift toward modernity. Romanian theater assimilates the new ideas of European extraction because the productions addressed an enlightened and motivated audience, eager to assert their authority and have a say in the critical assessment of the theater. The art of performance became increasingly an object of assiduous theatrical research and intense artistic meditation. The Romanian versions of


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Shakespeare derived from intermediaries no longer responded to the new generation of theater producers and audiences, so that the translations directly from English became a necessity. The first Romanian translation of Hamlet from English was by Adolph Stern (1877). Stern studied Shakespeare in the German Tieck and Schlegel version, and later in English. He was an adept of literal translation, acknowledging the preponderance of form over content. Stern’s Hamlet is in blank verse, with rhymed passages when they exist in the English original. Such high fidelity is difficult to achieve, considering the fact that Romanian words are longer by one or two syllables, which makes the use of iambic pentameter extremely difficult. However, Stern employed a rigid but correct metrical formula, following a mechanic and undifferentiated application of the English metrical system to the Romanian language. Because of this standardized transliteration of Anglo-Saxon verse structure into the romance frame of the Romanian language, Stern’s translation gives the uncanny impression of a foreign body of text engrafted on the target language. Acknowledging the importance of translating Shakespeare for the Romanian culture, Adolph Stern writes in the introduction, ‘‘The man who wrote these plays belongs not only to the country in which he was born, but his genius became the treasured property of the entire world. Thus, we will see other nations ready to lay a stone at the foundation of this mighty monument, worthy of the spirit to whom it is dedicated. Romania will not be able to take direct part in this great enterprise. She can pay her tribute in a mediated way, by translating the works of the great poet into the Romanian language.’’72 The author then argues that although Shakespeare has been translated into German successfully, probably because of the similarities between the two Germanic languages, the plays have not been properly translated and interpreted into Romanian yet. According to the translator, the differences between English and Romanian, a neo-Latin language, determined in a large measure this difficulty of interpretation.73 The translator notes that he could not imagine a Shakespeare version that would better render the ‘‘manly’’ and ‘‘harmonious’’ verse of the original. Despite the difficulties, Stern notes in this introduction that he tried to interpret Hamlet in blank verse, using the best editions (which he does not mention) and critical commentary.74 This version of Hamlet is accurate, produced with an eye for the internal rhythm of the soliloquies. For instance, in the soliloquy ‘‘O that this too too solid flesh would melt’’ (1.2.129)75 the translator uses the same term, solid, in Romanian, with the meaning of ‘‘earthy, heavy’’: ‘‘O! de s-ar topi,/Aceasta˘

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carne prea, prea solida˘.’’ However, the text is much abridged, and the act and scene divisions are erratic. Hamlet seems to be divided not only between thought and action, but also between Old and New Testament76 teachings on justice and revenge. The Ghost expects life for life, eye for eye (Exodus 21:23– 25). However, Christian teaching starts with Saint Luke’s exhortation to reply with good to those who hate you (Luke 6:27), and with Saint Paul’s idea that humans were to be patient and it was for God to exact vengeance (Romans 12:19–20).77 The average Romanian theatergoer would definitely see the Cain and Abel motif woven in the Hamlet plot, and maybe could recognize the biblical association when the hero speaks about the special providence in the flight of a sparrow (5.2.165–66). However, only the attentive reader of a good translation can observe the allusions to the book of Job in Hamlet’s ‘‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’’ (Job 6:4, 41:28), ‘‘a consummation devoutly to be wish’d’’ (Job 6:9–10), ‘‘to die, to sleep’’ (Job 14:10,12), ‘‘the oppressor’s wrong’’ (Job 3:18), and ‘‘the undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveller returns’’ (Job 7:9– 10, 10:21, 16:22).78 There was only one translation of King Lear in nineteenth-century Romania, produced in 1881 by Adolph Stern, but the play’s history of production is more notable. This particular edition is a translation directly from English, in blank verse, and it contains remarkable illustrations of almost every important scene. As is the case with all the other Romanian Shakespeare versions, the author does not mention exactly what English edition of this controversial play’s text he used. What is certain, however, is that the play is announced as ‘‘A Tragedy in Five Acts,’’ so it cannot have been the Tate version. The educated Romanian reader of King Lear could notice the Cain and Abel division of brothers in its feminine and masculine79 variant, through the Shakespearean figures of Goneril and Regan/Cordelia and Edmund/Edgar. The interesting, if veiled, allusion to the parable of the prodigal son in Cordelia’s words of pity for her father at 4.6.13–16, which echo Luke 15.16–19, or the more general biblical references that connect Cordelia with Christ, may have not passed unobserved. The unequivocal sense of waste and ‘‘nothing’’ that pervades the tragedy inevitably conveys the obscure feeling prevalent in the book of Job.80 These scholarly details were clearer only to the observant reader of this exquisitely illustrated Shakespeare translation. When Romania came to be recognized as an independent state in 1877, her representative at the English court was for a long time Ion Ghica, an able statesman and a writer of repute. His sons, Scarlat


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and Dumitru Ghica, were educated in England and translated Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, The Merchant of Venice, King John, Antony and Cleopatra, and Julius Caesar. They used accurate English editions and forged the original blank verse in pentameter, unlike other translators who, though they translated Shakespeare in verse, used the hexameter, a verse form common to the Romanian language. P. Grimm81 sees these early versions as cornerstones in Romanian Shakespeare appropriation, considering them far superior to all previous translations through intermediaries. Though Grimm pays more attention to the other plays in the volume, he notes that the translation of King John by Scarlat Ion Ghica is marked by a high fidelity to the source text, remarking some minor defects. The introductory note to King John by Scarlat Ion Ghica (1892) explains the historical context of the play, mentioning that this is the third Shakespeare play that the translator offers to the Romanian public. The author admits it would be less popular with the readers than Richard III or The Merchant of Venice because of its inferiority in conception and organization, and confesses that he cannot be deterred from his project by this detail. While admitting that the majority of the English public does not understand Shakespeare, despite reading the plays in their own language, the author confesses that ‘‘it is even more difficult for a Romanian translator to render the rich sixteenth-century English language into a less harmonious idiom.’’82 In the introduction, Ghica says that he chose this ‘‘tragedy’’ particularly because it is less known and it dramatizes a period of English history that is totally unknown to the Romanian readers. This play belongs, as Ghica writes, to the English history plays, referring to periods ulterior to those represented in King Lear and Macbeth (which, in his opinion, rely heavily on legend), and it describes a remote epoch of English history. The Romanian translations from Shakespeare in the late nineteenth century were part of a larger cultural project of integrating the newly independent Romania in the system of values belonging to Western Europe, distancing it visibly from the Ottoman heritage. Therefore, the translator mentions that the time when the play’s action is set, the 1200s, represents an obscure and uninteresting period in English history, except for the most important event that shaped the system of English liberty, the Magna Carta.83 As known, Shakespeare’s play is chiefly concerned with the features of King John’s reign related to his treatment of Arthur and his quarrel with the Pope, making no mention of the Magna Carta. However, the Romanian translator feels the need to point out the medieval symbol of British democracy as a consistent mark of this play. In addition,

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Ghica explains the frequency of historical inadvertence existing in the play as justifiable and excusable; because of the temporal distance of the period described, it was probably even intentional.84 According to the translator, Shakespeare may have intended to soften the asperity of John’s character, avoiding a description in dark colours, in order to elude the difficulty of presenting to the English public a ‘‘disreputable’’ period of their history. Despite the ingenuity of Ghica’s interpretation of what might have been Shakespeare’s intention, the translation is more accurate and stylistically valid than it is reasonable to expect from such early versions. For instance, Ghica is splendidly faithful when referring to the temporal accuracy regarding the Bastard’s birth. In act I, scene I, Robert Falconbridge requests the inheritance before King John, claiming that the Bastard is not his father’s son. In his argumentation, Robert (as the Romanian text introduces Falconbridge) narrates how his father was sent to Germany on a diplomatic mission for King Richard, who had an affair with Lady Falconbridge during her husband’s absence. Falconbridge quotes his father’s words on his deathbed, when he said that the Bastard was born ‘‘Full fourteen weeks before the course of time’’ (1.1.113). Scrupulous to the English but also to the Romanian meter, Ghica transforms the weeks into months, rendering the period as exactly three and a half months before the normal time of gestation: ‘‘Ca˘ci a venit pe lume trei luni s¸i juma˘tate / ’Nainte de sorocul firesc al gestat¸iunii.’’85 The translator’s fidelity to the text is all the more remarkable at this early stage, considering that a more praised and modern translation of King John by the poet Dan Botta (1955)86 blunders unforgivably by transforming the ‘‘full fourteen weeks’’ into ten months before the time, a total impossibility. This mistake by Dan Botta may lead the uninstructed Romanian reader (or audience) into attributing the anachronism to Shakespeare, when it is only the translator’s misinterpretation. Ghica’s translation, though more naı¨ve in many respects, dating almost a century before Botta’s, resolves this temporal difficulty successfully. Another interesting innovation in Ghica’s version is the problem of capitalization. Throughout the Romanian text, the syntagma ‘‘to the English King’’ is translated as Regelui Engles.87 Although in Romanian the nouns are not capitalized, be it the noun ‘‘king’’ or the nationality, the translator may have intended to be more faithful to the English original by capitalizing the nation’s name. In addition, whenever the noun ‘‘king’’ appears in the text, whether the English original capitalizes it or not, the Romanian translator does it solicitously, probably to emphasize the issue of kingship traversing Shake-


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speare’s histories. Another explanation might be that in writing, this capitalization signifies potently, because in Romanian capitalization means emphasis. Therefore, since the translation addresses the literate public, the readers are able to decipher the special importance attached to the issue of kingship in the play. Moreover, when a director produces King John following this translation, the capital letters might conduce to the actor’s laying special emphasis on this word. In the same line of thought, Blanche’s name appears as Blanca, a common female name, and she is referred to as print¸esa Spaniei (the Spanish princess) and fata˘ a Hispaniei (daughter of Hispania). However, in this case, the title of princess is not capitalized as is the title of king throughout the translation. This shows the (interpretably) subsidiary role attributed to women in the process of manipulation of power in the play, transmitted through the translation to the similarly male-centred nineteenth-century Romanian society. Ghica’s negotiation of the English word ‘‘cousin’’ in the Romanian translation is also remarkable. Several times, King John addresses his nephews, the Bastard and Arthur, as ‘‘cousin.’’88 It is known that in Shakespeare’s time the word had a larger domain, meaning almost any kind of kinship, except that of father, son, brother, or sister. Ghica moderates the status of family relationships diversely and cogently. Most importantly, the translator uses the term ‘‘cousin’’ generically, like in the English text. In act III, scene III, King John parts with the Bastard calling him vere (cousin) and Elinor calls him nepot¸ele (darling grandson). In the same manner, when King John sends Arthur to England accompanied by Hubert, he uses the term vere (cousin). In addition, in the Romanian text, King Philip refers to Constance as vara noastra˘ (our cousin) while in Shakespeare he merely calls her ‘‘lady,’’ a more formal and distant term. Similarly, after he is announced he is to marry Blanche, the Dauphin calls King John affectionately iubite frate (beloved brother) while the English text glosses the more formal ‘‘my lord’’ (2.1.497). In act II, scene I, when King John refers to Blanche, he calls her nepot¸ico (little niece), while in the original we have the more ceremonial ‘‘niece to England’’ (2.1.425). The Romanian version renders the relationship between King John and Blanche as too familiar, while Shakespeare points to the importance of Blanche’s marriage as a political bond between two countries. The diminutive in Romanian is a term of endearment and the translation alludes to the apparent affection between relatives. In the same manner, the Bastard calls his mother mamit¸ico (mummy), but, in Shakespeare, he is more distant toward her, with formalized language ranging from ‘‘Madam’’ (1.1.233) through ‘‘mother’’ (1.1.246), to the moderately

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affectionate ‘‘good mother’’ (1.1.238) or ‘‘good my mother’’ (1.1.249). It seems that Ghica emphasizes the issue of legitimate or illegitimate family relationships functioning in the play by having the characters use more tender terms toward their relations than in the original, while at the same time preserving the generic reference of certain words denoting family connection. The Romanian translator, however, found a less appropriate version for a stage direction. In act II, scene II, after showing her fury provoked by King Philip’s betrayal, Constance ‘‘sits upon the ground’’ (stage direction 70). According to what she says, the correct action is that of sitting, because Constance expresses her determination to sit there unmoved, on what she considers her throne, demanding that kings assemble and bow before her. The stage direction in the translation, however, is the equivalent of ‘‘she throws herself on the ground,’’ which is not consistent with Constance’s emotion at this stage of the plot. Although she feels betrayed, Constance is not yet desperate or begging mercy, as the movement of throwing herself on the ground might indicate. Rather, hers is a demonstrative act of determination and resilience, the sign of a combative spirit that still characterizes Arthur’s mother. Ghica’s version drastically changes the meaning here and sends wrong signals about this character. Similarly, the moving scene of Constance’s grief at the news of her son’s imprisonment is emotional, yet again the stage direction according to which Constance is tearing at her hair in anguish is translated ˆıs¸i rupe coifura (she tears her coiffure). The use of the neologism of French origin (coiffure) in a context of dramatic strength diminishes the tension, and Constance’s gesture of grief seems trivial. The use of the Romanian equivalent for hair (pa˘r) would have been more appropriate. In this respect, Ghica’s version pays tribute to the host of French influences invading Romanian vocabulary at that particular time in the nineteenth century. In the same scene, when she hears of her son’s loss, Constance calls death to alleviate her pain. In the Shakespeare text, Constance invokes ‘‘amiable, lovely Death!’’ (3.4.25), and Ghica conveys it correctly as prieteneasca˘ moarte. The entire passage is based on the idea that death seems appealing to Constance now that her son is lost, while for the other mortals death is frightening. Constance wants death to fill her mouth with ‘‘fulsome dust’’ (3.4.32), while the translator uses the term neagra˘ cenus¸a˘ (black ashes), thus emphasising the destruction, but also the purification Constance seeks in death. Probably inadvertently, the translator bases his choice on the biblical association dust to dust, ashes to ashes,89 and thus the Romanian and English culture meet in this translation through their com-


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mon Judeo-Christian heritage. Further on, Constance compares Arthur to all mothers’ first sons, from Cain to the last one who died the other day. Constance implies that a mother loves her firstborn son dearly, and the translation refers to Cain as aˆnteìul ba˘iet¸el (the first little boy), as compared to the more objective English phrase ‘‘the first male child’’ (3.4.79). Like in the previous examples, the diminutive is a form of affection and suggests a mother’s love for her son, despite his being a murderer, as Cain reputedly was. It seems that, deliberately or not, Ghica uses humanely tender terminology, exploiting efficiently the properties of the archaic and popular Romanian language and the biblical allusions. These remarks with respect to the nineteenth-century Romanian translation of King John by Scarlat Ion Ghica should not be interpreted as too laudatory. Like many of his contemporaries, Ghica turned to Shakespeare as a paradigm of Western civility and as providing valid cultural ratification. Thus, translating Shakespeare’s plays was supposed to raise the literate Romanians’ awareness to the issues of their time, when the country expected to be received in the European community of modern nations. Shakespeare was an ideal of English drama and, next to the adoption of the French models in the Romanian language, constituted the gate opened for the Romanian culture toward the much-aspired-for integration in the circuit of world cultural values. Ghica’s version has the merit of being the first translation of this play and is highly accurate in both form and substance. Understanding this version, the Romanian reader could create a clear image of King John, the atmosphere, events, characters, and metaphors. The original blank verse is rigorously respected, with occasional rhyming patterns. In point of style, sometimes Ghica’s version gives a more sentimental view of English history, deriving from the use of archaic language and some lexical choices. However, though faithful to the original text, which the translator assimilates excellently, the liberties he sometimes takes are not always the most opportune. The Merchant of Venice had a more direct impact on the literate Romanian audience of the time. The stereotyped image of the Jew had immediate Old Testament90 connotations. The antithetical angles of vision—from Shylock’s and Antonio’s perspectives— referring to the Old Testament mention of the multiplication of the sheep by Jacob when he was serving at the home of his uncle Laban (1.3.75–101) could not have escaped any alert Romanian reader. A more veiled allusion, which Bassanio prompts in the casket scene with reference to heretics in religion (3.2.100–1), may not have had such obvious religious connotations for the reader of the transla-

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tion. It is certain, however, that the ethical inference concerning the relativity of truth and its purposeful manipulation for obscure reasons was very familiar to the members of a nation who had so long lived under the dominance of a foreign Ottoman power. Portia’s plea for mercy (4.1.181–202) might have been recognized by some readers as a tissue of texts from the Old and New Testaments. However, only the scholar could discern that the comparison of divine mercy to rain derives from Deuteronomy 32:2 and the warning that no man is justified in God’s sight from Psalm 143:2. The attentive Romanian reader with some biblical education may trace the phrase about seeking salvation from Isaiah 52:10, and certainly many would recognize the prayer for mercy as derived from the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:12). In general, the Romanian theatrical audiences and the readers of this translation of The Merchant of Venice positively adhered to the Christian values of charity and tolerance apparently promoted in this particular Shakespearean passage. It is important to note that the revolutions in the religious, social, political, and moral traditions have an echo in the early reception of Shakespeare in the three Romanian provinces in the nineteenth century. According to this public’s perception, the tragedies dramatized a mode of melancholy skepticism, at times in the extreme forms of pessimism and nihilism. Shakespeare debated such ethical themes as revenge, justice, sin, the law, spirituality, and retribution. He showed how excess and the failure to adhere to religious principles could cause havoc and disorder on the personal and national level. The tragic rhythm of these plays is saturated with religious significance that mirrors extensive upheavals in the ethical, economic, and political sectors. The audiences and readers were certainly aware of these issues. The common people have managed to maintain the light of Christianity during centuries of Turkish occupation through the strict observance of these rules. When they could see that another nation’s poet showed these values almost the same way they knew them to exist, Romanians could only recognize their ideals in the plays they attended or read. The readers of the plays were the Romanian intellectuals, and many of them were country priests or teachers, who probably went to their respective villages and showed the congregation that many of the values taught by religion existed in the plays by Shakespeare. This could not have meant much for the hard-working agrarian populations of the Romanian countryside, but at least they had the feeling that they were not quite at the margins of the world. The local intellectuals tried to use translations from Shakespeare, particularly of the four great tragedies, as a means of stimulating a sense of national identity among the inhab-


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itants of the three Romanian provinces, before and immediately after the union achieved in mid-nineteenth century, the formation of modern Romania. This reaction could exist only if people were reminded that they were part of the spiritual values of a Judeo-Christian Europe, at an increasing distance from the waning influence of Islam in this troubled late nineteenth century. If an analogy is permitted, I will refer to the much-discussed marginalia of the Geneva Bible, where the translators mention the slight differences but essential similarity of the four Gospels as conveyed by the Evangelists: In this historie written by Matthewe, Marke, Luke, and Iohn, the Spirit of God so governed their eares that although they were foure in nomber, yet in effect and purpose they so consent, as though the whole had bene composed by any one of them. And albeit in stile and manner of writing they be divers, and sometime one writeth more largely that which the other doeth abridge: neuertheless in matter and argument they all tende to one end: which is, to publish to the worlde the favour of God towarde mankinde through Christ Jesus, whome the Father hath given as a pledge of his mercie & love.91

It is a matter of no comment that the four tragedies can hold the same place in the Shakespeare canon as the four Gospels in the New Testament. To extend the analogy even further, just as the commentators of the Geneva Bible consider that the Gospel according to John is the ‘‘keye which openeth the dore to the understanding of the others,’’92 so is Hamlet in the constellation of the four Shakespearean tragedies. Audiences and translators all over the world noticed this attribute and acted accordingly. The translators in the three provinces, and later in the unified Romania, responded to their public’s metaphysical need for a spiritualized vision of this dramatic universe by preferring—though unintentionally—in their translations the Shakespeare plays that were richer in biblical allusions. It was an opportune, though fortuitous, manner of spreading the Word in a new configuration, through so many Shakespearean words of wisdom. The conclusions deriving from the situation of nineteenthcentury translations in Romania, and their readers’ possible decoding of them in the religious orthodox mode, are by no means absolute. My argument does not start from the unproven assumption that the people and the period referred to were entirely predictable entities. Definitely, there were major cracks in the overall world picture of nineteenth-century Romania, which my argument in-

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cludes and makes provisions for. Though there can be no evidence regarding the actual translation strategies and the possible individual reaction to the Shakespeare texts in translation, it is still possible to see them from a hermeneutic perspective as influential to a certain, though limited, group of readers and/or audiences of Shakespeare’s plays. This group of intellectuals constitutes itself as the target of cultural evaluations about nineteenth-century Romania, and all significant advancements in the domain of Shakespeare’s appropriation in this country are due to their constant efforts. Therefore, all the other unaccountable deviations, subversive responses, or possibilities of resistance fall into the domain of unrecorded history, and all uninformed assumptions about them must give us pause. A certain fact is that the Shakespeare translations, imperfect and inadequate as they were in nineteenth-century Romania, have made possible, along with other works of classical and domestic literature, the nation’s transition into a convulsive and perplexed modernity.

3 Shakespeare’s Decalogue: English Histories in Romania THE ALLIANCE BETWEEN HISTORY AND THEATER PRODUCED SURPRISING effects in the theatrically defined Elizabethan culture and it gives rise to conflicting critical readings and radical adaptations now, when politics becomes increasingly affected by a ludic dimension, besides ephemerality and irrationality. Since absolute knowledge of historicity is impossible, the conflicts of interpretation and diversity of opinions are inescapable. The absurd version of reality suggested by the hostility in the world invites us to an awareness of their theatrical proportions and re-actualizes the issue of how the potential renderings of Shakespeare’s English history plays shift erratically over time and space. Just as the Elizabethan audiences in the early 1590s observed segments of English medieval history performed on stage, we now watch the media releasing moving scenes that illustrate the horrors of war and listen to emotional recitals of atrocities and refugees. The awareness that this is reality, not theatrical illusion, cannot prevent a certain aesthetic perception of history as drama, pointing to the political actuality of the productions of English historical plays. While current antagonistic ethnic, religious, and territorial re-evaluations raise serious questions about the falsification of history and the validity of ideologies ruled by economics and power, the multifaceted perspectives on truth dramatized in Shakespeare’s ten history plays might outline a relevant set of theatrical illustrations. Now as before, history and culture could be addressed to ameliorate unfair political practices. The present cannot be aligned to the past, but the representation of critical episodes in England’s history through various productions of Shakespeare’s histories may elucidate the inconsistencies of an unstable present. In exploring the dialectical relationship between historiography and theatricality, William M. Hawley writes, ‘‘Theatre is a historiographical art, just as history seems occasionally theatrical—witness the recent events in East Europe, including the spectacular collapse 67

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of the Iron Curtain and the reunification of Germany.’’1 Proclaiming the theater as ‘‘the historiographical medium par excellance,’’2 Hawley acknowledges the role of the imagination in the audiencemediated process interposed between text and performance. When considering the interface of the recent Romanian reception of Shakespeare’s chronicle plays with modern history, my analysis departs from a number of questions. Initially, to what extent is English history relevant for Romanian audiences whose cultural background is placed so far from the British account of historical events? The action of these plays seems to be less relevant to Romanian audiences, who are more interested in what directors can make of these plots by exploiting the current topical relationships of power and the theater. Furthermore, two basic questions arise: What theater? In addition, what power? What kind of theater is admitted into the politically conditioned republic? What is the influence of power over theater and, inclusively, what power for what theater? Is the choice of certain plays stipulated by political request? Conversely, what influence can the theater have over power and what theater for what power? This discussion might entail the problems of political censorship and theatrical self-censorship demanded by financial constraints. As regards the kind of theater under discussion, Donald G. Watson suggests an answer to the fundamental question concerning the Shakespearean dramatic version of English history: ‘‘Based as it is upon illusion and pretense, the drama represents the truth through fictions whose formalizations obscure but cannot hide the duplicity of its metaphors. The permanent theater created a new kind of cultural space in which the very act of ‘‘playing’’ confused the everyday certainties of the social order.’’3 Like the carnivalesque popular festivals, the public theaters enacted a release from the everyday restrictions of business as usual. The same can be said about the situation in the Communist Romania of the seventies and eighties. The theater was expected to provide the desired relief from oppressive ideological pressure. Speaking of the choice of theatrical repertory by Romanian theaters, in 1975, the critic and playwright Aurel Baranga advised for the selection of ‘‘major plays.’’4 Giving the example of Hamlet and Molie`re’s Le Misanthrope, Baranga defines a major play as one capable to produce ‘‘grave and profound emotions and to communicate them to the audience, who are obliged to meditate even after the curtain falls.’’5 The critic does not state explicitly the idea of catharsis derived from the plays’ questioning of political structures of the time, but the message is implicit in the context. Baranga raises the audience, seen as a sociological concept, to the

3: SHAKESPEARE’S DECALOGUE: ENGLISH HISTORIES IN ROMANIA

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omnipotent level of absolute judge, because the public’s partnership implies the participation of life in its own ceremony. Like Romanian directors, critics attached much importance to the decoding of meaning located in the audience. This situation can be explained by an analogy with the theater in Shakespeare’s time. The nature of dramatic experience is anomalous, for the performance requires the audience to believe and disbelieve simultaneously what they are seeing on stage. Shakespeare and his contemporaries employed a wide range of techniques to enhance the nature of theatrical illusion, including prologues and other framing devices, asides, soliloquies, and plays-within-plays. These dramatic tricks were designed to draw attention to the theatrical nature of the action, enabling dramatists to move confidently and skillfully within an old and well-established tradition of cooperation with the audience. As Julia Briggs writes about the stage-play world in Shakespeare’s time, ‘‘By offering a complex experience and demanding a complex response, the drama could express a new consciousness of simulation and dissimulation, both within the self and the others.’’6 In modern theater, the audience is no less sophisticated in demonstrating high expectations. In addition, the most important of the alienating devices that the modern Romanian audiences are confronted with, in order to deliberately undermine the theatrical illusion, is Shakespeare’s name. Since the icon has become synonymous with theater itself in the public perception, any Shakespeare play is expected to convey a special message, and audiences come with specific expectations to see such a production. We could say, without fear of overstatement, that the name of ‘‘Shakespeare’’ has become a theatrical convention like the ones mentioned above, through which modern audiences are exposed to a comfortable acceptance of the artificial nature of the medium. Moreover, they expect special developments in narrative and psychological complexity or even political innuendo. In the Communist period, the theater was a place of exorcising the spiritual demons of the totalitarian political pressure, a generic space of escapist illusion. Things have not changed much after the institution of democracy in 1989. In the hectic ten years of postCommunist novel democracy, however, the theater has become a sanctified cultural location where people can escape financial austerity through immersion in the never-never land of imagination on stage. There was a distinct fissure in the theater of the sixties and seventies in Romania relating to the marriage between critical practice and the reality of the performance. For instance, Brecht’s nonAristotelian epic theater exercised a remarkable influence on Roma-

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nian Shakespeare productions, in the sense that directors observed the potential of illustrating Brecht’s concepts of ‘‘distancing’’7 and historicizing events in the actual representation of the Shakespearean histories. To the degree in which foreign productions of Shakespeare’s histories can yield Brechtian readings, some directors tried to incorporate the German dramatist’s social and political theories into their theatrical practice. Certain audiences could discern visible political approaches to these plays, and their relevance to current public issues was transparent in almost every production. Theater critics, however, tended to overemphasize the Marxist side of Brecht’s theory, in an attempt to cope with the ideological requirements of the period.8 The Socialist-oriented verbose rhetoric that theater criticism used at that time was eventually coined as ‘‘wooden language.’’ This inflexible and iterative critical and political discourse offered an ideologically adjusted interpretation of all authors to suit the conceptual requirements of the Communist rulers of the time. Gertrude’s demand for more matter with less art could have been an appropriate description of the socializing commentaries that theater critics used in early Communist Romania in order to conform to the dictates of power at the time. Occasionally, certain reviewers cloaked their own resentment of the political regime under the guise of oversized Marxist critical assumptions. This dramatic split between thought and practice, at both the institutional and individual level, created an inherent—though not admitted—rejection of ideologizing critical interpretations. While professing to promote social-materialist criticism in an allegedly Marxist-oriented society, a permanent attitude of subversive resistance toward such ideas could be discerned in the critics’ statements with regard to personal options. A subsequent effect of this division, as experienced in current criticism, may explain the relative unpopularity of cultural materialism in formerly Communist Eastern European countries now, when critical inquiry is free of all ideological constraints. A direct example of such a disruptive intellectual impediment in the late sixties and seventies is the Romanian reception of the otherwise popular Shakespeare scholar Ian Kott. While his Shakespeare Our Contemporary was translated into Romanian with utmost promptitude,9 the book did not appear to have such an overwhelming influence on directors and theater critics. Scholarly criticism acknowledged the Polish author’s importance in the field of Shakespeare studies,10 but the effect of his ideas on theater directors was less perceptible. However, Kott’s remarks on the political relevance of Shakespeare’s histories, as appearing in a 1969 Romanian transla-


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tion, are as tangible as ever. Despite recent questionings regarding the playwright’s contemporaneity,11 Kott’s generalized statements about the actual application of Shakespeare’s productions to current political issues are still operational: ‘‘Shakespeare is humanity or life itself. Each epoch finds in him what it is searching for, what it wants to see. . . . Today’s spectators, on discovering their own contemporaneity in Shakespeare, come closer to Shakespeare’s world almost unwittingly. In any case, they understand it better—especially in what concerns the history plays.’’12 Kott’s statement concerning Shakespeare’s universality and the applicability of certain omnipresent criteria to any nation any time must be taken with a grain of salt, taking into account the period in which he wrote, abounding with Tylliardian speculations. However, the idea that the histories open the way to a theatrical negotiation between various cultures and the English past has been adopted by theaters in Romania for their repertoire policy. The power in Romania, before and now, seems to think too much of itself to get directly involved in the cultural life of the city. The officials’ former and actual self-centeredness precludes any real participation in the spiritual life of the nation. The Communists thought they could control the national theater through censorship and thought-oppressive practices. In their self-delusional grandiloquence, the rulers believed that it was enough to install an atmosphere of psychological terror and constraint in order to control the minds of individuals. However, ‘‘thought is free,’’ as the servants and slaves in The Tempest declare in their nonsense drunken song, and the long-disregarded individual consciousness exploded in an unprecedented way through the 1989 historic events resulting in the displacing of the Communist regime. It is reasonable to believe that Shakespeare’s theater, though not necessarily the productions of the histories, must have had an impact on the public consciousness, especially in Bucharest and the large cities, where all the popular movements took place and succeeded in overthrowing the political system. At present, the current power has totally released its grip over cultural life, preoccupied as it is with mundane matters, such as the Gross National Product and loans from the World Bank. Consequently, every theatrical production becomes a financial affair, and profit governs us all. The political censorship, which could have been opposed with subversive means, has been replaced by financial constraints. Romanian theaters can rarely find a solution to the latter. Performances are relative affairs, and the comparative neglect of foreign productions of the history plays points to the perceived oth-

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erness of dramatizations of England’s past, by both English and foreign modern audiences. By hindsight, asperities are erased, the focal points of reference are less acute, and the current perceptions of the dramatic representations of history become blurred and deflective. Moreover, memories of the productions themselves are elusive and selective, and the general impression becomes the de´ja vu of what the dramatic illustrations make of history’s chronicled events. It is reasonable, therefore, to accept that the popularity of Shakespeare’s histories on the Romanian postwar stage cannot by far be compared with the frequent representations of other plays. This chapter surveys a variety of Romanian productions of Shakespeare’s English histories over the past four decades: a period that witnessed radical changes in the geopolitical concerns and the confusing interplay of ideologies. The sixties, seventies, and eighties in Romania represented a period when there existed a severe split between what people thought and what they were told to think. The last and most extreme attempts of Communist ideologists at controlling their own fabricated history, in conflict with an increasingly unstable reality, were confronted with a cumulative but passive resistance at the level of public perception. The Shakespeare jubilee year 1964 was marked by a series of cultural events related to Shakespeare in Romania. From new translations or new editions of earlier ones to abundant critical studies and theatrical productions, the Romanian cultural territory was brimming with Shakespearean references. A special edition of the main theatrical journal in the country, entitled Teatrul, was dedicated entirely to articles on Shakespeare’s life and theater, reviews of productions in Romania and Britain, production histories, and dramatic critical approaches to Shakespeare. Among these, Alexandru Dut¸u provided a complete abstract of all productions of Shakespeare on the Romanian stage from the nineteenth century to the present,13 and Ana Maria Narti made an excursion into the most remarkable postwar productions.14 Writing about the meaning and importance of social criticism in Shakespeare’s histories, a favorite subject with Socialist critics, Narti argued for an understanding of the histories in the context of the age, while considering the fluidity of historical events and the general humanistic message of the plays. With the unavoidable reference to Karl Marx’s philosophy of art, Narti commended Shakespeare’s histories for their ‘‘complex dialectic realism’’15 and noted the plays’ political implications as only one reading out of their multiple possibilities of interpretation. As the Romanian theater critic points out,


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If we distinguish in Richard III nothing else but vehement politics, or bloody murders for the crown, what other value, except for the documentary one, can we give this play today, when the Wars of the Roses belong to a very distant past? If Marx had judged the ancient sculptures according to such criteria, he could have never enjoyed their beauty. Certainly, Shakespeare’s canon includes much history, many strong accents of social criticism, with immediate address to his world . . . However, he cannot be reduced to one or other range of meanings, but can be defined through the complex interplay of all ideas.16

Romanian critics in the sixties and early seventies were certainly aware of the multiple readings and political interpretations that various Shakespeare productions could ascribe to the histories, but they chose to discuss them only in the predominant Marxist key. While in the sixties the theater criticism was unmistakably engaged in defining the social and political coordinates of the histories in ‘‘realistic Socialist’’ terms, some critics of the seventies dared to express discordant political views in the disguise of perfectly orthodox Marxist theatrical criticism. For instance, Nicolae Manolescu wrote an article entitled ‘‘Shakespeare’s Modern Realism’’ in 1970. This title corresponded to the Communist ideological necessity of identifying social and realistic concepts in almost anything, from Shakespeare to moon landing. Referring to the histories, Manolescu made the expected reference to Ian Kott’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s histories, but then inserted some allusions of his own. He compared the icon of the hierarchical configuration of a series of English kings and their fight for power to the images of voievods painted on the Romanian monasteries. The critic’s reference to religious art was totally unexpected in the context, and the readers could not fail to notice the evasion. Moreover, in Manolescu’s analysis of the Shakespearean approach to history, many readers could identify parallels with the totalitarian Communist regime, seen as an implacable mechanism which disregarded individual values in the circuit of totalitarian authority and absolute power. Discussing Shakespeare’s histories, Manolescu used Ian Kott’s metaphor of the inexorable mechanism of power when he wrote, ‘‘With Shakespeare, history is not rational, like, for example, with Hegel, who considers that only individuals in history have the tragic flaw; history is tragic and absurd because it represents a senseless Mechanism, a reiteration of the same fatal circle of events. Order in history is as indifferent to people as universal order is; there is no freedom, only monstrous necessity, there are no causes and purposes, only an endless sequence of power cycles.’’17 The generalized

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form of expression and the impersonal tone, however, might lead to a subversive interpretation of Manolescu’s commentary, which is inscribed in the academic spirit of resistance to the Communist ideology. This critical consideration of the productions of Shakespeare’s histories could be deciphered as an accurate, though clandestine, description of the dictatorial regime in Romania. The Socialist political system tried to impose an alien Marxist-Leninist materialistic ideology and practice to a nation whose history had shown very few moments of freedom from different world powers. Under the guise of historical materialist criticism, Manolescu’s message about Shakespeare’s histories tells readers covertly that Communism is inhuman, acting like a ‘‘senseless mechanism’’ on individual consciousness. It has no regard for the human being, and all the political rulers of the day cared for was to obtain power at all costs and enjoy its benefits as long as possible. Irrationality and insensitive cyclical movement and the sense of waste and impossibility of significant action were only a few of the people’s general emotions in Romania during the sixties and later. In these historical circumstances, it is reasonable, therefore, to suppose that audiences would take these feelings with them to the theater, to watch how the productions of Shakespeare’s histories would match their expectations. A memorable production of Richard III in 1964 was directed by Ion S¸ahighian and focused on the actor’s interpretation. George Vraca, an important name of the Romanian stage, had the aspiration of creating this role, after having successfully faced the Hamlet challenge. For every actor at that time, interpreting a Shakespearean hero was equivalent to an accreditation of high artistic mastery. According to Florin Tornea, the version is focused on how the hero behaves, ascends, and falls, while ‘‘the actor constructs significant autonomous imagery, precisely designed and colored.’’18 Another reviewer observes that ‘‘George Vraca avoids the simplistic view of the fascinating Richard III and strives to resituate his character in the context of the age’s specific psychology. His hero invites us to study Machiavelli. We no longer see a diabolic monster who takes revenge on everyone around him because of his deformity, but one of those bloody and conflicting Renaissance warriors who have contributed, at times with extreme cruelty, to the formation of new states and a new order.’’19 It is visible how one reviewer focuses on the actor’s excellent interpretation, while the other suggests the image of the Renaissance titan, a being of exceptional energy and creative force, so much admired by the Socialist makers of beliefs because it was in accordance with their ideal of accomplished


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human being, actively involved in the communal life, though lacking in moral scruples. A decade later, in 1976, Richard III was interpreted by the reputed actor Radu Beligan in a production directed by Horea Popescu at the Bucharest National Theater. Like Hamlet, this role has been embraced by Romanian actors at the height of their careers. The first production of Richard II on the Romanian stage was in 1966 at Teatrul Mic, directed by Radu Penciulescu.20 A theater critic of the time, Mira Iosif, notes various stages of this director’s gradual understanding of Shakespeare’s histories. In brief, Penciulescu’s approximation, in stages, to history as shown by Shakespeare, could be interpreted on a more general scale as the way Romanian audiences perceived the political game of power in the history plays. Iosif writes that at first, Richard II seemed to Penciulescu a historical play admirably depicting a certain epoch, with multifaceted present-day resonance. The characters fell into distinct categories, white was different from black, good and evil people confronted each other from two opposing parties. Later, the director realized that the play was situated at the intersection of two worlds: the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, or the legitimate monarchy in contradiction with the brute force of individual interest in ascension. History remained thus only the background of an intensely political play with no clear demarcations between good and evil. There were no verdicts and solutions valid for only one party, and chronicles of the past were hazy affairs. In these conditions, Penciulescu discovered the multiple and tragic social significance in Richard II, which he read as a philosophical drama debating the relationship between individual values and public power.21 The director of this first Romanian production of Richard II saw the play as the tragedy of individual experience vanquished by the implacable mechanism of history. Both Richard and Bolingbroke were caught in this power-generated machinery, but each of them discovered gradually each link of the colossal concatenation of historical events, to which they were helpless prisoners. Immovable facts of chronicle constituted the play, while the heroes could only meditate on their individual destinies, as they were moved by the gigantic mechanical action of history. According to the theater critic reviewing this production, Penciulescu saw Richard II as ‘‘the work of a moralizing artisan who studies the mechanism of history.’’22 The director’s main ‘‘commandments,’’ therefore, were as follows: ‘‘Do not enact meaning or significance. Do not draw conclusions. Interpret characters, situations, and the true life of the text.’’23 With such directives in mind, and explained to his actors,

Richard III directed by Ion S¸ahighian at the Nottara Theater (1964). With George Vraca as Richard III. Courtesy of the Nottara Theater Bucharest.

Richard III directed by Horea Popescu at the Bucharest National Theater (1976). With Radu Beligan (Richard III) and Mircea Albulescu (Norfolk). Courtesy of the Bucharest National Theater.

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Penciulescu diversified the situations in the play in an appropriately Shakespearean mode. He showed deadly and implacable historical confrontations and graceful court rituals. Hieratic and lofty poetry blended with medieval morality scenes, such as the conjugal dispute at the Duke of York’s residence, which seemed inspired from a morality play. Epic scenes, battles, arraignments, and coronations alternated with philosophical meditations about individual destiny and power, about the multiple avatars of the human condition, about time and universe. The spectacle did not particularly emphasize a certain scene. Considering that Shakespeare concentrated the course of life in the five acts, condensing huge historical periods in one scene and dilating essential seconds in another, the director left to the audience the choice of selecting the order of importance. Like in life, the stage showed both essential and unimportant events. It was for the viewers to interpret them and draw their conclusions. The sets in this spectacle suggested very little to the eye. The wooden stage was composed of two trapezes superimposed horizontally. This was the terrain where conflicting action took place. Richard’s murderers could jump out of a dark trapdoor on this double stage. A few boards erected on this stage signified the battlements of the castle, while the garden lay in another corner of this stage-world. This theatrum mundi metaphor was meant to suggest the bare stage at the Globe, and the fact that the sets were constructed in front of the audience gave the impression of dynamic participation in the events of the play. The props were suggestive of power through heraldry. A throne, a knight’s armor, flags, and engraved shields suggested a specific medieval iconography. According to Elizabethan theatrical tradition, the stylized decor contrasted with the sumptuousness of costumes. Richard’s court was elegant, luxurious, sophisticated, and decadent, since he was seen as a waning representative of a legitimate but obsolete monarchy based on the divine right. Here, colors were extravagant in multiple chromatic nuances, and the fabrics were rich velvet, silk, and taffeta. Richard’s costumes had solar reflections, as he frequently compared himself to the sun, but they also accentuated his pallor, as a metaphor of devitalized royalty. By contrast, Bolingbroke and his men conveyed the sensation of live brutal force. His costume suggested wind, dust, and an active life. The fabrics were rough and elemental, mainly metal, leather, and wool, in red-brown and fiery tones. The costumes in this production of Richard II outlined a visible antagonism between Richard and Bolingbroke, and the medieval accuracy was supposed to exclude any existing association. However, the atmosphere created in the play said otherwise. The rapid scene


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sequences or the hasty crossings of the stage at certain high psychological moments conveyed infinite nuances to the specific ambiance and suggested up-to-date political implications. Permanent tension and mistrust hovered around those who conspired against King Richard. Furtive glances, subdued gestures, sharp replies, the advance of some, the hesitation of others, reciprocal mistrust, more or less dissimulated fear all these theatrical elements created a suffocating atmosphere of suspicion and terror. This ambivalent feeling of mistrust and fear was common to the real-life atmosphere in Communist Romania in those years. Barely emerging from the Stalinist period of suspicion and repression, the nation’s psychological horizon could hardly be expected to range within the sane and positive configuration. By forcing people to confront their hidden fears and expectations, Penciulescu’s version of Richard II helped audiences better realize the exact relationships of power and subjection within the large inhuman mechanism of history, of which they were also a part. On reviewing this production of Richard II at Teatrul Mic, a theater critic makes explicit the present-day relevance of the oppressive atmosphere omnipresent in the play. Narti points out that Richard’s deposition marked the end of a symbolic period of sacred, inviolable, and solid stability. The critic remarks, ‘‘This clearly defined theme is lively resonant for the modern-day audience, who has been attending, for more than half a century, the demise of beliefs that had seemed impossible to fracture, the dissipation of so many convictions that had seemed founded on sacred truths, and the failure of so many orders and systems that had seemed to be everlasting.’’24 The generalized reference is very vague and unaccountable, as many critics’ and historians’ statements used to be in that blurred period of Communist autocracy, but the historical resonance is very clear to the attentive readers. They all remembered having witnessed a deposition of the Romanian king only two decades before. What seemed to be a stable and infallible monarchic system had been shattered to pieces under the leveling Russian-driven Communist sledgehammer. This was accompanied by the no-less-deadly scythe of ideological domination. In Romania, 1976 was a year for the Henry plays. The National Theater of Timis¸oara produced 3 Henry VI. The Nottara Theater in Bucharest presented Henry IV, Part 1 and 2. The first Romanian production of Henry VI, Part 3, directed by Ioan Ieremia,25 offered a compressed version of English history in Shakespeare’s dramatic restatement. The synopsis published in the program gave a detailed description of the events in English history dramatized in the Shake-

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spearean play, making the necessary connections with European and Romanian history. King Henry VI of England was contemporaneous with King Louis XI in France, S¸tefan cel Mare in Moldova, and Vlad Tepes¸, surnamed ‘‘Dracula,’’ in Walachia. The director took the liberty of intervening in the text and in the order of the scenes. The production started with King Henry’s soliloquy sitting on a molehill on the Towton fields (3 Henry VI, 2.5.1–54). This alteration was meant to put the entire action into perspective. By moving this scene from its central place in 3 Henry VI to the beginning of this abridged version, the director pointed to the heroic, though futile, one-man battle against a contradicting and divided world. Henry VI may have been a weak king, as the chroniclers suggested, but this non-active, ineffective, and devout monarch imposed a model of superior moral order, in opposition with the disturbed political situation of his time. Though he seemed to be a poor leaf blown in the wind of the civil wars, Henry VI was aware of his insufficiency. He knew that he could not use the drastic methods of the sword and gallows to attain his political ends, as Warwick, Edward, Richard, or Margaret did. The production of the Henry VI, Part 3 directed by Ioan Ieremia suggested that war was wasteful and useless, and that hatred, enmity, treason, perjury, and murder could destroy kings, nobles, women, and children alike. King Henry’s initial soliloquy was meant to provide a lucid and superior position toward such adversities. History, in this director’s vision, was a giant piece of machinery that destroyed humans implacably and haphazardly. Murderers and innocents were all victims of this merciless and monstrous mechanism of history, as the audiences could see for themselves in their presentday Romania. The director used Henry’s soliloquy on the molehill as a kind of prologue to frame the production and to point to the theatrical illusion. At the same time, however, this framing device attached to a Shakespeare play pointed aggressively toward a current political interpretation, which the audiences expected when they went to see a Shakespeare production. Therefore, they perceived the director’s vision of history in terms of a repulsive mechanism of oppression relating to the political situation under Communism. After the political persecutions of the fifties and sixties, the Communist leaders found subtler ways of manipulating people, through mind control and psychological dominance. It is interesting that most directors staging the histories during the Communist period saw historical development as an implacable destructive mechanism that consumed individuals. This vision may have been induced by the current situation during the Communist regime, when there was


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a total disregard for individual needs. In those circumstances, sensitive people felt inescapably caught in a grinding wheel of power and destruction, from which there could be no evasion. However, Ieremia’s production of 3 Henry VI suggested final redemption through the peaceful image of an innocent child who walked serenely on the bloodstained battlefield. The future did not belong to any political party, as the director’s message seemed to say. On the bare stage, indicating a circular road against the background of medieval fortifications, were two heavy chariots representing the two contending houses that turned in never-ending circles. Each chariot came into the foreground, as factions gained precedence one over the other. In the middle was the throne, the ultimate symbol of power. The two stout chariots carried, in turn, the soldiers and their kings and queens, who attained power and defeat alternatively. The inclusion of much of the present-day social and political predicament in this play on English history made the laughter evoked in some scenes turn ambivalent, cruel, sardonic, and grotesque on most occasions. Henry IV, Part 1 and 2, produced at the Nottara Theatre in Bucharest (1976) and directed by Lucian Ghiurcescu,26 was an abridged two-hour version of the two plays. Critics censured this dramatized abstract for being arbitrary and needing focus. The three authors of this version, Dorin Moga, Sorin Arghir, and Lucian Ghiurcescu, were actors. They may have lacked a playwright’s discernment regarding plot structure, the arrangement of themes and motifs, or the distribution of foreshadowing and climactic scenes. This Shakespearean digest conflated the two Henry IV plays. As the playbill announced, part one contained ‘‘the famous history of the life and death of Henry IV’’ and ‘‘the life and death of Henry called Hotspur.’’ Part two consisted of ‘‘the death of Henry IV, and the coronation of Henry V.’’ The rudimentary construction simply collated capriciously various scenes and characters, operating massive text reductions. For instance, Falstaff ’s catechism on honor at 1 Henry IV (5.1.127–40) was transported at the end of the abstracted version, displacing the meaning substantially. Prince Hal’s soliloquy about his tavern mates, in which he compared himself to the sun (1 Henry IV, 1.2.122–214) was dropped out altogether. Consequently, the audience was deprived of an important part of the character’s selfrepresentation. Hal compared himself to the royal symbol, the sun, and looked disdainfully at his companions, but he considered them functional in setting off his own glory. A major drawback of this abridged text, however, was the insistence on the historical development of the conflict, leaving out the aspect of ‘‘chorography,’’27 the dramatic illustration of specific places, customs, and social groups as

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they are presented mostly in the Eastcheap scenes. The epilogue of 2 Henry IV was also excluded, thus depriving this production of the playful note provided by the comic actor’s last dance and curtsy. The actors-authors of this version focused on the sober historical narrative, in accordance to which the rule of law officially triumphed over the forces of disorder. They neglected to remind their audience that this was a play after all, a dance of history, and not a chronicle of life itself. Critics saluted warmly the 1981 production of Richard II at the National Theater of Craiova.28 They admitted, however, that this particular play had not been performed on the Romanian stage for ten years. This production was a reaction against modern innovation in the theater, which had accustomed audiences with Shakespeare’s plays performed in the most eccentric settings, on scaffolds or in city bars, with great soliloquies being spoken by actors chewing on gum or dressed in sporting outfits. Mircea Cornis¸teanu’s interpretation of Richard II was in the traditional key. Richard’s royal court was a medieval place with definite figurative elements: decorative frescoes, knights in armor, and heraldry. Perspective imaging gave profundity to the stage space, and mobile massive walls transformed the courtroom into the castle battlements, or the prison. Costumes were designed in strict agreement with the late fourteenth-century period. A critic reviewing this play explained this observance of historical accuracy through the intention to make the audiences think. As Paul Tutungiu remarks, ‘‘It is more interesting for the director to try to revive a lost world exactly and let the audience discover the present-day correspondences than to force the Duke of York, for instance, to run breathlessly on a highway in order to show that the director wanted to address current issues.’’29 However, immediate problems were in order at this theatrical court. The question of public and private responsibility, the personal and national consequences of power, or the legitimacy of authority were only a few matters raised by this production addressed to Romanian audiences of the early eighties. The director made a number of drastic interventions in the text. Some scenes were missing, such as, for example, that when the appearance of the Duke of Norfolk was announced, which created confusion regarding the nature of the confrontation between Thomas Mowbray and Henry Bolingbroke. However, the most effectual and suggestive directorial change came as an intrusion into the play’s grand finale. In order to emphasize the individual drama of Richard, whose personality developed from insensitive king to sympathetic human being, from the capricious and temptation-driven


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master to the philosopher who found individual freedom in the prison of his thoughts, Cornis¸teanu’s Richard was not killed in prison. He committed suicide. The murderer was not a match for Richard, who disarmed him easily. However, after a few moments of hesitation, the wiser Richard discarded his sword and let himself fall into the assassin’s dagger. Thus, this production showed the individual’s tragedy, when consciousness was caught in the implacable system of power and was not ready to accept its responsibilities. These significant alterations make us think that Cornis¸teanu subtly disguised his directorial techniques and messages in the form of a historical play acted in the traditional mode. Thus, the king became a person whom audiences were inclined to sympathize with, an authentic human being who understood his role in history. This view was drastically opposed to the conformist Communist ideological dictate, according to which any representation of a king, Shakespearean or not, should necessarily demonstrate the corruption inherent in the monarchic system and reveal the superiority of the Socialist order by comparison. As history, ideology, and identity became one in this historical tragedy, the audiences could witness social injustice, arbitrary measures, political crimes imposed without trial (or, at least, after a brief one), and overt or covert contentions for power. The play debated issues of kingship, and it opened up ‘‘a major distinction between the reality of power, the actual possession of it, and true royalty.’’30 According to the Communist rulers’ political fantasy, the Romanians were supposed to have forgotten that their country had been a constitutional monarchy, following the English model. However, most people—even the younger generation—still remembered the deposed king Michael of Hohenzollern forced to resign after the Communist coup d’e´tat in 1947. Clio, the muse of History, is the daughter of Mnemosyne, our collective memory, and people are entitled to remember whatever they like, despite ideological constraints that professed to forge history according to a certain hypothetical model. The spiritual figure of the deposed king Richard II and his thoughts in prison reminded everybody that what made us human could resist many adversities and incredible turpitude. Although Romanians in the early 1980s were not very familiar with the actual events in English medieval history represented on stage, the current relevance of the play’s message was definitely there. The Communist authorities could claim all they wanted, but they were unable to dispute the tangible reality of this particular production. Thus, over the centuries, the cumulative theatrical effect stressed the uncontrollable in history, and some Romanian viewers may have

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become more aware of who they were by seeing a play about the British medieval past. In 1983, Richard III was performed at Teatrul Mic Bucharest, directed by Silviu Purca˘rete.31 The music and sets were suggestive of self-alienation and desolation. In a period of political hegemony, when ideology could seriously undermine the subtext, the director explored mainly the political connotations in this play. In trying to decipher the motive and the object of power, which had been turned away from its ideal purpose, the director focused on decoding the historical process as it appeared in individual biographies and events. He suggested a possible general significance through individual actions. Thus, the production clearly connected English history and Romanian political issues. According to a review of the time, ‘‘The production suggests a discernible conjunction between the age indicated by Shakespeare and the anteroom of the third millennium.’’32 The set represented a blank space, where white was the dominant tone. In this case, white was not a color; it was the absence of coloration, of definite margins, suggesting the void before and beyond the convention named ‘‘history.’’ Like a blank page in a history book, or the white flag of capitulation in war, the dominating tone was suggestive of the annihilation of political borders or the acrid taste of defeat. The setting visualized an imaginary dissection room, where the bodies were crowned kings, subjected to vivisection by one of them. This space was a parable of history, a place where the mechanism of power was deprived of its constructive function and turned toward a self-destructive end. The glass cabinets on the two sides marked a significant component of the stage space. They contained masks, hats, theatrical costumes, and other props. An important item on display was a skull, which people expected to find in a medical dissection room, but which was a cultural ramification connected to the romantic interpretations of Hamlet. Here, Yorick’s skull had come to represent the mutability of human existence and the mental image was necessarily connected to conventional versions of Shakespeare. This framing device suggesting theatricality represented by the sets indicated a ludic production exemplifying the comedy of power. The characters created masks for themselves and the others, in a perpetual game of deceit. Purca˘rete focused on the subversive property of the fight for power by investigating profoundly the characters involved in its pursuit. Edward IV, Richard, and Richmond were all various hypostases of the same essence, namely, the immoderate quest for the illusion of omnipotence. The director suggested two essential components of power: the


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Machiavellian political action and the histrionic social behavior. In this particular production, Richard of Gloucester was not seen as a malformed monster craving for power in order to compensate for his physical deformity. He was a skillful politician who followed his purpose with premeditated lucidity and who saw his need for kingship as a political necessity. However, his obsessive pursuit of domination became anomalous and even pathological, suggested by Richard’s passionately embracing his throne, the ultimate symbol of power. Presented initially as an amoral personality, Richard searched for an ethical justification for the crimes that would elevate him to the throne. Once king, he was seized with the inconsistent delirium of power, which he transformed from a means to an end in itself. His will became absolute narcissistic passion, and Richard regressed from the sphere of political necessity to abnormal psychology. As the critic reviewing this production notes, ‘‘Purca˘rete makes the case for the institution of a viable ethics of power, greatly needed in a period when humanity has been seriously traumatized by similarly monstrous manifestations.’’33 The critic’s vague reference might be to the Nazi rise to power and Hitler’s megalomania, but the implication ran deeper, enclosing the Ceaus¸escu regime in the circle of signification. Both the sets containing theater props and Richard’s histrionic disposition suggested the familiar theater-world motif to be performed on the larger stage of history. Dilating and emphasizing the Shakespeare text, Purca˘rete constructed Richard of Gloucester according to a double personality frame. In his relationship with Lady Anne, he mimed fidelity but enjoyed the success of hypocrisy. Lady Anne played the part of the traumatized woman who asked for justice. Buckingham dissimulated his duplicity by using histrionic means. Richmond studied his gestures attentively, composed a serious physiognomy, and rehearsed conscientiously, like any comedian, the discourse he was about to deliver in front of his soldiers. The main political scenes, such as the mediation contrived by Edward IV, the council meetings, or the election of Gloucester as king, were obvious spectacle scenes, drawing on the ceremony and equivocal manipulation of court practices. By insisting on the versatility shown by those implied in the mechanism of power, and on their duplicitous presence, Purca˘rete reconsidered and re-evaluated the relationship between tragic and comic in his production. His vision was critically oriented against tyranny, which destroyed the spirit and consumed social energies in a concatenation of terror. However, Richard’s ascension to power took place in the rhythm of some kind of ruthless comedy, just as Henry Richmond played the comedy

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of history at a different level when he tried to hide theatrically the disparity between his declared intentions and secret goals. The machinery of power at work in Richard III was deployed in accordance with a quasi-comical principle, while its political and social effects were wasteful and tragic. What was the Romanians’ relationship with Richard of Gloucester and with a play that concentrated upon acting, deceit, and politics as spectacle? They had experienced the fragmentation of order and the absence of coherence after the war, when the Communist regime came gradually to power. They saw how mask and face, role and identity, word and action had been severed, and how the master of the art of acting had become the master of politics. This Machiavellian personality that objectified the energies of moral dissolution became an emblem of the violent ambitions let loose in the grotesque ambivalence of the current situation in Romania at that time. In an oddly diminished interplay of images, the incongruous figure of Romania’s political party ruler of the time, Nicolae Ceaus¸escu, appeared as emblematic for the eccentricities of power. The former shoemaker’s apprentice, who lacked formal education and proper diction, had become the Communist state’s absolute ruler because of histrionics and flawed historical contingency. The actor interpreting Richard III, S¸tefan Iordache, claimed to play a medieval tyrant, but he drew up the image of a present-day Romanian Communist politician obsessed with the luxury of authority: a person who transformed the potential virtue of power into the vice of dictatorship. The director visibly intended his audiences to decode such meanings in this production, and it is very likely that they did. Reviewing the 1988 production of King John at the Comedy Theater in Bucharest, a Romanian critic discussed the situation of theatrical policy in preferring Shakespeare to other playwrights when directors wanted to raise current (political) issues. Paul Cornel Chitic started from the statement that the theatrical season saw many ‘‘Shakespeares’’ in the theaters’ repertoires. This situation was explained by the fact that, in selecting Shakespeare for the stage, the theaters secured for themselves a steady prestige, given by the accredited name of the English bard. However, Chitic argued, ‘‘Introducing one Shakespeare here and there in the repertoire of one theater can be only an expressionistic solution of the main issue. The ostentatious cry of victory represented by ‘Look what we are producing!’ hides a concealed need to take refuge in the Giant’s shadow, which defeats, through time and space, any other impossible and inhibiting cultural claim.’’34 The critic further explained that whoever produced a Shakespeare play was cleared of any blem-


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ish, because Shakespeare was always contemporaneous with everyone, the only contemporary author recognized as such by all. Chitic’s irony was directed at those who selected the theaters’ repertoires, and he elucidated how, after a recent release of a Shakespeare production, the spectacle’s critics became all ‘‘Shakespearized’’ and the audiences became ‘‘Elizabethanized.’’35 In other words, all critics became Shakespeare scholars overnight, and every member of the audience expected current political innuendo through the production of that particular Shakespeare play, just as the Elizabethans were supposed to have done in their time. In the same ironic mode, Chitic demonstrated that everybody, critics and audience, came to decipher the slightest nuances of topical political references in the works of ‘‘the most contemporary—post mortem— dramatist.’’36 In this way, Chitic reasons facetiously, we become contemporaneous with Him, our contemporary. The situation in the Romanian theater during the eighties was identical to what Chitic ironically described. Two decades before, ‘‘His Highness’’ had been the Supreme Daring Weapon a director used as part of the repertory strategy. Whatever director succeeded in staging a Shakespeare play cogently obtained the inalienable, though debatable, right to be elevated to the status of a European director of substance. At the position of the late-eighties theater in Romania, however, the issue of selecting a Shakespeare play for the repertoire was debated rather like a matter of ‘‘Who dares?’’ Mounting a Shakespeare production became a challenge which, when taken with feeble force, could become a total fiasco. Former theatrical versions of Shakespeare focused on the centrality of the works in the canon, raising the issue of whether one particular play lent itself to the current interpretations that various directors appended to it. However, in the late eighties the problem was through which philosophical perspective directors should approach and re-appropriate a Shakespeare play. The focus on the method of directorial interpretation of a Shakespeare play rather than on the play itself shifted the center of interest from the plays in the canon to the directors and actors interpreting them. Consequently, a Shakespeare production often became a kind of oversized costume donned by one or another actor or director in order to show off how well it fit them, and thus the English playwright fell into the neglected background. A Romanian staging designed to foreground current political issues from a philosophically reflective standpoint, however, was a 1988 production of King John. The problems with King John have often been attributed to the absence of a central character, and this want of a hero to dominate the entire play contributed to the play’s

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interpretive difficulties. However, we find that England was the hero of the histories, suffering the tragedy of misrule, civil war, and international politics, and enjoying the momentary triumphs of peace, empire, and prosperity. King John37 directed by Grigore Gont¸a and produced at Teatrul de comedie Bucharest in 1988, was an ironic statement of historicity that sardonically deflated what was still left of the heroics of politics. The fact that it was produced at the Comedy Theater was a clear indicator that the play mocked the rhetoric and ceremony of history. At that time, Romania’s situation was at an extreme point of economic privation and political oppression. The 1989 public outburst of discontent was just one year away. In that case, only the incongruity of parody and the mock-heroic could describe tolerably the question of right versus might and the legitimacy of power. This production of King John was announced as a ‘‘stage version’’ of Shakespeare’s play. The translator, Florian Nicolau, operated massive reductions of the text. His translation was rich in lexical eccentricities, which made it adequate to the parody mode of the spectacle. The director preferred this Romanian translation to a more scholarly elaborate one by the poet Dan Botta. However, the declaration that the text was a ‘‘stage version’’ implied a deliberate directorial choice of difference. Not only did Grigore Gont¸a offer a more concise variant of the Shakespearean history play, but he modified the basic prerequisite of the genre. His production tended to be a satire aimed at the political situation in Romania, if not a forthright parody. By dropping out parts of the character interaction and stressing the text’s sarcastic tone, the director sustained an alert tempo on stage. In the first part of this version, equivocation and double-meaning jokes interfered with frolicking and more or less innocent pranks directed at the idea of kingship and the bellicose ardor. The phlegmatic irony, in this part, suggested serious revulsion against the tribulations of history. Toward the end, however, there was an increase in dramatic intensity and the tone became tragic. The Dauphin of France remained the only character who preserved the farcical aspect. Marian Raˆlea, an outstanding comedy actor, interpreted this controversial character. The extremely simple setting of King John at the Comedy Theater in 1988 gave the impression of weirdness. A catwalk traversed the stage, and lots of ropes hung from the stage canopy, like lianas in a tropical forest. Like in a simple sentence, this setting made a visible statement: the world was a jungle. This homo homini lupus motto became an ad litteram declaration when the audiences could see kings, princes, cardinals, and attendants hanging from these ropes like


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monkeys, and jumping into the political world of the stage. As a theater critic noticed about this production, ‘‘had we lived during King John’s reign, we would have felt avenged.’’38 This was an exceptionally daring statement, because the critic clearly transposed the political situation from British history to the present-day Romania, regardless of the Communist censorship, which was very weak at that moment near to the collapse of Communist regimes in Europe. The readers of this theater review could make a direct connection between the complicated games of political intrigue in the Communist regime, similar to those of the politicians in King John’s reign. On seeing the incredible number of ropes the politicians had to pull in order to achieve their political maneuvers, people would feel sorry for their mediocrity, then and now, here and there. In a TV interview taken in 2002 of one of Ceaus¸escu’s acolytes from that time, the former foreign minister admitted that it took a lot of energy and cunning to deal with the irrational dictator. Getting him to approve a certain project was like rope walking. This Shakespeare history play directed by Grigore Gont¸a, produced at the worst time of the totalitarian regime, showed the audience what was happening behind the curtains of power in the real world, and probably suggested that the power held by such pathetic people was very fragile. On a symbolic level, this setting elucidated how moral rectitude and verticality was the only possible sense of movement through ethical space. In order to reach the incredible heights of worldly ambition and political power, the characters’ only direction was going downward on a perilous rope. The horizontal stability of the stage space signified the vast expanse of interior victory, ground zero of human dignity. The memorable ending of this production was pure directorial invention, but it was in assonance with the general mode of the spectacle. Four of the last followers of King John were left alone in the background obscurity. They tried to break free, but were hindered by indistinct adversaries and forced to vanish in the surrounding darkness. Having been gradually sequestered by the higher conspiracy of history within the confines of a limited perimeter of political ideas, their only exit could only be into nothingness. This was the destiny of all ideologies based on the imposition of authority at the cost of human decency and common sense. Any dictatorial excess and disregard for the law rendered all tyrannical power unstable and irregular. This Romanian production of Shakespeare’s King John conveyed a warning, issued only a year before the Romanians’ energies exploded in an unprecedented way, rising against the annihilating authority of Communism in December 1989. The succeeding democratic mutation of the early nineties in Ro-

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mania brought an increased interest in the production of Shakespeare’s English histories by the theatrical companies. As the more or less obvious hazard of political censorship was there no more, directorial expectations came to govern the productions entirely, and the theatrum mundi metaphor was regarded as a viable cultural response to the inadequacies of everyday life. Theaters in Romania would see the political and dramatic appropriations of the English historical past in the Shakespearean version as a form of theatrical collaboration that transcended cultural and linguistic barriers. The theater created a new kind of cultural space in which the act of ‘‘playing’’ replaced the everyday uncertainties of the social order and the disappointment of dogmatic abstractions by representing the truth through historical fictions. Romanian theater became more self-conscious of its own medium and the magic of its illusions, making the carnivalesque and the theatrical representation a thematic matter. Directors developed a spectrum of self-reflexive techniques to insist upon the theater’s powers of pretense and makebelieve. As a result, Romanian productions of Shakespeare’s histories in the 1990s replicated, in a curious way, the situation in the Elizabethan culture in the 1590s and the role of the theater as an institution in that culture. The Romanian audiences for these new interpretations of Shakespearean versions of English history could see actors playing people consciously playing dramatic roles within the fictions, assuming disguises, parodying stage directions, deliberately deceiving other actors, watching plays within plays, and so forth. There was a visible and self-conscious directorial shift from the significance of the text in translation to the visual, aural, and kinetic elements of performance. Ritual, dance, and the rhythms of excess replaced the traditional expectations of representing England’s past. People expected such theatrical artifice as part of the convention. They were even more aware than they had been in the past of the interplay of theater, history, and politics, anticipating acting and directorial developments that would confirm their prospects, especially when a Shakespeare play was concerned. In 1994, Richard III 39 was produced at the Odeon Theater in Bucharest and at the Dancehouse, Manchester. The director, Mihai Ma˘niut¸iu, and his team of actors took this Romanian version of Shakespeare’s play on tour through England. They gave the English an image of their own history as seen through foreign eyes. The production enjoyed favorable reviews in English newspapers and scholarly journals. In 1995, a condensed version of the three parts of Henry VI 40 was produced at Teatrul Nat¸ional Timis¸oara, Romania,


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and at Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, directed by Ioan Ieremia. In this production, we see how international theatrical collaboration appeared to rely on the English histories as a convenient starting point for cultural dialogue, in an area where sensitive political and national issues tended to become increasingly prominent and problematic in real life. By producing a collaborative version of this history play, the directors demonstrated that the theater was a viable form of communication between neighboring nations, making interaction possible in a period when ethnic conflicts were more or less artificially maintained in political and military circles. Apart from international partnership, a distinct approach of the Romanian theater’s self-reflexive appropriations of Shakespeare’s histories took the form of adaptations. In 1996, Victor Ioan Frunza˘ directed Falstaff after Shakespeare, produced at the National Theater in Cluj-Napoca and adapted from Henry IV, Part 1 and 2 and The Merry Wives of Windsor.41 As if replicating Elizabeth’s wish to see Falstaff in love, which prompted Shakespeare to write a comedy featuring Sir John, the Romanian director-adapter rewrote Shakespeare’s histories and the comedy in order to respond to a highly stylized and formalized Romanian theatrical culture. Since Shakespeare’s name was involved in the equation, this particular director felt the need to translate the political into the aesthetic and the comic. Some critics tend to see the current need of re-titling and rewriting the English histories for modern audiences as a form of making them accessible to new theatergoers, who might otherwise perceive them as alien. I prefer to see these conversions as an acclimatization and response to increasingly self-reflexive theatrical institutions and audiences. In both Elizabethan and modern Romanian cultures, politics was/is seen as involving the arts of spectacle, and the plays that touch upon the history of English politics can best address the implicit nature of the theatrical medium. Moreover, since its adaptation to various national European cultures, the Shakespeare icon has evolved into the political theatrical agency par excellance. Highbrow Romanian theater criticism, represented by the reviewer of this production, Mircea Morariu, defined this composite adaptation of the Henry IV plays as ‘‘rudimentary, naı¨ve and confused,’’ considering it to be ‘‘neither Shakespeare nor Frunza˘.’’42 However, its purpose was to please, and thus it became very much Shakespearean. The sets by Adriana Grand visualized a three-storied structure, suggestive of the Globe and the theater-within-theater metaphor. A crowd of many-colored secondary characters gathered within or around the construction. They were the audience of a composite production, stepping in and out of it at times and under-

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going rapid metamorphoses. This patchy public attended the verbal encounter between Falstaff and Prince Harry and volunteered comments in the form of exclamations. However, the comic duel was unequal, and the less-experienced actor interpreting Prince Hal was no match for the more-accomplished Dorel Vis¸an, the actor playing Falstaff. According to Morariu’s review, the production did not appeal entirely to the Romanian public, educated in the spirit of ‘‘perfection’’ conveyed by former Shakespearean productions in general. However, the uneven reception of this flawed cross-genre adaptation may tell us more about the modern needs of present-day audiences. Like their Elizabethan counterparts, the Romanian public enjoyed seeing Falstaff at war, in tavern, and in love, caring to a lesser extent about the sophisticated philosophical and historical ramifications implicit in a more sober stage production. A similar 1996 adaptation placed Falstaff on the stage of a musical theater in Constant¸a. The musical was named Falstaff Story 43 and it focused mainly on its central character, neglecting the ‘‘story,’’ or ‘‘history,’’ that lay behind the comic figure. The 1998 Romanian production of Richard II 44 at the National Theater Bucharest directed by Mihai Ma˘niut¸iu was the best example of international theater collaboration, participation of the media in advertising the play, and the self-referentiality of politics within the dramatic text. The mechanics of the production was the outcome of artistic and management collaboration between the Romanian National Theater and an American Art Management Corporation (SMART). The immediate result was that the play was conspicuously present in the media, and the figure of Marcel Iures¸ as Richard II, complete with red velvet gown and golden crown, came to be aligned to that of the current runners in the election campaign of that year. In a flash of the TV screen, present-day politics and English history came to be associated with the current race for power, and Shakespeare’s play suddenly became very popular with Romanian audiences. Moreover, the theater-within-theater convention was visualized in the first part of the production, when Richard was presented as the director and protagonist of his own show. He struck the gong and invited the audience to step into his fictional world and enter the play of life and death, of power and betrayal. The games at Court or in battle were allegorically presented in Richard’s royal theater, where flight was the dominant scenic metaphor. The Court was a Chorus figure; the battles were in pantomime, part of a symbolic theatrical representation. ‘‘All the world is a stage’’ seemed to be the guiding statement. This particular Romanian production of Richard II, however, forced us to read the formula both ways. We


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could observe the Elizabethan theater’s potential for promoting or subverting the ideology of its own culture and the relevance of the English histories for modern-day theatrical companies at least, if not for individual cultures. This commentary has tried to extend the critical tasks from the simple production history toward an understanding of the theatrical dimensions of the history plays. Most often, the histories disclose the partiality of competing explanations of political events. Human motives are particularly diverse, and historical circumstances expose multiple ironies that challenge their interpretive completeness. The paradoxes at play on the political stages of history make us wonder whether the readings attributed to various productions of Shakespeare’s histories are compatible with as many interpretations as there are eyes to hear or ears to see, according to Bottom’s particular perception. As Donald G. Watson points out, ‘‘politics as paradox insists upon the ‘both/and’ of contradiction, upon what A. P. Rossiter called the ‘two-eyed’ view, an ‘ambivalence’ which submits two opposed judgments or explanations without invalidating or discrediting either.’’45 Like Touchstone, I would suggest the logical inconsistency of if when advancing a possible interpretation of any foreign reception of Shakespeare’s histories. If certain audiences in any particular country feel that they may read specific political meanings in some of these plays, they are free to do so, without any record of their actual interpretation. If theaters and directors choose to suit their selective policy according to certain political needs, the subsequent analysis of these alternatives is purely conjectural. What remains highly probable is that Shakespeare seems to have sworn by what is not. Writing about the reception of Shakespeare’s histories in Belgium, Josef de Vos46 documents the monumental adaptation of the two tetralogies, entitled Ten Oorlog, during the 1997–98 period produced by the theatrical companies of Ghent and Antwerp. Josef de Vos explains how Flemish producer Luk Perceval, in collaboration with the translator/adapter Tom Lanoye, presented Shakespeare rewritten as an explicitly ahistorical trilogy, and affirms that the ‘‘reader or spectator no longer has the compelling sense of witnessing a series of events from English history.’’47 The reason for this unrecognizable adaptation lies, according to the critic, in the authors’ deliberate intention to present a digested version of the evolution of Western history in general.48 In this Belgian situation of compressing Shakespeare’s histories in production, the foreignization of the English playwright through translation/adaptation/production is a case in point. There are instances of such adaptations

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in Romanian productions of these plays as well. I have mentioned the conflation of Henry IV, Part 1 and 2, produced at the Nottara Theater in Bucharest (1976) and directed by Lucian Ghiurcescu, and the Henry VI plays, directed by Ioan Ieremia at the National Theater of Timis¸oara (1995). Similarly, the 1996 Falstaff after Shakespeare, produced at the National Theater in Cluj-Napoca, directed by Victor Ioan Frunza˘, was adapted from Henry IV, Part 1 and 2 and The Merry Wives of Windsor. However, what appears relevant in the account of the Romanian theatrical appropriations of Shakespeare’s histories is the fact that productions of Henry V are conspicuously absent. Probably this play is so especially relevant to British history and is so inextricably connected with a specific brand of English patriotism that directors elsewhere found it difficult to adapt it to a foreign domain of signification. The new criteria governing the Romanian reception of the history plays reconfigure the equation involving the theatricality of Elizabethan culture and the theater as an institution in that culture. The threat of the former Communist ideology’s attempt at controlling meaning and the theater’s natural subversive reaction have been replaced by a self-reflexive theatrical response to the challenge of the modern audiences’ predilections. As Dennis Kennedy notes when writing about Shakespeare in postwar Eastern Europe, ‘‘people looked for the same values in the crowded theaters as in the crowded churches: confidence, in search to regain lost humanist traditions.’’49 This novelty of interpretation through international collaboration and reliance on visual and kinetic elements of performance brings about an extravagant directorial tendency to adapt or compress the text in favor of scenic innovations. Romanian audiences still encountered difficulties in relating to the political implications of Elizabethan national culture disclosed through the histories, owing partly to their rather obscure chronicled relevance, and partly to the incompleteness of the abridged Romanian text. Nevertheless, the Romanian theater as an institution was very enthusiastic in performing the English historical past, with Romanian directorial and artistic skills, in a local but mostly international milieu. Thus, the ten Shakespearean history plays tended to represent the decalogue of multinational theatrical export. They acquired an existence outside themselves and became increasingly apolitical and ahistorical for modern Romanian audiences and theaters, an aesthetic form of communication rather than an instrument of political subversion. Writing about Shakespeare’s histories from the direction of the theory of drama, Pauline Kiernan argues that Shakespeare replaced


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historical accounts of past events with a self-proclaimed fiction in order to challenge history’s claim to truth.50 According to Kiernan, the dramatization of a section of English history by Shakespeare ‘‘is not a representation of what actually happened, but a performance that is taking place now in a process which is historicising prior authorities on what happened.’’51 Moreover, in the process of producing Shakespeare’s histories on the Romanian stage, one must take into account the often-invoked authorizing function of the director. Therefore, the production of a chronicle play does not only ‘‘historicize’’ Holinshed and rewrites England’s medieval past in Elizabethan terms, but it recomposes Shakespeare’s authority in terms of the respective director’s intentions. Thus, what remains of the play’s interpretation must be located at the intersection between Shakespearean and Romanian directorial authorship, taking into account the translator’s intervention into the text and the totality of the previous critical beliefs that found their way into the director’s and the audience’s minds. In addition, when taking such productions of the histories to foreign shores, such as in the Romanian versions of Richard III (Mihai Ma˘niut¸iu 1994) or Richard II (Mihai Ma˘niut¸iu 1998), for example, the intercultural paradigm achieves an incredible interpretative superstructure. The British, or Serbian, or Japanese audiences of these Romanian productions of Shakespeare’s plays are confronted with a triple coating of historicizing Shakespeare’s histories drawing on English history. This may sound confusing, but it is how things stand at this point in Romanian appropriations of Shakespeare’s histories.

4 Romanian Metamorphoses: Comedies The Layout

SPEAKING OF THE SUMMER AND FALL SEASON AT STRATFORD-UPON-AVON, Russell Jackson gives an account of the RSC 2000 production of The Comedy of Errors, directed by Lynne Parker, at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Calling it ‘‘the more satisfying of the season’s two comedies,’’1 Russell Jackson notes that ‘‘the permanent set of the townsquare was reminiscent of Casablanca.’’2 We are shown a picture (reproduced courtesy of the Shakespeare Centre Library) representing Anthony Howell as Antipholus of Ephesus, in a Western suit and tie, and Ian Hughes as Dromio of Syracuse, with a Turkish cap and vest. Their discussion focuses on the key Antipholus holds in his hand, a key to Adriana’s house or to European tolerance between East and West. Based on this scene, and recalling my general impression when seeing this production in Stratford-upon-Avon (summer 2000), I incline to say that the play’s East-West axis, Ephesus and Syracuse, was clearly brought into focus. The rug merchant in Arab dress, the courtesan dressed in a belly-dancing outfit, and the general Eastern Mediterranean turn-of-the-century atmosphere of the now (and then) Turkish Ephesus would be very familiar to a Romanian audience. Having been under Ottoman rule until the end of the nineteenth century, many towns in southern and eastern Romania would have provided a similar decor of Turkish caftans, threateningly decrepit inward-slanting buildings in the main square, and people donning head-wear like Dromio’s fez cap (in Romanian fes). This personal reading reminded me of the function of the theater in relation to national identity3 and the audience’s cultural horizon. With this issue in mind, this chapter examines the modern productions of Shakespeare’s comedies in relation to the current state of Romanian theater and the diverse relevance of economical and political transformations on cultural politics. In comparing the intellectual vision and artistic choices visible in productions of Shake96

4: ROMANIAN METAMORPHOSES: COMEDIES

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speare’s comedies from the sixties, seventies, and eighties to more recent ones, the main point is that the choices open to the 1990s appeared to be financial, while the challenge was still to maintain a highbrow directorial vision. Romanian directors have always revised Shakespeare’s comedies to accommodate more demanding modern audiences. They made alterations considering budgetary, casting, or running time concerns, but only to a certain extent. The highlight of these productions always remained a challenge to current social and political concerns, marked by a kind of conservatism maintained by the authenticating presence of Shakespeare. Tracing the recent history of romantic comedy Shakespeare on the Romanian stage, one conclusion is that a diversity of form and cultural focus characterized Romanian productions of Shakespeare’s comedies. From the experimental 1970s, through the extravagant and subversive productions of the 1980s, to the current vogue of adaptations and foreign touring company productions, multiple metamorphoses have been the defining mode. Since the history of Shakespeare in performance was marked by actions, reactions, and counter-movements as theater people searched for new ways of selling the plays to the public, it is convenient to divide the record of Romanian productions of the romantic comedies into four broadly-delimited periods. In the early postwar section of ‘‘hard’’ Communism (1949–59), most Romanian directors considered staging Shakespeare’s comedies as a form of evasion from the Communist program of Russian acculturation, while at the same time they saw it as a way of avoiding the ideological commands of Communist propaganda. The production of the romantic comedies suited a practice of providing ‘‘neutral’’ readings, relatively free from any political commands, though insisting on the social aspects in the comedies. The decade of the sixties brought a different approach to producing Shakespeare in general. Far from seeing the playwright as a cultural representative of the undesirable capitalist ‘‘other,’’ as in the previous period, the Communist authorities hoped to dignify and legitimize their political rule with the cultural authority of British imports, and few names served their purpose better than ‘‘Shakespeare’’ did. Consequently, they promoted the productions of this particular playwright extensively. Translators worked on improving the existing versions and scholars and theater critics produced valuable commentaries of the plays, in the Ian Kott vein.4 In the theaters, however, directors and theater managers showed a special preference toward producing the romantic comedies as an alternative to the more politically centered disposition of the tragedies.

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During the seventies and the eighties, producing Shakespeare was a special venture for theaters in Romania in point of experimentation. Determined to challenge a public accustomed to elaborate realistic scenery, theaters engaged few actors and placed them in simple, stylized settings. Shakespearean staging was re-conceived, and a new mode of performance came to dominate the theatrical scene. Directors reconsidered drastically the major elements of production, such as the style of acting, the shape of the acting area, the furnishing of the stage, and the treatment of the text. The story of Romanian Shakespeare in this period was a narrative of dramatic texts transformed to suit the directors’ artistic exigency and, occasionally, subversive ideological purposes. The potential of the romantic comedies for political sabotage directed against the Communist regime could not have been very high, but directors and especially actors found means to improvise extensively. Therefore, no individual representation of each production was the same as the one before it—especially the one in the opening night, when all the official figures would attend. In Romanian theaters all over the country, theatrical practices became highly codified, in contrast to the formal grandiloquent style of previous productions of Shakespeare in the romantic mode. The comedies were a good vehicle for theatrical iconoclasts to capture the public’s attention and reinvigorate Romanian appropriations of Shakespeare. Since changes in the theater mimicked larger cultural transformation, in the decade of the nineties and into the twenty-first century we saw an unprecedented explosion of a particular kind of Shakesploitation for theatrical purposes. The need for political subversion was there no more, and the performance of Shakespeare became the touchstone of any histrionic activity. The most far-reaching directors appropriated for Shakespeare consequential techniques of abstraction, theatrical self-referentiality, and expressionism. In an attempt to make Shakespeare relevant for the more informed postmodern Romanian audiences, directors brushed aside historical and textual authenticity in favor of theatrical virtuosity. They proposed an expansive exploration of scenographic solutions, including a theatricalization of the mise-en-sce`ne by incorporating music, song, and dance. Such productions were based on a bold reworking and modernization of the text in support of special interpretation, going so far as to display the directors’ or the actors’ personal translations and rewritings, often severely remote from any scholarly corroboration. Directors relied on a physical rather than a verbal theater, and they attempted acute experimentation with time and space. Shakespeare’s comic strategies, such as disguise, physical


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identicalness, surprise, transformation, manipulation of letters and songs, wrong delivery of letters, eavesdropping, drunkenness, and confusion, were particularly suitable to the directors’ theatrical intentions. The theater of the nineties suffered important transformations, and the productions of comedies in Romania in this period were especially capable of mirroring these metamorphoses.

The Fifties and Sixties In the Stalinist period 1949–59, the few Shakespeare plays that were produced at Romanian theaters in Bucharest were mainly comedies,5 in an attempt to avoid any political readings from the Communist censorship. On reviewing one of these productions, a theater critic of the time dared to ask timidly ‘‘Why Only Comedy?’’6 Cazaban did not go as far as to provide a convincing answer, but we may infer, in retrospect, that the political neutrality allowed in staging the comedies may have been the reason for which the theaters selected these particular plays. Another reason could be that the comedies are fundamentally interlocutory. Jokes, comic situations, or gestures demand a direct response. The audience’s participation finally constituted the comedy of a particular performance. By choosing the comedies as the Shakespearean means of delivering their theatrical, and often political, message, directors could find a perfectly valid reason for the audiences’ direct involvement in the representation. If there was a visible reaction to covert political meanings in the audience, or to the stimulation of the obscure nuances in these romantic comedies, directors could avoid direct responsibility by ascribing these responses to the genre’s inherent dialogical specificity. Accounting for the variety of meanings located in the productions of Shakespeare’s comedies and their perception by increasingly sophisticated audiences, it is possible to explain the preference for Shakespeare as a form of cultural self-identification. As David Willbern writes, ‘‘Shakespeare is the occasion for idealization in English literature,’’ specifically the ‘‘mirror in which we see our idealized selves.’’7 In selecting to produce a Shakespeare play, especially a comedy, or in decoding specific meanings in a certain production, Romanian directors and audiences predictably tended to idealize themselves as well as Shakespeare. In a 1958 article entitled ‘‘What Kind of Shakespeare Are We Playing?’’ a critic maintains that Romania was the leading country in the Balkans regarding the number of Shakespeare productions. He declares that Romanian theaters preferred the production of light

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comedies rather than turn to the great tragedies, the Roman plays, or the histories. Flavius complains that we have not given a production of one of the plays in the ‘‘roman trilogy’’ by Shakespeare, nor one of his historical tragedies drawing on the English chronicles yet. However, Flavius argues, ‘‘we produce, at extremely high expense of energy and funding, Much Ado About Nothing . . . Twelfth Night . . . The Taming of the Shrew, and so on.’’8 The theater critic raises the essential question of his study: What could have determined our theaters, in their noble contest of staging Shakespeare, to have preferred the ‘‘homely wit’’ of the comedies before the universal spirit necessary in the formation of the social consciousness of the present-day audience? Could it be the comfortable and conservative need of choosing the easy way and a more or less beaten track, without probing the Shakespearean sea with inexpert or hesitant fingers? Could it be the tendency of showing off by producing what is the most decorative in Shakespeare, instead of raising the audience to the high emotion of his most representative work? Could the cowardly defense against the competition with film, which has given us an unforgettable Hamlet, an interesting Othello, an impressive Richard III, an unusual Romeo and Juliet have caused this preference for the comedies?9

The critic’s series of rhetorical questions, when viewed from the direction of truths he could not say, lead to a singular conclusion: the period’s preference for ‘‘light’’ Shakespeare may have been an unacknowledged way of counteracting the political commands of an alien but very aggressive ideology. When directors would no longer confront the loud clamors of Soviet-generated Communist doctrines launched in the desert of people’s minds, they chose to elude the unwanted dogma by providing a bright theatrical smile, just like Shakespeare did in his time. A statistical survey of the Shakespeare productions during the decade 1960–70 leads to the not-so-surprising conclusion that the comedies were preponderantly produced in Romania. We find that state theaters all over the country brought forward to their public one production of As You Like It, one Comedy of Errors, one Much Ado about Nothing, two productions of Twelfth Night, and two of Two Gentlemen of Verona. The most popular comedies, however, were The Taming of the Shrew (four productions) and The Merry Wives of Windsor (four productions). Rather than offering a comprehensive review or analysis of each of these productions, I will focus on a few particularly memorable and indicative moments in some of them. I hope to unpack encoded attitudes toward the viewing audience of each period, the social and political function of the performance, and the em-


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bodied subjectivity of certain characters. As W. B. Worthen has pointed out, ‘‘performance criticism tends to assimilate ‘Shakespeare’ to a universalized sense of theatrical practice, practice which is founded on modern notions of identity and the subject.’’10 In studying the ways in which modern stage practices textualize performance, Worthen invites us to approach performance and text as forms of cultural production. Thus, performance criticism explores the reproduction of Shakespearean authority through the textualizing process of diverse stage practices. In showing how Romanian productions of certain romantic comedies advanced different models of identity and the subject in approximately each decade of Romanian appropriation of Shakespeare, this discussion implicitly sends messages about the prevalent theatrical practices of the period. Earlier Romanian productions of Shakespeare’s comedies during the sixties were played in the common key of enacting festive fantasies. According to these dominantly playful directorial readings, Shakespearean comedy was a dramatization of common wish-fulfillment fancies. The audiences of the grim post-Stalinist years needed to know that love affairs could be satisfying, families were bound to experience harmony, and young men and women were able to find happiness finally. Directors were willing to trace through these plays the development of the comic catharsis, the fusion of realism and fantasy, the dialectic between self and other, and the process of individual maturation from the solitary to the social. While being able to avoid direct political interpretations, directors found ways to pay lip service to the Communist authorities by insisting on the social aspects in the comedies. Further on, theater critics took over the political directive and emphasized the Socialist message by providing extensive Marxist-influenced readings of one production or other. The main question for Romanian directors was still ‘‘what can and what do I want to do with this play?’’ However, the important question of what this play can do for the audiences surfaced frequently in many productions of comedies during the sixties. A prominent translator of Shakespeare in this period gave a brief history of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-uponAvon, and reviewed a number of productions dedicated to the centennial jubilee of this theater on April 7, 1959. Mihnea Gheorghiu entitled his article, published in the main Romanian theatrical journal, ‘‘Shakespeare at his Home and Ours.’’ Regarding the Bucharest theaters, the Romanian critic and translator mentions the productions of The Merry Wives of Windsor, King Lear, and Twelfth Night. Gheorghiu adds other plays, mainly comedies, to the long list of Shakespearean productions of the late fifties, including Much Ado

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About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew. This record, listing the Shakespeare productions running in 1959 in Romania, is far from exhaustive, but it offers a brief glimpse on the abundance of comedies produced in this decade. As a conclusion to how and why Shakespeare has been appropriated by various cultures, Gheorghiu writes that the productions and translations of the English playwright can integrate the artistic values of all nations everywhere. The reason for such universality is, according to the critic, an ‘‘intentional’’11 presentation of a changing world. Ignoring the assertion regarding the authorial intention, which was part of the period’s critical apparatus, Gheorghiu’s suggestion that Shakespeare mirrors a transforming world emerges as consistent. The English playwright composed his drama in a world of transition, and the multiplicity and often ambiguity of messages makes these plays applicable to varied and often exotic cultural readings. All the more so when these cultures, like Romania, pass through difficult and repeated periods of social and political transition, either from the pre-war monarchic regime to Socialism, as the situation in the fifties demonstrated, or from the totalitarian Communism to democracy, as indicated in the 1990s productions. An interesting example of the director’s use of comedy in expressing subversive, dark, and politically provocative designs was the production of As You Like It at the Bulandra Theater. In 1961, the then young director Liviu Ciulei designed the sets of this production and chose to play Melancholy Jacques. Thus, the director was scenographer and actor at the same time. He played the downhearted Jacques, an image of the philosopher who rejected a shallow and adverse society. The choice of the same actor for playing the two dukes—the usurper and the usurped—rendered the fight for power even more dramatic and ambivalent. The audience was faced with a total spectacle displaying extravagant and highly accurate Elizabethan sets and costumes. The proscenium and tiring house were dutifully presented, and the harlequin and masked personages attended the performance as the audience. Most characters were wearing masks, and the grotesque elements appeared as incongruous in the middle of the rich scenery representing the forest of Arden, with drawbridges and catwalks. By intensifying the deformed portion within the pastoral and festive atmosphere, the director intended to raise questions regarding the total appropriateness of a delectable reading. Ciulei played Melancholy Jacques, the raisoneur of the play, and the only character that remained outside the magic circle of harmonious final happiness. Thus, the audience was warned against trusting the overall cheerful ambiance of light comedy completely.


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Based on the common theatrical practice that posits the ideological, authorizing function of the director, it is possible to infer that the entire spectacle had a special meaning, which needed to be decoded with a directorial key. The critic reviewing the 1961 production insinuated a note of disapproval in the director’s treatment of the play in the comic-lyric mode, stressing its unreal character of fantasy, of a fairy tale remote from reality. In a period that praised socializing readings in the realistic mode, critics could hardly agree to a production insisting on the playful component of this romantic comedy. They recommended a more Socialist-oriented theatrical reading, which would present the play as a ‘‘satirical pamphlet against the world of the usurper’s court, the tyrant, the clergy, and the mysticism they proclaim.’’12 Moreover, Alexandrescu expressed his displeasure at the fact that Ciulei dared to present critically and in a parodic manner not only the representatives of nobility, but also the working people. A servile Socialist production would present the shepherds, squires, and the servants as ideal hardworking supermen and superwomen, endowed with all the humanist-Socialist qualities. Having his shepherds and shepherdesses wear masks, the director made them the caricatures of real people who were not exempt from the attribute of falsity and corruption. Following the requirements of materialistic and anti-religious propaganda, critics in the sixties claimed in their writings a form of social satire that suited the regime’s re-fabrication of life and history in the materialistic mode. It so appeared, however, that Liviu Ciulei did not want to voice the play in the Marxist tone. His insistence on the comic fantasy and on the incongruous aspects of the comedy being represented helped him avoid the required Socialist-realist historicizing perspective. The Romanian directors’ interpretations of Shakespeare’s comedies were open to multiple possibilities because of the strange blend of tones. The carnivalesque, joyous atmosphere always disguised some dark and troubling elements. As You Like It was more than a simple pastoral comedy. It contained satirical elements and abounding philosophical meditation. When the director wished, the play could become a satirical pamphlet against tyrannical and despotic political government. The appearance of a light comedy of love, submerged in poetry and lyricism, concealed the vehement message of freedom, truth, and social justice. Ciulei’s 1961 production at the Bulandra Theater, for example, represented a subtle form of protest against a despotic Communist regime. The subversive meanings were concealed behind the mask of a merry comedy of love. Thus, the theater itself became a form of disguise and dissimulation. In

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Ciulei’s version, the Elizabethan setting was the frame for a modern interpretation, and the theatrical metaphor worked as a ‘‘flapper’’ to the audience’s ears, reminding them that they were supposed to decode dramatic images. The two sides of the stage were painted with a fictitious audience, thus enhancing the self-reflexivity of the play. Liviu Ciulei’s restatement of As You Like It remained a landmark for Romanian productions, and some of the play’s political associations were meant to be disquieting for the current regime. In 1963, there was a slightly different version of this production at the same Bulandra Theater, featuring an essential modification in the cast. Ciulei no longer played Melancholy Jacques, and thus the meaning suggesting covert directorial signification was lost. A polyphonic play with a complex structure that harmonized numerous themes and various stylistic formulae, Twelfth Night was one of the favorite comedies in many Romanian theaters. It represented an important challenge both for the stage directors and for the actors’ imagination and creativity. Especially in the Communist period, this play’s handling of illusion, disguise, and duplicity was used by many directors for addressing their special political agendas. In 1964, the Shakespeare jubilee year, Twelfth Night was performed in five Romanian cities—Pites¸ti, Ias¸i, Baca˘u, Taˆrgu Mures¸, and Petros¸ani. Each version brought up new and original details in point of directorial intention and the audiences’ potential responses to it. Two productions—one of Ias¸i National Theater, the other of the team in Baca˘u—were relevant through their originality. The stage directors (Crin Teodorescu in Ias¸i and Vlad Mugur at Baca˘u) deconstructed and then reconstructed the text in a personal way, according to the main idea they wanted to focus on. The directors also chose different translations of the play (Florian Nicolau’s and Mihnea Gheorghiu’s), in order to achieve the desired and accurate correspondence between text and image. Though these directors were very different in their approaches to Shakespeare, they had similar concerns about the twin pressures of being ‘‘true to Shakespeare’’ and making Shakespeare ‘‘our contemporary.’’ The Ias¸i production underlined the comic essence of the play, which presented a rich variety of human relationships. It revealed vitality, dynamism, joy of life, and optimism—a festive, Dionysian vision of the world. The director insisted on the characteristics of a folk festival, a carnival, presenting an overwhelming mixture of music, light, and color, a contagious euphoria and energy, farcical elements, and subtle irony. The original title was slightly changed— Twelfth Night became The Kings’ Night [Noaptea Regilor], in order to illustrate better the carnivalesque topsy-turvidom and the fickle al-


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terations of power in a disturbing world. The costumes and the background decorations descended from the commedia dell’arte. Masks, harlequins, and columbines emphasized the cheerful atmosphere and the theatrical implications. Music, dance, and scenic movements were more than simple dramatic instruments in this 1964 production of Twelfth Night at the Ias¸i Theater. These auditory and choreographic devices became states of mind. Sir Toby Belch and his friends were the central exponents of this carnivalesque world. They did not appear as a gang of disreputable drunkards, but as the embodiments of the festive spirit, in oppositions to the stern Malvolio. He was a trouble-feˆte character, repugnant through his misanthropy and servility. The reviewer of this production commended it as a ‘‘popular spectacle,’’13 in which the audience was expected to relish in the collective euphoria of carnival and reject sarcastically the pious puritan snobbery. The critic especially celebrated the production’s tone of popular feast, with young men and women rejoicing themselves, because it responded to the Communist regime’s necessity of representing an illusory world in which everybody was happy in the Socialist community, far from the troubles of real life. The artificial, frigid aristocracy was presented with subtle irony in this production of Twelfth Night. Orsino and Olivia were fatigued and lonely, and they despised the simple joys of life. The two aristocrats rejected reality and were trapped in a fake world. They were unable to escape the ‘‘appearance’’ imposed by their rank. Viola represented the play’s active principle by provoking self-knowledge in others. Her disguise made her the mediator between the vivid carnivalesque folk atmosphere and the artificial world of the gentry. From this perspective, the production was servile to the Marxist ideological commands of presenting the devitalized and debauched nobility, for obvious satirical purposes. However, the director allowed the actors to freely express their fantasy and talent. Relying on the assumption that the body was also the vehicle for Shakespearean meanings, Teodorescu left to the actors the liberty to release a specific, ideologically constructed Shakespeare through the metaphor of their acting. The scenographer reinforced the festive dimension by using a prodigality of colors. Sometimes the beauty of the scenery was too overwhelming, provoking in the audience a special attention to the elusiveness of existence. When reading the reviews of the time about this production, one has the impression that the director gave an ideologically servile version of Shakespeare’s comedy. The happy carnival atmosphere may be seen as in accordance with the prescribed buoyant spirit of early Communist energy, when young working men and women were presented in the media as splendid

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architects of an impeccable Communist society. However, when seeing images from this production, an observant eye notices that the festive group of Sir Toby, Maria, and Sir Andrew was wearing the conventional costume of stock commedia dell’arte characters. The image intensified the theatricality and illusion of the representation and raised doubts about a straightforward comical and festive reading. While the production of the Ias¸i theater seemed to enliven the already energetic script with a touching, optimistic tone, the performance of the Baca˘u theater focused on a more philosophical and meditative attitude. Vlad Mugur’s Kings’ Night proposed to underline the fact that life should not simply be lived through, but it also needed to be understood. The lyrical meditative tone was announced through the preliminary recitation of a number of Shakespearean sonnets. In using the sonnets as a framing device, by way of a prologue, the director tried to induce the audience’s selfawareness by showing them an antagonistic and vicious world. The relationships between the characters were quite different from the version of the Ias¸i theater. For example, Sir Toby and Sir Andrew were no longer merry friends. The former treated the latter with aristocratic haughtiness and witty irony. Sir Toby felt intellectually superior to Sir Andrew, but both were presented as the inadequate voices of the declining nobility. By comparison, Olivia was more human and more willing to accept real life, while Orsino seemed to be unable to grasp the truth. All the while, Viola’s disguise was not very efficient, as she could not fully hide her feminine side, her shyness and fears leading to comic moments. Feste was at the center of the play, the true master of the appearance-essence game. He was presented as a chameleonic and protean figure, combining melancholic pose with sharp irony and with ludic temperament. By conducting the Fool figure to the front of the stage, Vlad Mugur focused on the play’s poetic and philosophical dimension. The melancholic ‘‘wind and the rain’’ finale reminded that real life was not enacted in a happy amusement park, and that beyond the cheerful comedy and exemplary reunions lay the chill of everyday actuality. The music and the changes in lighting emphasized the characters’ metamorphoses, their transitions from illusion to self-knowledge. The important number of productions of Shakespeare’s plays in general during 1964 is explicable through the political and cultural command occasioned by the quatercentenary jubilee. The Communist regime considered an extensive cultural appropriation of Shakespeare in Romania at this stage as an efficient form of legitimization of their political practices and Marxist-Leninist cultural theories.


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They thought that, by financing the production of Shakespeare’s plays in many state-owned theaters all over Romania, audiences would be exposed to a classical flexible figure of world repute, which they could interpret according to the Communist ideological constraints. The selection of plays and the directorial choices rested with the theaters. At this level, the situation became less controllable and in need of definition of nuances. The options for the comedies sprang from a general exigency of avoiding difficult and oppressive plays, in a period when everyday life in Romania was heavy and depressing enough. The fact that certain comedies, such as Twelfth Night, were produced in five cities around Romania in the same year showed that directors at the theaters in the provinces, outside the Bucharest cultural center, chose to represent a Shakespearean romantic comedy in a frivolous mode, adducing few politically subversive implications. When social satire was present, it was interpreted in accordance with the Marxist critical requirements, thus adjusted to a perfectly orthodox explication. Directors outside Bucharest dared to produce few deviations from the Socialist and Marxist measure, and their productions of the comedies were routine festive entertainment events.

The Seventies and Eighties Inasmuch as Shakespeare’s comedies explore false authority and unstable relations of power, they can be read in the historicist mode, with certain precaution. The decades 1970–80 and 1980–90 were marked by certain subversive theatrical readings inscribed in the comedies. In this period, directors focused mainly on the great tragedies to express seditious meanings directed at the unpopular Communist regime. When theaters did produce comedies, these were treated as a ‘‘serious’’ approach to the omnipresent anomalies in real life. Concentrating on the mischief, verbal dexterity, the convention of disguises, and the role of clowns, the directorial discourse stressed the interplay between the Shakespeare text, the theater institution, and the historical and political conjuncture. Alternative production approaches to the comedies during the seventies and the eighties showed the precariousness of the institutions by which authority was socialized, and intended ‘‘Shakespeare’’ to be a place where ideology was being produced and communicated simultaneously. In these cases, the question ‘‘is it or is it not Shakespeare?’’ turned out to be simply rhetorical. By not privileging an individual subject—director, author, or actor—as the site of meaning, these

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productions worked through a displacement of authority—both textual and performative—designed to show the different ways in which identity was constituted. Apart from the theatrical readings of the comedies relating to ontological status and internal politics, there was an important reason pertaining to the dialectics of acculturation regarding the Romanian production of Shakespeare in general in this period. The politics of ‘‘Russification’’ of Romanian culture had failed in the previous two decades. In the period 1970–89, we witnessed a beneficial cultural freedom from this particular direction. In schools, Russian was not a mandatory foreign language anymore, and the political command was less aggressive in the theaters. Students in this generation were among the first who were allowed to choose the foreign language to study at school, and, in a natural way, most opted for English (or French and German to a lesser degree). This choice of foreign-language study in schools might not mean much for the cultural history of a nation, but, in the end, it created an educated audience in the large cities, which would already be familiar with the English cultural markers. Consequently, they would appreciate more eagerly the artistic alternatives aimed at adopting Shakespeare as a vehicle for theatrical and political confrontations. Moreover, the popularity of studying English as a foreign language among the younger Romanian generation can account for their increasingly larger interest in and familiarity with issues raised by Shakespeare’s comedies. I could designate the decades 1970–80 and 1980–89 as the period of As You Like It in point of Romanian productions of comedies. At theaters all over the country, no less than seven productions of this comedy appeared on the Romanian stages. Comparatively, there were four productions of The Taming of the Shrew, three of Twelfth Night, three of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and two productions each of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Measure for Measure, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Much Ado about Nothing. Therefore, the repetitive production of As You Like It on the Romanian stages in this period may prove a few points. It seemed that the political message of spurious authority inscribed in the serious texture of As You Like It was not alien to Romanian directors, who indirectly wanted to convey veiled public meanings under the guise of discreet laughter and apparently joyful harmony in a pastoral setting. According to the critic who reviewed the 1978 production of this comedy at the Baca˘u Theater, ‘‘there is frail understanding and little true harmony in the forest of Arden.’’14 All the productions of this comedy, mounted mainly at state theaters in various towns in Romania, not in the capital, visu-


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alized an antagonistic world of somber comedy, a comic view that centered on exposure, punishment, and exclusion. Such a complex comedy as As You Like It represented an artistic touchstone for any theater or director. The 1976 production by the fourth-year students of the Theater Institute Bucures¸ti demonstrated creative audacity, both in the choice of the Shakespearean comedy and in the directorial alternatives. The study of Shakespeare represented a mandatory subject in the core curriculum for the drama students in Romania, in both the acting and directing sections. Producing a Shakespeare play meant to the students a major test of their artistic capacity. The large number of young people selected to populate the play dictated the particular choice of As You Like It for this 1976 graduating student production. The young student-director replicated some of the theatrical maneuvers used in Ciulei’s production, such as casting the same actor to play the usurped and the usurper Duke. However, the actor was not so convincing, neither was his political message of false versus legitimate authority properly brought home. The reviewer of this production notes that the play created the ambiance of a ‘‘school festivity.’’15 The irony of this remark could be better understood if readers knew that the festivities during which prizes were given to the best students at school degenerated into formal affairs devoid of any meaning. Such conventional ceremonies were a relic of the Stalinist ritualistic claim of rewarding the nation’s best youth at an early age. Likewise, this graduating student production of As You Like It outlined a happy commonplace pastoral world populated with artless youths, which seemed very far from the cynicism and perverse candor in real life. Despite their lack of artistic experience, the young actors showed talent and creativity in performing Shakespeare’s contradictory and ambiguous characters. The set designers created a very simple but ingenious setting: a mere string suggested the contours of pointed arches of the castle and the trees of the Arden forest. The music was well chosen (the songs of Myriam Marbe),16 emphasizing the characters’ inner metamorphoses. The costumes were very simple, offering freedom of movement and of interpretation. The young actors’ performance was designed to underline the idea of liberty that dominated Shakespeare’s play, but they missed the grave tones and invariable questioning of identity. In 1975, Aureliu Manea put on stage at the Cluj National Theater a production of Twelfth Night that stressed the metaphysical significance of disguise. The director introduced the play in a very personal manner: the characters groped in the darkness, under the spell of Maria Ta˘nase’s folk lullaby. They looked for each other,

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stumbled, and staggered, as if they were sleepwalkers. The critic reviewing this production wrote that Manea admitted, in a note in the program, that he intended to symbolize the night of the spirit and those who allow themselves to be lured by it.17 Paraphrasing theatrically Goya’s engraving entitled ‘‘The night of reason engenders monsters,’’ Manea drew the audience’s attention to the irrationality and psychological deterioration within the system. This Twelfth Night became a night of the loss of reason and a night of wonder. The costumes seemed to draw on the Victorian age, but the space determination was ambiguous. Connotations of the British Empire and the extension of power from the West converged with the irrational proliferation of power from the Communist Russian East. The setting might be the superstructure of a steam ship, or a stylized image of an Elizabethan stage. In fact, Illyria was a place of confusion and insight, the magic land of self-discovery. The carnivalesque atmosphere had a hallucinating effect on the characters. For a moment, Sir Toby and Sir Andrew replaced the Bacchic libations of wine with the exotic marijuana. Everybody struggled to escape the state of illusion. Viola’s transvestitism functioned as emblematic of this topsy-turvy world. Cross-dressing here led not only to homoerotic implications, but also to the subversion of power. The heroine’s male disguise offered her the privileges of masculinity, helping her to make her way in the alien land of an oneiric world. This production emphasized the dark side of Twelfth Night. Consequently, the characters’ attempts to grasp the truth from the darkness of ignorance and alienation seemed to be quite unsuccessful. The joyful atmosphere in the end of the play was just another mask, hiding undisclosed fears. In 1978, Cristian Pepino, a young director at the Baca˘u Theater, had the audacity to produce As You Like It in a politically parodic mode, after the famed and revered production by Liviu Ciulei. In the play’s program, the director emphasized the disruptive and threatening tones deriving from a political reading of the play. The Forest of Arden was a locus of fictitious authority and deceptive bucolic landscape. The critic reviewing this play quoted the director’s notes in the program, and observed that the Arcadian Arden Forest was only illusory, because of the threat of death looming over its residents.18 In the confining critical spirit of the seventies, when a Shakespearean comedy was not properly produced unless it focused on aspects of social satire, Bogdan Ulmu disagreed with Pepino’s parodic and politically sensitive theatrical interpretation. The critic considered that the satire of courtly life and the play’s metatheatrical component were not sufficiently highlighted. The young direc-


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tor preferred to foreground what Ulmu called ‘‘secondary episodes’’ centered on slapstick comedy and melancholic music, composed by a reputed Romanian folk singer, Nicu Alifantis. However, Pepino chose to cast the same actor in the roles of Duke Frederick and Duke Senior, and the acting was declarative and obviously parodic. Thus, this production made a statement to the audiences of the small provincial town of Baca˘u, a place where significant and revolutionary events rarely happened. Living in a world of make-believe and content with satisfying the needs of the body and the requirements of a good life seemed a doubtful option. In the real world of Communist politics, where all the games were being played, people had two faces, and brothers destroyed each other for the sake of power. However, nobody could distinguish between good and evil because the entities were very much alike, if not identical, like the Duke twins. Another production of As You Like It, directed by Alexandru Dabija at the Cluj National Theater in 1979, raised not only the usual metatheatrical issues and the political innuendo, but it addressed religious concerns. In a period when religion was, if not under persecution by the Communist regime, at least in a state of deliberate neglect, the main sets designed by Theodor Ciupe showed a high figure in a long white robe, with arms stretched like in crucifixion. This five-meter-high structure was placed in a central position on the stage, arms outstretched, dominating the setting. The vertical position of this frame formed a cross with the two horizontal levels of the stage space. The Christ-like representation, which was a bearded and bald-headed person very similar to the Shakespeare authorial image, loomed over the actors’ scaffolding and ladders. These constructions pictured synthetically the Elizabethan stage doors and the tiring house. The scenographer Theodor Ciupe was awarded an important Romanian theatrical prize for the sets to As You Like It in 1980. The director articulated social issues in the language of the theater. The social hierarchy was represented at the two levels of the stage, and the climbing or sitting on the two ladders placed on the sides figured the ascension to or descent from the positions of power. The Christ-like figure’s long robe covered both levels of the structure, and its middle folds worked at times like a curtain. Jacques’s head popped up at the upper level, in the heart region, to meditate on the world as a stage theme, while Audrey and Touchstone consummated their ribald jokes from the folds at the lower level, generally corresponding to the figure’s crotch area. The production showed a world of Columbines and Harlequins moving like puppets on a string. In the final reunion scene, the two worlds—of the court and of the forest—were clearly delimited by

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the central presence of the crucified Christ-author, which dominated the theatrical and social hierarchy. Parties kept on their allotted sides of the stage, and there was no communication, or final communion, between the illusory woodland world and the elaborately structured circle of the court. In Romania’s cultural territory of the seventies and eighties, the Youth Theater of Piatra Neamt¸ was considered a launching space for new talents. Young up-and-coming directors and actors started their artistic trajectory from this Youth Theater in the extreme north of the Moldova region. This theater created a tradition in staging Shakespeare, and the fact that the majority of actors were young made the productions of the romantic comedies a good opportunity for promoting fresh talents. The young director Alexandru Tocilescu, for instance, interpreted The Merry Wives of Windsor at this theater, in 1978, ‘‘as seen through the eyes of his generation.’’19 The entertainment characteristic of the comedy was the main outline of this spectacle, where color, music, rhythm, dance, and movement contributed to create the impression that the audiences participated in a special game of modern mystery-theater. The production looked like a musical, because Nicu Alifantis, a popular folk singer and composer, created the music, while the young painter François Pamfil designed the sets. The critic reviewing this production considered it ‘‘a total show’’20 but interpreted the modern setting as a sample of the current western consumer society. In the required note of social criticism, Mira Iosif analyzes how the production parodied some of the Western myths and an obsolete system, presumably the capitalist one. The critical implication is that everything coming from the Western world was corrupt and harmful. According to this reviewer, Shakespeare satirized the evils of ‘‘His’’ society in this comedy, just as this particular production satirized the vices of the entire Western industrialized civilization.21 The Ford and Page couples, Shallow, Slender, and Mistress Quickly were presented as typical characters through which Hollywood stars, international sports figures, advertising, and art as consumer goods became the object of ridicule. Such a socializing Marxist reading was meant to hit home the idea that capitalist values were harmful, and that only Socialism was the viable way to progress and civilization. Paradoxically, an author of this reviled Western civilization was employed by the Communists to interpret their biased views of the capitalist society. How the Marxist idea had been proved to be wrong, only life could tell. In any case, this production of The Merry Wives of Windsor offered an image of a social universe in which the consumer society was made to look limiting and disabling, while the Romanian


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people of those times were deprived of most goods defining consumerism. Many of them wished to have lived in such a futile society and enjoy the commodities it could offer. Theater critics could say all they wanted about a certain production, because the reality of the theater was different. Like in life, where the Romanians’ social and material problems belied the Socialist materialistic views of a festive ideology, the theater showed a different version than the one envisaged by the Communist leaders. Tocilescu’s 1978 production of The Merry Wives of Windsor responded only partially to this socializing interpretation according to which the play satirized the vices of capitalist society. Viewing the first half of the comedy, satire and light entertainment could indeed offer this general impression. From the second half of the play, however, the tone was somber and more profound. When Falstaff, the predominant vice figure of this modern morality play, was punished at Herne’s oak, the production showed the world’s cynical ruthlessness and indifference. The clown became the knight of the triste figure, and the audiences could see how unmerciful and inhuman their world was. The rest is silence, as this sad ending said without words. By introducing this dispirited note in the festive tone of the comedy, the director hoped that the audiences leaving the theater would not retain the image of festivity and delectation, but the muteness of a harsh world. People were expected to remember that they lived in a cruel society, which had no regard for the individual, and where a valuable intellectual could be branded at the pillory just as easily as a fool could obtain academic titles. Like life, the theater could be what biased ideologies wanted to make of it. There was always a variable factor, like the final silence and sadness in this production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, which told more than the critics’ prudently designed words could ever say. In 1980, the Youth Theater of Piatra Neamt¸ produced The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Iulian Vis¸a. About this production, critics agreed that it was light and superficial, with many elements of the slapstick comedy. While praising the innovative spirit of this professional youth theater, Virgil Munteanu noticed that the Romanian theater of the eighties had transcended the need for modernization as an end in itself proposed just for the sake of experiment.22 The critic considered this compulsion for originality, manifested in the form of an appetite for parody and the extraordinary, as a characteristic of the immature adolescent youth, which the more adult Romanian theater had fortunately outdistanced.23 Iulian Vis¸a produced a dynamic spectacle, yet staged in an excessively comic mode. The induction was played in the theater’s foyer, among the audience. The

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scene at Padua was set on the main theater stage, and it was played in a more conventional fashion. The third part, however, was performed in the center of the theater hall, in a circus arena. Here, the taming of the shrew was executed as the taming of a wild animal in public view. This interpretation diminished the psychological proportions of Katharina’s transformation and lost every dramatic purpose in the ridicule of frivolous laughter. Katharina terrorized her father and relatives by shooting a gun. People laughed. Lucentio in love acted like he was inebriated, banged his head on the walls, and started to speak Italian. People laughed. Petruchio came to the wedding dressed as a kindergarten kid. People laughed. Bianca sang in parody of opera and pop music. People laughed. The horse spoke English, and people laughed. The audience laughed because the knockabout farce was funny and there was a lot of rough-and-tumble. However, where was Petruchio? Where was Katharina? Their complex personalities were buried in the incredible amount of cheap horseplay. Such light productions would suit the ends of the Communist authorities. They wanted their people as brainwashed and subdued as possible, addicted to low entertainment and circus in order to forget their material needs. Incidentally and, probably, involuntarily, the young director Iulian Vis¸a created just this type of play out of Shakespeare’s comedy. Even this exceptionally comic mode of interpretation speaks for the enduring power of Shakespeare to compel audiences, despite the type of inflated rhetoric that often accompanied such statements. Shakespeare’s cultural force could easily lead certain directors to dilate on the praise of the power immanent in the text. One year after the production of the Shrew in 1981, the same ingenious director Iulian Vis¸a staged The Merchant of Venice at the Botos¸ani Theater, in the north of the region of Moldova. This production was important because it revived a tradition of performance of this comedy, which had been interrupted for more than half a century on the Romanian stage. While earlier Romanian theatergoers had seen The Merchant of Venice in the interpretation of great artists such as Matei Millo and Constantin Nottara, theaters and directors in the twentieth century neglected this play for more than fifty years. The splendid translation in verse by the Romanian poet and novelist Gala Galaction gave a special elegance to this production of the Merchant. However, Romanian critics suggested Socialist-oriented interpretations of the play. One reviewer wrote about the satire directed at an epoch of transition to capitalism and the ‘‘de-humanizing influence of money.’’24 According to this critic, Shylock represented the mores of a capitalist society whose materiality drove the individ-


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ual to total despair and alienation. The Communist ideologists wanted people to believe that theirs was the best of the possible worlds, forcing them to see the black rose painted red. In this view, capitalism was supposed to be a source of personal division and estrangement from the essential human values. The pursuit of finances and marketable commodity were seen as abominable sins by the leveling Communist thought-speculators. In Vis¸a’s interpretation of The Merchant of Venice, romantic love, considered an essentially human emotion, was set against the consuming forces of money and commerce. This opposition was rather artificially rendered through the contrasting worlds of Venice and Belmont. The stage space was clearly divided between the Rialto, where commercial activities took place and where all characters plunged into huge water tanks whenever they made a transaction, and Belmont, a pillow-like white place of idyllic purity. The all-toostrong contrariety of wet and clean, evil and good, wild splashing and divine music neglected much of the play’s ambivalence. The terms were too drastically defined, leaving no room for doubt or wonder. The Communist ideas of equality and justice pretended that all people were deemed equal, but practice had it that some were just more equal than others were. Similarly, this production suggested to its audiences that Western capitalism was bad and inhuman, but practice showed capitalism as the only place where money came from, so it was very useful. Whether one waddled or dived in the waters of commerce, one still had to get wet. History has proved this point cogently, since all the former Communist rulers in Romania, supposedly holding high social ideals of equality and fraternity are now very prosperous businessmen, fully adapted to the capitalist system they used to vilify in words only. The rest of the population in Romania, now as before, trudges in the shallow pool of full equality in poverty. The director chose to maintain the tension between fidelity to the Shakespeare text, to the social and political reality in Romania, and to the audience by exploring the play in a disruptive mode. Since dismal, threatening atmosphere and political corruption were the order of the day in the real-world Communist Romania, Measure for Measure seemed the appropriate ‘‘dark’’ comedy for the beginning of the eighties. The Communist politicians were increasingly distanced from the people’s problems, busy as they were with their own business interests, and the moral and material criteria were at their lowest. In such circumstances, a theater from a smaller town in Romania, the Theater of Pites¸ti, produced Measure for Measure in 1982. This was the first production of the play in the eighties,

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after the memorable production directed by Dinu Cernescu in 1972. The director of this stage version, Mihai Lungeanu, made significant changes in the character delineation and the plot. He altered the ending, though without changing the text. The director departed from the traditional version presenting an enlightened Duke Vincentio who wanted to amend the vitiated morality of the city of Vienna. The Duke was enacted as an unscrupulous manipulator of lives and consciences, a deceptive politician who planned a double coup. He wanted to impose a drastic regime of constraint on his subjects vicariously, using Angelo as an unwitting intermediary, and he intended to discard a possible rival to power in the process, since Angelo was Vincentio’s cousin after all. The tradition of Angelo’s theatrical presentation was completely overturned in this production of Measure for Measure when he appeared as the self-righteous character whose ethical principles threatened Vincentio’s corrupted pursuit of power. A self-possessed intellectual whose highbrow contemplation kept him far from the court intrigues and corruption, Angelo was sincerely convinced of his mission of effecting ethical purification in the depraved city of Vienna. When he came to rule, Angelo was not polluted in contact with the entrapping force of Power. His indecent proposal to Isabella disclosed just a moment of weakness, and was interpreted as an inevitable tribute to her beauty and spiritual excellence. Thus, Isabella appeared as une aˆme soeur, Angelo’s dyad of purity and truth. Despite the contrasts between the two characters, the director presented Angelo and Isabella as aspiring toward the same goals, and the moral corruption of Vienna could not pervert their lofty, respectable ideals. The director Mihai Lungeanu modified the play’s ending too. By ordering the killing of Claudio, despite the fact that his apparently obscene inclination had been satisfied, or so he thought, Angelo demonstrated that he chose to act according to the dirty rules of the mechanism of power that he had at his disposal. After having been ordered to marry Mariana, Angelo walked to the gallows, not ready for any compromise. These were raised for him at the back of the stage, on the same scaffolding that had figured the triumphal arch celebrating Angelo’s elevation to power in the first act. The audiences could infer that he died with dignity, rationalizing the mutability of power and of moral contingency. All the other characters were modeled according to this fundamentally deconstructed antithesis Vincentio-Angelo (and Isabella). In the special sequence of characters created by this reversal, Escalus was the obscure personage lurking behind Vincentio’s dishonesty and deception, and Clau-


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dio was a frivolous young man who lacked any sense of honor or responsibility. The play was set in the Vienna of the latter half of the nineteenth century, the period of Franz-Joseph’s reign and of the Strauss waltz. The city of Vienna teemed with vice and displayed cases of low and high treason. Angelo and Isabella opposed this corrupt world with the frail arms of their intellectual integrity and/or purity, so they had to be annihilated. By reversing the traditional meanings ascribed to the two poles of power and ethics in the play, this production painted an alreadydark comedy in even more dismal tones. This was the moral and political panorama of Communist Romania in the early eighties, and the corrupt and manipulative Vincentio could easily be identified with the Communist president Ceaus¸escu, while Escalus and the praetorian friars looked like his acolytes. The two sneaky and anonymous Gentlemen in the Friar’s company, who pulled invisible strings, were the threatening figures of the Communist secret police. These mute characters created by Mihai Lungeanu blended convincingly in the background of suspicion and uncertainty underlying the Vienna of this production. Faceless supporters of a distorted ideology and maiming political practice, these symbols of the everpresent secret police did not offer coherent actions for preserving the regime or accomplishing Vincentio’s orders, but were a necessary attribute engendered by fear. Having no clear identity themselves, the members of the secret police in the Communist state were dreaded instruments of maintaining a power that had little or no sustenance and justification apart from the oppressive state of anxiety they were able to maintain among the populace. By showing them on stage as the pillars of the Duke’s regime of suspicion and terror, the director used a significant character addition to the Shakespeare text in order to emphasize the dangers of the Communist totalitarian state for the people’s mental sanity and individual good judgment. A fascinatingly subversive production of As You Like It, directed by Nicoleta Toia at the Ias¸i National Theater in 1982, raised important issues regarding the indirection of a stage director’s political agenda in those times. While reviewers noted that this version of the play was nothing more than ‘‘a bucolic comedy in which all the profound meanings have been submerged,’’25 we may read differently between the lines of the director’s statements in the play’s program. Like the preface of a book, in which writers motivate their intentions, the program was considered to capture the volatile and often contentious directorial design of approaching Shakespeare. According to the reviewer, Nicoleta Toia admitted that Jacques’ role in the play

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was conventional and prosaic (‘‘Jacques is not Hamlet, after all’’), so she dismissed this character to a minor plane. However, in the program the director acknowledged the comedy as a philosophical parable of aggregated nuances and intense psychological intensity. It replicated the absolute equation tyranny-liberty from the histories, and the love paradigm from the sonnets. How could a director who had such views of the theatrical amplitude of As You Like It have presented it in a simplistic farcical pastoral mode? Was Nicoleta Toia not aware of the play’s political connotations? The program says she was. In that case, the only possible answer could be that she chose to interpret the comedy in the high-spirited mode, in order to veil the political commentary. Nevertheless, a significant change in the play’s final reparation of injustice made the audiences think twice before leaving the theater completely satisfied. Apart from relegating melancholy Jacques to a secondary role, thus categorizing the abstract theorization of life as spiritless and conventional, Toia suppressed the character of the other Jacques altogether. The younger brother to Oliver and second son of Sir Rowland de Bois was supposed to announce Duke Frederick’s conversion. His episodic and conventional appearance would have been meant to declare the restoration of the rightful order, and the possibility for the legitimate Duke Senior to regain his lawful possession. Without this intervention, audiences retained the image of a bucolic illusory world of the forest, where there was no right or wrong, and no hereafter. Conversely, in the real world, the usurper would be allowed to rule free of any care. No higher moral or legal authority could penalize usurpation and fraternal malice. Depression and lack of confidence in the restoration of justice were the prevalent moods in the Communist Romania of the early eighties. People had lost all hope that something could be changed in the implacable and expropriating grinding machine of Communist political power. The critic reviewing this comedy extended the ideologically valid interpretation of the play in the merry mode, noting that Jacques’ absence signified that ‘‘nothing intervened to change the paradisial life of the community in the Forest of Arden.’’26 Like the Communist ideological speculators, this critic wanted people to think, or hoped they would think, that existence in a utopian communal fairyland could efface the abruptness of real life. The intention was to obscure the difficult reality of the Socialist regime by suggesting an ideal image of the Communist utopia. Toia’s version of As You Like It, however, offered her audiences no false optimism. As long as the iniquitous ruler(s) did not change their ways or resign, which they seemed unlikely to do, life in the


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Communist community continued to be a false game of deceit and betrayal under the appearance of happiness and prosperity. The Two Gentlemen of Verona was produced in 1983 at the Comedy Theater. Alexandru Dabija articulated the grave elements in this early romantic comedy. He played the tension between female love and male friendship in serious undertones, suggesting betrayal of male friendship and an understanding of female love in heavily determined sexual terms that amounted to near rape. The final celebration of male friendship and the comparative deflation of malefemale love may have come as a possible expectation in a play largely based on self-deceit. Valentine spoke of love as being some foolish sensibility, and ended by falling madly in love with Silvia. Similarly, Proteus in love appeared to be mentally alienated. Psychologically unstable, his unrequited love for Silvia seemed to ‘‘metamorphose’’ (1.1.66) him drastically, making him show some of the attributes of the romantic damned heroes, according to Dostoyevsky’s fashion. The director’s choice of a prose translation by Anda Teodorescu and Andrei Bantas¸ highlighted the play’s narrative aspect of disruptive emotions, as well as the slapstick comedy in the clowns’ scenes. A good joke could be conveyed in a serious mode or in a cascade of laughter. Alexandru Dabija chose both methods to show the contradictory nature of sentiments and the fractured rhetoric that lay behind the facade of declarations. Love was seen at once as sublime and ridiculous, and the audiences laughed at Proteus wearing a necklace of love letters, which he had written to Julia in lachrymose pathetic moans. The faithful Julia, who thought she could escape the restrictive social conventions limiting her gender by adopting cross-dressing for the perfectly conventional reason of getting her lover back, behaved like a spoiled brat. Silvia was a frivolous lady who imparted her flippant graces to many admirers. Her father, the Duke, simulated deafness in order to hear once more the adulatory chorus of female voices (his daughter’s young companions) who wished him good morning. In this 1983 production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Dabija tried to alleviate the strain produced by the violent and unexpected turnabouts in the play’s concluding moments through pure slapstick comedy. In the woods, where everything was possible, a fierce outlaw menaced his prisoners with a long sword, while he constantly stumbled on the ropes he had tied them with. Lance looked into a tree hole and suddenly wiped his face of his master’s spit, which had reached him against the wind. The erotic and the bawdy aspects of love were conveyed through the inventory Lance made of his milkmaid’s graces. The clown’s splintered language, in which nothing

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was communicated directly, appeared in coarse prosaic Romanian, as the vernacular idiom of crude peasantry. Despite all this laughter, Alexandru Dabija ascribed an intense and gloomy annotation to this light-hearted comedy. After Valentine announced the happy closure represented by the two marriages, which were supposed to consecrate ‘‘one mutual happiness’’ (5.4.170), the two heroines, who had been at the center of all the adversities and disruptions, were left alone on the stage. The fickle Proteus and the comic congregation forgot about Julia and Silvia, who remained to find their way in the solitude of the deserted stage. For a moment, the crude white light gave emphasis to their unjustified separation, as if the absence on the stage replicated the waste in their souls. Seeming absolute bliss resonated into something else. In showing the different ways in which identity was constituted and disrupted in the play world, the director of this production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona reminded his audiences that, like in life, total content was and was not among them. A protean play, Twelfth Night may assume many shapes, in accordance with the wishes of the directors who orchestrate it. Especially in the early eighties in Romania, this play was used to typify the abnormality and irrationality of a world in constant degradation, ridiculed under the mask of carnival. The 1984 production at the Bucharest National Theater, directed by Anca Ovenez-Doros¸enco, raised uneasy questions and an even more alarming answer regarding the malformed spectacle of a social milieu in persistent moral and psychological decline. In the program of this production, the director announced a ‘‘grotesque vision of comedy,’’ as confirmed by the critic reviewing this version of Twelfth Night.27 Radu-Maria argued that the Shakespeare text, however, could not be restricted to this ‘‘limitative directorial vision.’’28 We can find here a deliberate conflict between what the director wanted to convey to the public and the critical reading, which had to conform to the ideological demands. Orsino’s pathetic commendation of music as the food of love and Olivia’s outrageous gestures and accents of voice were reprimanded by the critic. However, the parodic representation of love, and especially art, raised serious questions regarding the liberty of artistic expression in the Communist regime. Viola and Sebastian appeared in white fluffy dress, the gentle metaphors of seraphic lyricism. Viola’s cross-dressing typified an androgynous Eros dedicated to childish pranks. The merry group was meant to suggest the liberation of subconscious sensuality from the conventional constraints. Sir Toby was a jovial old man who was having a good time within certain limits. Sir Andrew, however, was a ludicrous clown who


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jumped clumsily and yelled in a loud voice. The entire jolly company appeared to be the mimes of genuine feeling, like in the clowns’ pantomime of life. This theatrical overstatement was meant to shock the audiences into seeing the harsh difference between the pretension of a good life, as promoted by the Communist authorities, and the sorry reality. In this production, Feste was placed on a stage of his own, marking the limit between the stage world and the real one. He lived in an auxiliary realm at the frontier between the societies of the comedy and the audience. The superior and concessive note conveyed by his humor was intended to remind everybody of the necessity for reconciliation amid the madness of this world. However, Malvolio was the character that focused the audiences’ attention. His grotesque behavior was directly conductive to the illiterate upstart Romanian president of the time (Ceaus¸escu). The initial somber and sardonic attitude adopted at the start by this servile character developed into a disproportionate aggrandizement of the self. Malvolio had reached a prominent position in the house, but was still a servant to his mistress. The spiritual tumefaction of his ego made his

Twelfth Night directed by Anca Ovanez-Doros¸enco at the Bucharest National Theater (1984). With Damian Craˆs¸maru (Orsino), Tamara Cret¸ulescu (Viola), Silvia Popovici (Olivia), Gabriel Oseciuc (Sebastian), and Mihai Ma˘laimare (Feste). Courtesy of the Bucharest National Theater.

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tight black costume seem notably rigid, and the swelling in his legs produced by the crossed garters typified an oversized individuality. Likewise, the president Ceaus¸escu was constrained within the narrow margins of the Communist ideology, which he promoted only superficially. His servile position toward Russian politics and his status as a social climber within a relative hierarchy were clearly defined by Malvolio’s position in the power structure of servants. Gradually, intense megalomania overpowered this self-deceiving character, and Malvolio’s conduct attained an extreme of the ridiculous when he imperiously demanded his mistress to admit to the sentiments he believed she confessed in the letter by poking at her with an umbrella. By using the theatrical meaning expertly, the director conveyed a covert message to the audience, inviting them to acknowledge the phony quality of such an individual and to agree to his final exclusion from the general, though doubtful, mirth of the spectacle. In 1985, the Nottara Theater Bucharest inaugurated a new production of As You Like It, directed by Dan Micu, in a remarkably innovative mode. The pastoral was adumbrated by the recollection of death lingering among us in the happiest places and times. Melancholy Jacques and his reflection on life’s ages and margins, as well as the episode of the killing of the stag, was meant to remind the audiences that the comedy’s ludic fantasy may decline into the uneasy leaden shade of Saturnine melancholy. In the mid-eighties, when the Romanians’ oppression by the Communist regime was at its highest in the form of material deprivation, artists tried to offer a glimmer of hope by sending messages to the effect that everything was not lost after all, though it very much seemed so. The critic reviewing this production was vaguely defiant of the censorship when he analyzed the issues of usurpation, rebellion, and exile in a double entendre mode. Constantin Radu-Maria writes that ‘‘Shakespeare does not lie to us: only the outlaw can escape into the wilderness, or a person who refuses social servitude, which, in some moments of history, may become more repressive than the natural confinement.’’29 The critic alluded to the repressive Communist regime, and insinuated that the people who refused to accept social and political subservience placed themselves in the position of outcasts. This description hinted at the numberless Romanian intellectuals who chose the way of exile in the Western democratic world rather than abide by the distorted rules of an oppressive political system. Paraphrasing the depressing social and psychological situation in Romania at that time, Dan Micu’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s


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comedy asphyxiated all the light comic elements by focusing on the dismal individual drama. The director figured Duke Frederick’s court as an instruction camp, where the person was dehumanized and stripped of all distinct qualities in the process of ceremonial power. This place looked like a boxing ring or an animal enclosure, and in both interpretations the image of violence and confinement was overwhelming. Moreover, this arena was doubly enclosed; besides the fence, it was encircled with a kind of moat with stagnant water. Like from Communist Romania, nobody could escape the enclave of spurious power and incredible oppression. The inmates in this peculiar form of prison had only two options: either to act in blind subjection to the strictly determined rules belonging to the hierarchy of political power, or to choose self exile in order to achieve consistency. Escape to the Forest of Arden, which was a symbol of freedom and renaturalization, was not easy at all. Like the escapees from the concentration camps, fierce hounds chased the poor fugitives. This image recalled the innumerable tragedies having happened at Romania’s western borders, where large groups of emigrants were fleeing the Communist country-prison, some for nobler reasons and others just for a better life. By alluding to a current political and administrative situation in Communist Romania, the director used modern stage practices to textualize performance, so that the Shakespeare name became a highly valued pretext to contextualize Romanian politics in a clandestine mode. Like many Romanian directors of the late eighties, Dan Micu reproduced the Shakespearean authority through the textualizing process of directly involving the dramatic text in the current politics of the city. In this 1985 production of As You Like It at the Nottara Theater, Dan Micu used the recurrent but significant doubling of the usurper Duke Frederick and the exiled Duke. This artifice of physical identity drew attention to the relativity of relationships and of criteria that lead to the negotiation of political power. While tyranny expressed the submission to a conventional form of hierarchy per se, which annulled individual freedom, the escape into nature showed how all forms and social conventions shrank and shifted in a different milieu. When the formerly powerful personage encountered the same hardships as his vassal, the genuine nature of people’s personalities became known. Relationships suffered a forest-change, instead of a sea-change, like in The Tempest, being transformed from an abstract socializing convention into concrete communal practices. The governor and the governed became mutually convivial. The tyrant became the first citizen, a model for the community by

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his wisdom and rightful exercise of authority. He no longer enjoyed the ethically meaningless games of the court jesters, who left him anyway, but kept company with sagacious philosophers. Melancholy Jacques reminded the duke of the right measure of things, in keeping with the natural order, and he corrected all excessive escalation of pride or emotion. In a paradoxical way, this directorial version of life in the Forest of Arden was very far from advising people to rough it in the wild in order to find themselves. Moreover, this world of civility and social order represented by the woods, where community practices and individual values were judiciously appreciated, looked very much like what the Romanians thought (and some still do) of the Western society. The austere setting representing the Arden forest did not look as threatening and implicative of violence as the usurper’s court. However, the world of freedom lay on the other side of a high wall, and some ivy leaves climbing on it figured the greenery. This wall was at the back of the stage, so that the audience had the impression that they looked from the interior of this world of liberty. What lay beyond the tall wall, or iron curtain, or the tyranny-civility divide, the audience could guess easily. As in a concentration camp, there were two fire escapes climbing on that wall, as if announcing that, in case of emergency, there was always a way back from the self-exile of the wood, or from the Romanians’ escape to the Western world. Dan Micu provided a special ending to this significant, though rather gloomy, production of As You Like It. Conforming to the dispirited image he wanted to impart on his audiences, the director could not accept the comparatively easy and unmotivated optimistic ending. When the wicked were reported to repent unconditionally and universal harmony was restored, all was too good to be true. Consequently, the actors stepped out of their own roles, and they assisted indifferently to a final scene that was not acceptable from a realistic perspective. Thus, acting as individuals outside the characters they represented, the blessing of Hymen became a simulacrum in a now shattered theatrical illusion, with actors divested of their attributes. This was a harsh reminder that the reality of tyranny still existed, and it awaited the audience beyond the illusory walls of the theater building. The 1986 production of As You Like It at the Bras¸ov Drama Theater, directed by Florin Fa˘tulescu, was a particular case in point regarding the directors’ authorizing function, which placed each Shakespeare production in an idiosyncratic intercultural encounter with current political connotations. In a period when many winters of the Romanian people’s discontent and bitterness had assaulted


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the social security of the Communist authorities, the director subordinated the illusory vision of happiness and the play’s meditative sphere to a personal discourse relying on grave consideration and scenic improvisation. The Romanian prose translation by Lucia Demetrius was meant to convey the note of reality and immediacy to the Shakespearean comedy. In the commedia dell’arte mode, the theatrical troupe alighted on stage from their strolling players’ cart, disputing their costumes frantically. While Melancholy Jacques announced gravely that ‘‘All the world is a stage,’’ the actors enacted parodically the seven ages of man. The usurper duke’s court was marked heavily by heraldry, symbolizing the combative spirit of the current power. In a distant corner was a dusty piano locked with a huge bolt, signaling that the arts were silenced when intolerant totalitarian domination reigned supreme. In contrast to this dissolution of the arts, the fighting scenes ranked high in the distorted scheme of values. The jostling scene between Orlando and Charles was carefully represented in this version, suggesting that the combative spirit and the spectacle of conflicting violence were the preferences of pastime for the authorities. Moreover, in order to enhance the ridiculous nature of such belligerent entertainment, the director introduced the droll figure of a Nurse, who instructed Rosalind and Celia in one-to-one combat by manipulating a rag doll as the fierce adversary. Rosalind and Celia’s escape from the usurper’s concentration camp was performed as a rope glide across the theater space, toward the darkness of the backstage. The suggestion might be that there was a drastic discontinuity between the grim reality of power and the illusory world of the Arden forest. The other place of the wood was grotesquely represented as a kind of theme park, where the histrionic banished duke conducted a phony chorus composed of his faithful subjects, accompanied by the loud background music of a gramophone. The resounding music from the machine obscured the subjects’ false notes in such a way that the absolute ruler’s musical sense should not be harmed by the jarring sounds produced by his dependents. The idea was that the appearance dominated the absurd society of the wood, just like it was prevalent in the Communist society. The people pretended to sing (or say) as they were instructed and commanded to, yet they only made a show of it. They appeared to be a team producing collective harmony, in the required Socialist spirit, yet they generated individual disturbing noises. The conductor appeared to be in control of this discrepant crowd, yet he was not. The semblance of harmony, however, needed to be preserved. Seen from the exterior, all the people were ex-

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pected to seem to sing in unison a song of praise to their beloved leader. This role of cosmetic and superficial reparation of social and political inadequacy was performed by the mimetic music of the gramophone, an obsolete machine that rendered a repetitive tune. The ceremonial scene of the hunt, in which the subjects brought the dead animals under the Duke’s aim, was another irony directed at the Romanian Communist leader Ceaus¸escu, who was known to be a hunting aficionado, but appreciated only the appearance of the sport. Melancholy Jacques was self-exiled in a craggy ivory tower, and he tried in vain to assert his presence by emitting false notes on his trombone, in dissonance with the already-existing pandemonium. He showed the position of the intellectual in the formal society of Communist authority. The personal voice, itself distorted and false, could not be heard in the leveling totalitarian regime, where thinking independently was considered a crime. The only alternative for the meditative spirit was to retire in the ivory tower of creation, in total isolation from the world of pretended social equity. Touchstone’s appearance in a tub walking on two booted feet, like a hilariously cynical Diogenes, reinforced the grotesque imagery. The wise fool’s alternative performance seemed to suggest a pragmatic acceptance of the incoherent surrounding world. Looking at it with a superior and cynical smile appeared to be the best solution. For a moment, Touchstone discarded his motley coat in order to take a dip in the river. At times, everybody in this inconsonant society seemed to be willing to compromise, including those who criticized it. From his solitary tower, a voyeuristic Jacques watched Rosalind and Celia bathe, using an ancient telescope. In this 1986 Romanian production of As You Like It, the banished Duke looked very much like the Romanian dictator Ceaus¸escu. He promised people prosperity and food, just like the Duke assured the starving Adam that he would be fed, but when it came to real action, no food was provided. The poor servant fainted of starvation, just like the Romanian people, who almost lost their fiber as a nation because of the constant malnutrition deriving from the lack of food available in the shops. In this rapacious society, Orlando was presented as the parvenu social adventurer willing to ascend to an elevated position in this absurd mimicry of court by marrying the Duke’s daughter. The apparently nonsensical recital of theatrical emblems closed with a political parable. The banished Duke, who had directed the counterfeit chorus praising Hymen and the final familial harmony, suddenly left his directing/commanding position of illusory power in a make-believe world in order to resume his dignity in the real world. His usurping brother, who had become peni-


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tent and determined to rule the false realm of illusion, replaced the sham conductor and took over the prerogatives of spurious power. The director’s suggestion was that the future leaders of a diseased society would behave exactly as their Communist predecessors. What a somber foresight as to how things would work in postCommunist Romania! This problematic directorial reading about the cryptic relationships of power and the indeterminate role of the arts within this puzzling game of make-believe appeared in a period when the relations of hegemony in the real world of Communist domination were equally precarious and fluid. In 1986, the Ias¸i National Theater presented A Midsummer Night’s Dream directed by Cristina Iovit¸a˘. The director saw the play as an adventure of the human spirit in search of knowledge, and this Faust-like reading called for some interesting innovations. A prologue and an epilogue in pantomime symmetrically framed the play. In order to suggest that the Dream was the product of Oberon’s creative fantasy and science, the prologue scene showed how the fairy king animated Puck’s body. The framing epilogue revealed the disintegration of the spirited Robin Goodfellow back into the amorphous matter of the beginning. Cristina Iovit¸a˘ found that the play’s analogy with The Tempest could be an engaging mode to consider the issues of creativity and spiritual adventure. In this sense, the director constructed Oberon and Puck in the manner used by Liviu Ciulei ten years before, at the Bulandra Theater, to fashion Prospero and Caliban. Just as Prospero, in Ciulei’s interpretation, had been a master philosopher dominating Caliban’s brute force by the power of his reason, Oberon, in this production of the Dream, was a divine quintessence, and he chose to create a spirit to serve his almighty intent. The similarity with an earlier Romanian production of a Shakespeare play was designed to speak a lot about the director’s sophisticated intentions of self-referentiality. Cristina Iovit¸a˘ liked to play a game of ambiguity, which was decoded by the theater connoisseurs, conveying the message that different productions of Shakespeare’s plays could be involved in a special dialogue of dramatic intertextuality. By employing this strategy of interference and infiltration, the director asserted the supremacy of the directorial interpretation over the production and the meta-directoriality of the modern theater. Here, the play, its author, and the audiences seemed to be just the excuses for the display of directorial workmanship. The sets of this version of the Dream were constructed according to the three magical and social levels of the comedy. The fairy world occupied the highest level of a three-layered structure, a space

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where Oberon’s large library marked the notable authority of books and knowledge in fashioning the extent and acquisition of power. Like Prospero, in Ciulei’s interpretation, the creative artist, armed with the wisdom of art, could invent a superior universe and influence the social hierarchy down under. The strictly organized power structure in society, with the aristocratic couples and the workingclass artisans performing below the fairy level, was just an illusion. All the theatrical games of love confusion and the Pyramus and Thisbe episode emerged from Puck’s creativity, and the audience knew that the spirit was also the conception of a superior entity. Oberon’s fervid imagination wove love-and-revenge schemes on a large scale, and he took visible delight in picturing Titania enamored of an ass. The fairy world was partially effaced by the director’s wish to show the supremacy of the spirit and creativity. However, the production was very dynamic in the elf scenes. The rich ornamentation of the wood, Puck’s energy, and the corporeal expression augmented the impetus of this magic world. The choreography and the music were excellent in the wood scenes, and the animation was ensured by the fact that professional ballerinas performed as the group of fairies. Sometimes the creation-within-creation scheme went too far, like in the scene near the conclusion, when Philostrate, a character-creation like all the others, assumed his fate as an independent being and committed suicide. Puck tried inefficiently to re-animate his body, in the manner used by the master Oberon, but the artistic trick could not always work. The comedy’s harmony was clouded by this new dumb-show performance which, like the prologue and the epilogue insertions, tried to say too much about a theater that had already exceeded its traditional perimeter. In the Romanian theatrical territory of the mid-eighties, a group of young directors working in theaters from the important towns, such as Cluj, Arad, Bras¸ov, and Ias¸i, turned to producing sparkling Shakespearean comedies in an energetic mode. As a critic pointed out in 1986, ‘‘It is clear to us that in the past three or four seasons the route to Shakespeare has been beaten at an alert pace from tragedy to comedy.’’30 The critic considered this beneficial ‘‘exit from inhibition’’ as a remarkable evolution in the forms of Romanian theater, triggered by the young directors’ activity. In the same season 1985–86, no less than four productions of comedies were registered at theaters all over Romania. People could see Florin Fa˘tulescu’s As You Like It at the Bras¸ov Theater, The Dream produced at the Ias¸i Theater directed by Cristina Iovit¸a˘, The Shrew directed by Adrian Lupu at the Arad Theater, and another Shrew directed by Mihai Ma˘niut¸iu at the Cluj Theater. All these productions bore the imprint of their


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young directors, especially in the dynamics of the spectacle, which at times progressed toward a special form of restlessness and excitability. The two Shrews at Arad and Cluj, both cities in western Transylvania, were nervous productions that amplified the impression of theater-within-theater. In the Arad version, Adrian Lupu compressed many scenes and considered others in great haste. The director’s intention was to achieve a realistic interpretation, but he only succeeded in showing a kind of mechanical ballet. It seems that, in their intention to drastically displace meaning toward the director as author rewriting the Shakespeare text, Romanian directors of the eighties sometimes went too far in their specific ideologically constructed versions of Shakespeare. Mihai Ma˘niut¸iu at Cluj took further liberties with The Taming of the Shrew (1986). He restructured certain scenes and shifted some accents, such as, for example, when he dropped the induction altogether, but maintained the theatrical illusion through the scenic image of winding roads or arches and inclined planes of access. Scenic movement was intense in this production; the audiences could see a scared Bianca running away from her aggressive sister, who appeared in the form of a warlike Amazon. Katharina tried vigorously to force Bianca out of her act of passive submission, which was only a mask like all the others in the play. Petruchio was a bellicose mercenary, complete with huge backpack kit and boots. The final scene of Katharina’s supposed capitulation, however, was acted as a hunting demonstration, where the tame wife shot the prize stag. Its impressive horns descended from the display on the wall at the wedding feast, through a complicated system of pulleys and ropes, and were placed on Petruchio’s head, right at the moment when he proclaimed himself a winner in the submissive-wife wager. The music in this production consisted of an international collage of folk songs, suggesting that the love trials and the betrayal stories were the same the world over, like the masks everybody was wearing. All the productions of Shakespeare’s comedies directed by the young generation of artists evolving in the mid-eighties in Romania were comparable in vitality of performance. The vigorous tone imparting ardent passions and robust emotions, though at times licentious and rather libertine, was healthy in the young Romanian directors’ productions. Through this merry note, they intended to show the parameters of sane life in a society that had long lost, and even forgotten, the hearty aspects of normality. In these productions, the privileging of the body and of spontaneity in performance was meant to emphasize the director as the site of meaning. Such essentialist strategies informed a range of directors writing about

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their own works and sustaining the public’s interest in the supposed authority of the director over the meaning of Shakespeare’s plays. Apart from the directors’ notes published in the programs of the productions, in which they recorded their artistic intentions and symbolic patterns regarding a specific production, there were interviews with the directors published in the main theatrical journal. Like their productions, the allusions in these interviews were radically subversive, since neither directors nor the critics interviewing them could speak freely regarding a certain political allusion. However, the language of Shakespeare was studded with so many disruptive allusions that it became evident to the attentive reader of the interview that the subject of the discussion was not Shakespeare, but something else. Some of these interviews had become so distant from the subject of Shakespeare (text and author) that it seemed that Shakespeare was a mere interloper in the life of the Romanian productions of his comedies. Author and text faded in the background of irresistible laughter, while directorial composition came visibly to the foreground. In 1987, the young director Dragos¸ Galgot¸iu directed Twelfth Night at the Bra˘ila Theater. It seemed that the directors at theaters in the Romanian smaller towns were more daring in their use of the comedies for dispersing subversive political messages. The dream was the main metaphor in this production. The immobile actors playing Viola and Orsino and the court of Illyria were placed at various points on the stage, and they came gradually to life as the action evolved. All seemed to wake up from a deep dream (a re-evaluation of the Calderonian la vida es suenõ theme), and they looked like revived marionettes in a puppet show (the life-as-a-theater paradigm). The theater was the generator of fictional worlds that seemed truer than real life, and it was figured as a diversion of masks intermingling with faces in the confusion of carnival. A sequence of masked personages combed the stage in search of hilarious and taunting subjects, yet the feast had a cruel and mocking note and the laughter was subliminally grim and cruel. Despite the great quantity of comic relief displayed on stage, this production was not at all merry and serene. Feste’s melancholy song closed a feast in which Viola was permanently hunted and aggressed, appearing as a victim of circumstances who longed for her femininity, dissimulated through cross-dressing. Malvolio’s excessive erotic delirium drove him to the extreme of almost ravishing Olivia. This was the image of a mad world, a ship of fools, which landed only temporarily on the illusory Illyrian shore. The excess of violence reminded the audiences that they lived in a society which, through prolonged material austerity,


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had succeeded in depriving its citizens of the joy of living. The feast and celebration were only apparent, as was everything else in this ideology-dominated society, where fake words subverted dissimulated thoughts, and an oppressive reality was served, with a pinch of salt, under the mask of carnival. A year before the 1989 political explosion in Romania, in a period when the social and material situation had almost escaped all control, another Shakespearean comedy rendered a violent dissonant world, where the rapid and absurd movement on stage replicated the nonsense of the system in real life. In 1988, Dragos¸ Galgot¸iu exercised an expressive theatrical approach to Much Ado About Nothing at the Ploies¸ti Municipal Theater. According to the reviewer of this production, the spectacle’s rich imagery was displayed through the pictorial representation and the vigorous movement on stage.31 The sets recalled notable Renaissance paintings extant in the art museums of the world, and the dynamic activity on the stage suggested the intense passion and cruelty of a world in which the belligerent ardor is the attribute of normality. The reviewer clearly stated that this stage version observed the time the play was produced (1988), the time of its composition (probably 1599), and the time of its possible temporal setting (1282). I am not very sure, though, on what source Victor Parhon based his statement on the play’s medieval temporal frame, because the Oxford Shakespeare, for instance, does not mention such a time setting.32 The sure thing is that this production of Much Ado About Nothing was set in medieval Messina and was saturated with suppressed violence. Moreover, the suggestion of the crusaders in the background emphasized the idea of the futile ideological and religious battles. At the end of the play, when Benedick is informed of Don John’s capture, he defers the punishment and possible tragedy ‘‘till tomorrow’’ (5.4.121), proposing dance as an alternative to torture. In this production, however, the audiences actually saw the horrifying scene of the malignant slanderer being skinned to death and eviscerated, as if in an attempt of physically reaching the essence of his evil. The fact that Don John was wearing devilish bat wings, a distorted Dracula image, told a lot about the malefactor’s bloody destiny. The abhorrent scenes of violence, however, maintained a note of ambiguity, and the final dance was supposed to camouflage human misery and cruelty. The director was speaking through the symbolic ambiguity of a fallen angel, an active raisoneur of what happened on stage, who ultimately turned out to be an alter ego of Beatrice as a future wife, or the symbolic angel of death. The medieval danse macabre suggested at the end of the play was represented

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through a mysterious choreography of the shadows of death, which happened behind a red curtain used to mark the scene transitions. The symbol of the iron curtain had been variously used by Romanian directors to suggest many things, from isolation of the Eastern from the Western world to the blood victims of Communism. This red curtain, however, brought the Mask of the Red Death right in front of the audience, reminding them of the injustice and cruelty of the Communist system. Medieval morality scenes abounded in this production, ranging from the horrid to the grotesque. The conspiratorial fabrication of appearances and the skillful manipulation of the code of shame and honor united Benedick and Beatrice. The audiences of this production could actually see the two chafing lovers exposed in a cart of shame for their guilt of being in love, but the public performed the punishing lapidatio with straw instead of stones. Everything was grotesque and menacing in this comedy, where hatred lurked behind the lovers’ meetings and permanent intrigues were the prevalent socially approved practices. The director operated various doublings of minor characters, thus increasing the ambiguity, but the significant change was made in the character of Borachio. Dragos¸ Galgot¸iu extended the role of Borachio, the principal calumniator in Don John’s company, by transferring many of Balthazar’s parts to him. Thus, the faithful servant of honest Don Pedro was dropped into the background, while the evildoers’ ambivalent presence became pivotal in this production. Who were the bad persons, and who were the good characters? In which society of what century could one make a clear ethical delimitation? Like life and like Shakespeare, this Romanian version of Much Ado About Nothing never seemed to give a direct answer. In a 1991 interview given to a Romanian theater journal, the young director Alexandru Darie speaks about the ‘‘codified theatrical language’’33 that used to dominate the Romanian productions of Shakespeare before the installation of democracy in 1990. The interview is entitled ‘‘Alexandru Darie: ‘We no longer live in a world of simplicity,’ ’’ and it reviews the situation of the Romanian theater at the beginning of the nineties. Darie notices that in the Communist period, when directors read a Shakespeare play, they searched for the political relevance and the live impact on the audiences. In a fraction of a second, as Darie says, they would see the political significance of Measure for Measure or Hamlet for instance. The appropriate reading was in the air, and it was ‘‘like a biological reaction,’’34 according to Darie. In their turn, the audiences expected to decode clandestine political meanings in the productions of Shakespeare’s


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plays, and this was a reason for their popularity. After 1989, however, Darie notices the predictable change in the theatrical language in Romania. The relationship theater-audience was reconsidered, and directors focused on free expression through the spectacle, without any constraints for current political relevance. As Darie says, ‘‘many directors used to stage certain plays, Measure for Measure, for instance, in order to speak about dictatorship, while now they can direct this play in order to speak about . . . Measure for Measure.’’35 Considering this interview about the Romanian directors’ intentions in relation to producing Shakespeare’s plays, my first reaction was that probably this compulsive predilection for political implication accounted for the overwhelming tension in these past productions of Shakespeare’s plays, even the comedies. I was tempted to speculate that this almost visceral or biological need of directors to commit to public arguments explained the general oppressive atmosphere in which Shakespeare’s comedies were staged in the seventies and especially the eighties in Romania. Likewise, the threatening violence, disrupted emotion, frequent use of masks, dissonant noises, and excessive movement on stage may be plugged in the hotwired circuit of political interpretations. However, after more than ten years of seeing Shakespeare’s comedies in the theaters of democratic Romania, I wonder if this corporeal-oriented implicit arrogation of Shakespeare on the Romanian stage was not a form of metatheoretical and meta-theatrical approach to an increasingly indistinct and challenging subject: Shakespeare. Instead of dramatizing a concerted ideological plan of political subversion against the Communist authority, Romanian directors seemed to have tried to tie up the slippery text belonging to a highly valued author from another time and place with the golden strings of their creativity.

The Nineties and the Twenty-First Century The decade 1990–2000 advanced additional riddling components to the already-puzzling picture of theatrical versions of the comedies in Romania, while also removing a few. The political urgency for subversion was no longer valid, considering the incorporation of democratic practices at all levels of political, social, and cultural life. Since the dissident component was unnecessary, theaters and directors concentrated on the comedies’ representation and shaping of identity through theatrical self-referentiality. In statistical terms, this was the decade of A Midsummer Night’s Dream,36 considering the extant six productions of this comedy. By comparison, Romanian the-

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aters presented four productions of As You Like It, four of Measure for Measure (confirming an increasing taste for ‘‘problematic’’ plays), two of Twelfth Night, and one production each of Much Ado About Nothing, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, and an adaptation of The Merchant of Venice. It seems that the emphasis on metamorphosis and the multiple levels of dramatic irony in A Midsummer Night’s Dream made directors and spectators realize that they were caught in a social matrix they could neither understand nor fully control. The double metamorphosis, involving both physical and psychological transformation, was central to the meaning and the form of this particular comedy, but the paradigm may be extended to all productions of Shakespeare’s comedies and to the theater in general. Romanian directors seem to have seen the theme of transformation, responsible for shaping Shakespeare’s comic dramatic structures, as best representing an increasingly volatile theatrical milieu and a shifting or elusive everyday reality. The theatrical multiplicity of the comedies, and especially of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, gave directors an unprecedented liberty to construct the dramatic debate as one between the verbal and the visual, with interfering extremes of invention. Most of these productions of Shakespeare’s comedies were aimed primarily at shocking the spectators with unusual images and sounds, working through auditory interaction to animate the audience in a physical way.37 Directors and the acting team forged their own translations or conflated versions of the text, and the offensive visual or auditory invasions were frequently used to display an abnormal and grotesque relation to reality in the Bakhtinian mode. It is not easy to assess such Romanian productions of the nineties, which verged on the extraordinary and even outrageous. Perhaps the fairest thing to say is that they ‘‘localized’’ Shakespeare in productive and interesting ways, to borrow Leah Marcus’s38 enormously useful term, which she employed to describe the practice of reading Shakespeare with reference to specific sites, societies, and beliefs, rather than through a universalizing moral or psychological model. To the attentive observer, these post-Communist Romanian productions of Shakespeare might say more about the current state of directorial authorship postulating their historically created notions of authenticity rather than about the volatile Shakespeare topic. Right in the crucial year of Romania’s change, 1990, Alexandru Darie directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Bucharest Comedy Theater. As if positing a predicted metamorphosis of the Romanian theater in the nineties and the celebration of its marriage with other


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visual arts, this production had several elements of transition, something old and something new, something borrowed, and, probably, something blue. The much-edited repetitive elements were the familiar commedia dell’arte modes, the parody, and the wild movement on stage. The new scheme was evidenced in the suggestion of a directorial game with several strategies. For example, Darie used all the extant translations in Romanian of this play, in both verse and prose. From the early twentieth-century translations by the Romanian poets, S¸t. O. Iosif and George Topaˆrceanu, to the later, more scholarly verse translation by Dan Grigorescu, the director invented a collage of many Romanian versions. Thus, he stated the volatility of the word as text and the status of the translation as an evanescent process of transition from the English Shakespeare to the Romanian lexical appropriation. Moreover, Darie produced his own contribution to the text, a directors’ translation, probably suggesting that a director who could read the play in English should make a statement in the new order of his spectacle by placing himself as a link between text and performance. The borrowed constituent in Darie’s interpretation was the recurrent character doubling. The frequently used doublings of the Theseus-Hippolyta and Oberon-Titania couples were not new. However, Darie produced a tripling of the Theseus-Oberon character by casting the same actor in the role of Peter Quince. Transition was the word in this production, and the characters’ transitions on stage allowed the audience to notice the transformations from one role to another. A costume accessory, a symbolic gesture, or musical signals announced the moment when such transitions were effected. The blues aspect of this comedy appeared in the melancholy tone pervading the lovers’ and the mechanicals’ episodes, and in the suggestion of the starry night through a dark canopy studded with sparkling lights, which lay like an unfinished tent in the background of the wood scenes. A reviewer of Alexandru Darie’s 1990 production of the Dream notes that the director declared the need for a ‘‘freedom of passage’’39 through this interpretation of Shakespeare’s comedy. The director needed to assert and define his human sensibility through the theatrical production. Thus, he created a comedy in which the multiple games of deception embraced several strategies and the building tension achieved a potent psychological status. The general idea stated and conveyed by the director was that the dream condition could be translated in real terms as a multiple artistic game with many variants. All the characters’ progress designed a special kind of stage geometry, like a ballet of various couples, ascribed to various levels of social and cultural, but mainly imagina-

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tive, hierarchy. The royal couple kept to the solid ground of reality, and the lovers hung on ropes or splashed in water basins. The mechanicals displayed a special dignity of the theatrical profession when Bottom, after the show, made his companions refuse the humiliating money Philostrate threw at their feet as a reward for the comic relief they provided. The central metaphor of the theater as the ultimate illusion and reality appeared in the interesting combination of live theater and puppet show. At the end of the spectacle, all the actors retired to the back of the stage and human-sized puppets descending from the ceiling performed their parts. Thus, the actors stepped outside their own system and observed the theater as an abstract and tangible entity. Self-referentiality was the word for Darie’s interpretation of the Dream, as for many other Romanian productions of Shakespeare emerging in the last decade of the millennium. The renowned production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream directed by Liviu Ciulei, recently returned to Romania from the US, at the Bulandra Theater in 1991 was a new assertive directorial statement that required many pages of critical interpretation. In keeping with Peter Brook’s reconsideration of the original empty stage space in producing Shakespeare, Ciulei gave this vacuum a dominant color: red. In contrast with the purity of white, as envisaged by Brook, red was meant to assault the audience’s cortex and transmit a message of intensity and violence. On the red platform, which was a square red partition formed of shining slates, all characters walked barefoot, suggesting a direct relation with the earth and the possibility of immaterial flight. At the back of the stage, the red and black stripes isolated the scarlet frame from the rest of the world. The almostirritating and shocking predominance of the red color was intensified by the presence of a metallic platform lit with neon lights, which descended from the ‘‘Heaven’’ of the stage. Just like the red space was transformed in turn into the palace in Athens or the wood of ardent instincts, this platform was converted into a chandelier, Oberon’s voyeuristic observatory, Titania’s bower, or the stage for the Pyramus and Thisbe tragic mirth. Thus, theatrical metamorphosis was the ruling concept in this new Ciulei Shakespearean production. A huge, abnormally oval, shining full moon overhung the aggressive red color dominating the decor both horizontally and vertically. The subconscious connotations related to the moon symbol pertained to the text, but the combination with the blood-colored red created a visceral and sinful attraction toward the obscure zones of the hallucinatory physicality. The obsessive setting in this play certi-


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fied that the deep parts of the unconscious were uncontrollable, and yet the dream was in the outside world. The abyss on stage suggested that the dream’s dream and the nightmarish visions of the subconscious derived from the state of consciousness. Ciulei’s setting made the statement that the ‘‘other’’ reality we have within us, though distorted and strangely awry, is still part of our darker nature. Like the red color of the setting, violence (manifest or subdued) was the key word for the characters’ behavior. The audiences could see the warlike Hippolyta dispossessed of her Amazon costume, which was symbolically burned, and dressed in a white robe, like all the others at Theseus’s court. The static but contorted dummies in the background vaguely hinted at war and its violence. The confrontation between Titania and Oberon, which in the text seemed like a force of nature disturbing the genuine order of things, was here an apparently civil debate between two powerful monarchs from the two far ends of a dividing magnificent table. Sitting rigidly on two stools placed at a certain distance from the table, the protagonists spoke in a subdued tone. The restrained passion was only revealed when Titania involuntarily knocked over a carafe of rich red wine, which spilled assertively on the white tablecloth. The costumes were opulent but simple, consisting mainly of red, white, and black capes. The artisans wore coarse cloth, as if obeying a strict sumptuary law, but each of them had a red token in the form of a collar, a necktie, or a pocket trimming. The fairy figures were clouded in the shady black capes of the night, since they were creatures of darkness and the subconscious. One of the critics reviewing this play noted that Ciulei’s interpretation of the Dream was intentionally symbolic and visual. Dan Micu writes that the production suggested several interpretations of the dream, which was the site of all possible ‘‘metamorphoses.’’40 Beside the changing multifunctional sets, the theme of transformation was suggested by the evocation of Ovid, whose influence on the construction of this comedy was generally recognized. All Romanians knew that Ovid was exiled and died in the ancient Black Sea city of Tomis, and the projected image of Ovid’s statue from the city of Constanta (Tomis) in the background sent the exact signals referring to the Latin poet. The inferences about the historicity of art and the transmission and influence of poetic arguments through intertextual metamorphosis were logical conclusions for those who saw Ovid projected on stage. Just like Ovid was seen in Shakespeare’s time as the paragon of poetic magnificence, and his work constituted the source for many plays, including the Dream, so did Shakespeare become the wor-

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shipped model of theatrical virtuosity, equally unrecognizable in the process of negotiation. The stage space in Ciulei’s vision was symbolic of the attributes of the two sides of the brain discovered by modern research in psychology. The right side (from the audience’s perspective) signified concentration, attention, reason, and interest, while the left side meant compassion or affective motivation. In this figurative space, people progressed like in a dream, with slow gestures and leaps. Movement played an important part in this production, and its partial impediment was meant to look like the effortless leaps the mind performed in dreams. When he intended to avoid the escalation of conflict between the two confused pairs of lovers, Puck commanded the fog to descend on stage. This fog was the kind of artificial cobweb that is hung at American windows on Halloween night, and Ciulei had certainly brought the material from the States. The complicated choreography performed by the professional ballet dancers in a slow tempo had the role of spreading this gossamer substance along the expanse of the stage. The lovers tried hard to free themselves from the flimsy but encumbering ties of almost-invisible matter which, like the dream, kept them entangled in surreal circumstances. In this way, the contribution of modern technology and substances unknown in Romania helped Ciulei make a directorial statement regarding Shakespeare’s comedy that played on the insubstantiality of dream-formation. It seems that Ciulei did find a palpable means of giving the airy nothing a local habitation and a name. The Romanian director intended (and succeeded) to give tangible expression and visual accuracy to the stuff that dreams are made of. The Romanians at that time were still healing their wounds from the psychological war of the nerves that some used to call the Romanian revolution against Communism. During the psychological anxiety in the winter of 1989, people thought they could see or hear the so-called ‘‘terrorists’’ attacking from almost everywhere, only to find out that, in many cases, it was some electronic-sniper device. The psychological pressure was too much for many people living in those dramatic days. There were moments when many could not distinguish between the reality of a social and political revolution and the illusory creation of the media (especially the TV). This psychological tension would have a long-lasting impact on the Romanian subconscious, so that Ciulei’s production of the Dream in hallucinatory red and violent notes could only remind most people psychologically affected by the conflict about the real-life nightmarish events they had experienced in December 1989. Thus, going to the theater and being confronted with the hallucinatory visions of the subcon-


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scious made into a material configuration became a form of expiating suppressed fears and insecurities. This is how productions of Shakespeare could develop, besides other things, into an efficient form of psychotherapy for a large number of confused Romanians. A prominent Romanian director, Andrei S¸erban, schooled with Peter Brook in London, returned in 1990 from abroad with the enthusiastic and noble purpose to set things right in the world of Romanian theater. He was immediately named the director of the Romanian National Theater in Bucharest and produced five plays there, including Twelfth Night in 1991. The play was entitled The Kings’ Night or What You Will, and the former title was part of a Romanian translation tradition, because this was how Dragos¸ Protopopescu, a prolific pre-war translator of Shakespeare, entitled his Romanian version. I believe that the Romanian title was derived from the correspondence of the Twelfth Night in the Orthodox religious calendar with the celebration of St. John the Baptist’s beheading, an important feast in the Eastern Orthodox liturgical year. The kings’ night might be connected with the period of feasting of the Jewish kings, resulting in the final beheading of John the Baptist at Salome´’s request. The tragic connotation was very powerful in this Romanian translation of the play’s title, but directors in the previous Communist period had used the reference to the kings to explore the issues of legitimate versus illegitimate accession to power. Andrei S¸erban’s directorial statement made the theme of disguise and confusion of identity the principal pivot of his spectacle. Deception and masks already exist in Shakespeare’s comedy, but S¸erban used different theatrical modes to signify the transition and transformation of the theater in the process of producing this play. As was the case with many nineties directors, self-referentiality was the guiding declaration. Like in Shakespeare, self-irony dominated the spectacle, but, in this production, the director played freely with the preexistent modes of the theater. The initial storm scene was realized in the grand ope´ra style, with carton-arching waves and zincclattering thunder sounds. The audience could see Sebastian being separated from Antonio, who traversed the stage-space flying from the top of the mast to the turmoil below. The director wanted his production to be a free game of masks, travesties, and styles. Orsino’s court of Illyria was elevated on some kind of platform, which looked like a funeral monument in the Florence of the Medici. The place swarmed with people, who appeared to be members of the Neoplatonic Academy, participating in poetical ceremonies. The scenic groups of courtiers signified various arts: there were two painters at work, a sculptor fashioning a statue, and suave maids

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Twelfth Night (The Kings’ Night or What You Will) directed by Andrei S¸erban at the Bucharest National Theater (1991). With Vivian Alivizache (Olivia), Claudiu Bleont¸ (Feste), and Gheorghe Dinica˘ (Malvolio). Courtesy of the Bucharest National Theater.

playing the harpsichord. The neoclassical columns, or the frequent changes of light and color, gave the impression of a changing space, which was and was not from this world, and the period was rather indefinite. The indistinct collage of styles in the Illyrian decor attained a shocking climax when Orsino jumped from a carton helicopter pointing a pistol at the audience. He was surrounded by his bodyguards, and alighted in this neoclassical-Renaissance milieu in the formidable noise of a police car. The contrast between the verses of love and music spoken by the Duke and the pandemonium surrounding him was meant to strike the audience with its incongruity. Apart from the discontinuity created through the apparent mixture of theatrical styles, the carton props (helicopter, cars, and gun) suggested the convention and the material unreality of the theatrical productions of all times. Among the recurrent anachronisms in S¸erban’s production of Twelfth Night we could see Cesario traversing the stage on a bicycle, Malvolio watching the Romanian TV news, Maria using a vacuum cleaner, and Sebastian and Antonio chatting in a bar that displayed whisky ads and lascivious dancers on the counter. The Duke’s ro-


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mantic apparel—white satin gown and long curls around his shoulders, sporting a silk handkerchief hanging from his little finger—was in tone with his pose of disconsolate romantic lover. When a courtier brought him back the refused bouquet of red roses from Olivia (artificial flowers, of course), Orsino fluttered it like a fan and commanded it to be taken to his flowery bed, which looked like a funeral dais. In this production, Romanian audiences were shown complex blends of cultures and costumes, temporal anomalies, and symbolical props that signified confounding issues. The scene when Orsino lamented his unrequited love visualized in the background the romantic ruins of decrepit towers. At the Duke’s request, Feste started to sing the melancholic ‘‘Come away, come away death,’’ in English, and Curio (an actress in travesty role) attempted to translate the text. The words were accompanied by grotesque images, which showed the tears and death of the unhappy lover, and how he lay in his coffin among cypresses. Apart from the sadness of the scene, the audiences could see how the original verses were translated into a foreign language, emotions were translated into concrete images, and true feelings were parodied through the theatrical metaphor of the mask. S¸erban’s Illyria was a travesty space, the image of an image, a mask adopted by every character, in total forgetfulness of their genuine existence. Among these images of inconsistency, Viola-Cesario hoped to incorporate delicately the double truth of her identity by reaching for her inner self, whom she had rejected by adopting the inimical disguise, while searching for her twin brother, whose image she had appropriated. Andrei S¸erban created a troubling scene when Viola passed by Sebastian in the street of the illusory Illyria, without either of them seeing the other. Like Shakespeare (through Viola), S¸erban told us that adopting a disguise was very dangerous, and that those appropriating the images of others were courting disaster. Very much aware of the director’s role in the theater, invariably in charge with assuming various authors’ identities as their own, Andrei S¸erban predicated the question of metatheatricality in directorial terms. The final scene added a melancholy note to the couples’ happy reunion. The storm that had marked the tormented beginning returned, and the characters turned their backs to the public, divided from them by the double row of carton waves. The barely united pairs faced an uncertain future in immobile serenity, but they were part of an artificial decor, which singled them out as just the romantic representations of some thespian illusion. In an interview given to the main Romanian theatrical journal, entitled ‘‘On the Eve,’’ which marked the eve of the premie`re of

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Twelfth Night, Andrei S¸erban made a note about how he saw the interpretation of a Shakespeare play: ‘‘Knowing that a person experiences two lives simultaneously—the everyday life and, at the same time, an invisible, secret, interior existence—Shakespeare developed a form of theater, like Picasso in the portrait form, a method by which we can see simultaneously the expression on a person’s face and the hidden inner-soul vibrations. That is why his characters are in perpetual change, at times realistic, or romantic, or formal, or stylized . . .’’41 A director whose affinities with the Shakespearean mode of reflection went back a long way produced this particular production of Twelfth Night on the huge stage of the Romanian National Theater. The staging debated concurrently the issues of personal or collective identity, but also the shifting faces of the theater toward the end of the millennium. No longer accepting the exigency of a particular fashion in presenting certain plays or characters, by complying with the romantic-declamatory, the mannerist, the political, or the modernizing necessities of the period, the theater turned upon itself in a reflexive manner. Rather than providing just the foil for the abstract and brief chronicles of the time, the theater generated its own analytical structures, according to the directors’ interests. In this way, the audiences could see a double image, namely, the external presentation of a Shakespeare comedy and the inner, secret, and often conflicting faces of Melpomene, and Thalia, in close entourage of Clio, Euterpe, and Terpsichore. This trans-generic directorial approach to Shakespeare’s theater, which stressed the visual and the choreographic, combined a variety of styles in theater history with music and dance. The Romanian directors’ approaches to the comedies in the decade of the nineties and into the twenty-first century seemed to go along these intersected and convoluted lines, and their sophistication was caviar to the general. A special attention to the deceptive game of ambiguity in theater and life brought about an interest in the production of Measure for Measure on the Romanian stage in the mid-nineties. For almost twenty years, ever since a remarkable political production by Dinu Cernescu at the Giules¸ti Theater of Bucharest in 1972, directors and theaters had not approached this difficult, dark comedy consistently. There was one exception—the 1982 production directed by Mihai Lungeanu at the Pites¸ti Theater—but this was a provincial playhouse, not the central Bucharest forum. Probably the play’s moral ambiguity and its somber tone did not appeal to directors before 1990, interested as they were in destabilizing the Communist regime’s absolutist self-centeredness from the direction of politically significant productions of Shakespeare. In 1995, however, there was


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a production of Measure for Measure at the Theatrum Mundi playhouse in Bucharest, directed by a young student in the class of the director Theodor Ma˘ra˘scu named Mihaela Sa˘sa˘rman. The reviews of this production were not very good, and the reviewer considered it a form of undergraduate exam for the drama school, a juxtaposition of dislocated signs that forward no significant idea.42 A rag doll tossed from one side to the other, probably to signify the use and abuse of morality, or the onstage live-construction of a scaffold with some wooden boards in order to impress the viewers could hardly constitute a pertinent approach to the play. A year later, however, in 1996, a young-generation director, S¸tefan Iorda˘nescu, proposed an inciting and equivocal version of Measure for Measure at the Arad State Theater. The unique decor was conceived as the baroque terrace of a mansion, with stairs on both sides. This setting allowed for the elaborate suggestions of superimposed planes (especially in the scenes involving Angelo’s negotiations), social and rank difference, and the characters’ inner conditions. The modern-day note was given by the costume design and by the nervous and alert acting. Ambiguity was the dominant mode in this production. Duke Vincentio was a deceitful person, obscuring his reasons under the mask of affable bone mine. Not for a moment did the audiences know for sure whether Vincentio chose the friar disguise in order to get acquainted with the social problems of his city, problems that his loyal subjects wanted to keep hidden from him. Maybe he decided on the disguise in order to trap Angelo, a possible enemy and dangerous rival. In addition, he might have had the hidden purpose of consolidating his authority. The Duke might have retired from the public life for the declared motive of improving his city’s morals. Who knows? Perhaps he went away in the hope of experiencing extreme life situations. All alternatives were possible. Angelo was also a cryptic personage, equally perverse and enigmatic. He was a cruel and fanatical defender of justice, both hypocrite and sincere, an authentic image of the contradictory human nature. Isabella was incomprehensible and paradoxical to the end. The fervent passion she demonstrated in defending her chastity showed that she was just as dangerous and intolerant as Angelo. S¸tefan Iorda˘nescu’s Measure for Measure revealed the impossibility of knowing where evil ended and where good began, where and when people were right or wrong, because in that world, like in ours, lies and truths were perpetually associated. In this universe of insecurity, the only certitude was that everything was changing. Truths turned into falsehoods, the dukes into friars and the reverse, minis-

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ters were worse than the executioners were, and these might have become more human than their rulers would have ever been. In Dinu Cernescu’s 1972 production of the play, centered on politics, the conflicting interpretations had been less perplexing. There, the dictators used all means in order to achieve power, and used this domination to subdue the others. There, Isabella had no choice in the end but to kneel wordlessly before the red-mantled colossus who condescended to ask her for his wife. There, the red Communist power was limitless and it subjugated all genuine feeling. With S¸tefan Iorda˘nescu’s production, however, the audiences had changed. In the age of democracy, the Romanian public no longer expected to decipher subversive messages about the discredited Communist authority. Their tastes evolved, and they perceived a real mad, mad world in the concrete form of a double flight of stairs, which people climbed and descended incessantly. Values, identities, families, and emotions were traded continually at the universal stock exchange of this mutated world, where all was conditioned, reprogrammed, and even cloned. Iorda˘nescu’s production recycled Shakespeare’s universe of innuendo for the newly fashioned Romanian audiences of the late twentieth century. Intending to give an informed overview of the large number of Romanian productions of Shakespearean comedies, I have made a point of registering the more modest attempts of less famous directors as well as those by the prominent figures of the Romanian theater. These artists strove to address the problems in the comedies from their perspectives and to speak for the audiences all over the country, not necessarily in the cultural center of Bucharest. The situation of the drama school in Romania has changed significantly since 1990. While before this decade there was only one extremely elitist ‘‘Academy of Theater and Film,’’ after 1990 many universities in the country offered courses in drama and canto, though not so many in directing. Before this crucial decade, being admitted in this special club of the privileged few students at the only drama school in Bucharest was no easy role, and many young people tried for years on end before reaching such a desired status. By the mid-nineties, there was already a new generation of actors and directors who would approach with enthusiasm any Shakespeare play, which they perceived as a certification of their professional caliber and, possibly, a passport to international fame. Vasile Nedelcu was one of these young artists, and he was still a student when he approached the Dream with a team of professional actors at the Toma Caragiu Theater in Ploies¸ti (1995). The reviews for this production were good


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because, as one critic said, the director constructed a ‘‘coherent and lively colored spectacle.’’43 Nedelcu centered on a dominant idea of theater-within-theater and the scenographer designed the sets as a multi-plane series of proscenium arches. Various many-colored curtains (white, red, blue, and black) delimited these playing spaces. They rose or descended successively to reveal various scenes in the play. The vertical demarcation was suggested by an ingenious rocking chair that glided like a toboggan, sending every character expected to slide into erotic selfdeception to the obscurity of nothingness. The interplay of curtains revealed sequentially the interpenetrating worlds of the illustrious court, the fairy woodland, and the unpretentious milieu of the artisans. When these would-be actors took over the stage play-world in the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude, the other actors became a special kind of audience, taking their seats in the area normally reserved for the orchestra in the playhouse. This entity of performance was differentiated from the real audience, who occupied a distinct space in the auditorium. The director made the statement that the whole world may be symbolically compared to a stage, but it was not one. There were differences between the figurative world of the theater and the world outside. However, when a play was performed, actors and audience joined a conventional reality that took the part of their world for the two hours’ traffic on the stage. In the mid-nineties, many Shakespearean comedies found their way in the metamorphosed Romanian theater. As You Like It had been used extensively in the Communist period to signify political sedition. When this play was produced in the nineties, however, it showed audiences how cultivated, refined, and ‘‘postmodern’’ its director was. The production of As You Like It directed by Nona Ciobanu at the Bucharest Teatrul Mic (1996) was one of these cases of affirmation of directorial expertise. The first assertively creative action was performed at the initial stage of the preparation of the play, when Nona Ciobanu produced a new translation. She devised an adaptation from the English version, collating the extant Romanian translations by Virgil Teodorescu, Lucia Demetrius, and Ion Brezeanu. The implied idea in this recurrent habit of translation activity by modern Romanian directors was that they were in complete authorial control of the spectacle, and the text should be adapted to their Prospero-like demands. The next symbolic issue was the woodland as a stage, implicit in the placement of Jacques’ monologue in this medium. While he spoke the famed lines (in prose), the actor used his capacity as a mime and acted the description, but he appeared like an interesting four-handed Shiva, and his Indian-like

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motion typified a mythical dance of life and death. The director counted on her trained audiences to decode these kinds of signs, and to appreciate the accumulated erudition existing in the theater hall at that specific moment. The complex mixture of styles and cultures could be identified in many instances of this production of As You Like It. People at Duke Frederick’s court used a sophisticated jargon, derided extensively by Touchstone. Orlando displayed the vocation of suffering expected from the romantic hero of the amour courtois convention, and he wrote his sonnets directly on the leaves of the carton trees, in total disregard of environmental necessities. However, the theater props are not real life, and carton leaves are made of the same stuff as the books we read from. The relationship Rosalind/Ganymede-Orlando was very physical in this production, and they often fought not only in words, but also in action. Jacques’ homespun philosophy was meant to appease the lovers’ ardent combat, but the frantic Orlando turned his invectives upon him. Even verbal abuse had cultural connotations in this sophisticated version of As You Like It. On parting, Orlando called Jacques ‘‘Monsieur Tristesse,’’ while the melancholy protagonist called the disconsolate lover ‘‘Signor Amoroso.’’ Nona Ciobanu counted on her audiences’ proficiency in French and Italian, as well as on the more cultivated connotations sending to the French convention of medieval courtly love and the Italian Renaissance sonneteering mode. The irony of pastoral comedy in this production was addressed to the common cultural assumptions of the audience. Originally a population of shepherds, Romanian culture has a specific pastoral myth represented in the folk ballad entitled Miorit¸a [The Darling Sheep]. In this folk verse narrative, two nameless shepherds were envious of the third one, who was richer and more handsome, and they decided to murder him. A miraculously articulate sheep warned her master of the danger, but the shepherd chose to await his death passively. He visualized his end as a mystical wedding, in communion with nature and the universe. Critics identifying this passive submission to fate as characteristic of the Romanians’ national spirit have derisively coined this defensive and inactive individual reaction to the aggressive modern world as mioritic. Thus, instead of taking arms against a sea of everyday troubles, selecting an active involvement in the life of the community, Romanians are generally indicted for passive submission and patient expectancy. Nona Ciobanu’s production of As You Like It was first performed during the general election campaign that promoted the idea of change, and the Center-Right party slogan was active participation


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in the construction of capitalism. The play’s ironic view of the pastoral spirit in the mioritic mode indirectly promoted the idea of active interest and political responsibility. It is very likely that the refined intellectuality usually attending these Shakespeare performances took the message directly, and they voted for the Center-Right idea of operative change in the old Socialist mentalities, and for an option in favor of the full capitalist system. However, these highspirited ideas did not last more than four years of political mandate, because lofty ideals collided constantly with the ragged asperity of the bare necessities of life. In the Romanian election year of 1996, many Shakespearean comedies were used one more time to convey partial political messages. This time, the criticism was more obvious, because there was no formal censorship apparatus, and it was directed to the political parties emerging directly from the Communist past, which used the perfectly honorable reason of democratic election to ascend to power. Schooled at the formerly select Communist academies training people in the competence of spreading fear, hatred, enmity, and calumny, the members of these neo-Communist political parties relied on disseminating rumors and the denigration of the opposition in their electoral campaign. In a 1996 production of Much Ado About Nothing directed by Alexandru Dabija at the Youth Theater of Piatra Neamt¸, the director relied on this idea of subtracting information, spreading falsified reports, and manipulating people’s beliefs by distorting truths and misrepresenting errors. This ambivalent Shakespearean comedy acquired a serious tone in describing a world of deceit, dangerously traversed by the disconcerting buzz of the discrediting whisper. The large quantity of distorted messages transformed ordinary life into an unbearable wasp’s nest where hypocrisy secured the appearance of normality. The director addressed his political criticism to the gullibility of some, as well as the perversity of others. The sets and lighting in this production suggested shady actions and movements in the chiaroscuro region, where danger and incertitude lurked from every adumbrated corner. The stage looked like a space designed for keeping an eye on people, spying on their privacy, with the contemptible purpose of using the information for obscure reasons. This menacing setting would recall to many the productions of the play in the Communist period, when the threat and spying were implied to emerge from the authorities. The costumes were designed in such a way that they covered some characters’ faces. Hidden eyes peered at their interlocutors from behind the shaded light of some dubious lanterns. These flickering lights

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thrust at people’s faces were shocking, and they left the peaceful and credulous citizens of Messina temporarily blind. The faceless figures who conducted such veiled and Inquisition-like interrogatory on innocent inhabitants were the recycled members of the former secret police, who knew how to obtain their information and who took advantage of people’s naivete´. In this atmosphere of suspicion, Don Pedro’s victorious soldiers made a grand entrance. They carried the dead bodies of their comrades as trophies, and these disintegrating cadavers would dominate the world of the play, like disheartening omens portending disaster. The obvious political message of this scene was that the current governing Social-Democratic party, derived from the Communist predecessors and formed mostly of members of the former secret police, used the glory built on the dead martyrs of the 1989 revolution for democracy in order to satisfy their appetite for power. An accredited member of this disbanded and morbid army, Don John was exceptionally versed in the art of provoking people, inciting them to rise against each other. This character was called simply John, and his name alluded to the corresponding political leader of present-day Romania, Ion (John) Iliescu, president of the country and perpetual candidate for ever-renewed mandates. Death was very present in this morality play of the nineties because the corpses became strangely animated and they mingled with people and exchanged masks with them in a grim danse macabre. The setting was dominated by an enormous reproduction of Rembrandt’s painting ‘‘The Night Round.’’ The characteristic obscurity of the background in this painting and the contrasting illumination of the faces belonging to the immobile figures of soldiers frozen in a formal deployment of duty spoke about the ceremoniousness and formality of Romanian ‘‘new’’ politics. Likewise, the presence of the Rembrandt painting was an eloquent image of the degree of sophistication needed in decoding the artistic message expected by the director from his audience. It was also a sign of the me´lange of reflexive artistic techniques used in the theater to signify diverse messages. The directorial commentary in this production of Much Ado About Nothing was a warning against relying on erroneous rumors, which derived from the absence of communication among people. Normal relations were replaced with formal poses, and there was no sympathetic comprehension and appreciation of the other. The conclusion the director wanted to lead his audiences to in this production was very sad, but the atmosphere of suspicion really existed in Romania in those years. Unfortunately, the change of political regime as a result of the 1996 elections, as well as the 2000 democratic vote,


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did not change much of the general impression of mistrust captured by Alexandru Dabija in this production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. This was a play infrequently performed on the Romanian stage, probably because very few directors dared to reconsider and refashion in new cultural dimensions the already unsettling and indeterminate tone of this implacable comedy. However, the play’s ambivalence recommended it to modern audiences, and many Romanian directors used its morally uncertain intensity to convey topical political allusions. The relative infrequency of producing this comedy in professional theaters in Romania speaks for Shakespeare’s perennial double life, straddling both popular and elite cultural productions. It also adduces the problem of dissemination of political dissension among the theater audiences by using a Shakespeare play as a vehicle. This form of theatrical manipulation in Romania used to be a strategy of the 1970s and ’80s, but it is clear that the directors in the ’90s thought it useful to revive some of their artistic schemes. It is easier for directors to deal with Twelfth Night from any perspective because the dimension of carnival and departure from the subliminal self can take so many forms that it lends itself to many culturally diverse readings, both popular and refined. The production directed by Victor Ioan Frunza˘ at the Hungarian State Theater of Cluj-Napoca (1996) was played under the sign of mystification and androgyny. The production relied on pictorial image, and all confusion seemed to derive from inexplicable optical deficiency. The director led his audiences to think that they lived in an androgynous universe of easily shifting identities. The characters looked like the delicate decoupages from the Japanese shadow theater, and the disembodied figures could not communicate directly because they were placed on disparate planes and the rules of perspective did not apply. The technique of perspective painting was translated into the rules of theater, accounting for the imprecision of dramatic viewpoints. Since the characters in this romantic comedy often fall in love with the wrong partner or are disillusioned by other people, all the actors transacted their roles as disembodied entities, in no apparent relation with their respective partners, because the relationship was just an illusion. By showing they had a false image of themselves and the world around them, the characters in Twelfth Night gave directors the occasion to explore issues of identity in various disguises, including the Romanian perspective, to suggest the metatheatrical fantasy. The objects of decor illustrated the self-referential idea of the theater as illusion. A translucent disk illumined by neon lights repre-

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sented Moon. That it shone only when lit, after the prop was set on stage, communicated the potentiality and the function of the theatrical setting. A number of massive woolen bales descending from the ceiling figured nature and a synthetic pastoral setting in the artificial world of carnival. The white marble statues symbolized classical balance and harmony, replicating the Renaissance idea of humanist order, but their prominent presence in the scenes about love had clear erotic connotations. In contrast with Andrei S¸erban’s reading of Twelfth Night as a world that misconstrued the territory of the real into the hallucinations of the absurd, Victor Ioan Frunza˘ proposed a changing theater world that helped people reconsider their perceptions of reality. Discovering its contradictory nature, the audiences were forced to admit the inherent antagonism and inconsistency, but also harmony, existing in the real world as suggested by the theater of illusion. Frunza˘ ultimately cautioned us, as critics and auditors, not to repeat Malvolio’s mistaken notion of performing the ‘‘trick of singularity’’ (3.4.70). By exploring the dense interaction between text and performance in this production of Twelfth Night, its Romanian critics and reviewers established this comedy as a work realized within changing social and erotic constructions of identity. A 1997 version of As You Like It directed by Alexandru Colpacci at the Oradea Theater showed this romantic comedy in an almost traditional mode, only highlighting some minor characters and scenes. The director reconsidered the banished Duke’s relationship with Amiens by casting an actress in travesty in this role. Le Beau appeared as a self-important character, somehow similar to the artificial Osric in Hamlet. Minor occasions, such as serving the meals in the woods—an intentionally sumptuous affair—or the appearance of some bizarre animals roaming around, became significant. The setting was intended to replicate the Elizabethan stage, with a long proscenium arching over the center area of the stalls to the boxes behind. This brightly lit area accommodated the court scenes, while the main stage was in total darkness. When the Arden forest was the setting, the main stage was illumined to show a splendid medieval tapestry representing a hunting scene in the woods. This pictorial effect of art representing nature was characteristic of the Romanian directors’ interpretations, especially in the nineties period. What caught my attention when reading the review about this production, however, is the fact that the critic recorded an amusing event concerning the audience on the night he attended the performance. Adrian Mihalache writes that a group of high-school students were the majority of the audience on that particular night and the kids


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were very restless; they moved around during the performance, talked, and even tossed their popcorn at the actors. Consistent with their profession, the actors assumed a mock-educational role, and those who had minor parts descended from the stage during their moments of intermission and made a show of reprimanding the disruptive members of the audience in jest.44 Aware that this is how things must have happened on some performance nights with the Elizabethan audiences, the actors endured stoically the risks and magnificence of their profession. Alice Georgescu, a theater critic reviewing a 1997 production of The Comedy of Errors at the Comedy Theater Bucharest directed by Alexandru Dabija, starts with an interesting analysis of the general styles of producing Shakespeare’s comedies in Romania. Georgescu writes that the productions of the tragedies in the past decade have taken reputable theatrical configurations, while the productions of the comedies have been modest, even inadequate, in form, not in number.45 The critic further justifies that A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night have been most widely and adequately performed. However, the so-called ‘‘pure’’ comedies, such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and The Comedy of Errors, have been either facile humorous presentations or dismal commentaries of a comic theme.46 The production of The Comedy of Errors directed by Alexandru Dabija at the Bucharest Comedy Theater was an exception, in the sense that it interpreted the text in a jovial key. There were some darker nuances in the visualization of the inherent violence characterizing the citizens of Ephesus, or their hostility toward strangers, in Adriana’s morbid jealousy, her sister’s sentimental insecurity, or the kitchen maid’s grotesque erotic fixation. However, these drab touches did not alter the effervescent comic tone. The predominant blue lighting was a specific feature of this production. A directorial technicality meant to increase the confusion of likeness was the casting of the same actor playing both Antipholuses and both Dromios respectively, when they appeared alternately on stage, and when they acted at the same time the roles were played by different actors. This operation was confusing enough with critics and scholars, who knew very well what was going on, but the general audiences that took pains in understanding the comedy’s intricate plot as it was had a hard time of it. In the review of another Shakespearean comedy, a ‘‘dark’’ variant of Measure for Measure, the critic Alice Georgescu notes that ‘‘Shakespeare is the dominant figure of the 1996–1997 season.’’47 Georgescu observes that Measure for Measure is most attractive for modern theaters and directors because of its relevance for present-day poli-

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tics and corruption in Romania. Many directors have seen the play’s moral double meaning and the cynical questioning of accepted values as a good occasion for exposing what is happening in the newly capitalistic and democratic Eastern European country. The problem of eradication of corruption and the purification of morals has been the central concern for all Romanian governments since 1990, and this is the declared purpose of Duke Vincentio’s political maneuver. However, the concealed question regarding the Duke’s real motive of his retirement appeared immediately in this production directed by Theodor Cristian Popescu at the Taˆrgu Mures¸ National Theater in 1997. A 1996 production of the play directed by S¸tefan Iorda˘nescu at the Arad Theater raised similar issues, which showed that they were (and are) a constant problem of Romanian society. Popescu’s suggestion was that Vincentio wanted to eliminate a potential political adversary in the person of Angelo by compromising him publicly. The actor playing the Duke had slow, feline gestures, and his humble-carnivorous smile divulged his concealed intentions and dubious character. Lucio played an equivocal role in assisting Vincentio’s plans, and his reactions on the stage made the audiences compare him to a benign version of the manipulative Iago. Escalus typified the envious and resentful high government official, while Pompey, Elbow, and Froth represented the petty charlatans. Angelo was neither innocent nor culpable, and Isabella’s ingenuity had its hidden flaws. All the characters were pretenders, and they progressed in parallel worlds, where right and wrong had no definite borders, and people were taking double truths by any other name. Ambiguity and excess were the dominant modes of producing the comedies in the nineties in Romania. The production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the version of the director Ion Sapdaru produced at the Ias¸i National Theater in 1998 was a sexist and erotic interpretation. The critic reviewing this production argued that this sexually oriented version of the Dream neglected the text and was no longer connected with Shakespeare.48 The director declared in the program that he saw the characters as inclined to sexual excess, even abuse and perversion, likely to lose their identity in romantic and carnal pursuits. Sapdaru visualized them as homosexuals, pedophiles, sadomasochists, and zoophiles. He did not intend to present these sexually perverted characters in a poetic mode, performing in a natural and Edenic environment. This spectacle was neither lyrical nor ostensibly pastoral. The sets were very simple, and the music was a mixture of harsh sounds that nullified what was left of the poetry and mystery of the text. The verse was heavily deteriorated, and no accurate translation was manifestly used. The audience was ag-


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gressed with dissonant noises and deafening roars. Titania was an unrestrained nymphomaniac who roared ‘‘Uahh!’’ and the fairies needed to tie her with ropes in order to prevent her from sexually assaulting poor Bottom. At times, Oberon cried ‘‘Craa!’’ suggesting a crow, or a raven, or something like that. The entire production bore the stamp of luxuriance and intemperance, though the director may have most honorably intended to reveal the submerged erotic fantasies lurking in the unconscious. The 1999 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream directed by Victor Ioan Frunza˘ at the Cluj National Theater was a different transgressive version, which cut through the comedy elements to the bare bone of tragic parody and self-irony. The play was presented as the caricature of sexuality in excess, where Puck was a little pervert genius and Oberon a voyeuristic old lecher. The director adapted the text freely. He produced a collation of the five extant Romanian translations, spicing it with insertions from the Marquis de Sade and the Holy Bible. The Pyramus and Thisbe section appeared as a deformed self-parody to Romeo and Juliet, and the play ended abruptly in this note of theatrical failure into the ridiculous, without being saved from derision by the final intervention of the fairy world. The spirits were malefic and perverse instruments of mischievous transformations. They seemed to have strange bird shapes, looking like evil fallen angels who amused themselves by playing tricks on the foolish mortals. According to Victor Ioan Frunza˘, ‘‘those who laugh at the comedies are fewer and fewer’’ and the director intended ‘‘to tell a pleasant fairy tale about sin.’’49 Increasingly so, productions of Shakespeare’s comedies in the late ’90s focused on the conflicting elements within the plays, such as grave festivity, carnival, the grotesque, and sexual and moral license. These sober, but almost grotesque versions of Shakespeare in late-’90s’ Romania were a silent reminder of the directors’ tendency to transform the popular accessible Shakespearean stories and spectacles into serious art, the preserve of an elite intellectuality. The directors’ interest in the problematic Measure for Measure was very active in late-nineties’ Romania. If, in the previous decades, during the Communist period, cases of moral degradation and the corruption of power were plentiful, these issues were never addressed directly. In the usual manner of pretending that their society was perfect, the authorities preferred to ignore the problem. In this manner, they did not readily authorize the production of certain Shakespeare comedies that posed too many problems. In the nineties, however, when no censorship menaced the choice of plays to be performed, directors thought that the issues of power and profi-

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teering could be better debated through a problem comedy that anatomized the most unpleasant social and political infections. This process was similar, in reverse, to the one Lawrence Levine described when writing about burlesque versions of Shakespeare in nineteenth-century America. In showing how Shakespeare’s popular stories have been turned into the sanctuary of the ruling classes, Levine exemplifies his idea by the 1849 Astor Place riot. He sees this phenomenon as a sign that ‘‘theater no longer functioned as a cultural form that embodied all classes within a shared public space, nor did Shakespeare remain the common property of all Americans.’’50 Similarly, the Communists, when in power, saw Shakespeare as a cultural idol that could legitimize their social ascension through lofty educational highways, while later post-Communist models of interpretation chose to go beyond and behind the plays to find the process of institutionalization and canonization at work. Thus, directors rendered all manner of Shakespeare worthy of consideration, not only those comedies endorsed by the institutional vanguards of literary and theatrical value. A reading of Measure for Measure directed by Bocsa´rdi La´szlo´ at the Theater of Sfaˆntu Gheorghe (1999) was used to perform a theatrical incision into the purulent wound of Romania’s social and ethical pollution. The main question regarded the government’s capacity to exercise power. Is one person in a position of authority capable to decide the destiny of a nation? To what measure can one act in the name of the others? Who can bring order in a world dominated by chaos, duplicity, and moral degradation? How can the law be applied flexibly and efficiently, without invoking severe conventions and rigid codes? These were the questions asked by most Romanians on the brink of the twenty-first century, after ten years of democracy and two Center-Left and Center-Right governments, when they saw that things had not changed at all. Expecting their audiences to go to the theater to see a Shakespeare comedy that seemed something else, and which looked so close to the corrupt real life they were experiencing, Romanian directors of the nineties acted upon a social and cultural command. They saw the performance of Shakespeare’s problem plays as evolving not in an ahistorical vacuum but rather as located in specific historical and political circumstances. Thus, cultural history blended with performance practices, and Shakespeare functioned as a factor of democratization in postCommunist Romania, challenging structures of inequality and corruption instead of conserving them, as was often the case in the past. Duke Vincentio was a doubtful character in this staging of Measure for Measure, but he was not the tyrant of previous productions. He


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was genuinely conducted by a will to change the corrupted status of his country, but his good intentions were suffocated by the precarious circumstances. This authority figure indicated the current Center-Right president of the country, Emil Constantinescu, a wellintentioned university professor who had hoped to purge the evil habits in Romania; but the task seemed to be too large for his shoes. For Angelo, power meant tyranny, terror, and cruelty. Power dehumanized this character, and La´szlo´ Bocsa´rdi showed the consequences of moral alienation on a general social level. The prison scenes were especially terrifying, because they revealed a world where people lived in fear and despair, screaming from the dark dungeons, with no effect other than the jailers’ sarcastic laughter. The oppressive atmosphere was almost tangible when the convicted subjects and their wardens walked among the audience, showing them that they were also part of that maltreated population. At that time in Romania, like today, taxes and prices were very high, remuneration very low, and when somebody wanted to claim a right he or she encountered a blind wall of non-responsiveness and indifference on the part of the authorities, cloaked under the pretense of legality and shrouded in impenetrable bureaucracy. Although the theater was no longer expected to address topical political issues directly, the current relevance of Shakespeare’s problem comedies for a discordant Romania was unavoidable. Two productions, one of As You Like It by Mihaela Lichiardopol at the Timis¸oara National Theater (2000) and one of the Dream by Tudor Ma˘ra˘scu at the Constant¸a Theater (2000), did not enjoy such good reviews. About Lichiardopol’s interpretation of As You Like It, Doina Modola argues that it was like a ‘‘defective dećoupage,’’ where the bare white stage did not significantly disclose the complex game of contrasts and appearances from the Forest of Arden.51 However, the serious tone of this production, meant to reveal the relativity of destiny, where good and bad fortunes and ethical values intermingled dangerously, was characteristic of most Romanian productions of Shakespeare’s comedies at the beginning of this century. Lichiardopol tried to insert a kind of feminist innovation in the character structure by casting an actress in travesty for the role of the banished Duke and by doubling many parts, but the effect was not very convincing. Delia Voicu writes about Tudor Ma˘ra˘scu’s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that it is a ‘‘disharmonic’’ and ‘‘forceless’’ spectacle.52 However, when I saw the production, there was enough time to notice some positive aspects. While they are not enough to recommend the production as a landmark for the theatrical interpretations of Shakespeare’s romantic comedy in Romania,

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Ma˘ra˘scu introduced enough self-referential theatrical material to conclude that, at least from the directorial perspective, this production could make a statement. The production blended traditional interpretation and innovation. Theseus was a warlord of the wild nineties, complete with tattoo and skinhead, and Hippolyta was a veritable Amazon. She was dragged in chains into the marriage and produced aggressive comments directed to the actors in the play scene. However, she was a visibly tamed Amazon by this time, and the chains, the only vestiges of her reluctant spirit of feminine freedom, were used as adorning diadem and bracelets. Oberon and Titania formed a female couple, but the sexual innuendo was traditionally guided in the direction of Bottom and the classical connotation of the ass’s sexual potency. Puck was a triple ubiquitous figure with the qualities of an acrobat, popping out of the pit and the side doors simultaneously. The fairies played the neat schoolgirls with satchels, led by an authoritarian and musical Mary Poppins. Titania’s bower looked exactly like the flowery crimson bed of feathers suspended from the ceiling in Peter Brook’s 1970 RSC production. Ma˘ra˘scu’s version showed a mixture of styles and interpretations of Shakespeare’s play, combined with diverse cultural allusions. The mechanicals’ artistic transaction and the critique of theatricality carried allusions to Ophelia’s mad discourse through a suave distribution of flowers. Additionally, there was an interesting pantomime performed by (presumably) an added Feste, the King’s Fool, who broke the chains of ignorance and learned who he was through the theatrical show and through Puck’s emancipating intervention. The epilogue was theirs, and so was the conclusion of the play. Tudor Ma˘ra˘scu’s production made a statement regarding the condition of Shakespeare’s theater in the uneasy year 2000. The general tendency was toward no more, or probably less, politics, while many productions were a recapitulation of styles and theatrical strategies. In a discussion ranging over a variety of Romanian productions of Shakespeare’s comedies during almost half a century, it is difficult to pinpoint a pattern describing Romanian performance practices. However, just like ‘‘Shakespeare’’ is a dramatist of volatile identity, changing color like a chameleon53 according to the culture in which he is being presented, so are the Romanian productions of his comedies in various periods of Romanian theater history. Probably more extensively than other plays in the Shakespeare canon, various theatrical rewritings of the comedies force us to a reconsideration of the ways the theater can articulate the myths of our society. In a period when Communist policy was restrictive, the comedies were a form of


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escapism in the theatrical ivory tower of fantasy. During the decades of subversive anti-Communist discourse, the comedies provided a delightful mode of exposing unpleasant truths. The productions of the romantic comedies in the new millennium, however, are no longer romantic affairs, but they disclose many ambiguities and a roughness inherent in the decentered mode of modern-day theatricality. The current stage of Romanian productions of comedies during the nineties and into the new century evidences an emphasis on the transgressive and perverse elements actively undermining the harmony in the comedies. This aggressive and often offensive mode of producing these plays is meant to have an effective impact on postmodern audiences. It forces them to admit the deep-seated contradictions in real life and, implicitly, draws their attention to the modern theater as a cultural institution, whose popularity has been threatened by an increasingly peripheral position in relation to other versions of Shakespeare’s comedies on film, video, or television. Faced with increasing material and financial difficulties, Romanian theaters try to tell audiences that they are still there, attempting to make them laugh or wonder. I cannot venture to provide a cogent answer as to the audiences’ responses to this challenge. All I know is that the box offices in Bucharest and other cities are always fully booked, for Shakespeare or for any other play that is running in one season, for that matter.

5 Shakespeare, Communism, and After: Tragedies WHAT MEANINGS DID THE ROMANIAN PRODUCTIONS OF SHAKESPEARE generate for those who knew only the Stratford variants? Romanian productions of Shakespeare, especially during the Communist period, were an enigma and a closed chapter for mainstream ‘‘Shakespeare in performance’’ criticism. The country’s economic, political, and cultural isolation did not allow for many informational exchanges and the theater was no exception. At the same time, however, the Shakespearean theatrical show in Romania went on, because the Communist authorities knew intuitively that they had everything to gain by adapting the plays to their ideological demands. In an attempt to refresh the state of Romanian Shakespeare for interested readers, this chapter examines how Shakespeare has been initially appropriated and gradually localized in Romanian theater under the forty years of Communism and in the decades that followed the 1989 change in the political system. In studying the significance of Shakespeare to the cultural development of Communist Romania, we can easily see that he entered the domain of this theater by stages and became a predominant touchstone of theatrical—if not political—identity. ‘‘Shakespeare’’ became a paradigm of cultural evolution and the theatrical maturity of a nation. Moreover, the tragedies played an important role in revitalizing the people’s political combative spirit, especially in the last decade before the fall of the Communist regime. In the early years of ideological Socialist oppression, the productions of Shakespeare’s tragedies were used either for cultural legitimization of Socialist practices, or manipulated to signify the superiority of Communism over capitalism by applying idealized Marxist theories to the theater. In the ‘‘hard’’ Communist period of the 1950s and ’60s, when the authorities wanted to legitimize their control over Romania’s past and present in every possible way, producing Shakespeare extensively was a vehicle for exploring identity 158

5: SHAKESPEARE, COMMUNISM, AND AFTER: TRAGEDIES

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in relation to the other. As a rule, the Bard was seen as a paradigm of ‘‘classical’’ elegance. At times, certain critics and Communist propaganda exploited the Romanian public’s increasing taste for Shakespeare by drawing attention to the dangers of accepting the ideas of the perilous Western ‘‘other’’ indiscriminately. In reviewing one production of Shakespeare or another, the critic’s authorized role was supposed to raise the reader’s awareness regarding the confused recognition of a playwright who described the mores of a country that had embraced the capitalist and imperialist values throughout the centuries. However, certain critics used their reviews of Shakespeare’s productions as a form of masked anti-Communist resistance. They knew that the people attending a Shakespeare play, or those who read the reviews, belonged to the middle-class intellectuals. Most educated people did not adhere to the proletarian views, and the Communist authorities worked hard at creating a class of intellectuals deriving from the working class. In the meantime, however, certain elements in the theatrical performance, as well as some allusions in the reviews about a production, were indirectly and piquantly subversive. It is convenient to look at the history of the Shakespeare in performance in Communist Romania as being divided into three liberally delimited periods. The decade 1959–69 was a time of adaptation and cultural integration of the plays in the national theatrical circuit. This adoption was limited, however, by the political and cultural commands. Theaters and directors chose to elude the indirect and selective censorship by producing those Shakespeare plays that were less adaptable to overt political commentary. In this sense, the light comedies were definitely preferred by theaters, especially in the state theaters of the large cities, in contrast with the tragedies. The tragedies were mostly produced at the theaters in Bucharest, and their frequency was comparably lower than that of the comedies. The explanation is that there was a larger concentration of refined middle-class intellectuals in the capital. These cultured audiences could taste the fine casual theatrical references in certain productions and interpret the anti-regime insinuations appearing in the written reviews appropriately. In their misguided attempt to ‘‘stabilize’’1 the Shakespeare text, as W. B. Worthen puts it, Romanian directors and theaters constantly needed Shakespeare as a banner to legitimize cultural and political debate. Probably less aware of the theoretical issue related to the fact that the director’s concept of interpreting Shakespeare is also hermeneutically shifting on a continual basis, Romanian directors relied on the common notion that

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‘‘Shakespeare,’’ as they saw him, was somehow uniquely interpretable, renewable, and relevant. In the period 1970–80, the theaters experienced a process of modernization, and Shakespeare was as much read as performed. From the earlier demure attempts at making Shakespeare known to a larger Romanian public while eluding the inflexible Communist censorship, directors in this period started experimenting and even radicalizing Shakespeare. Considering such issues as staging, acting, improvisation, ceremony, and ritual, we can see radical changes in how theaters staged Shakespeare for Romanian audiences. The need for camouflage was still there, but directors became more active and efficient in conveying clandestine transmissions with political resonance under the guise of theatrical innovations. In their turn, the audiences expected and enjoyed political innuendoes, and the theater became a place where the publicly oppressed Romanian people could release their frustrations in a verbalized cultural fashion within the restricted theater space. In a similar indirect manner, certain departments of the University of Bucharest educated the members of the younger generation in the spirit of Western values through Shakespeare. For instance, the undergraduate students at the Faculty of Letters, especially the English section, emerged in general from an intellectual middleclass social background, and their system of values was more liberally oriented. At times, the director invited groups of students to attend a Shakespeare production, manifestly in order to become acquainted with English culture, but in particular they formed the younger age group that would examine critically the irrational claims of the totalitarian regime. In the decade 1980–90, theaters passed through a period of rediscovery marked by political and cultural appropriations. ‘‘The bird named Shakespeare’’2 was transparently put to ideological uses, and local theaters became more involved in undermining the collapsing Communist rule by reshaping mentalities about the prerogatives of power.3 The theater’s subversive influence over two decades of producing Shakespeare in Romania might have culminated in the 1989 political displacement of autocracy in the real world. The politically informed audiences in this decade of communication expected directors to adopt a more ideologically combative attitude when producing Shakespeare. The tragedies, particularly Hamlet, dramatized social imperfections, the nature of power and the relations of power, authority, and legitimacy. Romanian directors produced these plays relying on the impact of economic and social transformations on cultural politics, knowing that this was what their audiences ex-


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pected of them.4 The result was a particular kind of ‘‘Shakespolitic’’ that took into account the public’s expectations and the exigencies of the modern theater, and focused on the tragedies as sites on which profound political contradictions were intercepted, rehearsed, or displaced. After 1990, when the international panorama of producing Shakespeare expanded and Romania entered the circuit of theatrical collaboration, producing Shakespeare became the primary metonymy for the theater itself. For many theaters and directors, the plays in the canon, plus a large number of adaptations, combinations, and contractions, became a verified mode of affirming their artistic resourcefulness. Most productions of the tragedies were performed in the meta-theatrical key, and the productions’ successes were cashed in, internally, through the box-office sales, and externally, by various international tours, especially in England and the US. Eager to escape the unfair prior marginalization and isolation from the world’s cultural circuit, the Romanian theater companies found that producing Shakespeare by using the Romanians’ exceptionally creative talents was a rewarding activity. During the entire period of the nineties, a remarkable number of directors applied their artistic skill to producing Shakespeare, and the tragedies had their special place in this worthy and useful venture. We still see the directors’ and theaters’ tendency to evoke as authority a Shakespeare that, nonetheless, betrays a perpetual straying from definition, since this is a mode of authorization by historicity. However, this time, Romanian directors and theaters got involved in a special kind of ‘‘Shakescommunication,’’ understandable in an age of cell phones and satellites.

Tragedies and Communism Considering the distinct adaptability of the Shakespearean tragedies to political commentary, I will focus mainly on the productions of some of these plays during the forty-year period of Communist rule in Romania. The need for restriction does not allow me to refer to Romanian productions of Hamlet, which is an issue in need of a special chapter. Romanian directors and critics have always considered Shakespeare’s tragedies as a public platform of debate erected within the theatrical platform of the stage. Directors relied on the relationship of the theater to politics in Shakespeare’s use of Rome to explore aspects of empire and republic in Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Titus Andronicus, and Antony and Cleopatra. Similarly, the politics of

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deceit in the four great tragedies gave them the possibility to transmit ambiguous meanings, or to interrogate people’s ability to communicate and interact socially. Through the mediation of the inwardly self-reflexive heroes of the tragedies, directors aimed to raise the audiences’ historical and political awareness, as well as to give them a glimpse of transcendent metaphysics and interiority. In a society that could barely account for its public and cultural parameters, the productions of the tragedies showed the audiences how to question the current system and distinguish between what people pretended to be and who they really were. Moreover, the simple idea that such a questioning was possible emerged as rewarding enough for a nation that had been impeded from thinking freely for several centuries of foreign political and ideological dependence. Most Romanian directors read Shakespeare’s tragedies as metaphors of social disintegration and explained the world they lived in as a further stage of decline. Hamlet’s rage and depression were seen as his responses to the complacency of the world around him, which could be easily identified with the assertive and corrupt Communist privileged few. King Lear objectified the horror of individualistic logic, and this disregarding attitude typified the posture of the Communist rulers of the time. Macbeth internalized the inflexible determination in the pursuit of power, and the productions sent explicit messages to an audience that had experienced the obdurate extravagance of the Communist leader Ceaus¸escu and his ambitious wife. Antony and Cleopatra considered the impossibility of a full humanity in an inhumane society, and many productions made the audiences question the inconsistency and inadequacy of Communist rule. Timon’s all-consuming hatred resulted from society’s unrelieved, totally irresponsible pursuit of wealth, and Romanians knew that the members of the Communist autocracy had amassed huge amounts of assets and privileges at the expense of the ignorant working class they pretended to represent. In general, the tragedies exposed a sustained contravention of moral logic accompanied by invariable dishonesty in refusing to acknowledge this fact. This particular brand of moral duplicity was characteristic of the Communist ideology when applied in practice. The lofty Marxist ideals, brassily promoted in theory, were belied in everyday social practice. Here, the poor were still poorer, while their ‘‘elected’’ government representatives enjoyed inconceivable privileges. Directors sought to raise the public’s attentiveness to these issues by mainly playing on the Shakespearean tragedies’ theatrical complexity. On reviewing the theater agenda for 1947–57 in Romania, the


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general impression is that the theaters preferred local authors. Among the foreign dramatists, it was a matter of national policy and Communist party propaganda to promote Russian and Soviet playwrights, such as Chekhov, Gogol, or Ostrovski. Shakespeare was the undesired epitome of ‘‘bourgeois’’ and ‘‘capitalist’’ Western culture and, as such, was unofficially banned from the stage. Only certain Soviet troupes on tour could afford to adopt a pose of educational patrons and produce one Western play here and there. In 1953, for instance, the Mossoviet troupe presented a deficient Othello at the Bucharest National Theater, in 1957 they reappeared with The Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw, and in 1959 they proposed an ideologically neutral version of The Merry Wives of Windsor. When Romanian theaters did produce plays belonging to Western European playwrights, they mainly focused in the direction of Molie`re, Goldoni, and Ibsen. The comedies by Molie`re, Goldoni, and Shakespeare for that matter could provide the indispensable light entertainment that would make people forget the precarious status of their lives as drab survival. The directors, on the other hand, had not reached that special degree of sophistication that would allow them to exploit the serious and disruptive constituents of the comedies and disguise everything behind the mask of the spectacle. After 1958, however, the theater became a matter of national policy. The Communist rulers had enough political acumen to assume that they could control the already-frightened and tame masses better by providing panem et circenses, bread and circus, for them. The alimentary side came in the material form of many food shops (called Alimentara in Romanian), destined to cater to the basic needs of a still-famished population. An ideological tag suggesting that it was the omnipresent and omnipotent party who cared for its people’s welfare accompanied all food supplies. Concomitantly, the media inundated minds with downpours of patriotic music and clamorous speeches about how Romanian agriculture was surging to incalculable heights with the help of zealous workers, while in reality the land and all property was being taken from the legal owners and transferred to the state. In the middle of this ideological circus, which articulated the increasing discrepancy between seeming and being, Shakespeare became as good an influential tool as any to serve Communist propaganda’s ends. In 1957, the Bucharest National Theater produced Romeo and Juliet in a subdued love-anddeath tone, while theater criticism of the time favored the Brechtian view of epic theater and the importance of historicizing interpretations.5 An anonymous article in a theater journal of the time, signed ‘‘t.,’’

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debated the situation of the repertoire policy in Romanian theaters. According to the unnamed author, an order from the Socialist Department of Culture, General Direction of Theaters, stipulated that ‘‘In the Popular Republic of Romania the theater contributes to the people’s cultural progress, enhancing their education in the spirit of action for promoting Socialist values and universal peace.’’6 However, the author complained about the lack of funding from the state. These budget cuts made theaters replace the production of money-consuming Shakespeare plays (such as As You Like It at the Baca˘u State Theater) with less demanding authors. The critic argued that the troupe’s limited budget should not interfere with the managerial selection of producing valuable plays. Despite the politicians’ indoctrinating wish to reshape Shakespeare according to the Communist agenda, directors and theater managers could find ways of eluding the political implication. Willingly or not, they seemed to have selected for their repertoires those Shakespeare plays that were least adaptable to political and ideological commands. It is a documented fact that in the dark period of inflexible Communism (1949–60) mostly Shakespearean comedies were produced on the Romanian stage. It is true that all directors insisted on the presentation of social conflicts in the comedies, but, apart from this aspect, there can be little political concern in the love-and-marriage tribulations of the characters from The Taming of the Shrew, The Merry Wives of Windsor, or Two Gentlemen of Verona. In a comic cartoon designed by Val Munteanu in a 1961 theater journal, under the rubric entitled ‘‘Theater Stuff,’’ the reader can see an image of Shakespeare’s bust on a pedestal. Behind the Bard’s statue is a scared artist (director?) who is being chased by a fearsome-looking critic (or Communist censorship member) with a club in lieu of argument. The caption reads, ‘‘When you aim at your adversaries, do not hide behind the monuments of famous people. They have not been erected to this purpose.’’7 In the best form of double entendre, it is difficult to discern the roles of the two protagonists of the cartoon. We may consider the person hiding behind the Shakespeare monument to be an actor who performs a Shakespeare character badly. The director reprimands him, and he finds an excuse for his failure in the author’s ‘‘greatness.’’ Thus, we may have the sort of neutral reading that would look good to the official eye. Another tame opinion would be that an indolent director wants to escape any artistic responsibility and he selects Shakespeare as a comfortable screen for his deficiencies. When the reading becomes more refined, however, an important question is being raised: Who is the adversary? Is he just a resentful critic, or does he represent


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the political censorship, those who have been trained at the Stalinist schools to use clubs as arguments? In this new and unconventional light, the director sees the representative of the Communist propaganda as his contender or an opponent of the theater in general, and he hides behind the great Shakespeare figure in order to be able to say things he could not have voiced otherwise. This interpretation is only for those who want to go beyond the flimsy appearance of Communist indoctrination. Such a cartoon is a sure example concerning the permanent dual signification of many artistic representations during the fifties. This kind of dissimulation designates the solid defense screen the theater and the arts chose to adopt against the offensive domination of Russian culture and the aggressive intrusion of Communist propaganda and censorship. The idea that producing Shakespeare was a necessary prerequisite for fostering a nation’s ideological progress suited the Communist authorities very well, so they dutifully embarked upon a programmed promotion of staging Shakespeare for the masses, in order to advance their revolutionary spirit and their taste for social prosperity. This was what the authorities wanted to happen. What theaters really did was another matter. A similar pattern consisting of impersonal and apparently non–politically biased productions of comedies advanced by Romanian theaters characterized most of the sixties. From the official perspective, this period was one of unprecedented opening to the cultural values of Europe in general. With attempts at Russian acculturation still very high, the Communist authorities allowed, however, a larger penetration of the literature and theatrical influences from the West. Shakespeare in particular was seen as the archetype of dramatic value and a cultural platform of debating certain economic and social principles, which the rudimentary Communist ideologists thought they had invented all by themselves. They considered it their responsibility to transmit these values to the people via the ‘‘classical’’ intermediaries. Particularly around 1964, the year of the quatercentenary Shakespeare celebration, theaters all over the country responded to the cultural command of producing Shakespeare extensively with an enthusiasm equaled in social life only by the workers’ very vocal efforts to reconstruct the country’s infrastructure. The 1964 edition of the central Bucharest theatrical journal dedicated an entire number to the ‘‘Shakespeare phenomenon,’’ and most theaters produced at least one play in the canon, especially in the period 1962–64. For instance, the writer Florin Tornea surveyed a number of twentieth-century critical receptions and argued that Shakespeare demonstrates a particular sense of history because his

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plays reveal the essentially popular origin of his characters. Therefore, the critic proposed a materialist and historical critical interpretation.8 Ana Maria Narti surveyed some late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Romanian productions of Shakespeare’s plays.9 In the same jubilee issue of the main theater journal, Dana Criva˘t¸ presented the usual facts about Shakespeare’s life and the Elizabethan social and theatrical milieu and argued that the playwright was a great actor and a practical man in everyday life.10 In point of productions of Shakespeare, the comedies were still in high regard in this celebratory year, but there were also some remarkable productions of the tragedies. Apart from a 1963 Macbeth at the Bulandra Theater and a noteworthy Richard III with George Vraca at the Nottara Theater (1964), however, this splendid devotion to the Shakespeare cause materialized mainly in the production of comedies. I could go as far as to pronounce the decade 1959–69 as a period of intensive production of Shakespeare’s comedies in Romania. Even after the auspicious year 1964, during 1965 through 1969, the comedies occupied an important part of the Romania theaters’ Shakespearean repertoire. Among the fewer tragedies produced in the sixties decade, a fulltext Antony and Cleopatra at the Nottara Theater in 1961 needs to be mentioned. The director, George Teodorescu, experimented with the young actors’ theatrical skills rather than focusing on political allusions. Audiences could see a conventionalized and asepticlooking Rome, complete with the classic costumes of the Roman soldiers, but Cleopatra’s Egypt provided no contrast to it. The entire production left the Shakespeare text and the actors to speak freely in the particular language of the theater, without any directorial intervention regarding certain political innuendo. The text was unabridged, and the translation was adequate to the cultural necessities of the time. A closer look at a picture representing the scene of Antony’s suicide in this production, however, shows that the four stern soldiers surrounding the Roman triumvir who pleads for his death look like his executioners rather than his faithful guards. The three guards and Dercetus, followers of Antony, look fiercely at their commander and have their swords drawn in a position of war. Antony’s company of apparently faithful attendants is evocative of the period’s hostile secret police, a group of militiamen who would be present instantly, whenever one leader or advocate of the antiCommunist resistance was expected to collapse. Quite differently, the 1962 production of Macbeth at the Bucharest National Theater focused on the ethical issues raised by the play and the social evil the ‘‘deed’’ generates. The director, Mihai Berechet,


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confronted his audience with the larger-than-life and murderous figures of the King and his Lady, interpreted by prominent actors of the Romanian stage at the time, Emil Botta and Anca S¸ahighian. As a reviewer pointed out, ‘‘Denouncing the bloody tyrants’ despotic autocracy has been the central concept of the spectacle . . . This led to the conclusion that the root of all evil and every misfortune befalling a country lies in the possibility of continuing dictatorship.’’11 The critic offered an initial socializing commentary on the hard life of the ‘‘working class’’ in the Elizabethan age, which counterbalanced such a bold assertion, rather inadequate for this Communistoppressed period. Nicolau informed the Romanian readers that in the Elizabethan period, the emerging capital prospered, sustained by the Queen, while the people were ‘‘plunged in the darkness of increased suffering.’’12 The policy of the enclosures was interpreted as a forceful confiscation of the farmers’ lands, leaving the workers without means of subsistence and turning them into vagabonds and mendicants. The Elizabethan ‘‘monsters’’ who did such a thing to the impoverished people were, according to Nicolau, the representatives of those elements on which the capitalist structure was founded. The religious persecutions in England were allegedly attributed to these capitalist demons, whose cruelty had caused the execution of 72,000 people, as Nicolau said that Holinshed wrote.13 A dutiful Marxist quotation in this amazingly biased theatrical review appeared to certify the sound ideological framework. However, the critic’s passing reference to the concept of ‘‘dictatorship’’ was conducive to a concealed allusion to the Communist totalitarian government. Given the prejudiced Socialist version of English history, Shakespeare’s position toward the common depravity in his period was supposed to be one of pungent criticism. Thus, the playwright, according to Nicolau, was expected to show ‘‘his ardent love of virtue, his admiration for the hero who protests and fights against the social evil, and his hatred for those who are the instruments of this evil.’’14 In this view, Macbeth was the protagonist who, though gifted with great psychological force and noble attributes, lost his humane qualities when he let himself slip into the evil ways of his age. Trying to reach happiness through oppression and murder, Macbeth erred because he thought that he could achieve the full potential of his humanity by becoming a king. According to the Communist propaganda, kingship was the least desirable of all social hierarchies of power because it involved alienation. Macbeth renounced his humanity in order to be king, just as Lear attained his humanity when he lost his kingship status. Florian Nicolau maintained that the play

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was meant to ‘‘condemn the vices of autocracy and despotic monarchy’’ and to assert ‘‘the legitimate right of the people to rise against their tyrannical kings.’’15 Considering that this play was produced only five years after monarchy was abolished in Romania by a political coup, which was presented as the people’s revolt against the authority of kingship, the Communists tried to use distorted meanings by Shakespeare in order to justify their dubious political ways. When looking at the records of this production with critical eyes, a few elements of subversive and intentional anti-Communist messages can be noticed. For instance, the director Mihai Berechet gave an exceptional importance to the weird sisters’ scenes, a choice very much criticized because it did not correspond to the social materialistic requirements. By giving the workings of providence and the supernatural an important place in shaping human destiny, the production implicitly denied the objectifying materialistic stance. Moreover, the protagonists’ roles, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, were performed by different actors at different stages of their moral dissolution. The same actress playing one version of Lady Macbeth interpreted the role of Hecate. All the supernatural scenes, including the apparition of Banquo’s ghost, were very prominent in this production. This directorial choice derived from a particular artistic resistance to the atheistic and positivist commands of the regime. In the same subversive key, the murder scene had a special connotation, especially at the moment when Macbeth and Lady Macbeth extended their bloody arms in the form of a Satanist cross. The gesture might be interpreted as a critique of religious practices in an atheistic reading, but the two intersected bloody arms could also signify the crossed scythe and hammer against the red background of the Russian Communist flag. Apparently, this production of Macbeth did not please the Communist authorities of the time, so the director reviewed it in 1963 with a different cast. This time, the same theater critic Florian Nicolau wrote that ‘‘one can clearly see the heroes’ tragic fate, determined by the social evil undermining Shakespeare’s age.’’16 This distinct shift of focus toward the socializing commentary would better suit the censorship’s command for a more neutral and less politically influential production of Macbeth. At first sight, the ‘‘domestic’’ version of tragedy in Othello could give little scope for political or social stage readings. The 1965 production at the Craiova National Theater, however, focused on Iago as the duplicitous motor of the conflict. In his directorial perception, Ca˘lin Florian emphasized ‘‘the tragedy of deceived good faith.’’17 He tried to avoid previous interpretative errors based on stereotypes, such as the synonymy between Moor and jealousy, or


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racial and pathological speculation. The audience could see how deceit and dissimulation destroyed the individual’s moral fiber, and the last words they could hear on stage were the open-ended ‘‘Demand me nothing. What you know, you know / From this time forth I never will speak word.’’ (5.2.309–10) This equivocal finale might suggest that the director intended to warn about the disastrous moral consequences of psychological dissimulation, especially in a period when only few were really convinced of the unprecedented economic, social, and moral benefits of Communism. Most people could see merely material deprivation under the official pretense of plenty; social injustice under the rule of the working class; and the moral disaster of hypocrisy, when people could see one thing but were forced to pretend to see another. This ethical duplicity on a social scale could find the best theatrical representation in the Iago character. The suggestive sets and lighting of the production contributed to the psychology created by the shifting images. A complex set of panels, walls, and arcades, which changed position successively, suggested in order the Venetian street, the Cyprus square, the Senate in Venice, or Desdemona’s bedroom. Nothing ever was as it seemed to be in Venice, in Cyprus, on the Romanian stage, or in real life. The 1969 Othello at the Bucharest National Theater raised similar issues of error, misunderstanding, and ethical crisis. Additionally, the director Cornel Todea introduced the innovation of subtle humor underlying the tragedy brought about by hypocrisy. The Iago-Roderigo scenes had a greater importance than those featuring Iago and Othello had, and they were acted in the commedia dell’arte improvisational spirit. This Arlechino-Pucinella type of dramatic exchange made the tragedy seem an obstinately burlesque farce devised by a traitor and a dupe. The director showed preference to the montage film technique, so the production abounded in panoramic and group scenes, close-ups, and ingenious interplay of lighting and shade. This production’s apparent lack of metaphoric significance and its whimsical tone gave the reviewer the impression that this variant of the tragedy was ‘‘a reduction, a simplification of the fabulous, gigantic Shakespearean universe to the inferior proportions of cheap affairs happening in a provincial garrison.’’18 The intentional low-key tragic note could be another directorial artifice to avoid the intrusion of political or ideological issues in the fabric of the Shakespearean tragedy. The production’s emphasis was on psychological development. The hero was presented as a slave of his instincts, who at the peak moment of his regression into mental disorder heard the obsessive drumming of his African ancestors, who used to exor-

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cise the demons of the mind by using mysterious shamanistic practices. This tendency toward insinuating occult meanings in a positively secular tragedy of the mind could be explained by the artist’s need to resist the atheistic requirements of ideological indoctrination through the suggestion of a supernatural world above the visible everyday existence. As long as the allusion was not so loud as to disturb the Communist self-centeredness and theoretical recommendations, all was fine with the Romanian world of Shakespeare’s theater. The then young-and-upcoming student-director Andrei S¸erban displayed ‘‘a cultural spectacle’’19 in producing Julius Caesar at the Bulandra Theater in 1968. The main character in this production was the Shakespeare text, and the young director, the actors, and the set designer (Liviu Ciulei) harmonized in leaving the script its freedom to construct an ample commentary of the present times based on historical circumstances. This modern-dress Julius Caesar evoked the classical drama of the Senate’s confrontation with the nature of tyranny, easily translated in Elizabethan terms as the Queen’s conflict with the Parliament. However, the theatrical metaphor extended to present-day Communist Romania, where the specter of totalitarian power was already a critical issue. The specificity of the theatrical representation was exploited to suit covert political ends in this production. The assassination scene was set in a huge amphitheater, the Senators and Caesar on its highest level. As Casca dealt the first blow Caesar did not fall immediately, because actors only represented reality on stage, they did not actually live and die on the podium. Caesar covered his face with the scarlet toga and descended one step, where he was stabbed again. Thus, blow after blow and step after step, Caesar, as the theatrical metaphor of deposed power, descended the stair of absolute magnificence and recovered his initial human proportions. On the lowest platform, when Brutus struck the deadly blow, the tyrant became human and he looked at his murderer with love and understanding. However, Caesar’s red mantle, an effective spot of color in the relatively simple modern dress of the spectacle, symbolically represented his potentially tyrannical power, but also his death and the extent of the Communist power in Eastern Europe. In the Romanian political climate, the red color had an obvious Communist symbolism, and the annihilation of the mantle’s importance after Caesar’s death had a definite anti-Communist meaning. In addition, the symbolic spreading of the mantle signified the extension of the Communist sphere of influence in the world. This intense directorial tendency to append symbolic meanings to Shakespeare’s plays,


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and even to the props as dramatic text, shifted the paradigm of theoretical discussion from the idea of an author at work to the fact that each dramatic text could be almost always contextually (re)constructed. While Romanian directors claimed a unique fidelity to the elusive ‘‘Shakespeare,’’ they exploded the naı¨vete´ of anxious audiences, eager critics, and vigilant political censorship. The Shakespeare they served to the Romanian public ceased to be even the entity directors believed to have adopted as their artistic mentor, which was an epitomizing idea that sprang from a historically created notion of authenticity. Frustrated and limited by their own and the public’s need to see a particular production as ‘‘Shakespeare,’’ Romanian directors were hampered in their aspiration to transgress the text by the very fact that they assumed a stable text in the first place. Thus, they betrayed a universal implicit imposition of contingent ideological values upon Shakespeare. In Andrei S¸erban’s interpretation of Julius Caesar, Brutus’s error was his tragedy. He inferred that, when devoid of any sense of reality, the highest ethical ideal might become its antithesis. On an existing ideological plane, any member of the ’68 audience could extrapolate the message and see the decline of the lofty Marxist ideals into the reality of the Stalinist regime of subjugation and terror. Although at that time the fear of Bolshevik repression had subsided substantially in the mind of the population, there was still a general feeling of persecution and control in the form of the omnipresent Communist Party secret police, or the Securitate. Paradoxically, the name of this repressive institution, which was famed for imprisoning and torturing everybody that opposed the Communist regime, implied that this state organization offered ‘‘Security’’ to the country’s citizens. The question was for whom it provided this kind of security service. Was it for the people, as they claimed? However, the Romanians were mostly persecuted for their different political views. Was it for the Communist Party? It was most certainly so, because through this suspicion-and-fear-generating instrument the unwanted regime consolidated its authority. The production of Julius Caesar implied that names and definite labels could be tragically misleading in the game of world politics and power under any totalitarian regime. Two conclusions are evident from the survey of this decade’s productions of Shakespeare in Romania (1959–69), namely, the comedies were predominant in the theaters’ selection of Shakespeare, and the majority of these plays were produced at theaters in the main cities of the country, not in Bucharest. The few Shakespearean tragedies produced in this period, however, were staged at central

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theaters in the capital. Local directors may have been aware that less-informed and more-easily-manipulated audiences in smaller towns were less likely to respond to the undercover political innuendo the tragedies could yield, so they chose the form of light entertainment provided by the comedies. The directors in the capital, however, were more tempted to experiment with theatrical techniques of dissimulation and elusive practices, in order to convey meanings that would go against the direction of official mainstream Communist propaganda. Sometimes the directors’ intended political message was outstretched, in the sense that many made other theatrical energies become subservient to the sole purpose of political criticism. Essential concepts of performance, improvisation, and imitation, as well as issues related to the social construction of race, gender, and subjectivity remained on a secondary plane in the Romanian representations of the tragedies during the sixties. The decade 1970–80 was a period of radicalization and subversion for Romanian productions of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Directors self-consciously tried to convey a covert political message under the appearance of theatrical innovations by selecting those Shakespearean tragedies that could yield political interpretations. The rate of productions of comedies in Romanian theaters was still high, but those tragedies that were being performed could initiate a particular type of communication with a more educated and radical audience. The authority and decoding agency of Romanian audiences at that time could be interpreted in terms of an intense and receptive theatricality and rhetoric. The audience’s varied responses to the stage might be viewed as anticipating the postmodern pluralism of theatrical transactions. Their expectations from the performances, especially of Shakespeare’s tragedies, were so high that the tension was almost a palpable presence in the theater. This was the decade of King Lear, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, and Macbeth, because these tragedies were adaptable to certain clandestine directorial interpretations in the political mode. Moreover, during a particular performance, actors would use specific techniques of their art to improvise, by brief pantomime, tone of voice, gesture, or even intrusions in the text. Thus, each individual night of Shakespeare was a special occasion for ingeniously eluding the censorship, to the audience’s delight. The 1970 King Lear at the Bucharest National Theater, directed by Radu Penciulescu, incorporated theatrical innovation and public issues. The modern-dress production exploited the sets by Florica Ma˘lureanu to convey the idea of the ‘‘poor theater,’’ relying on human potential rather than elaborate sets and costumes. At the be-


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ginning of this production, all the actors were on stage. They were the audience within the audience, observing the beginning of their own show. The ‘‘stage-within-stage’’ convention appeared through the setting of an Elizabethan inner stage, which provided the main acting space where key scenes were played. The second section was a metallic catwalk, which was the area of the institutional and ordered world, accommodating Goneril, Albany, Oswald, and others. Transitions from one zone to another typified the escape from the evil and corruption of the world of politics. Edgar fled this confining territory and retired on the main stage the moment he became poor Tom. A third playing area was represented by the theater itself. One lateral box was turned into a stage where Lear confronted the Fool and Edmund and Edgar unfolded their brotherly dispute. This was the place where Lear told the audience about ingratitude and cracking nature’s moulds or about omnipotence and vain authority. The focal point of this spectacle was the intimation of fate, or time incorporated in history. The courtiers’ shiny white capes symbolized ceremony and authority. The calm order of a self-sufficient world was disrupted when Lear initiated the abdication ceremony. At this moment, chaos began, and the attending squires lashed repeatedly at these white capes enfolding the protagonists. Goneril and Regan’s visceral grotesque laughter, Oswald’s sly smile of complicity, and Lear’s final groans of anguish suggested the anarchy of psychological disorder. This Lear in the ’70 version was a performance of the body, which was meant to express madness, chaos, and the incoherence of an unjust world. According to the critic reviewing this production, ‘‘The current audience, electrocuted by the experiences of the twentieth century, especially those of the past thirty years, can grasp Shakespeare’s tragic meaning only through the vision of the grotesque.’’20 Excessive laughter was the symbolic theatrical signal in this production. The audiences heard Regan’s hysterical and incited chuckle when Gloucester’s eyes were pulled out, Lear’s gruff cackle, his autocratic resonant throaty sounds, and the desperate and soft whisper of demented disintegration. The mortally wounded Edmund groaned with insane laughter, rolling on the ground when he announced that fortune’s wheel had come full circle. This demented laughter was appeased by the sad music of a flute, the Fool’s main theme, which marked the end of the play. The bare brutality of this spectacle raised questions about the inequitable world the audience lived in, where all people were deemed equal, but some placed in a privileged political position of power enjoyed the niceties of life freely, grinning insolently at those whom they were sup-

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posed to represent. Visceral behavioral attitudes and booming laughter seemed to be the only alternatives to the theatrical description of a disturbing world, in the attempt to express and/or adjust to a kind of reality that offered no relief. At the other end of the 1970s decade, in 1980, a slightly different King Lear emerged at the Taˆrgu Mures¸ National Theater, directed by Kincses Eleme´r. The political commentary was transparent in this play, produced at the section in the Hungarian language of this prestigious Romanian theater. The audience was told from the start that the production centered on the struggle for power. A huge silvery crown dominated the foggy stage, traversed intermittently by indeterminate human forms. All events in this version of King Lear revolved around the brutal race for the prerogatives of this domineering crown, and all characters clashed for absolute power, be it in the form of happiness, love, legitimacy, authority, or riches. As they advanced along the all-consuming pursuit of hegemony, the power-loving personalities declined into visible manifestations of instinctual passion. The mute epilogue, a directorial innovation, renewed the initial theme. The majestic crown of omnipotence, looming over throughout the events in the tragedy, descended at stage level and was enclosed in gray opaque walls. The iron curtain persisted, and it dominated all attempts at obtaining power. When viewed from the outside of the gray wall of Communist dominance, all these endeavors at obtaining jurisdiction within the confines of the ideological prison became relative. The theater could place its audience outside the leaden wall of Communist ideology and restriction, allowing them to question the legitimacy of the regime. The theaters’ urgency to expose the corruption, flattery, duplicity, and inconsistency of the members of the Socialist oligarchy of the period made certain directors determined to adopt a less-performed play in the repertory. Timon of Athens had never been performed on the Romanian stage when, in 1974, it was produced at the North Theater in Satu Mare, directed by Mihai Raicu. The play was known in the excellent translation by Leon Levit¸chi and Dan Dut¸escu, but the theaters had avoided staging it, probably because of the authorship controversy around this play and the cynical note of its message. However, the people’s social bitterness and the growing disappointment with the ineffectual and dishonest Communist party politicians demanded a more abrupt Shakespeare approach. During his diatribes against the corruption of the world, a mustached Stalinistlooking Timon, dressed in a suit with a visible badge identifying him as a member of a particular group, addressed the audience directly, with his hands raised in prayer, like a modern preacher. The other


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members of the group behind Timon adopted a passive and even bored stance, as if nothing of what was said could be new to them. They were dressed in saint-like white capes, and the position adopted, with hands crossed over their chests, was meant to suggest some angelic acolytes of an evangelist. However, everybody in Romania knew that those who had power were far from righteous, and the sets of abstract values preached by the non-realistic Timon did not apply in the real world of Athens, as elsewhere. Raicu deftly choreographed the semantic slippage that resulted from all the definitions of political and human values in theoretical terms, tying up the dialogic confusion with shortly conclusive and persuasive categories. While Timon’s apparent coherence and force of exhortation eluded the audience, the director suggested the slipperiness of transmission and of cognition. Values were relative, Raicu seemed to conclude through his interpretation of this Shakespearean character, but they could nonetheless be defined quite precisely in context, once paradigm shifts had been recognized. In an attempt to address the issue of the meta-theatrical interpretation of all Shakespearean plays, Mihai Raicu transferred the prologue from Henry V to this production of Timon of Athens. Thus, he invited the audiences to formulate opinions regarding the up-to-date messages this theater succeeded in conveying. This 1974 production was the prelude to a new stage version of Timon of Athens directed by Dinu Cernescu in 1978 at the Nottara Theater in Bucharest. The play’s tone was as harsh as its author had intended it to be, and the political insinuation was evident, as it had been in all of Cernescu’s productions of Shakespeare’s tragedies during the Communist period. A 1976 Macbeth at the Ploies¸ti Theater, directed by Aureliu Manea, proposed a different version of the theatrical metamorphic sign, influenced by the Japanese Kabuki theater. This was supposed to be the play of fanatical pursuit of power in the symbolic key. The tragedy progressed in a wintry ambiance, where dark deeds and snowy, foggy roads intersected in a cold sepulchral world. The stage was an empty snow-covered field, dominated by the royal throne, the symbol of Macbeth’s power. This central wooden object was adorned with furs and animal heads, which were trophies of earlier conquests and omens of the death that was to come. According to the reviewer of this production, ‘‘the spectacle is seen as a cosmic duel between Good and Evil, between Life and Death, between order and chaos, or between nature and the human being as a representative of social convulsion.’’21 The elements were visualized as violent forces of nature raised by and revolted at the evil unleashed by the humans. The

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backstage curtain, made of shiny metal strips, figured the overflow of furious waters. White columns representing trees bent in the howling wind. Fire, lightning, and thunder gave the impression of an enraged universe. At the end of the tragedy, when the final order was installed in Scotland, the white snow symbolized light and purity, covering peacefully the final scene. The waters calmed down, fires ceased to traverse the stage, and cosmic peace was installed in the former space of crime. In this stage version of Macbeth directed by Aureliu Manea, the weird sisters did not appear in a material way. They were the secret inflections of Macbeth’s haunted conscience, and the ‘‘king hereafter’’ (1.3.48) prophecy became one of his multiple inner voices. This apparently realistic, non-magical approach might be interpreted in accordance with the atheistic requirements of materialist ideology, but audiences could also read in it the psychological collapse of the individual mind in a dividing and incoherent society. Moreover, by annulling the importance of the occult definitions in the characters’ comportments, the director emphasized the issue of individual moral responsibility. The driving force of ambition and selflove propelled all the characters in this production. Everybody looked like Macbeth in this evil world, and the king was different only through the fact that he visualized his hallucinations. All spied on each other, hunted, and killed. In order to suggest the barbarity of all the people in Scotland, the actors’ performances were marked by brusque action, grouchy timbre, and grunting sounds. A certain stylized influence of the Japanese theater was materialized through the parallel with a warlike and wild culture, where all the actions were driven and justified by ambition and merciless competition. The indirect reference was to the peculiarity of the Communist moral set of values. In an atheistic world that claimed the primacy of materialism and objectivity, ethics was a void principle. Vocally invoked in theory as ‘‘Socialist morality,’’ this was just an empty notion with no actual resonance in the individual consciousness. Only ambition and the ruthless wish to reach their egotistic ends by whatever means possible drove those in power in that period. Aureliu Manea indirectly showed this social and psychological failure of the Communist regime by augmenting the scope of the deviation and extending the vice of moral transgression to every major character in the play. After the celebrated Hamlet (1974) and Timon of Athens (1978), the director Dinu Cernescu staged another Shakespearean political play—Coriolanus—at the Nottara Theater (1979). This time, however, the director partly avoided the political implications, insisting


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on the social and civic resonance of the play. As the reviewer of this production wrote, ‘‘Cernescu starts from Jan Kott’s opinions (which he soon abandons, fortunately) and opposes the crowd, representing the crude, primitive form of Roman democracy, to the patricians’ indomitable arrogance.’’22 However, the critic complained that ‘‘in avoiding the political debate, which stimulates the dramatic action, the director succeeded in marking the contours of the spectacle, but he deprived it of its operative drive.’’23 What could have determined the director of formerly so intense political productions to adopt a socializing view? Is it possible that the need for change might have intervened, or were the social needs more obvious? Whatever might be the reason, when the metaphor of the belly became a powerful reality for the hungry populace in Rome, or in Romania, all claims of ideology began to fade. In this particular period, the Communist ruler Ceaus¸escu got the idea that he would cut a better figure to the Western world if he paid all the country’s international debt. He chose to do that at the expense of his people, and this was the approximate beginning of an unprecedented ten-year interval of starvation and material humiliation for the Romanians, which led to the political uprising of 1989. Dinu Cernescu directed the same play again almost ten years later, in a more politically combative tone. His Coriolanus at the Bucharest Teatrul Mic (1987) came at a critical moment in Romanian history, when the Communist ideology had ceased to mean anything for anyone and the material and moral degradation had become so acute that only a radical movement could change something. I would like to quote the introductory paragraph of the review for this production, which is particularly descriptive of the social and political situation in Romania at that time. In describing to the reader the configuration of the plot and the motivation for action in Coriolanus, the theater critic gave an accurate description of Romania’s social and political status under Communism in its last phase: We are in the historic moment of consolidation of the Roman political revolution, when, following the expulsion of Tarquinius Superbus, the last Etruscan king, the Roman patricians are forced to accept sharing the power with the plebeian tribunes. Though the patricians had not given up their political privileges, they give the plebeians the right to sanction the public offices by direct vote. The young republic functions and is sustained by demagogues who allow themselves to be flattered and bought by those who want to accede to state offices. The tension between the government and the governed induces acute class psychological changes and leads to the division of the social organism by polarizing

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the citizens’ wills and allegiances. This situation may degenerate into civil war.24

These words were written two years before some sort of civil war really broke in Romania, due exactly to the causes mentioned in this theater review article. If we read ‘‘Roman patricians’’ as the Communist oligarchy, and the ‘‘plebeians’’ as the rest of the population, this is an accurate description of Romania in the mid-eighties. The period of ‘‘consolidation’’ of the Socialist revolution meant a disaster for the people in Romania. In time, the governing Communist Party clique became the ‘‘patricians’’ of Rome, and they only pretended to give the ‘‘plebeians,’’ the people, the right to sanction the public offices by vote. In fact, the party in power did what they wanted, nobody endorsed their self-centered practices, and the rulers’ irresponsible actions led to the ruin of the country. By the end of the eighties, the situation had become intolerable for the Romanian plebeians. Cernescu’s choice of play and directorial techniques, aimed at outlining the political paradox, was meant to contribute to the audiences’ tentative invigoration by making them question the immutability of authority. The director fashioned his own stage text out of the excellent existing translation, in a visible audience-targeted tactic. He meant his public to learn from this production of Coriolanus that genuine authority implied moral influence over a country’s citizens, not merely bare words, flattery, and hypocritical servitude. The paradox was that out of an entire city, only one person could embody the nation’s urgency for the affirmation of truth. Coriolanus advanced the tragic question of to be or not to be a citizen and a leader. The hero’s vanity was so monstrously exaggerated that the tragic character’s representation slipped into grotesque farce. Coriolanus’s death was depicted in a ritualistic fashion, and (alas!) the director used red paint for blood. However, the facts that the hero died on the long dining table that looked like an altar and in his fall his head knocked down a row of cups full of red wine became visually significant for an associated event of current international policy. Caius Marcius was ceremonially sacrificed on the altar table of democracy, and his fall entailed an important sequence of events. In a similar way, the fall of Communism in one country at the end of the eighties would entail, according to the ‘‘domino principle,’’ the collapse of all the red dictatorships in Europe. Dinu Cernescu conceived this spectacle of Coriolanus in the classic monumental style. The sets consisted of four sliding panels suggesting the city walls. By gliding frequently, these panels limited the


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stage space and gave an indeterminate impression of what was ‘‘within’’ and what was ‘‘outside.’’ It became impossible to tell the difference between the privileged and civilized Roman citizens, who enjoyed all the rights of their citizenship, and the barbarous Volsci outside the city walls. Similarly, on a political plane, the Romanians in that period were puzzled by their possibility of affiliation to a larger Europe. While their geographic position and the aspiration to the values of democracy and civility included the Romanians among the community of peoples of Europe, their country’s marginalization and isolation were evident and disturbing. The problem of national and political identity was very acute for every Romanian, because people failed to see who they were in relation to their neighbors, and were led to feel as if it was their fault that they were born in a country kept out of the European circuit. Dinu Cernescu’s interpretation of Coriolanus showed how a segment of Shakespeare’s theater, filtered through the director’s artistic option, could influence partly a segment of the public, possibly some of those who would have a role to play in the subsequent popular uprising of 1989 in Romania. It seemed that the theater not only represented but also determined reality in secret and perplexing ways. The decade 1980–90 seems to have been the period of King Lear in point of productions of Shakespearean tragedies. Romanian theaters saw three productions of this tragedy, one in every year preceding the 1989 social and political revolt. The 1987 King Lear, directed by Ioan Ieremia, was produced at the Timis¸oara National Theater. This city in the West of the country was the initiator and the motor of the political uprising leading to Ceaus¸escu’s removal from power. Its citizens were nearer to the Western world and more easily informed of, and influenced by, capitalist values. This particular production of King Lear had definite political connotations. Ioan Ieremia suggested, in the Ian Kott spirit, that history could become an uncontrollable artificial mechanism, and political power was the essence of history. A huge throne, which could be dismantled, like Lear’s crown, into two halves, dominated the stage space. This power division resulted into two royal capes, which loomed over the main action of the play. The indefinite but very real ‘‘people’’ were those who, in the opening scenes, had cheered Lear while he was still in power. The masses reappeared in the storm scene as an obsessive projection of a deranged mind. Goneril and Regan emerged as a single ambition-driven personage, two hypostases of a cruel Lady Macbeth, easily identifiable with the Communist ruler’s wife, Elena Ceaus¸escu. In the program, the director admitted that he maintained only 50 percent of the play’s

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text. The rest was directorial innovation, a newly created text to suit the needs of political commentary. The Fool was kept until the end of the play, and he was a sensible raisoneur of the events, sporting a slight regional accent. The director clearly intended to use the Shakespeare authority to sow the seeds of sedition among the public, the citizens of Timis¸oara, and to challenge the existing political Communist hierarchy. The stimulating juxtapositions of directorial intention, method-acting techniques, and the notion of authority had suggestive implications. There was a finely lined tension between Romanian national and social identity and the artifice of Shakespeare’s theater, which led to the audience’s finding the external, historicized text in the internalized, specific psyche. The final suggestion appeared to be that Timis¸oara and the Western part of the country could have an important role in reintegrating Romania in the circuit of the Western values. The audiences became very attentive to these messages, and some of them even demonstrated the courage to die in the streets of this city in December 1989 in the name of these European values and meanings. Mircea Marin directed the 1988 King Lear at the Giules¸ti Theater in Bucharest. According to the critical interpretations of the time, this production, however, deviated from political readings. A select group of Romanian theater critics, meeting in a panel to discuss this particular production, agreed that, despite the audience’s expectations of a political Ian Kott–derived performance, Mircea Marin proposed a psychological Shakespeare in the ethical key.25 Lear’s drama became an individual encounter with fate and self-knowledge. However, the theater could show aspects that critics might want to avoid mentioning. The insinuation of power was manifested in the omnipresent symbol of the throne, which was once a royal privilege, and could be metamorphosed into various symbolic objects and sites. It was, in turn, a shelter for poor Tom, a seat of torture for Gloucester and the stocks for Kent, a bed of rest and deathbed, and finally a catafalque for Lear and Cordelia in the final scene. The bare sets and the simple costumes pointed to this production’s inscription in the canons of modernity, but they also left the audience plenty of thinking space, allowing them to ponder on the austerity of their life at that particular moment in history. The final scene of Lear holding Cordelia’s dead body in his arms had the quiet persuasion of Christian iconography, where the image of the Mater Dolorosa became that of the bereaved father. This production of King Lear may have been the tragedy of the self and a return to the simplicity of feeling, but the harsh sounds of the contest for power could be clearly heard. The director Andreea Vulpe proposed a different theatrical inter-


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pretation of King Lear. In a 1989 production at the Theater Academy Studio, she brought into focus a powerful Goneril figure, interpreted by Maia Morgenstern. This feminist directorial reading typified a willful, aggressive, and independent personality, raised to titanic stature. Goneril became obsessed with power; she was the perfect general leading the battle in a cold war, but she lacked diplomacy. Andreea Vulpe made the audiences see Goneril’s point of view in the tragedy. She thought that her father had acted inconsistently, confusing the convention of love with sentiment. While the king’s aberrant conduct transgressed the human potential for endurance, Goneril was presented as the feminine version of the Renaissance titanic figure, revolted against any form of patriarchal authority. If the tone was serious or merely mock-heroic in this production, the audiences could discern for themselves through the deflationary techniques of representation. In contrast with the offensive but thoughtless figure of Goneril, the director projected Albany in the role of the lucid observer, the intelligent tactician who stood to reason and brought the civilizing note in the final predication of chaos. Using the full text of the Folio King Lear, the director transfigured Lear, Goneril, and Albany into ‘‘emblems of historical epochs.’’26 According to the reviewer, Lear symbolized the Middle Ages; he was a faintly contradicting figure and observed aberrant fanatical rigors. Goneril voiced the Renaissance personality dominated by instinct and the energetic pursuit of power, like the figure of a Titan in Greek mythology. Albany stood for the modern economical efficiency, a man of facts, icy lucidity, and regard for appearances.27 However, this original theatrical interpretation could not avoid political meanings, even when viewing the play from gender-pointed angles. In the eighties, under fully oppressive Communist authority, even a tragedy like Othello could be read in the political key. The 1983 production directed by Dan Alecsandrescu at the Cluj National Theater showed clear allusions to Romania’s political and economic isolation from the Western world in those years, debating issues of national and racial acceptability. The capitalist world of Venice appeared as central in this Romanian version of the play, and the characters of the Venetian senators were quite prominent. The emphasis on the Venetian administration policy suggested that, in the presentday relevance, there was a capitalist nation, America, who embraced the same cosmopolitan values and had a similar senatorial system of governance. Othello the Moor, the outsider, was opposed to the Venetian community, and Lodovico was the spokesman for the Western system of values. The game of political influence and power was

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very visible in this production. Iago’s ambitious personal plans of ascension in Venice’s military hierarchy collided with the preference of Cassio by the Republic’s signoria, the governing body of the Venetian city-state. In this way, the director debated the present-day concurrence of the political spheres of influence in international politics. In this global East-West conflict of power, Romania was under the Eastern (Russian) influence, just like in the early seventeenth century, when it was under the Ottoman sphere of control. At the start of the action on the eastern island of Cyprus, during the Venetian conflict with the Turks, the sets showed a ship in full sail. In the background was a dark tunnel, at whose end flashlights illuminated intermittently the abysmal obscurity. All the messengers coming from Venice emerged from the depth of that long underground passage. The directorial implication was that Romania looked like an isolated ship at the mercy of international political tempests, and the aspiration to the prosperity existing in the Western world was like the glimmering light of hope at the end of this nightmarish tunnel of hardship and loss. The ‘‘light at the end of the tunnel’’ was a common metaphor among Romanians, signifying the hopeful end of a long period of political oppression and material deprivation. The audiences viewed everything from the ship’s end of this tunnel, and they could only hope to see the resplendent world beyond it. In the chess game of international politics, Iago was the instrument of the Senators’ secret strategy. After having used Othello for their hegemonic ends, the Western-power representatives felt that the general might escape the seigniorial influence and become an independent agent. The fear of losing control over a powerful subject made the authorities adopt a deceitful strategy. According to this political system, the stranger had to be annihilated, and the practical Iago could serve a crucial political purpose of international importance. The director signified racial difference and political design through a symbolic, though rhetorical, gesture. Othello spoke the ‘‘It is the cause’’ soliloquy holding two chess pieces, a black king and a white queen, in his outstretched arms. The grandiloquent hand movement signified not only the racial divide (black-white), political difference (East-West), and the chess game of international politics, but also alluded to earlier theatrical representations of Othello in the romantic key. Unlike these declamatory interpretations of the tragedy, as the director distinctly announced in the wordless stage language, his production asserted the wish for an active involvement of the theater in the international game of power,


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and showed Romania’s disenfranchised status in the world community of nations. The directorial taste for Macbeth as a vehicle for political message was equally active during the eighties. In 1982, Mihai Ma˘niut¸iu directed Macbeth at the Cluj National Theater. In speaking about the importance of producing Shakespeare in Romania, a critic writes that it ‘‘confirms the continual attraction of new generations of artists toward ‘our contemporary.’ Shakespeare has become a mode of stylistic configuration, a central point of the aesthetic program of those directors who are serious about their profession.’’28 This production was present-centered. The Shakespeare text was much abridged and the final was changed, but the play was a danse macabre in the pursuit of power. The set was a wooden construction with a rotten aspect, which looked like some sort of fortification. The dilapidated interiors and a kind of multi-functional throne-pulpit-lectern suggested the moral degradation of the occupants. The decrepit structure of the castle was surrounded with dirty pools of stagnant water. There were certain symbolic objects pointing to capital sins, such as the serpent of vainglory, the goblet of drunkenness, and the crown of power. Macbeth and his Lady slipped into the grotesque key, and, in this way, the director suggested the ephemerality of power and the futility of crime. One of the witches echoed Grouch’s last demented monologue, and this mimicry of the queen’s agony of conscience diminished the orbit of her tragic end. The ridicule extended to other characters too, and the director modified the ending by showing that Malcolm was much more dangerous for Scotland than the murderous couple. Invariably, all theatrical representations of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth brought to mind the couple in power at that time, Ceaus¸escu and his wife, who were no less callous, ridiculous, and ambitiondriven. As if in a trick of history, their end would be tragic too, though their final words before the execution seemed to have been played in the tragicomic key. Like in a fatal omen of life imitating art, the Communist tyrants were executed after a brief and grotesque trial. However, those who snatched the power after their death were no better than the pathetic and delusional elderly Ceaus¸escu couple, who thought they owned the world, but learned very little about its entrapments. Intending to address current issues through the language of Shakespeare, Ma˘niut¸iu could be said to have had a premonitory vision. With the artistic experience derived from decades of theatrical practice, the director emphasized the relativity of political values and ideologies once the opposing party seized the power. By implying that the new generation of kings in

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Scotland was no better than the Macbeth couple, the director anticipated a political situation that would settle in Romania after the fall of the Communist regime. In this new reconfiguration of the power structures, the former Communist members embraced various political shades, all involving the term ‘‘democratic’’ in their political agendas, but the deep-structure configuration revealed familial or affinity affiliations, or confidence connections with the former Communist leaders. The ultimate political spectacle in the Macbeth series was the composite Ubu Rex with Scenes from Macbeth, adapted from Alfred Jarry and William Shakespeare. Silviu Purca˘rete directed this corrosively political play in 1990 at the Craiova National Theater, with huge national and international success. This time, the spectacle was overtly symbolic, because it was produced in the first year of Romanian democracy and freedom from Communism. Director and critics acknowledged the political connotations and references in the open, stressing the grotesque allusion to the Ceaus¸escu couple. The preposterous Mr. and Mrs. Ubu viewed the representation of Macbeth, and the theater-within-theater metaphor pointed to the increasing self-reflexivity of Romanian theater during the past decade and immediately after 1990. As expected, these caricatures of characters were the marionettes of the game for power. What I find interesting in the favorable reception of this production is the slight note of criticism addressed to the fact that the theatrical representation of the already-famous couple typifying Communist dictatorship became a fashion among Romanian directors after 1989. According to the theater critic Dan Predescu, before the fall of Communism the parallel of the Ceaus¸escu couple with the protagonists in Macbeth was almost an obsession for directors. When the political censorship was active no more, this allusion tended to become a form of politically semantic mania, or a fashion in the Romanian theaters’ repertories. As Predescu writes, ‘‘In Ceaus¸escu’s time, it was easy to think that the absurd and ridiculous ‘Beloved Leader’ was, in many ways, worse than Mr. Ubu was. It would have been more complicated, even dangerous, to have tried to introduce the play in a theater’s repertory, especially in the last years. If, toward the end of the change of regime, the Ubu character had been an obsession, lately the plays by Jarry and Shakespeare tend to become a repertoire fashion.’’29 National and international reviews did not cease to praise this Romanian version of the Shakespearean story about crime and power, which relied on expressionist visual and auditory effects to convey viscerally the brutality and dehumanizing consequences of absolute authority.


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A different though not so famous Romanian production of Macbeth was directed by Andrei Mihalache at the Constant¸a Theater in 1990. The play’s vivisection on the theme of power made this tragedy an excellent vehicle for handling the tender issue of the dramatic change of government that took place in the winter of 1989 in Romania. Gradually, the notion of political power in the play glided toward the meaning of theatrical authority, while directors enjoyed elaborating on the idea that drama had a prominent role in the political and social changes in history. The memory of the pathetic Ceaus¸escu couple and their gory end was still very fresh in people’s memories six months after their deaths, and the directors played upon their audiences’ expectations of theatrical reassurance. This time, the theater was no longer subversive in the dissemination of anti-Communist ideas, but it responded to a still-fresh psychological trauma of expiation on a national level. After having witnessed the abominable and disruptive events of the 1989 revolution, which culminated in the couple’s cursory trial and execution, the Romanian public still needed a justification of the tragic political circumstances. They wanted an assurance coming from an artistic authority that would tell them that all the waste was not in vain. Seeing on stage how the delusion of grandeur metamorphosed the Macbeth couple, the audiences were allowed to exorcise their own disturbance and confusion regarding the events in the immediate history. Andrei Mihalache’s version of Macbeth asserted definitely that the fight for power knew no ethical constraints and included murder, betrayal, and dissimulation among its tactical instruments. Focusing entirely on the murderous couple’s public materialization of power, however, the director did not show how the appearance of omnipotence had a devastating effect on the individual’s moral sense. The mental specters of schizophrenia and paranoia, associated with the destructive delirium of grandeur, did not have a central place in this production. Instead of showing how the ambition for power gradually deteriorated the individual mind, the director amassed an excessive quantity of theatrical signs to show the duplicity of the supremacy game and the theater-like illusion. The director took his artistic cue from an exceptional and original Romanian production of Macbeth in the fifties by Ion Sava, which used masks and rhythmic incantations to suggest the dissimulation of the political strategy and the individual’s retrogression to instinctive impulses. This allusion to a previous Romanian production of the play was part of the recent directorial technique of self-referentiality to theater history. Apart from the reiterated idea that life was a theater and people hid behind the masks of their unclaimed actions and stimuli, Andrei Mi-

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halache tried to suggest to the connoisseurs that the various forms adopted in each production in the past were as many ways of conveying a theatrical message. The acting was manifestly mannerist, mimicking various dramatic performance styles, and the black setting and insufficient lighting emphasized the suggestion of murderous possession, but also rephrased the predominant modes and colors in which this play was performed in time. This brief sketch of the stage history of Shakespearean tragedies in Romania up to 1990 has considered the political resonance of Communist productions, tracking how the change in the political climate has affected the reception and performance of these plays. In studying the role that the Shakespeare productions in Romania in the period 1949–90 played in the cultural process of the time, it is difficult to address the problematic issue of identifying subversion in these productions. Apart from the general idea that certain sedition is expected on the part of the director and the audience might look for political clues, it is hard to document exactly how particular audiences interpreted the political indicator. As to the cultural politics of the theaters, we are faced with a paradox regarding the production of Shakespeare in Romania in this period. ‘‘Shakespeare’’ as a theatrical entity, which may be equaled with classical criteria and values, was a matter of cultural policy for the Communist authorities, and they promoted productions of the plays in the canon at various theaters all over the country. This demonstrates how the cultural politics of a theater, dictated by a central totalitarian government, can communicate to an audience as much of a company’s cultural realities as that of a director or even the playwright. The theaters’ choice of plays, however, remains a matter of subtle interpretation. The fact that directors selected the Shakespearean tragedies as a vehicle for their in situ political commentary tells us a lot about educated individual options. The productions of the tragedies during the totalitarian regime redefined the Romanian Shakespeare from an anti-Communist perspective. In the initial phases (1959–70), productions were concerned with interpretations of history and social order, plus the role of the individual in shaping them, as required by the Ian Kott, Robert Weimann, and Bertold Brecht theatrical principles, featured in many postwar foreign language productions of Shakespeare. In the next, more maturated, phase (1970–89), theaters and directors were concerned with exposing the limited possibilities of self-fulfillment in an increasingly rigid and restrictive society. This period yielded the most corrosive productions of Shakespeare’s tragedies, responding to the directors’ and audiences’ needs to tell or to hear the truth


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told by a ‘‘politically correct’’ and ‘‘classic’’ voice. The ultimate paradox in Romanian theater was that ‘‘Shakespeare’’ had been both the accredited cultural favorite of Communist authority, in the best tradition of bardolatry, and the multiple, often subversive and unstable, Shakespeares of individual performances, mainly of the tragedies. In this particular kind of Shakesploitation, directors were willing to speak in a language of their own, only for a special audience to hear.

After the Fall of the Red Curtain Once the individual Romanian productions of Shakespeare’s tragedies fulfilled their role of triggering subversion and reviving the people’s dormant political consciousness, the directors in the nineties generally lost interest in producing plays belonging to this genre, as compared with the Communist period. Tragedies dramatizing the spectacle of Roman excess, however, such as Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus, and Julius Caesar held the theaters’ and the public’s interest throughout the nineties. Titus Andronicus was directed by Silviu Purca˘rete and produced at the Craiova National Theater in 1993, at the Festival de Theáˆtre des Ame´riques (Montreal, 28 May–12 June 1993), at the Nottingham Playhouse (May 1997), and on tour through 1997. The English tour brought favorable reviews published in reputed journals, such as Observer, Theatre Journal, TLS: The Times Literary Supplement, Cahiers e´lisabe´thains, The Independent, and Shakespeare Bulletin. The production was dutifully based on the Shakespeare text, but it focused on the tragedy’s visceral eccentricity and the grotesque tragic components. A special taste for the culture of violence in modern audiences made this play, and its Romanian version, an attractive spectacle in which horrifying scenes of mutilation spoke volumes about the appropriation of Roman stories in an early modern European classical revival. Certain members of the audience may have been aware that Tamora’s Goths had roamed the fourth-century territory of Moesia Inferior, the ancient name of a region in modern Romania (maybe even the area around the city of Craiova, not far from the Danube), in which case, they were entitled to wonder at the curious repercussions involved in the constant iteration of ancient stories, regardless of locality and time limitation. Purca˘rete’s version of Titus Andronicus was an indisputable national and international success. The emblematic scene of Lavinia’s dead body on stage, flanked by her father and Marcus Andronicus, had an eerie attraction for the audiences. No blood was visible, but

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the three figures dressed in white robes, members of the same family, constituted a stage composition of compelling dramatic effect. This tragic triptych assumed a posture representing past and present disaster. Lavinia’s body lay on the shiny black stage-ground, the long white robe enveloping her but hardly hiding her mutilated hand. Her head was completely covered with a white scarf, looking like the kind of head wrapping used to cover the naked scalp of cancer patients after chemotherapy, or the white bonnets the inmates in nineteenth-century mental hospitals were made to wear. The single candle burning by Lavinia’s side, a Christian symbol of the soul’s passing to eternity, reinforced the image of vulnerability and tragic death. Next to her stooped Titus, laying his hand on her head in sign of reprieved benediction and regret. In contrast to these tragic figures, Marcus Andronicus stood ready for action, aware of a mission of reconciliation and active restoration of order in Rome. The Christian symbols were transparent in this emblematic scene from Purca˘rete’s production. Lavinia was the sacrificial lamb who died by the wish of the father, and the uncle was the symbol of the apostle Paul who, with the walking staff in hand, was ready to spread the word of love to the civilized nations and restore confidence. The director could not resist inserting potent theatrical signifiers in this production, hoping to show that drama’s manifold rules could apply to various political circumstances and epochs. The tendency toward creating emblematic images like the one described above derived from the theater’s competition with the film iconicity and from a wish to leave unforgettable impressions on the audiences. Purca˘rete’s Titus Andronicus enjoyed excellent reviews and was at its ninety-third performance in 1997 when it went to Sweden. The production represented Romania at the Festival of the European Theater Convention (E.T.C.), held at the Municipal Theater in Stockholm in the period 10–20 September 1997. The theme of the festival was North-South, and theaters from Spain, France, Greece, Denmark, Austria, Finland, Germany, Slovenia, South Africa, and Italy presented their best productions. On their way back to Romania, on the Lufthansa flight, while reading and enjoying the favorable Swedish reviews of this production, a critic recorded how the actors were offended by the flight attendant’s attitude.30 On hearing that they were Romanians, therefore marginal and contemptible people, she neglected them altogether, turning her professional attention to other passengers. It mattered little to the flight hostess that these were the actors and the director of a production of international repute returning from a prestigious theater festival. The unfavorable reports about the Romanians and their ignominious ac-


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tions had obscured all other superlative moments of excellence, theatrical or otherwise. Thus, the image of the reviled residents of an Eastern European elsewhere had gained ground once more in one Western European consciousness, obliterating all positive implications. In such a particular circumstance, not even the Shakespeare theater could redeem the implications of a vilified peripheral nation. Two productions of classical plays during the nineties showed a related interest of Romanian directors to concentrate classical images in modern signifying clusters. In the 1994 Coriolanus at the Cluj Napoca National Theater, directed by Christian Theodor Popescu, and Alexandru Darie’s Julius Caesar (1995), the directors adopted an essential and conventional theatrical figure, like a pentagram, which they followed and contextualized along the entire spectacle. Romanian directors were aware, too much, perhaps, of the pivotal importance attached to symbolic signs, which focused on the theatrical icon and left an indelible impression on the audiences. This emblematic theatrical sign had a radiant quality, orientating the entire spectacle’s meaning to a certain direction. Reviewers called the production of Julius Caesar directed by Alexandru Darie ‘‘A Spectacle for Export’’31 because it was produced for a premiere in Tokyo and was modeled on the previous verbally concise productions by Silviu Purca˘rete. The text was a translation and ‘‘adaptation’’ by Ramona Mitrica˘, revised by the director. The scenography and music were important elements in this Romanian version, and the text remained secondary, custom-tailored for the Japanese audiences. The critic reviewing this play noted ironically that such productions were not performed in Romania very much, probably because the Romanian public did not deserve such niceties. Foreign audiences, however, who decoded the theatrical image across the linguistic barriers, enthusiastically cheered these symbolic representations. The Shakespeare text was disintegrated into disparate vocables, while the choreographic, musical, and scenographic components came to the forefront of the stage. Parhon deplored such icon-focused practices. He considered that the Romanian public might have had ‘‘different’’ exigencies, and that Darie’s Julius Caesar was merely ‘‘shocking at the level of the theatrical image.’’32 The Romanian theater’s urgency for reconsidering classical themes in postmodern dramatic nuances and extravagant corporeal modes could easily include a production of Timon of Athens within the discussion of the post-Communist re-evaluation of the tragedies. A director who had already demonstrated his preference for Shakespeare, Mihai Ma˘niut¸iu, produced Timon of Athens (1998) at the

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Craiova National Theater, a cultural institution that had developed a tradition in producing Shakespeare and organizing Shakespeare festivals. In an interview about this play, Ma˘niut¸iu declared, ‘‘Timon of Athens is the most radical testimony of my Shakespearean preference.’’33 The text was indeed radicalized to the extent that the production was entitled ‘‘Timon of Athens after W. Shakespeare.’’ This technique of directorial translation and adaptation of the script made the original text almost unrecognizable, while the theatrical motion and malleability became pivotal. Shifting away from the political spectacle, the director pondered on the hero’s inner reflexivity and self-destruction. The hollow stucco statues being broken on stage visualized the destruction of identity, and the director created a spectral alter ego of Timon, interpreted by an actress. This female projection of the hero’s schizophrenic division between animus and anima, drawing on modern psychoanalytical theories, haunted the hero’s existence, which was as hollow as the plaster statues adorning the palace. Finally, these absurd forms suffocated Timon; in a state of exasperation he killed the feminine phantom, and thus failed to achieve a meaningful spiritual metamorphosis. As one critic reviewing this production wrote, ‘‘This understanding of human existence as devoid of significance is specific to the modern-day world.’’34 If this complex puzzle of aberrant images might be generalized as the contemporary world, any theatrical attempt at rendering its divergent modes could only be disruptive. The music of this jarring show was a hybrid combination of classical themes, percussion, and Hebrew rhythms, and was considered too aggressive for a theater hall. Despite its radical questioning, obscurity, and rugged edges, this production was inscribed in the tradition of the spasmodic iconicity characterizing most Romanian productions of Shakespeare at the end of the twentieth century. These strange productions reveal the troubling composite nature of drama at the end of the millennium. While the nineteenth century had created an inconclusive or bardolatric debate in the separate fields of performance and text in relation to Shakespeare, the late twentiethcentury directors seemed to be little concerned with the written script, and their concept of ‘‘performance’’ acquired inconceivable dimensions. Hybridization can be seen as the ruling concept for these productions, and the question is inevitably raised as to why ‘‘Shakespeare’’ was needed at all, since in these productions any kind of disembodied theatrical practice might have served the same end. King Lear directed by Dragos¸ Galgot¸iu at the Bulandra Theater in Bucharest (1999) was among the productions of the tragedies char-


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acterized as ‘‘too aggressive’’35 by Romanian critics. The director provided the musical illustration to the play, and the harsh resonance was meant to sustain a state of tension among the audience, together with the dissonant costumes, which combined the fashions from various epochs with flamboyant modernity. The show started in the hall, where the sets were made of an agglomeration of rough wooden panels, insinuating an atmosphere of strangeness. On the stage, a table made of the same unpolished material was the center of the action, being put to multiple uses as a royal throne, a shelter during the storm, or funeral dais in Lear’s death scene. Rather than give a presentation of this particular production, I prefer to look at the way in which a critic of the late nineties perceived the Romanian reception of this King Lear. Ileana Berlogea felt that this production was ‘‘a King Lear we greatly needed, especially at this end of century and millennium, a King Lear that reminds us of the truth that a person with no money and power means nothing to the world when faced with egotism and desire for dominance.’’36 By highlighting the play’s relevance for present-day Romanians, Berlogea documented the Romanian theaters’ repeated shift from slavish commitment to authentic Shakespeare toward a Brechtian historicizing model of performance. Alternatively, the Romanian critic voiced, rather, what W. B. Worthen called ‘‘the post-Brechtian compromise between ‘realistic’ and ‘theatrical’ characterization typical of the RSC since the mid-1960s.’’37 Locked on the margins of what was still a discriminatory and divided Europe, everybody in Romania could see how the values of civility and integrity were being suffocated in the whirlpool of the pursuit of power and money, then as before. Whether they saw a Shakespeare play or witnessed an event in real life, people were tempted to extrapolate and make connections that would respond to their psychological and social tensions. In this dangerously hopeless social and political context, a Shakespearean tragedy like King Lear reminded people that issues of inequality had always existed, and that it was how one dealt with them that made the difference. Lear might be right in saying, ‘‘Nothing can be made out of nothing’’ (The History of King Lear, 1.4.116), but the people of Romania had learnt what it means to be ‘‘an O without a figure’’(1.4.171). By taking off the Communist emblem from the Romanian flag, the enthusiasts of December 1989 hoped to have made a statement against dictatorship by this symbolic absence. However, no unitary value was added to this zero. Hence, like in Lear’s tragedy, very many people were tempted to say that all their efforts had been in vain, and that all amounted to nothing. Ten years after the change

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to democracy in Romania, Lear’s specter still raged among the theater audiences, making directors respond to the public’s feeling in significant modes. Thus, a particular production of the play, though not politically subversive, could still communicate a disquieting sense of waste. Apart from these grave tones of desolation, all was well and merry in the world of Romanian Shakespeare productions. Directors took up the American fashions of the early nineties, when the Reduced Shakespeare Company (RSC) played in London an abridged version of the Complete Works. The youthful London audience at the Apollo Theatre watched in ecstasy how the presenter, in the role of the prologue and coordinator of the sequences, would take the bulky Book out of his large pants, remarking nonchalantly, ‘‘Nobody can say I don’t like my Willy!’’ The Complete Works of WLM SXPR (Abridged) is a text by Jess Borgeson, Adam Long, and Daniel Singer. This was translated and adapted by the director Petre Bokor, who provided the music as well. The 2001 production at the Nottara Theater was well received by young audiences, though critics were either reserved or ironic, saying that at least people could save the money spent on going to see thirty-seven Shakespeare productions. Three actors interpreted thirty-eight Shakespearean major or minor characters, but there were some additions, like a modern sports commentator or a cook. The abridged text was based on the individual sense of humor in each member of the audience, and this was probably the reason for the play’s mixed reception. Seeing Othello synthesized in tattered rap verse or Titus Andronicus introduced like a disgusting TV cookery show might seem shocking to some. The audiences were involved in live workshops analyzing Ophelia’s psychological trauma, for instance, but the effect could be rather awkward when some sections of the spectators or some individuals did not respond readily to the challenge on the stage. In any case, the production was an entertaining escape from the tediousness of prosaic life. A critic reviewing this production noted that the audience felt obliged to adopt a definite stance concerning the abbreviated Shakespeare at the Nottara Theater. One might either like it or not; there was no middle way.38 Readers of the program found out very soon through the director’s voice that this production should not be seen as a parody of the ‘‘illustrious Brit.’’ The spectators were asked to understand that this was only a pretext to deride the transformation of the art consumer into a fast-food client. Since this vulgar tendency had become an aggravating fact, the actors and the audiences pretended to laugh not at Shakespeare, but with him.


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Thus, far from being considered a ‘‘blasphemy’’ or a ‘‘profanation,’’ the text by the three American authors was supposed to address the sensitive issue of the perception of high culture in the US. The director’s need for justification regarding this eccentric production and text may lead some to think that the bardolatrous criteria of Shakespeare’s reception in Romania did not fade away. After all these years of incessant use and abuse of Shakespeare for political, cultural, or merely entertainment purposes, many Romanian actors, directors, and theatergoers still felt that they were accomplishing a majestic act of ‘‘culture’’ by interpreting or attending a Shakespeare play. Any other form of approach, like the tongue-in-cheek mode, for instance, would mean a sacrilege to the Bard’s memory. Fortunately, though, some among us still go to the theater just for pleasure, and enjoy Shakespeare with innocent simplicity and tender love.

6 Staging Revenge and Power from the Margins: Masks of Romanian Hamlets THE ‘‘PERFORMATIVITY’’

1

OF HAMLET ASSAULTS THE OBSERVER FROM THE

inside of the play, and this feature has made directors and theaters the world over select it whenever they wanted to convey a special dramatic message. In Romania’s particular theatrical climate, there are three distinct ways of approaching this play. In the early period of the Romanian theater, the hero Hamlet, acted in the customary romantic and grandiloquent mode, was used as an occasion for great actors to show their artistic skills. In Communist Romania, just after the war, the play was not performed so frequently because theaters and directors tried to avoid the possible political readings intrinsic in this play’s dramatic texture, so the Shakespearean comedies were the preferences of the theaters’ repertoires. During the seventies and eighties, however, when directors became increasingly aware of this tragedy’s politically subversive potential, they used the productions of Hamlet as a public theatrical platform for expressing their anti-Communist position. In this period, the Shakespearean tragedy modeled on a revenge play, but in which no revenge really happens, was used as a form of theatrical revenge against an unwanted Communist regime. Theaters staged Hamlet professedly because it is the prized pearl in the Shakespearean crown of jewels. Actually, they had a specific political agenda. During the 1990s, after the fall of Communism, Hamlet became the epitome of theatrical practice, and Romanian directors saw themselves as so many invisible Hamlets who could conduct and influence the destiny of the Romanian stage from the height of this accredited Shakespearean control panel. The productions of Hamlet became very sophisticated thespian affairs, which spoke about the self-referential attribute of the theater. Actually, the first production ever of this special revenge drama can be viewed at the play’s ending, with Horatio as a director and Fortinbras calling in the noblest of the ‘‘audience’’ (5.2.331). Hora194

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tio instructs that the bodies be placed ‘‘High on a stage’’ (5.2.332), warning the spectators they were about to hear tales of bloody events. Horatio looks back on a trail of intrigue and violence that gives an accurate description of an entire genre named revenge tragedy. He emphasizes the educational and morally corrective effect of the events being ‘‘performed’’ (5.2.347), which would prevent others from being in error again. In fact, Horatio’s story is a silent one and it involves showing and viewing rather than telling.2 The audience is expected to redress and make amends only by seeing the mute gory picture on stage. In Shakespeare’s hands, the revenge play tradition becomes a marker of Hamlet’s meta-theatricality. In discussing the soliloquies in Hamlet, Alex Newell addresses the question of Shakespeare’s ambivalent handling of the revenge issue. Newell argues that ‘‘the play’s view of revenge is rendered not by explicit reflections on the ethics of revenge by Hamlet the thinker, but rather by what happens to him, what he undergoes in becoming a revenger.’’3 It is visible, therefore, how this theater achieves a delicate balance between showing and telling, with a clear propensity toward the visual effect. Although we are dealing with Shakespeare’s most wordy play, containing the largest number of soliloquies, action comes first. In mapping out briefly the numerous theatrical rewritings of Hamlet4 on the Romanian stage, I intend to address a number of questions. Were the explicit dramatizations of revenge central concerns for Romanian directors and actors interpreting Hamlet? Did they consider this aspect as being more relevant to Romanian audiences than other ramifications of the play? During the century and a half of successfully staging the play, did Romanian directors have an eye for the meta-theatrical and parodic implications of violence? Did the generic discourse on the ideological legitimization of revenge have any influence on this theater? Alternatively, was the issue of theatrical violence a rather marginal component of various productions, an ingredient that came with the packaging, but was to be discarded as minimal in comparison to other crucial directions? If Elizabethan misconceptions about Italy and Spain accounted for the predictable setting of the revenge play in a Mediterranean milieu by Shakespeare’s contemporaries,5 does the Northern location in Denmark change anything in the production of Hamlet by Romanian directors? Is the reception by Romanian audiences altered through the collision with the play’s integration in the revenge heritage? By exploring the dramatic performativity of Hamlet as realized in historical performance in Romania through the alternative variants of the theme of revenge, it is easier to assess how other determinants of

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performance, besides the author-function paradigm, can help us find our way among today’s multiple Shakespeares. Romania was a traditionally Christian Orthodox nation in the nineteenth century, when Shakespeare penetrated effectively on the stage. Like Shakespeare’s England, the Romanian cultural order incorporated the same general tension between two conflicting attitudes centered on the notion of revenge. On the one hand, the law and Christianity were unequivocal in condemning private revenge as a human attempt to usurp the prerogatives of God. On the other hand, the tradition of private revenge, dating from an earlier and more turbulent time, was still very much alive. After all, the local population was descended from the ancient Scythians and Thracians, with some later addition of Goth, Hun, Tartar, and Vizigoth material. However, the stage did not cogently reflect this conflict in the public consciousness until much later and with more sophisticated audiences. The German, Italian, and Viennese theatrical troupes mounted the first productions of Hamlet during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.6 They filtered the vision of the play according to their age’s expectations, in general tributary to the Romantic image of Shakespeare created by Lessing, Herder, and Goethe, but also by Coleridge and Keats, Hugo, Taine, and Pushkin. Apart from the distorted conceptual interpolations, these foreign companies staged the play in their respective languages. They effected serious changes in the text by dropping entire scenes or Germanizing character names. When a Romanian translation was available, it was often heavily tributary to these foreign implants. The first local productions of Hamlet were rather timid and sporadic, no less influenced by the paradigm of romantic drama and the eccentricities of heavily Germanized prose translations. Mihai Pascally was the first Romanian actor to interpret Hamlet, during 1861–62. The text follows the romanticized French translation by Alexandre Dumas (pe`re) and Paul Meurice. An equally famous production by Grigore Manolescu was presented in 1884 at the Bucharest National Theater. This exemplary actor translated the French version of Hamlet by Monte´gut and Le Tourneur, being the sole director, translator, and leading-role performer of Hamlet. As Odette Blumenfeld points out, ‘‘the 1884 production established a lasting tradition in the Romanian theater: any performance of Hamlet should display a rich style of acting, usually the classic one . . . it should considerably reveal the greatness of the tragic actor.’’7 Manolescu had viewed prestigious European interpretations of Hamlet by Mounet-Sully, Salvini, and Ernesto Rossi, yet his Hamlet was melancholic, sentimental, and overstrained. The Romanian troupe pre-


sented this production before the Viennese audience during the first European tour of Romanian professional actors. The actor and director of a theatrical company, Constantin Nottara, offered a similar Byronic perspective on Hamlet in 1895 at the Bucharest National Theater. This Hamlet looked as if marked by deep psychological trauma, which he assumed in a lucid manner. Nottara’s diction was ample, cadenced, and musical, attracting the audiences’ attention by copious acoustic accolades. Considering the Shakespeare text literally, Nottara played a Hamlet with abundant facial hair. In the same year (1895), the Ias¸i National Theater featured the actor State Dragomir as the leading hero in Hamlet. This actor-centered and romantically biased concert of productions typified the territory of Romanian productions of Hamlet during the entire latter half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. In 1906, Petre Sturdza interpreted Hamlet for the first time at the Craiova National Theater, and two years later Constantin Ma˘rculescu played the Prince on the same Craiova stage, followed by a third Hamlet in 1909 by Al. Dem. Dan, who left an impressing notebook containing his theatrical comments. In February 1912, a noteworthy year in the history of the Romanian National Theater, Tony Bulandra presented a majestic Hamlet during the sixty-ninth representation of the play on the stage of the Bucharest National Theater. Aristide Demetriade interpreted Hamlet in December the same year, and the tremendous success obtained by this delicate and impassioned actor made many critics compare him with MounetSully, De Max, and Moissi. When he became the director of the Ias¸i National Theater, the poet-actor Mihail Codreanu encouraged another actor, S¸tefan Barborescu, to recite his original translation of Hamlet forged in sonorous rhymed verse. Zaharia Baˆrsan was another poet who interpreted the young prince in 1922 at the Cluj National Theater. All these actors, poets, and translators contributed to constructing a tradition of ‘‘lead-role’’ performance history of Hamlet, a canon of exemplary Romanian productions against which subsequent attempts at interpreting the play must give us pause. The 1925 production at the Craiova National Theater, with Ion Manolescu impersonating Hamlet, was the first Romanian full-text representation. Only sixty years later, in 1985, another integral version of Hamlet was to be produced at the Bulandra Theater. The actor translated the play after the French version by Georges Duval. Manolescu noted in his memoirs that he tried to render the Prince of Denmark in a ‘‘humane’’ mode, the way he understood him, as a noble, tormented, and revolted soul.8 In 1926, at the Theater Company owned by Bulandra-Manolescu-Maximilian-Storin, Tony Bulan-

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dra and Ion Manolescu interpreted alternatively the leading role in Hamlet. This postmodern view avant la lettre according to which there is no integrally valid and authoritative formula of interpreting this role and alternative readings are recommended was something to be noted as a curiosity at that time. In 1937, the distinguished director Ion Sava produced Hamlet at the Ias¸i National Theater with Tudor Ca˘lin as the prince, in the translation by the remarkable Romanian prose writer Mihail Sadoveanu. Sava used cinematic techniques in this version and he advised the actor to blend irony and sarcasm with subdued inner reflection in his interpretation of Hamlet. The director visualized Claudius, Gertrude, and Polonius in the grotesque mode, as masks of perfidy, weakness, and stupid servility. Another remarkable series of productions was recorded in 1941. Liviu Rebreanu, a prominent Romanian writer, was the director of the Bucharest National Theater at that time. He initiated what was called ‘‘the challenge of the three Hamlets,’’ three simultaneous competitive productions introducing George Vraca, George Calboreanu, and Valeriu Valentineanu in the role of Hamlet.9 At the beginning of the 1941 theater season, the director of the Bucharest National Theater informed a large audience in the entire country from the microphone of the Romanian National Radio Broadcasting Company that the theater initiated a competitive project of interpreting Hamlet by three prominent actors of the period. In an interview, Rebreanu said that he would like to believe that one of them, at least, would attain the elevated standards of interpretation set by Demetriade or Grigore Manolescu. The poet Tudor Arghezi noted that George Vraca seemed to him ‘‘sprightly, alert, and yet focused and substantial,’’10 while Calboreanu interpreted Hamlet as ‘‘a self-made philosopher forged by abnormal circumstances.’’11 Valeriu Valentineanu struck the Romanian poet as ‘‘a man destructively obsessed with his own indecision, sunk in shady thoughts, tormented by doubt, and at times muffled in pale resignation.’’12 This actor did his own translation (from French) of the Hamlet part, and tried to produce a compelling hero in the lyrical mode. In the first half of the twentieth century, Romanian productions of Hamlet adjusted the play to suit a leading actor, usually an outstanding theatrical figure. This protagonist styled the Shakespearean hero according to his histrionic exigencies, generally fostered at the French and German declamatory schools. The play’s revenge dimension was tributary to the need of creating an essentially noble hero, in accordance with the period’s romanticized perception of Shakespeare. Reminiscing over some prestigious impersonations of Hamlet on the European13 and Romanian14 stage, the playwright


Victor Eftimiu noticed a special kind of ‘‘magic’’15 in connection with the great actors’ performances (with or without the celebrated beard). Coming from such a culturally refined member of the Romanian audience, Eftimiu’s description of the particular fascination created by the great actors’ interpretations of Hamlet tells us a lot about the psychological and historic influence a certain acting style can have on the cultural constellation of a star hero. Such essentialist strategies of interpretation of Hamlet in the romantic mode draw on the stage-centered theatrical practices that approached the Shakespearean character as a universal and as a given. Leading actors were usually also the directors of Hamlet, and their acting naturalized particular kinds of performance practice as somehow cosmically endorsed by the bard himself. Focusing on performers rather than on the increasingly nebulous subject Shakespeare, the Romanian criticism of the time did not address the tension between text and performance, but rather contributed to the institutionalization of a certain form of canonicity based on the authority of the actor. An unusual production of Hamlet, however, took place not on the professional stage, but in a Romanian court-martial political prison during 1942–43. Records of this version are very volatile. There are only some sketches by a talented prisoner and the testimonies of certain members of the audience to vouch for it. During the war, classical texts were produced in prison with a view to raising the morale of the inmates and in order to give them confidence in the end of the war. This unique production of Hamlet was mounted in a political court-martial prison in Timis¸oara, and later in Arad. A parody of the ‘‘To be or not to be . . .’’ soliloquy paraphrased one of Hitler’s discourses, in an intertextual fusion where levels of significance were suspended above the ideological void and around the censorship functioning in a wartime political penitentiary. Nowhere could the relevance of Denmark’s prison be more actual and politically responsive to an audience. There was a pun on ‘‘to be’’ and the German people, and ‘‘not to be’’ and the fascist regime. The scene where Polonius and Hamlet discuss the cloud as a camel satirized allegorically Hitler’s acolytes. The play was used subversively against the Nazi regime, and the theme of revenge could be altered significantly to suit the expectations of political anti-Nazi prisoners. An inmate designed the sketches displayed in a 1973 article by Theodor Ma˘nescu recording this performance in prison. There are no reviews of this amateur production, just the actors’ testimonies and the sketches.16 In the Communist period that followed the war, the theater in-

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creasingly capitalized on Shakespeare as a subversive weapon to undermine the unwanted but much feared Russian cultural domination and the alien ideology the Communist officials wanted to impose. The repressed fear of being imprisoned for the only motive of existing in this country, having more property than others, or having an enemy who could denounce one to the authorities at any time made people see the frailty of their existence. The Romanians at that time were psychologically prepared to understand Hamlet’s dilemma and the veiled and ambivalent hope for revenge. In those depressing years, Shakespeare was a shelter and a collective place of refuge from the implacable adversities of life and politics. The theater responded to the nation’s need for the truth being told, even if covertly, in a Hamlet-like manner. Reviewing the first production of Hamlet in twenty years (1958) at the Craiova Theater, the critic Mircea Alexandrescu explained the directors’ former lack of enthusiasm in approaching this play as a kind of ‘‘fear-dominated hesitance.’’17 The critic’s obvious and official meaning is that the fear was caused by the large number of excellent previous productions and interpretations of this role, against which all actors must find a restatement rising to a compatible measure. The reader who deciphers the secret cultural codes, however, may conclude that ‘‘fear’’ was the prevailing feeling in the Romania of those spy-infested Stalinist years. In this new light, the directors’ reluctance in approaching Hamlet might spring from the general anxiety that dominated the nation under the political aggressiveness of the Russian influence. Being unable to approach the play in the political mode, directors chose not to produce Hamlet at all for a while. The first post-World War II Hamlet in Romania, directed by Vlad Mugur at the Craiova National Theater in 1958, offered the young actor Gheorghe Cozorici the chance to perform a lucid Danish prince, different from the earlier romantic interpretations. The critic reviewing the production at that time was at no liberty to describe the performance exactly as it was. Rather, Mircea Alexandrescu noted that Vlad Mugur’s interpretation was rather formal, influenced by Lawrence Olivier’s Hamlet, and that the director insisted too much on scenic movement instead of focusing on social conflict.18 In a 1989 historical presentation of ‘‘Hamlet on the Romanian stage,’’ however, the theater historian Ionut¸ Niculescu quoted the actor Gheorghe Cozorici regarding his interpretative intentions, thirty years after the production. The actor said that he saw and played Hamlet as a resolute man, who looked uncertain only when he estimated the fine balance between right and wrong, not when he moved to action.19 We learn indirectly from the actor’s statement,


issued in a period of relative liberty from censorship, that the 1958 production was covertly subversive, in the sense that the play’s ambiguity was restricted to the domain of ethics. The problem of the hero’s determination to act against murder and injustice was not overtly debated in this Communist production of Hamlet. In a 2000 historical overview of Romanian productions of Hamlet, a critic quoted the director Vlad Mugur about his 1958 interpretation of Hamlet. Forty years later, when there was no censorship to be feared, the director said that he saw the hero as someone who ‘‘needs to know the fault of those who must be punished, and who intends to secure good and strict justice.’’20 The perception of revenge as an act of justice within the Christian boundaries might provide a clandestine allusion to the unwelcome Russian military, political, and cultural influence. In 1960, the actor Fory Etterle´ played Hamlet in a production directed by Ion Olteanu at the Bucharest Municipal Theater. The actor noted later that he was forty-seven at the time, and only the preparation for the famous soliloquy took him months of intense labor. Constantin Anatol acted under the direction of Miron Nicolescu at the Cluj National Theater, and this version of Hamlet persisted on stage for three years consecutively. A year later, Dan Nasta directed the play and interpreted Hamlet’s role at the National Theater of Timis¸oara. This production focused on the convergence of philosophy, politics, and art in the hero’s personality, reminding the audience that the Danish prince studied at Wittenberg, the great university of the medieval world. Considering the play’s popularity in postwar Romania, we see that theaters from four major cities in the country produced Hamlet successfully in the period 1958–61. Moreover, the radio, the most popular of all media at the time, made Hamlet known and appreciated throughout Romania, accessible to all social groups, in a production directed by Mihai Zirra, with Constantin Codrescu in the leading role. It is as if directors thought that the sequence of dramatic events in this play could have some bearing on Romania’s political situation. This subversive undercurrent is visible in the directors’ choice of authors (mostly Shakespeare) and plays (preferably Hamlet). Such a statement cannot be backed by material evidence drawing on the theatrical reviews of the time because the theaters, directors, and critics executed a complicated form of diplomatic ballet in order to avoid censorship. However, the 1961 production of Hamlet at the Timis¸oara Theater showed that there was some directorial subversive intention behind the mask of the spectacle, regardless of what the reviewers of the production could say at that particular time. An initial indication is

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that the director, Dan Nasta, played the role of Hamlet. Thus, the audiences were warned to be attentive to special cryptic meanings under the theatrical guise. Moreover, Nasta designed the sets and the costumes, and thus he announced that there were certain implied meanings in the decor arrangement. The process of the hero’s inner consciousness was clearly distinguished from the action of the play. The soliloquies were set out through Hamlet’s advance to the front of the stage. While he addressed the audience alone, a gray wall divided him from the rest of the stage space, where all the action was taking place. This wall had always been a sign of Romania’s isolation from the rest of the world, after the implacable descent of the Communist iron curtain. Thus, the subversive character of this production was visible at the level of the fleeting life of stage shorthand such as sets, gestures, and the physicality of some dramatraining techniques that speak in dumb language. On the other hand, the critic reviewing Dan Nasta’s production in 1961 focused on the social commentary and wrote that the director intended to give a message of humanistic confidence. Alexandrescu affirmed that Nasta showed a play that was ‘‘tragic on the individual level, but profoundly optimistic in the historical sphere.’’21 While Hamlet’s individual tragic stature was expressed in the soliloquies, the critic argued, on a historic plane he embodied the Renaissance hero, who raised against the feudal social order. Such critical statements show just how reliable Romanian performance criticism was in those days. By the seventies and the early eighties, the Communist regime had ceased to control individuals by means of direct and steady political persecution. A form of subtler control emerged, and the method was similar to Polonius’s way of finding directions out by treacherous indirections, such as spying, thought manipulation, and watchful insinuation. The audience’s relation to Shakespeare in this period was one of secret complicity and friendship. Shakespeare gave a local habitation and a name to all the hidden fears, political apprehensions, and motivations that people could not express overtly. The stage was the halfway point where the audience’s expectations of hearing the truth clearly stated met the actors’ and directors’ secret wish of saying things that would elude the political censorship. Thus, a Shakespeare play became a special location where many wishes converged. The 1974 production of Hamlet directed by Dinu Cernescu at the Nottara Theater in Bucharest took the theatrical world by storm. It was for the first time when the directorial focus shifted visibly from the capable actor interpreting the prince’s pale cast of thought to the Denmark arena, where politics


was the big game. As a theater critic pointed out, ‘‘Hamlet is a cultural and political production . . . It is political because an entire system of directorial conception is built on firm political attitude toward the truths in the text.’’22 It was for the first time in the stage history of Romanian productions of Hamlet when the play was manifestly seen as a tragedy of the fight for power—obtained by bloodshed, maintained as such, and lost in the same way. Dinu Cernescu’s Hamlet was a sequence of crimes, like in the royal tragedies. The right to rule was obtained through violence, cunning, and intrigues, and it was lost in a similar manner. Claudius (Alexandru Repan) murdered his elder brother for political reasons. Nothing entitled us to believe he did it only for love of Gertrude. The royal couple’s complicity to murder increased their passion pathologically, in a Freud-like mode. This emotion bonded them and made them extremely cautious. The Danish king’s court swarmed with guards and spies. A perfectly coordinated repressive system protected the king, who knew he could have the same end as his brother at any time. Moreover, in the secret chambers of the castle there was another plot. Marcellus, Bernardo, and Horatio devised Claudius’s murder. Horatio was not Hamlet’s friend; he was the current king’s enemy. Horatio saw in Hamlet the scourge of revenge and, for a time, Claudius’s successor. Horatio unveiled the secret of Claudius’s murder to Hamlet by pretending to be the ghost of the murdered king. He might have acted in accordance with the text, if we accept that King Hamlet’s ghost was the scenic image of the rumors about the king’s unnatural death. Horatio wanted to make Hamlet rebel against Claudius and to help the young prince become king himself. When they understood that Hamlet was unable to act, the conspirators looked for another solution. They abandoned Hamlet. One night, another name presented itself: Fortinbras. The king of Norway would be Claudius’s successor. The power struggle went on. Some were plotting, others were watching, protecting themselves. The conspiracy was gaining ground gradually. Yet, was it the only one? Polonius (S¸tefan Radoff ), the king’s counselor, sent his son to France in order to remove him from the surveillance at court. To what end? Moreover, why was Polonius so much against Hamlet? Was it because the prince was the legal successor to a throne he wanted for his own son? We were reminded that, after Polonius’s death, Laertes came back to Elsinore leading the rebel Danes, who were determined to take over the power. He refrained from doing it for the moment because Hamlet was still alive. Laertes accepted deceitfully the game proposed by Claudius. And so on. Why not? This hard-hearted strife for power attained gigantic proportions under

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Cernescu’s directorial guidance. Hamlet acquired a new and unexpected profile. Fortinbras, the possible successor, came to the forefront. Hamlet was removed. Why? Because Hamlet did not want to get the throne, he only wanted to avenge his father’s death. Hamlet knew the time was out of joint and he could not set it right. His coming to power would not change anything. The great mechanism would go on grinding and the world distribution of power would remain the same. This was not a time for the moral order to be installed. Hamlet was merely an insignificant gear in the mechanism of power. Cernescu’s Hamlet (S¸tefan Iordache) was not mad. He did not even feign madness. He was no longer taken for a madman. Hamlet had seen too much, understood too many secrets, and told too many unpleasant truths. Unpleasant, that is, for the king and his followers. It was convened that Hamlet was mad and that he had to be thoroughly guarded, so that he could not leave the court or the kingdom. In this way, the director’s allusion to the Romanian intellectuals who were prevented from leaving Communist Romania was very powerful. At one point, Hamlet ceased to exist. Fortinbras took over the throne and, for a while, there was an ominous silence in Denmark. Only the flute was allowed to sound faintly. Dinu Cernescu addressed only a part of the play’s complexity. He gave the production a reasonable duration. However, did he achieve the necessary amplitude? By clearing its meaning, did he not oversimplify the tragedy? Denmark was an authentic political prison, with iron bars and heavy metal doors slammed brutally, but was it also a nutshell from where Hamlet could contemplate infinity? The stage designer, Helmut Stu¨rmer, translated the prison metaphor into an actual penitentiary with black iron bars at the windows and the leaden atmosphere of such a place. The audience saw clearly that the phrase ‘‘Denmark is a prison’’ was a tautology. The lateral walls were long and dark, and there were crooked corridors full of whispers ending in iron doors. The stage was like the inner court of a prison, with many dark galleries whose walls were covered with blurred foggy mirrors, multiplying the guardian, the spy, imminent danger. The arrangement of the hall-like stage was designed mainly for the whispers of those in the shadows rather than for the dramatic exchange in the text. Consequently, the setting did not express what had already been said, or was being said by Hamlet, but it visualized what no one in Cernescu’s Denmark/Romania dared to voice. Nobody ventured to say that the new king’s throne was placed on his subjects’ dead bodies, even if these subjects, as in Polonius’s case,


had been fanatical partisans of the regime. The throne, a permanently moving object, was in turn a deathbed, wedding-feast table, and wedding bed. Cernescu’s production was definitely political and director-centered. It impressed the audience with the effective images of the throne-casket-tomb-bed-table, the crimson capes in the color of old crimes, the leaden-shining mirrors, and the sharp glisten of daggers, the tools of blood revenge. This kind of assertive directorial vision in the political mode opened the way for a large number of subsequent Romanian Hamlets in the political style and spoke for an alternative model of theatrical investigations of Shakespeare which would resist the authoritative theater practices promoted so convincingly in earlier periods. For the first time in the history of Hamlet productions, the rhetoric of Shakespeare performance engaged in a dialogue not only between author, text, and director or actor, but involved a subversive dimension intended to challenge the structures of authority in the Communist state. In 1975, there was a production of an original opera, Hamlet, by the Romanian composer Pascal Bentoiu at the National Opera House of Bucharest. The reviews of the time23 mentioned the importance accorded by the director, George Teodorescu, to pantomime and body language, combined with suggestive lighting. This lyrical rewriting of Shakespeare’s tragedy focused on the conceptual framework of Hamlet rather than on dramatic action. There were ten scenes representing ten key moments of the tragedy. The immobility of the setting suggested a still-life painting or the suspended movement of the film camera. This symbolic paralysis on stage reflected the undercurrent of speculative thought, where Hamlet’s mind reigned supreme. Action and movement were expressed only in pantomime and body language, at times stylized in ballet scenes, like in the Mousetrap section. Pantomime summoned powerful images, and the expert lighting intensified them expressively. The play on light and color was the chief merit of the production because it emphasized the abstract ideational process. The director intended to separate the truth from errors and lies by allotting them symbolic status. All the lie-conducing actions were depicted in cold, somber shades, while what is taken to be the truth was flooded in warm, natural colors. The setting gave Pascal Bentoiu’s music the status of an absolute abstraction in relation to Shakespeare’s tragedy. Revenge, murder, power, and politics were marginal issues in this Romanian musical Hamlet. The opera version became primarily a drama of knowledge, of conscience, and of the hero’s candidly confronting the mutations of providence. As a theater critic concluded, ‘‘Shakespeare’s personality emerges more potently than Bentoiu’s, who

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tries to rise at the level of the model by non-specific means.’’24 The result of this opera adaptation was a musical abstraction, which questioned marginally the absolute directives of the predominant Communist ideology of the time. In 1983, the director Nicolae Scarlat proposed to the Romanian audiences of Taˆrgu Mures¸ a minor stage version of Hamlet, when compared with Cernescu’s interpretation. It was no less directorcentered, in the sense that Scarlat tried to explore too many of the play’s dimensions and, at times, the audience got confused. When the director wanted to show the demonic conscience at work, he actually made devils and imps walk on stage. When he wanted to reveal the troubles of this too too solid flesh, a feathered Ophelia would fly into Hamlet’s arms. In trying to emphasize the play’s metatheatrical component, the director extended the theater-within-theater scene too much. In order to show that a corrupted society was an easy prey for the ambitious enemy from the outside, the director brought Fortinbras in full regalia and mounting his live horse on the stage. The rich Elizabethan costumes were used to emphasize the contrast between appearance and reality. Particularly, the royal personages were wearing impressive ruff collars and jewelry, while Hamlet’s ironic and self-critical pose was suggested by his plain white costume. The sets were constructed of a composite mass consisting of rags, nets, and ropes, which in the semi-obscurity of the intermittent lighting suggested gothic arches and columns, or bay windows and secret recesses. The rotating stage constantly modified this volatile space, giving the impression that nothing was stable and all communication took place in a labyrinth. Despite its many imperfections, this production was inscribed in a consistent series of Romanian theatrical rewritings of Hamlet that read the tragedy in a political key. Many Romanian directors intended to voice truths about current issues through Hamlet, as they saw it, in a period when truth was tongue-tied. This disruptive component of the theater in the Communist period might be interpreted as a form of camouflaged revenge against the unpopular regime. A remarkable 1985 full-text production of Hamlet at the Bulandra Theater (Bucharest), directed by Alexandru Tocilescu, had kept the Romanian public’s interest for more than five years, and provided appreciated material for theatrical export, with excellent reviews, through the entire latter half of the eighties and especially in 1990. Critics have penalized, however, Tocilescu’s ambitious and rather confusing design to say ‘‘everything about Hamlet.’’25 In the precarious existing circumstances, when every member of the audience may have had a different opinion about this play, and it may not


have been coherent with the directors’ intentions or the actors’ interpretation, such an attempt at saying it all could seem hazardous. During the almost five hours, with only one intermission, Tocilescu bombarded the spectators with complex issues of power and the political theater, the moral condition, thought and action, conscience, revenge, life as theater, life and death, love and hatred, and the ambivalence of ‘‘to be’’ and ‘‘to have.’’ Tocilescu entered Elsinore through three important gates, namely, Philosophy (Ethics), Politics, and Art. Hamlet’s dilemma of action and revenge was given a tangible resolution through the suggestion that the hero had no doubt that Claudius was the perpetrator of the crime. The father’s immaterial Ghost was just a disembodied voice. A complex play of lighting obscured the specter, suggesting that it might be the hero’s inner consciousness. In the truest Bakhtinian spirit, two clowns preceded the ghostly apparition and intensified the carnivalesque image of life as theater, or art holding the mirror up to nature. In Tocilescu’s version of Hamlet, art reflected life’s confusion and came in opposition with power through its divergent tendencies. While power tended to subject reality and impose an ideological monologue that would reduce life to being subservient to the despotic order, art invited to dialogue contradiction and diversity. This production was an assertion of the theater’s subversive potential, in a period when only subtle allusions could suggest dialogical action as an alternative to the totalitarian opacity and self-assertiveness. Apart from the theater-within-theater aspect, the production suggested other forms of art as viable dissident forms of action. The play began with a pantomime of the final fencing scene, on a blackmirror stage designed as a chessboard. The fight was interrupted by a silhouette in black, which took a seat at the piano and provided the musical background during the key scenes of the play. The pianist (Dan Grigore) was a silent figure who intervened in the encounters with the Ghost, and at times became an unnatural apparition himself. Hamlet (Ion Caramitru) joined this ghostly appearance in playing the piano while he received Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. On other occasions, the hero was playing the flute. Besides music, the play on mirrors and the frequent emergence of clowns prompted related allusions to the dissident power of art. The director’s disruptive theatrical statement had an overreaching significance, since it included all the other arts, besides theater, in the challenging dialogue with the self-serving Communist authority. Politics and power gave a third dimension to Tocilescu’s version of Hamlet. The abstract attributes of the relations within the corridors of power admitted material representations through the direc-

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tor’s description of the characters that possessed authority. Claudius was a vulgar and aggressive tyrant, capable of primitive hatred and conniving action. He was the image of the political opportunist, whose only assets were cunning and venality. The King wore a military uniform, a signal of the zealous need for dominance and power represented by martial rule. He was short and insignificant-looking, but he had the grand taste for ceremony, descending majestic stairs, usually in the accompaniment of patriotic music. The veiled allusion to the existing Romanian counterpart of such a figure, the uneducated but scheming and power-driven president of the Communist Party, Ceaus¸escu, could not escape an audience that was eager to read topical meanings in complex plays such as Hamlet. Ceaus¸escu was a vengeful peasant whom circumstances had placed in a top position of power. His wife’s personality lay behind the scene of the contest for power, but she was represented as a vain and jealous woman. The director created an entire scene in which he showed the Queen’s dressing room, the vanity of her mirrors, and her jealousy toward a younger and a prettier lady in waiting. The Romanian audience knew that Ceaus¸escu’s wife was just as vain, and she used all the power she could wield to adorn herself with unearned academic titles and elaborate hairstyles. Polonius was the militia representative in a police state. He was limited and suspicious, but very proud of his knowledge and life experience. He thought he could achieve the position next to the summit of power by flattery, deception, and psychological torture. The director’s reading invested him with all the characteristics of a member of the collective instrument of repression represented by the secret police in the Communist state. Polonius’s modern black suit designated the uniform of the obscure individuals who were the instruments of the repressive system. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were the plain and analogous instruments of power, the ordinary party members of the Communist regime, while Laertes became involved in the mechanism of authority without being aware of it. Fortinbras was not a redeeming figure of hope. He was the rapacious harvester of the disastrous consequences of evil and tyranny. The Norse king rushed on stage wearing a long red robe. He attacked everyone and caused the murder of Horatio by the now-revived acolytes of the old regime, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Fortinbras’s takeover signaled the cyclical continuity of terror and blood revenge, just as the stylized fencing scene initiating the play ended it in a circular mode. The attending pianist exited thoughtfully, offering the redeeming hope of meaning by art. Tocilescu’s elaborate production was considered the ‘‘heaviest’’26


Romanian Hamlet in the last quarter century. Its successful staging had anticipated the historic events of 1989, the disintegration of Communism in Romania. In an interview with Richard Eyre, the director of the London National Theater, taken in early 1990 when he came to Bucharest to see the play, the British man of theater indicated the relevance of this political play to Romanian audiences. According to Eyre, the public could read the end of the Romanian oppressive Communist regime in the play about Elsinore even before the events in real life started. As Richard Eyre said, ‘‘A play like Hamlet could speak distinctly to people, and the authorities were unable to prohibit staging this play just because it was Shakespeare’s.’’27 Thus, Tocilescu’s Hamlet became a subtle form of revenge that the theater took over life. Like a theater-within-life play, it was the ‘‘thing’’ which activated the Romanians’ moral sense and rectitude, helping them to take decisive action and pull apart the fifty-year Communist rule. In 1990, the memorable production of Hamlet went on tour through Britain, where it enjoyed many favorable reviews. Analysts mentioned the specifically Romanian connotations of this particular Hamlet. As Michael Billington said in The Guardian, ‘‘This is, in fact, Romania’s Hamlet, fashioned according to this country’s political circumstances’’ and ‘‘this version is impregnated with the atmosphere and politics of Ceaus¸escu’s Romania.’’28 We have reasons to believe that there is more to various theatrical rewritings of Hamlet than actually meets the eye. In addition, this particular Romanian production of the play made a significant point. The increasingly sophisticated and self-referential theater of the nineties’ democratic Romania staged Hamlet in idiosyncratic modes. The rhetorical grandiloquence of earlier interpretations was there no more, nor was the need for politically subversive meanings. Instead, directors focused on Hamlet as the ultimate director of an artful and expressive spectacle. Eight long years after the 1989 events that turned Romania from a marginalized country governed by a totalitarian Communist regime into a democratically regulated elsewhere, two Romanian theaters staged Hamlet during 1997–98. The lesser variant at the Mihai Eminescu Theater in Botos¸ani, directed by Ion Sapdaru, offered a directorial reading based on the theaterwithin-theater scheme. The mise en abyme effect established the priorities of the spectacle, and the tale of the making of a play by William Shakespeare took precedence over the revenge story. The major themes of life as a stage and men and women as merely actors, the theater as holding the mirror up to nature, and the actor as the chronicler of times came to the forefront of this production. After the final fencing scene, when the spectators expected the end of the

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spectacle, the actors came back on stage and sat down to talk with the audience. Then, Hamlet slowly lit a cigarette and raised the question of to be or not to be. This production was clearly inscribed in the present-day trend of Romanian theatrical versions of Hamlet in which the director and his spectacle were all that counted. The 1997 production of Hamlet directed by Tompa Ga´bor at the Craiova National Theater focused on the director’s belief in the values of the spectacle and in Hamlet as a man of theater. This was the first production of Hamlet ten years after the same director’s attempt with this play at the Cluj Hungarian Theater, with Heija Sandor as Hamlet. In an interview the director said, ‘‘In producing Hamlet, I saw the possibility of meditating on the meaning of theater, of asking ourselves why we are involved in the theater. Why do we need the theater?’’29 The play began with two clowns coming on stage. While they were playing for the audience, an iron curtain descended behind them. The clowns tried in vain to go under, above, or beside the blind wall. Finally, they sought refuge behind the theater curtain, because this was a play after all. The iron curtain of reality, or a heavy prison door, rose to uncover the main setting of Tompa’s production. In the middle of the main stage, there was a smaller stage. Its reflective surface and lateral walls mirrored the actors and the audience. In the director’s vision, the theater was not a single reflecting looking glass but a system of parallel mirroring surfaces. Significant doubling became a major technique in this confusing combination of images. Hamlet’s identification with the Mousetrap scenes was subtly paralleled in the casting of the same actor as both the Player King and King Hamlet’s ghost,30 a figure made up to look like the familiar Droeshout portrait of Shakespeare. The author was writing his play while seeing his characters in action. Meanwhile, he was a character-actor, guided by Hamlet-character-director. Hamlet sported the black outfit and long scarf that had come to be associated with the modern director’s garb. He was not only the director of the players on the stage within the stage, but also a director of conscience. Hamlet’s presence defined the modern author’s condition. He tried to enclose his meanings within determined boundaries, in order to protect his work from ulterior political manipulation. Tompa Ga´bor’s Hamlet was a production organized around concentric circles, or concentric spectacles, whose starting point and end of game was the theater, its protagonist, the author, and the audience. Hamlet embodied three basic dimensions of theatricality, namely, director, actor, and audience. The actor and his theater emerged as the only viable ways of telling the truth as Hamlet, or


Shakespeare, or Tompa, or the audience saw it. As a critic declared, ‘‘The production is a homage to the theater as ‘mirror of the world,’ and to the actor who . . . places his soul into the director’s capable hands.’’31 Hamlet (Adrian Pintea) and the other characters played in a dramatic key, over-emphasizing the theatricality of the interpretation, in order to indicate that they were only characters of drama, interpreting a part that had been played many times before. Moreover, this particular protagonist showed he was a reflection of all the past dramatic illustrations of this role, emerging from all the romanticized, cynical, melancholy, or idealized interpretations of the Shakespearean hero. His costume reminded us of the well-known pictures showing Grigore Manolescu as Hamlet in the renowned 1884 production. What was the place of the revenge-play tradition in this complicated entanglement of self-reflexivity and meta-theatricality? Had the Romanian theater become so self-absorbed within its own artistic boundaries that it came to neglect this Elizabethan convention? The evidence of the spectacle showed us this was the case. The show counted most, after all. The wise and knowledgeable directors drew forceful guiding lines for the audience and the critics to follow and decipher. As a theater critic pointed out, Tompa Ga´bor ‘‘wants to display not so much a tragedy of revenge as one of exposing the mechanism that moves political and individual destinies in times of transition.’’32 The stage director of Hamlet had become the magician Prospero, in control of his spectacle. In June 2000, the Bulandra Theater in Bucharest staged the seventh Hamlet in its history, directed by the Prospero of the Romanian stage, Liviu Ciulei. The director could boast notable versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. The play’s focus was once more on the actor and his stage, the theater-as-life paradigm, and Hamlet as an active hero-actor. Marcel Iures¸ created an everyday-life character, a man who thought, spoke, and died naturally. He voiced the ‘‘to be’’ soliloquy sitting on a bench in different locations on the stage. The right side was the part of reason and the left was the seat of emotion. The middle-stage visualized inner doubt. The director drew clearly on recent psychological and medical research concerning the physiological processes related to the two halves of the human brain, just as Shakespeare did in his time by staging melancholy according to popular studies in psychology, such as Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Moreover, the stage space acquired symbolic signification in a theatrically concentric production. Ciulei’s version was ‘‘classical’’ in the sense that the director resorted sparingly to postmodern theatrical techniques. His aim was to uncover the essential meta-theatricality of Hamlet. Seen from this direction, Hamlet’s

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problem became personal, rather than philosophical. What happened in Denmark was primarily a personal drama, which came to attain universal dimensions through recurrent use and, often, misuse. By this artifice, the director tried to recover the original relevance of the play’s themes, including the revenge dimension. Before being a common Elizabethan theatrical convention and an ethical concern, revenge was a personal problem certain individuals had to deal with as part of their lives. Ciulei’s anti-rhetorical eloquence aimed at showing his audience the simplicity of truth. In the Mousetrap scene, however, the director showed us the usual play upon mirrors, but his Hamlet cut a different figure. Unlike the ubiquitous and all-powerful producer of previous variants of the play, Ciulei’s Hamlet suited the action to his word; he was happy with being a simple actor in the play he intended to direct. This latest Romanian production centered neither on the hero as an epitome of romantic ideals or histrionic rhetorical skills, as was the case in very early Romanian Hamlets, nor on the director as the omnipotent maker on stage, such as many of the postwar and more recent productions indicated. Nor was it concerned with the ethical problems of revenge, or its complex refashioning by Shakespeare. Critics noticed a certain lack of dramatic focus in this production, which was surprising when coming from a director who had come back to the Romanian stage after a long period abroad, directing Shakespeare and other plays on foreign shores. As Magdalena Boiangiu pointed out, ‘‘the production at the Bulandra Theater must confront one of the most terrible ghosts that can haunt a theater: the ghost of youth, of beauty, of success. In the year 2000, Liviu Ciulei could not find the theater he had left in the seventies, not even the theater revisited in the nineties. For the young generation, the legend was stronger than the man was. And maybe Prospero is getting tired of showing, as Hamlet requires, the form of the very age and body of the time.’’33 Liviu Ciulei, however, was much more satisfied with this version of Hamlet than with those he had produced in 1977 in Washington, or in 1984 in New York. The 2001 production of Hamlet directed by Vlad Mugur at the Cluj National Theater focused on the director rather than on the increasingly nebulous subject, Shakespeare, or the even more problematic Hamlet. As Worthen states, the director is perceived as anchoring the slippery text somewhere between ‘‘fidelity’’ and ‘‘creativity.’’34 Since it is a common fact that the director’s appreciation of the play’s meaning is hermeneutically shifting on a continual basis, it is rewarding to follow the virtual adoption of this particular play on a personal level by a Romanian director. The appropriation of Hamlet


for subversive ideological purposes under Communism and after was a common practice among Romanian directors. Similarly, directors of the nineties and the 2000s refused to replicate the romantic nineteenth-century interpretations of the hero, except for contrastive theatrical practices. However, Hamlet has never meant so much and so personally to a director as in this production directed by Vlad Mugur at the Cluj National Theater in 2001. Mugur knew that he was dying, and he chose to direct Hamlet as a final celebration of his artistic activity and a theatrical statement of continuance. Unusual for Romanian directors and theaters, this particular production is exceptionally documented. There is a documentary book35 edited by Marta Petreu and Ion Vartic, the manager of the Cluj National Theater, and a video recording of the rehearsals. In a discussion with his assistant director Roxana Croitoru, which is recorded in the book, Vlad Mugur says, ‘‘When you have reached my age, you will have known that nothing is for ever! You are not allowed to by-pass Hamlet; it is a chance in a lifetime for you. It is a challenge for me too. I had to do this production.’’36 In this particular case, we see that ‘‘Shakespeare’’ was needed, not as a banner to legitimize current cultural or political debate, but as an ontological support to justify a director’s life dedicated to the theater. Mugur perceived Hamlet as a self-identifying concept and the existential marker of an aporetical limit. Thus, in this particular case, the true Shakespeare exists, not as an ideal form, as an accepted but ultimately arbitrary hypothesis of no fixed residence, and not even as an example of what others think Shakespeare is. In Mugur’s case, Hamlet comes to represent the vehicle for an individual’s intimate relationship with his selfhood, his private existence, and his immediate death. It is as if Hamlet knew he would be dying and he staged the Mousetrap as a symbolic theatrical ceremony of his own death. Who can say it might not be so? Vlad Mugur’s career as a director started in the fifties. During his professional years, he directed at the Bucharest, Craiova, and Cluj National Theaters. In 1971, when he wanted to direct Hamlet at the Cluj National Theater, the Communist authorities proscribed the rehearsals because the production was too politically revealing and subversively critical of the regime. In a seditious phase, Mugur immigrated to Italy and then to Germany, directing plays produced at the theaters of Mu¨nich, Konstanz, Hanover, Esslingen, Mu¨nster, and Bern (Switzerland). After the fall of Communism, he returned to Romania and directed plays in Bucharest (The Odeon Theater), Craiova, and Cluj. In March 2001, at the Cluj National Theater, in an attempt to bridge a thirty-year gap, Mugur decided to approach

Hamlet directed by Vlad Mugur at the Cluj National Theater (2001). With Sorin Leoveanu as Hamlet. Courtesy of the Cluj National Theater. Foto: REÉL/Nicu Cherciu.


Hamlet once more, in a symbolic gesture of theatrical self-referentiality. The avant-premie`re of this production was on June 22, 2001, his seventy-fourth birthday. Mugur died exactly one month after that, on July 22, 2001, at his home in Mu¨nich. When, in October 2001, the Cluj National Theater inaugurated the official opening night, the director’s presence was only symbolic, a disembodied spirit hovering over an empty seat. He might have appeared as a ghost haunting the theater together with Old Hamlet’s Ghost, and joined by the ghosts of all the diverse Hamlets produced at this theater and elsewhere, viewed by this director or others. Considering that there is no stable text for his Hamlet, Mugur created a conglomerate script, combining the seven extant Romanian translations and even forging some phrases in his own version. When his assistant director presented him with a revised translation combination from Nina Cassian, Ion Vinea, Vladimir Streinu, Leon Levit¸chi, and Dan Dut¸escu, Mugur was not completely satisfied with it. Roxana Croitoru admitted she had viewed the Shakespeare text from the philological perspective, focusing on grammatical and lexical accuracy, while the director looked at the scenic script, which needed to be decontaminated of all the heavy metaphors, leaving space for the direct theatrical expression and the text’s dramatic ‘‘nerve.’’37 Mugur said he was in need of a very recent translation, because the latest one dated from the seventies and was done by Alexandru Pop especially for Mugur’s Hamlet of that time. However, according to the director, that was a romantic Romanian version, and ‘‘romantic’’ productions do not work for audiences these days. Therefore, though the script revised by Mugur is an accurate translation in blank verse, the parts were severely cut and concentrated, so that, at some points, the dramatic exchange takes the form of light repartee. For instance, Polonius’ line ‘‘For this defect effective comes by cause’’ (2.2.103)38 becomes, in Mugur’s script, just Efect— defect.39 The script is composed of two parts; part 1 has eight scenes, and part 2, seven scenes. The ‘‘To be’’ soliloquy, for instance, is a multiple dialogue initiated by a contemplative character, Lucianus, the Prologue, who acts as Hamlet’s alter ego. Positioned at part 1, scene 6, after Hamlet’s ‘‘Hecuba’’ speech, the ‘‘To be’’ dialogue was a lesson in reflection and endurance served to a disconcerted Hamlet by Lucianus, Second Player, First Player, Horatio, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, and, ultimately, Polonius. Like in a sophisticated golf game—and golf was another hidden theme suggesting psychological tension and release—these characters took over the stroke play in turn. They informed Hamlet of the potentially lethal dimension

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of human existence, of the dangers of to die, to sleep, and the undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveller returns. The Players’ intimations about death were friendly, almost parental, and they were read from the theater script, the shuffled pages suggesting the transition from text and script to actor, director, and performance. Moreover, the First Player who spoke these weighty verses (Melania Ursu, an actress) was wearing a nondescript raincoat, like most characters associated with Hamlet did, but this one sported the long white scarf that had come to symbolize the director’s distinctive costume and theatrical prop. While the actor-director substitute in the play lectured Hamlet about death, sustained by a variety of actors interpreting other characters in the play, and while Hamlet played the director in staging the Mousetrap, the real-life director, Vlad Mugur, staged a representative play that anticipated symbolically his own death. The sets were a construction site, a world that was being built and rebuilt continuously before the audience’s eyes. This was the only symbolic section in the production that might be interpreted as having a current cultural and political connotation, since Romania in the economic transition phase is a place where old institutions have been demolished and many are under construction. At the beginning of the play, the curtain was up, and some actors were among the audience. The first scenes were played against a white screen, and the actors were sitting at a long table on stage, reading their parts from the play’s script. The Shakespeare text was conceived initially as the blank reading of a script, and the director saw this activity as a form of therapy with the audience, to whom an important message was being communicated.40 At one moment, however, after the ghost scene, the script matured into performance, the written text became theater. Before this crucial moment, the actors had been on stage or among the audience as actors interpreting a script. The reading came alive gradually, as the actors became characters in performance, an action triggered by the Ghost’s entrance. The apparition was the ghoulish image of a semi-decomposed cadaver, whose head exposed a strange system of pipes, revealing an outlandish human anatomy. Old Hamlet’s ghost appeared from some construction scaffolding on the left of the stage, emerging in a cloud of plaster debris, cement dust, and fumes, and exiting through an improvised workers’ elevator within the same structure. Cement dust and lime were the main symbols in this production, and Mugur said that the white powder was almost as dramatically suggestive as blood, because it aggressed on the audience’s senses, irritating their


nostrils and throats and making them feel empathy with Hamlet’s drama. In the rehearsal notes, Mugur said he would not focus on the philosophical aspect of the play because, in any case, the tragedy breathed metaphysically and the contemplative area was evident.41 Moreover, Mugur wanted to avoid the temptation of producing the play in the romantic-philosophical mode, and thus he focused on the ‘‘situations.’’42 As regards the text, this situation-oriented form of acting needed to preserve the rhythm of the verse, its cadence, and not its fluency. Therefore, the actors were instructed to act the script by breaking the verse into short utterable units, thus departing from the ‘‘mighty line’’ of iambic pentameter. By avoiding the cadence of the original verse-form, Mugur said, the actors would learn to circumvent the text and evade the risk of giving the impression that they were dramatizing an obsolete spectacle in the romanticized mode. This ‘‘running away from the traditional verse-form’’43 was, in Mugur’s perception, a valid means of asserting the spectacle’s modernity, by showing a break with the convention of the romantic-mode interpretation of Hamlet. Mugur coined the traditional declamatory interpretation of former times as ‘‘ta˘irist,’’44 a term that suggests the notion of larger-than-life acting meant to impress the audience with emphatic tones. By contrast, his Hamlet (Sorin Leoveanu) spoke with the intimacy of normal conversational flow, but had the effect of hitting the audience in the solar plexus. In distinguishing between text and performance and in showing how the script was turned into theater, Mugur warned us about the hybrid nature of drama, which since the nineteenth century had created inconclusive debate in the separate fields of performance and text. Through this production, he indirectly commented on how Shakespeare was evoked to authorize the critic, or the director, or received notions of theatrical practice. According to his notes, Mugur wanted people to infer from this spectacle the state of alienating insanity we all reached, meeting the border between normality and the pathological. Mugur discriminated between page and stage views of the play, each claiming a unique fidelity to the elusive ‘‘Shakespeare.’’ He exploded the naı¨vete´ of both views, which were misleading for both readers and audience. There is no clear answer as to Mugur’s response regarding the validity of one view or another, but the explanation lies in the director’s choice of the author and play. In choosing Shakespeare and Hamlet as the ultimate theatrical statement of a lifetime dedicated to the stage, Mugur adroitly maneuvered the semantic lapses that resulted from all these redefinitions of what others thought Shakespeare was. He tied up the

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dialogic dilemma with a final conclusive category: death, his own. This directorial attitude to Hamlet45 might be interpreted as an extreme form of ‘‘presentist’’ implication in negotiating Shakespeare’s play. A memorable comment by a Romanian critic about Ciulei’s production of Hamlet helps us admit the idea that it is next to impossible for any stage production, however exhaustive its director may want it to be, to encompass the play’s complexity. As Cristina Modreanu says, ‘‘Liviu Ciulei’s re-visitation of Hamlet on the Romanian stage looks like a family doctor’s visit to a patient whom nobody can diagnose correctly.’’46 Could Shakespeare have envisaged such an effect of his theater? We know what we are, but we cannot know what we may be, or what may become of our actions. The eminent Romanian poet Marin Sorescu wrote an essay entitled ‘‘Monologue about Hamlet,’’ in which he wondered about the delicate psychological ‘‘mechanism’’ of Hamlet. The poet could not find a satisfactory answer regarding the hero’s complexity, and he even speculated on Shakespeare’s ever having been aware of what he had created. ‘‘The abysmal profundity of the soul is released,’’ Sorescu wrote, ‘‘and by and by, step by step, look where we are. I think Shakespeare himself was astonished at what had come out of his pen.’’47 The Romanian poet’s artistic mind intuited the eccentricity of creation and the bizarre ways in which conscience makes cowards of us all. In a condensed paragraph, Sorescu abridged the plot in Hamlet and gave his version of the reasons for the play’s extraordinary popularity: A bloody ghost comes up front and says ‘‘Boo!’’ Bernardo is startled. Francisco is scared, Horatio is appalled. Hamlet is called on the scene and is not frightened. He takes the phantom seriously, he thinks it is his father’s, disappeared in mysterious circumstances . . . Once he believes this, it is the end for him! The ghost annexes Hamlet and drags him through five acts like a slave. The spirit deprives Hamlet of his story. The phantom comes out of the prompter’s trap door and drips into his ear a poison that does not put to sleep or kill, but which has a much more dramatic effect: it releases a form of ontological delirium for justice. A paroxysmal commotion of the ego.48

This extreme state of psychological excitement in the fashioning of the self, observed by the Romanian poet concerning Hamlet, may be the cause of the audiences’ deep involvement in the issues raised by the play. Such an almost supernatural fascination with the multifaceted parallels of truth and the puzzles of personality shown in performance is offered as an explanation for the play’s popularity with directors and audiences.


In a lecture on Hamlet published in Romania, Stephen Greenblatt argues that the play’s ‘‘corrosive interiority’’ resides in the movement from revenge to remembrance. He infers that Shakespeare was influenced by the dispute between Catholics and Protestants regarding the burial of the dead and life after death. The revenge theme became a play of remembrance in Shakespeare’s hands as a result of the Catholic rites concerning the memorial of the dead and purgatory, challenged in the writings of Simon Fish and abolished by later Protestant practices. Greenblatt concludes that ‘‘the space of the Purgatory becomes the stage space, which Old Hamlet’s ghost will continue to haunt.’’49 This repeated remembrance on stage, I reckon, has transformed the ghosts of old and young Hamlet into perpetual haunters of consciences. It is said that every actor’s dream is to interpret Hamlet and producing it suits every director’s wish. It is not my intention here to construct a series of ‘‘greatests’’—from Shakespeare as greatest playwright through Hamlet as the greatest play to Hamlet as the greatest acting challenge. However, my belief is that our fascination with this play sustains a form of revenge that the ubiquitous ghost of Hamlet takes on us all. We cannot escape being haunted by its remembrance and we try to revisit it in every possible artistic configuration. However, by replaying the sanguinary scenes in cultures and accents yet unknown we carry out exactly what Shakespeare may have wanted us to do: we show more than we can tell.

7 Romanian Mental and Theatrical Maps: Romances THIS FRAGMENTED WORLD, ONLY APPARENTLY UNITED BY ADMINISTRATIVE measures or sophisticated means of communication, seems to allow less room for words and a greater need for factual and visual representation. We might assume for a moment that a dramaturgical version of the ancient, eccentric geographic economy related to faraway places and the ‘‘new’’ geography based on scientific facts and coherent mapping of the world are to be found in Shakespeare. How, then, are these two conceptual modes related in the theater world? In addition, what significance would such a finding have for our understanding of his theater? More particularly, how do the romances address and paraphrase the English Renaissance drama’s interpretation of the world beyond English shores, and of the foreigners who inhabited those spaces? If the romances emphasize final union through initial dislocation and dissension, do they typify a particular interpretation of territory and stage world? I will try to answer such questions by viewing the theatrical representations of Shakespeare’s romances in Romania. According to all the data available to Jacobean authors and audiences, this European country lay at the margins of a well-charted but uninteresting elsewhere, in a land that, though not totally alien, was rather eccentric and uninspiring. Shakespeare and his contemporaries had few notions about the Balkans and the Eastern European area, and they did not refer much to these places, except for the tangential contact through classical mythology. Conversely, when Shakespeare was appropriated by Eastern European nations, he became a revered site of authority, displaying a cultural centrality that could only be appreciated in relation to these marginal spaces. As if in unpremeditated response to the early modern English lack of knowledge regarding the values and customs of this Eastern European country, Romania has taken over in an internalized manner the many forms of the Shakespearean interpretations. Transla220

7: ROMANIAN MENTAL AND THEATRICAL MAPS: ROMANCES

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tions, productions, and literary adaptations and criticism of Shakespeare’s plays have become cornerstones for the development of the Romanian national culture. When the international interpretations of the plays expanded to the marginal areas of Europe in the nineteenth century, productions and translations of Shakespeare in Romania contributed to the redefinition of the local language and national theater. Unlike the other plays in the canon, however, the romances were less abundantly represented in a theater that, against all odds, had learnt the language of performance at the school of Shakespeare. Dragos¸ Protopopescu first translated The Tempest in 1940, followed by a translation by Petre Solomon in 1958, which was sponsored by the Communist regime and published at the State Publishing House for Literature and Art. A translation of The Winter’s Tale appeared in 1942 by the same prolific translator Dragos¸ Protopopescu, while Florian Nicolau translated Cymbeline as late as 1971. Not until the elaborate and scholarly edition of Shakespeare’s Complete Works in nine volumes (1988–95), supervised by Leon Levit¸chi, did we have a published translation of the vexing Pericles. Like the history of literary translations, the production record of the romances is far from comparable with the other Shakespeare plays. Those productions that have been mounted, however, remain as landmarks in Romanian theater history. The 1979 production of The Tempest directed by Liviu Ciulei at the Bulandra Theater in Bucharest, for instance, won the National Prize for the Theater in the same year. Ciulei signed the scenography as well, and the Epilogue scene showed Prospero as Ciulei reciting the farewell lines. The director stood in the middle of an unearthly Renaissance decor composed of the scattered debris of odd pieces. There was a medieval armor on the floor looking like a dead soldier, a sextant, a telescope, numerous mantles and curtains hanging on illusory walls, and a huge replica of the Da Vinci sketch that had come to symbolize the human inscription in the universe. Amid this eerie collection of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance paraphernalia of knowledge and empowerment, the artist begged the audience to be released from the bonds of his own creation with the help of their good hands. So ample was the general applause for this remarkable production of The Tempest in Liviu Ciulei’s interpretation1 that the Bulandra Theater replayed it on 21 October 1983 with a different cast. Five years after the initial representation, the critic reviewing this one commented that the Romanian audiences for this exceptional spectacle fall into two categories: those who saw Ciulei’s version of The Tempest for the first time, and those who came to see it again and again.2 The production sustained the message of Renaissance ap-

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preciation of reason, civility, and urbane regeneration. The translation by Nichita Rapaport and Nina Cassian spoke in clear rhymed verse to those present. In the crude light flooding the stage, the protagonist addressed each member of the audience, asking each to lay aside the veil of illusion and walk on the clear path of selfconfidence. By showing them that all humans depended on their fellows, the artist made the case of lucid intelligence, which should oppose conflicting hostility. This message was conveyed in the period of full-force Communist dominance during the Ceaus¸escu regime, when the laws of reason had no connection with everyday life, and where fear, treachery, and aggressiveness were the prevalent psychological modes. Prospero’s fictitious island was the refuge of deviant members of humanity, coming from a dissolute external world where the rules of destruction and treachery of brother against brother prevailed. The characters in this enchanted isle were symbolic figures representing the social structure in the resembling island of the imaginary country of Romania, lost in the Red Sea of Communist power. Ariel (Florian Pittis¸) represented the restless intellectual, torn between the sense of allegiance as a citizen and his aspiration for individual freedom. All those intellectuals whose minds resembled an airy spirit in Communist Romania could only feel prisoners in that world, caught in the pine clove of Marxist ideology, or playing the game of the overpowering Russian dominance. Miranda (Mariana Mihut¸) still wondered at her brave new world, which, in her innocence, she had not come to know in all its ugliness yet. Caliban (Victor Rebengiuc) looked like the upstart Communist Party leader, a hybrid creature limited in his obtuse aggressiveness, showing signs of a primitive but hard-hearted cunning in pursuing his selfish ends. Prospero (Petre Gheorghiu) was pathetic in his tolerant approach toward the faults of his fellow beings. He might have represented the tragic resignation of the Romanian artist, who felt alienated and out of touch with his creative will. Antonio (Marcel Iures¸) was the malefic character, whose intrigues obscured all sense of justice in the imaginary world of the play. He was dutifully attended by a stately but self-effacing Alonso (Mircea Bas¸ta) and an intrigue-loving Sebastian (Ion Cocieru). These Shakespearean characters mapped out the social configuration of Romania at the beginning of the 1980s, when the theater’s subversive potential was used extensively. Ciulei seemed dissatisfied with what the Communist regime claimed to be a splendid and respectable world based on the model of the ‘‘new human being.’’ His version of The Tempest showed the moral insecurity characterizing each individual in those times.


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Eight years after this remarkable production by Liviu Ciulei, the Taˆrgu Mures¸ National Theater produced The Tempest directed by Kincses Eleme´r (1987). The theater critic Victor Parhon made a significant introduction to his review of this version, emphasizing metaphorically the reiteration of this last Shakespearean play along the centuries and in various national interpretations: A testament play, The Tempest carries on its specific distancing from the real circumstances of the initial production, a fact that is probably more important than all the parables and allegories it contains. It seems that Shakespeare’s genius has been tempted to look once more into the mirror. The face reflected does not matter any more because, in any case, it seems alien to him, yet he recognizes his own smile. It belongs to him, enigmatic but definitely representative. Should this be the reason why this play attracts, in an almost magical way, all the makers of spectacles, even though very few dare reflect themselves, in their turn, in The Tempest’s mirror?3

The critic explains the scarcity of productions of The Tempest on the Romanian artistic scene by the high quality of directorial expertise and actors’ talent involved in such a project. In addition, Parhon gives a visually specific representation of the theatrical recurrence and renewal reaching the audiences with each individual production of the play. Different as these productions of The Tempest may be, they are all aesthetic reflections of the same creative personality. Shakespeare’s self-irony and quizzical mood have become an essential part of our understanding and liking of him. Eleme´r’s personal reflection in this play’s mirror was one that showed a younger and more boisterous artistic personality. Not yet at the age of needing an introverted perspective, this director’s spectacle was less interiorized and self-analytical than Ciulei’s previous representation of The Tempest. The director’s motivations in this 1987 production lay somewhere in the terrestrial zones of how the play dealt with the real world, than in the fate of the artist and his inscription in an antagonistic universe. Therefore, this production had a clear, mundane message, with political reverberations addressed to this contemptible end of the Communist period. The play’s idea of the interchangeability and reversibility of the real and fantastic spaces was still there, but the director chose to give the real dimension politically significant undertones. Prospero was a rather authoritative and self-centered ruler who had a special relationship with the definitely female spirit Ariel, interpreted by an actress. The magus was aware that, without this spirit’s help, he could no longer maintain his magic attributes, and would be forced to revert to the

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real world of a mercenary and contaminated Milan. The rhetorically grandiloquent passages in Prospero’s speeches signify differently when viewed in the context of the diverse previous productions of this play in the declamatory mode. Ariel’s relationship with her master was very ambiguous, suggesting a potentially sexual and obscure initiatory transfiguration of the spirit. Shakespeare has made it possible that the performative fate of The Tempest be dependent on Caliban as much as on Prospero and his magic universe. It seems that in Shakespeare’s world, like in ours, the presence of such creatures is necessary for the definition of the elusive self. He knew enough of the way this life works in order to make his created globe look like it. All we can do is see this evidence and believe it, admitting that Shakespeare is always right. Caliban’s character in Eleme´r’s vision functions in a different semantic code, as opposed to the general mode of the spectacle. While Prospero, Ariel, Ferdinand, and Miranda evolved in a decor of dream-like white gossamer curtains typifying an illusory realm, Caliban entered the stage in a greasy overall, wearing a funny beret. Those who saw him would know this was the representative uniform of the Romanian working class ‘‘hero.’’ This illustrative member of the proletariat, whom the Communist authorities wanted to present in hyperbolic images, spoke in coarse language and was very amusing. In fact, this Caliban had a kind of slapstick humor every time he was on stage, but the menace implied by his presence was very physical. In a final dumb show, the director presented an aftermath of Caliban’s reinstatement as the sovereign of the island. After Prospero’s departure to Milan, Caliban destroyed mercilessly everything that represented civilization in the land. In his frantic search of the magic wand, which he thought would make him the omnipotent master of a deserted world, Caliban demolished all the symbols of Prospero’s artifacts by tearing down the vulnerable, white, flimsy fabrics of life. In destroying the emblems of civility and deference, this ruthless Caliban felt indeed lord of the island, even to the point of finding and trying to use Prospero’s magic rod. The audiences of 1987, when Eleme´r’s version of The Tempest was first performed, lived in a period when the Communist regime, after having destroyed for forty years all the signs of previous civility in Romania, including every shred of private property, seemed very certain of their unlimited authority. Like as many Calibans on the abandoned island of Romania, they had shown what it meant to destroy all values in the name of unlimited power, disregarding everything but self-sufficient personal ends. This production of The Tempest showed the country’s


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oppressive state of destruction and sent a warning against the totalitarian regime. Two years after this initial production of The Tempest, in 1989, those who were in favor of democracy chose to dismiss Caliban’s rule and return the island back to the honest benefit of civility. After fourteen years, however, the current political and social situation in Romania shows us that Shakespeare is invariably right. Calibans will always exist, but at least now fewer of them can boast exclusive prerogatives of power, though blessed with substantial bank accounts. Pericles is an odd play, and Dinu Cernescu chose to produce it at the Giules¸ti Theater, maybe thinking it would have an extravagant meaning in the theatrical panorama of 1981 Romania. In reviewing this production, a Romanian critic admits the fact that this may not be an exemplary play in the canon, and its insufficiencies have led to its exclusion form the First Folio, but this is still Shakespeare. As Ghit¸ulescu puts it, ‘‘It is self-evident that all titans, be they Homer, Shakespeare, or Goethe, even though dormant, are still surrounded with an ever-attractive aura of grandeur and poesy. Admitting that Cerimon is not Prospero, nor Dionyza Lady Macbeth, nor Marina Miranda or Imogen, these are characters who bear the imprint of the ‘lion’s claw.’ ’’4 If the selection for performance of any Shakespeare play needs any justification, the critic argues, the reasons for Cernescu’s option lie in Marina’s attractive personality and the play’s hopeful, even robust, ending. However, the director modified the text radically by eliminating Gower as narrator and, thus, altering the mise en abyme effect created by the presence of the medieval poet. It is true that Romanian audiences of the eighties would not have had much background literary information about Gower to appreciate his presence, but the play’s narrative weight was lost. Moreover, this chorus figure could communicate more lively the offstage events of a naval battle, a shipwreck, or the report of Antiochus’s death by fire from heaven. Instead, Cernescu insisted on the deuxex-machina solutions of the conflict in the play, when the goddess Diana tells Pericles to go to her temple in Ephesus and narrate his experiences. Another innovation brought by Cernescu in this production of Pericles was the replacement of the tournament scene with a pantomime of doubtful taste. Though the need to highlight the theater metaphor may have caused this directorial intervention, the abrupt and condensed belligerent ballet seemed out of place in the serene Pentapolis. The swarming low-world of the Mytilene brothels was also grotesquely emphasized, to the extent that one gets the idea that such kinds of immoderate and vicious exchanges were the only

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characteristic of society in this part of the world. Cernescu offered a Brechtian view of cripples, beggars, prostitutes, and pimps teeming on this small island, probably intending to make a parallel with his present-day Romania. Actually, the director created three distinct locations in the play. There was the ideal world of Pentapolis, with its opulent and uncontaminated classical atmosphere. Here, the good king Simonides looked like a silver-robed Plato reigning in his perfect Republic and Thaisa was like a white caryatid supporting a colonnaded Erechteum, emerging from a column-like white curtain. Then, there was the world of Tharsus, practical and mercantile, but also raided by famine and pirates. At the lowest end of this illustrative human comedy, there was the corrupted Mytilene, which suffocated all hope. Cernescu’s contrastive message did not end here. The initial and final verses, borrowed from sonnets 129 (‘‘Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame’’) and 50 (‘‘My grief lies onward and my joy behind’’) respectively, left an open-ended note of discouragement and suffering. This was in total contrast with the play’s formal happy ending, and led the audiences to think about the current state of affairs in present-day Romania, when state official corruption was at its highest, while ordinary honest citizens had no hope left. After the 1989 democratic mutation in Romania, the people’s hopes were too high indeed, and in times of excess the taste for extravagant productions surfaced again. This time, Romanian directors played on the contradictions and anachronisms in the romances, probably wishing to highlight the intemperance and overindulgence of the modern world. The 1994 production of The Winter’s Tale at the Bulandra Theater in Bucharest, translated and adapted by the director Alexandru Darie, played freely with the notions of space and character in the play. Starting from the title, the entire plot was constructed as a premonitory vision that Mamillus recounted to his mother, in the form of a tale or like a dream on a cold winter night. This strategy opened the possibility of productive implications in terms of the relation between real and imaginary spaces. The fantastic, the improbable, the implausible became naturally accepted in these unusual locations. Leontes’s fiery and illogical passion developed in a supposedly cold Sicilia, an image that was totally inadequate in terms of the stereotypical construction of Sicily in Jacobean and in modern times as a warm and richly fruitful country. The pictorial sets evoked discreetly a number of famous wintry paintings, such as Breugel’s Winter. The music by Henry Purcell was part of the structural unity of the spectacle, marking the moments of dramatic intensity. The stage space was locked in these two forms


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of artistic representation, music and painting, in order to highlight the quality of artifact manifested by drama itself, suspended midway between an imagined narrative of a dream, and a fictive reality of representation. Mamillus’s transitory scenic presence was assimilated to that of Time, an equally ephemeral truth-seeker of the play. The translocation of imaginary spaces was harmonized with variable alterations in time, in order to synthesize the vacuum of the theatrical representation, which absorbed any attempt at definite determinations or realistic geography. The fact that the same actress who played Mamillus narrating the story was cast in the role of Perdita closed the circle of signification. The director emphasized that, like any individual conception of time or space, our notions of identity were equally elusive. The dream-like quality of this particular production and the blank images of frozen spaces tended to slow the motions of the spectacle. Dynamism was suppressed, giving way to the inert confusion of dreams. By contrast, the lively Bohemia at the sheep-shearing feast disclosed a different dramatic space, punctuated with distinctly warmer music and an altered pictorial setting. Shakespeare rewrote the story of Robert Greene’s Pandosto by reversing the positions of the two kingdoms, making Sicily rather than Bohemia the locus of the initiating action, and by changing the names of the characters. In the same way, the director of this Romanian production altered the audience’s expectations of a warm and summery Sicilia, in contrast to a wintry northern Bohemia. Space, duration, and individuality were never what the audience might have expected them to be. A radically innovative Romanian production of Pericles, at the Odeon Theater (Bucharest 1995) admitted no boundaries to the geographic and ethical space on stage. The title announced prudently Pericles after William Shakespeare. The director, Alexandru Hausvater, played on the intervention of the everyday irrational situations in the workings of individual destiny. When confronted with incest and moral dissolution, Pericles was not amazed and he did not try to fight evil according to the common moral expectations of a hero. He thought he could devise a stratagem of retreat and subversive containment, but the audience saw that he was not the author of his own plan. This particular Pericles was the actor of a multifaceted cosmic scenario, according to which all individual actions and projects were clearly defined. Gower was the tyrannical Commanditore, a cruel and fantasizing director, who ordered actions and emotions according to his own hallucinatory games of evil. The stage space and audience space became one, and all were forced to obey the compelling script. In an authoritarian voice, Gower or-

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dered the audience to enter and take their seats. He directed blasts of noisy music toward them and ordered the movement of the numbered bodies on stage, selecting the numbers that were allowed to become names. More or less like a god, Gower confused the time scheme and changed the sex of his characters as he pleased. He showed that he belonged to an eternity of violence that could not be hindered by individual details. Number 5, Pericles, was a betrayed king, an exiled vagrant, and a hopeful pilgrim in search of happiness. He toured an eternally ambivalent European space where nothing was stable. The cheering crowds of carefree tourists around the Eiffel Tower alternated with film sequences showing the ruins in Sarajevo. The significant sets and the rapidly moving succession of film images gave surprising amplitude to the scenic space. Pericles traveled almost incessantly, and he stopped to rest only in certain anonymous places, where he would find a wife or distribute humanitarian aid. Tyrants were the same everywhere in his peregrinations, whether they were heads of state like Cleon, the governor of Tarsus, or brothel masters. Ordinary people were visibly similar in cowardice and moral degradation; they were mere interchangeable numbers, objects animated by the imperious voice that determined their fragmented existence. Ultimately, these theatrical slaves freed themselves from Gower’s irrational authorial tyranny, but this was done in such a frenzy of jarring music and noise that the moment of supposed emancipation could only increase the general discord and irritation. Hausvater aimed to disturb the audience’s passive condition of viewers of the spectacle from their comfortable velvet seats. He extended the stage space aggressively by shocking the spectators with the grating intensity of the noise, the harsh and turbulent scenic movement, and the pinching difficulty of the riddles. However, by invading the viewer’s personal space through the assault on their senses, little was accomplished in point of intense participation. Aggressed on all sides, the spectator experienced the rejection of the whole. After seeing productions such as this, one needed to be reminded of the distance between stage and audience. In truth, this is only a play, as Shakespeare invariably helps us to understand. Sometimes, he used the limited space of his stage to show that this is a small world after all. Particularly in the erring geography of the romances, the significance of the stage space in visualizing dramatic locations became especially relevant. However, Hausvater’s production of Pericles made too much use of new and innovative stage inventions and onstage activities to suggest active movement and shifts of location. Instead of paying attention to Shakespeare’s use of the


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stage and realization of character through performance, the director took too many liberties with Shakespeare, falling into the trap of contra-textual interpretation. Apart from the fact that the romance genre in itself allowed a number of authorial liberties, which Shakespeare exploited copiously, the Romanian director transgressed even these permeable boundaries and created a theatrical hybrid. A multicultural 1997 production of The Tempest at the National Theater Bucharest,5 directed by Karin Beier, was an attempt at domesticating the Babel language anarchy through the theater. The twelve actors spoke eight languages (French, English, Croat, Polish, Romanian, Finnish, Italian, and German), and they seemed to communicate excellently through the Shakespearean common language of theatrical space and rhythm. Prospero and Miranda were the only characters who spoke the same language—Romanian—throughout the spectacle. Their identity was unaltered by formal topographical and linguistic conventions. The shipwrecked politicians disputed their useless and ephemeral power in various languages. Regardless of sex, they were wearing modern suits and ties, parading the sterile political hypocrisy. When they were starving, Alonso, Sebastian, and the lot auctioned the few tomatoes one of them kept in her briefcase. They held grandiloquent speeches, engineered obscure coups d’e´tat, and in general were arguing constantly. Beier’s The Tempest started with a European summit. Antonio, Alonso, Sebastian, Gonzalo, and Francisco discussed a tomato, the symbol of a united Europe. Their verbose orations included several European languages in a single utterance. The parody applied to the pretentious rhetoric used on such official occasions, and the actors employed significant gestures relating to national and relational specificity. For instance, Alonso embraced Ferdinand, a Polish actor, according to the Slav fashion, and Sebastian kissed Alonso’s hands in the manner of the Sicilian Mafia. During the convivial banquet offered by Ariel, hidden resentments and nationalistic prejudices became open outrageous verbal assaults, directed at the former allies. Alonso, a Finnish actor, was told that the Finns were no better than the Russians were, and that they drank too much. Sebastian, an Italian actor, told Antonio, an English actress, that Englishwomen were sexually inhibited. Antonio and Gonzalo, a French actress, told Sebastian that Italian men were said to think only with what they had below their belts. The affronted Sebastian got back at Gonzalo with the malicious observation that French women used too much perfume because they did not like to wash. This was Karin Beier’s version of a united Europe. As for Shakespeare . . . Caliban spoke the twelfth-century Upper Middle German, an ar-

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chaic form of modern German, and this linguistic individuality placed him in the space of myth and legend. The primitive and deposed former king of the island inhabited a territory that was no more, and the only idiom he had learned from the colonizing Prospero was the abusive language. We know this from Shakespeare, but Karin Beier’s Caliban cursed loudly and clearly, using the richest Romanian oaths. His abusive and aggressive attitude jolted the audience out of their snug and precarious conceptions about master and slave, questioning Prospero’s right to invade his land and personality. With Ferdinand and Miranda, however, words did not matter, but it was not certain how the self-absorbed space of their love was going to change when they were transported into the real world. The symbolic game of chess paraphrasing the love venture was made of much giving and taking, insolent cheating, and it was eloquently open-ended. Prospero, the apparent master and all-powerful magus, was exiled in his own utopia, like the other characters. He was neither the victorious hero nor the director-conquistador of a magical theater-island. In the end, life appeared to be accepted for what it was—be it a deceptive dream or an absurd conflict of power. Ariel was the authentic hero in Karin Beier’s conception. He was the master of the universal language of music, and the only source of peaceful harmony in the discordant multilingual insanity. Only seraphic sounds emerged from this airy spirit, the voice of pure art. He remained free to roam the island, away from the expropriating and polluting presence of humans. The abstract space of music conferred a necessary refuge of peace and truth. The director of this multinational production in Romania shrunk the illusory spatial coordinates of the stage-island to an abstraction. From the incoherent cacophony of political power and ambiguous rhetoric that dominated the initial scenes, the imaginative space on stage diminished drastically, no longer an inadequate dream, but a melodious form of perfect art. However, by overexposing the issues of national and cultural difference to signify European diversity and potential dissension, Beier created a visible discord between text and enactment in the performance. Too much display of cultural diversity at the expense of the text involves the risk of having us see a uniquely relevant interrogation of the status quo, while betraying an implicit imposition of directorial authority upon Shakespeare. The Romanian productions of the Shakespearean romances mentioned above dealt with the concept of space and movement from their directors’ perspectives. What they had in common, however, was the assumption that this theater was concerned with doing things not only with words, but also with people and their under-


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standing of the spaces they inhabited, or imagined that the others lived in. In some instances, the audiences were aggressed and forced to accept that there was a conflicting world out there, like in Hausvater’s offensive production of Pericles. In other productions, they were lulled into a final acceptance of harmony after the harsh movement of power, like in Beier’s interpretation of The Tempest. In all situations, however, the directors wanted their audiences to create their own emotional images of the real world beyond stage, which Shakespeare’s theater only triggered into being. Thus, Shakespeare ceased to represent the original authoritative dramatic text and he entered a dialogue of diversity, in which text, director, actor, and audience played with the increasingly volatile notion of meaning in a ludic multiplicity. While the true Shakespeare was implicitly assumed to exist, like an epitomized item or an accepted but ultimately arbitrary postulation of no fixed occupancy, current Romanian productions of Shakespeare in general, and the romances in particular, approached the plays surreptitiously, in a gypsy-like manner. Although they partly used the traditional text as a basis of their extravagant productions, Romanian directors were no longer interested in achieving a definition of this ideal ‘‘Platonic’’ Shakespeare any more than Romanian-origin gypsies of that period were willing to relate to Western constraints of social behavior. Directors just used the system, regardless of what others thought Shakespeare was, and were more concerned with what they thought Shakespeare was. Writing about two productions of Twelfth Night presented at the Madrid Festival during the 1996–97 season, Graham Keith Gregor mentions the Spanish ‘‘Shakespeare-manıá,’’ which is a phrase coined in the Spanish national daily El Paı´s.6 In suggesting some possible reasons for the Shakespeare boom in Spain, Gregor draws a convincing image of the appropriation of the English playwright by the Spanish culture in the latter third of the twentieth century. This thriving of Shakespeare on the Spanish stage and page was fostered by the spread of English as a second language in the late 1970s, which led to the public’s better acquaintance with Anglo-Saxon culture and its most hallowed icon. In addition, a burgeoning academic Shakespeare ‘‘industry’’ resulted in a large number of excellent ´ ngel-Luis Pujante and translations published by scholars such as A M. A. Conejero. Gregor brings a broadly social and political argument in support of the widespread appreciation of Shakespeare in Spain. Since 1975, when Spain re-emerged from its historic isolation, the return to democracy has brought political recognition and economic prosperity. Producing the plays of authors whose dramatic discourse seemed best to reflect the aspirations of the modern

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European democratic state necessarily enhanced the prevalence of Shakespeare among many other playwrights. A third and equally pertinent reason for Shakespeare’s popularity is found in the facility with which Shakespeare’s blank verse, in the best modern translations, had been adopted by Spanish actors because it seemed less taxing than the recitation of rhyme-based Spanish classical drama. After listing all these reasons conducing to Shakespeare’s unprecedented popularity in Spain after 1975, Gregor affirms that ‘‘Shakespeare has thus not only become the best-known and most successful of the foreign dramatists but has even supplanted native authors (both modern and classical) as one of the most performable playwrights.’’7 The justifications listed by Gregor in speaking of the reception of Shakespeare in Spain can be successfully extrapolated when referring to the integration of Shakespeare in Romanian culture after 1975, when the appropriation of the British bard embraced all areas of the national theater and literature. There are few similarities and direct influences between Romanian and Spanish cultures in point of Shakespeare reception, except for one deriving from the common origin of the two romance languages. Spanish theatrical troupes in the nineteenth century did not venture as far to the east as Romania, and the dominating influence of the French and German appropriations of Shakespeare in the period precluded any Spanish-Romanian connection in this direction. However, it seems that most European cultures in the late twentieth century have been united by the adoption of Shakespeare as a standard-bearer of European ideals of independent thinking and civility. All the insecurities, fears, and aspirations toward the modern European constitutional state could find an outlet and were more easily conveyed through the international and democratic language of Shakespeare’s theater. As Rafael Portillo and Manuel Go´mez Lara have pointed out, the result of the popularity of Shakespeare in modern Spain was a form of identification, through Shakespeare, with some of the issues (both aesthetic and moral) that affected other citizens of the European Community.8 Though different from Spain in point of social and political circumstances, Romania naturally, and probably fortuitously, replicated the cultural redemption achieved through Shakespeare by the other European states. In 1975, Spain was emerging from a state of political and cultural isolation, while Romania was at the highest point of segregation from the rest of Europe because of the Communist regime. Although the dictator Ceaus¸escu pretended to adopt a liberalized stance in international policy, the internal economic and


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political situation was worse than ever, since the Communist government was adamant in trying to pay Romania’s international debt entirely at the expense of the people. However, in this decade, the absorption of Shakespeare by the national culture was at its highest, equaled only by the flourishing of productions during the nineties. Offering the perspective of an East European who explains Shakespeare popularity, Boika Sokolova explores the importance of the Bard in Eastern Europe during the second half of the twentieth century. Sokolova explains this prevalence of the British playwright through the dialogical nature of drama and the position of the theatrical institution in European society.9 While discussing significant productions of Hamlet in the former Communist countries (among which the Romanian Cernescu’s Hamlet), Sokolova affirms that Hamlet had been ‘‘an instrument of self-analysis across Europe, representing national concerns—be they German, Russian, Polish, or others—at moments of crisis.’’10 It is difficult to produce a viable generalization when speaking of Shakespeare’s lives as given by various nations and periods. Notwithstanding, at least in Romania, things cultural were, as in most countries of Central and Eastern Europe, directed toward the values of the Western world, despite the political isolation under the Communist regimes. In examining the health situation of the live body named ‘‘Shakespeare’’ as transplanted into the dynamic being of Romanian culture, this study is far from being able to give definite proclamations. Writing of the historical factors that influence, condition, and sometimes control the production of any Shakespeare script, H. R. Coursen favors the subjective answer to the question of how the historicist critic can determine the relevant historical context of a particular production of Shakespeare.11 Seeing theater historians and critics as individuals who discern the flow of history as it moves each of them personally, not as it may move others, or cultures, or countries, Coursen takes a position of relativity regarding critical judgment. He places a series of scripts and performances, including movie, television, and stage productions, in certain historical contexts, but he sees them as ‘‘my history’’12 —actually Coursen’s. It is history seen by him (or possibly others) from the historical present, and his vision of the historical past will change as the historical present becomes history. A similar relativity of perception, or ‘‘presentism’’13 as it has come to be called in current critical practice, informs this account of Shakespeare’s reception by the Romanian culture. However, some critical statements could not escape the devil of generalizations, especially when trying to give a coherent expose´ of the chronological integration of Shakespeare’s translations in nine-

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teenth-century Romania, or the appropriation of the comedies or tragedies by the early twentieth-century national theater. Trying to confront the issue of what happens to Shakespeare’s script in particular productions, my analyses of the Romanian directors’ choices and their rewards in performance have been permanently informed by this kind of intellectual and emotional subjectivity. The critiques of certain productions happening in my mature lifetime, and which I could get to see, are the result of a specific reply belonging to a particular spectator and auditor who has the ability to respond creatively to a range of theatrical choices. As for the earlier productions, especially those from the Communist fifties and sixties, my only recorded sources were the theatrical reviews of the respective period, badly marred by the heavily ideologizing Marxist models required at the time from any kind of cultural response. However, my knowledge of the social and political circumstances in that time has been improved by later readings and by the general understanding filtered through personal experience. Therefore, I have been able to discern between the critics’ diplomatic attempts of going below and around the Communist censorship and convey more than the written text would imply. Thus, the original Shakespeare text of a certain production in the Communist period has been subjected to a process of triple interpretation. First, the director’s authorial intent, according to which almost each production, particularly Shakespeare’s, was meant as a dissident response to the unwanted Communist regime. Then, my analysis took into account some pictures of the productions and the reviewer’s interpretations, which described the production’s general theatrical coordinates without pointing out its seditious aspect. Moreover, the critics of the Communist period tried to cloak anti-government meanings under the guise of generalizing and flat commentary. Finally, I have submitted critical interpretations to an attentive examination, in order to discern all the traps and pitfalls laid before the heedless censorship reader, but visible to the observant commentator. In anatomizing the transmutation process of Shakespeare’s script into performance, Robert Weimann makes the distinction between the contents of the script and the elements of performance. Weimann describes locus and platea as ‘‘modes of authorizing dramatic discourse’’ on what he calls ‘‘the Elizabethan platform stage’’: locus is ‘‘associated with . . . what and who was represented in the dramatic world’’ and platea with ‘‘what and who was representing that world.’’14 In its simplest form, from the point of view of performance criticism, the distinction might be between locus—the script as received, and platea —the script as might be interpreted. Although critics are likely


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to find this interpretation somewhat reductive, the central contrast seems to be between the author’s script and the director and actors’ interpretation of that script. However, considering the Latin terms literally, locus also means locality, region, country, while platea is the marketplace or the public space of performance. Therefore, these terms can be interpreted differently when examining the manner in which Shakespeare was localized in Romanian early translations or productions in the past forty years. The integration of this study in the ‘‘Shakespeare and/in’’ variety seems to be inevitable up to a point. Examining the relatively large number of studies concerned with Shakespeare and Italy, Manfred Pfister sees this ‘‘conjunctive genre’’ of critical approach as limited to a contextual interpretation, remaining arrested in the indefinite limbo of background.15 Pfister considers the Shakespeare-and-Italy line of research as a case of ‘‘the law of diminishing returns,’’ according to which the more information scholars gather concerning Renaissance Italy and the Elizabethans’ understanding of this country, the less insight is offered into the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.16 Discussing the rather limiting contributions analyzing Shakespeare and Italy from the perspective of the history of ideas, the monograph sort of approach, Pfister advocates for a line of research that would observe aesthetic considerations of the theatrical medium or of genre. Considering the tension implied in Robert Weimann’s spatial dialectic of locus and platea, any critical approach should look for the underlying opposition of England and Italy in Shakespeare’s plays as inscribed into the ‘‘disruptive heterogeneity of the theatrical space.’’17 Keeping Pfister’s notes among the intellectual and methodological antecedents of my approach, this study considers Shakespeare’s heterogeneous integration in the Romanian culture, particularly at the point of contact with the dramatic world. It is visible that the volatility of the romances could better encompass the amplitude and irregularity of foreign dramatic spaces: the here, there, and nowhere of performance locality necessary for the dramatization of a liminal Eastern European space. It is by no means incidental that the actual naming of a (already dead) Transylvanian, the Panonians and the Dalmatians, or of Bohemia and Russia18 for that matter appears in Shakespeare’s romances, which display a strong a-topical and atemporal dramatic relevance. Thus, it is safe to assume that for the Jacobean audiences attending the performance of one of Shakespeare’s romances, the mentioning of these names sounded exotic, triggering connotations of a vilified geographic and ethnic space. This myth-making process is similar to the later accep-

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tance of Dracula’s name, associated with Transylvania and Romania in the Anglo-Saxon Western world.19 Regardless of the historical, ethnic, and social reality of the region allegedly harboring the Dracula myth, the Western culture has assimilated the geographic region encompassing most of Romania’s territory with the literary parable created by a nineteenth-century Irish writer20 of a gothic novel. Interestingly enough, the people of this area are not seeing themselves through the mirror of the Dracula cultural prototype. For commercial reasons, aware that this is what Western tourists want to see in Romania, the Dracula story is being reiterated at the appropriate sites. However, when a symbolic cultural identification is required, Romanians look at themselves rather through the reflecting paradigm of Western cultural values, best represented in the popular consciousness by the Shakespeare tradition. Paradoxically enough, in what most of the Western world thinks to be Dracula land, people feel inclined to adhere to the social and cultural values of civility and democracy by adopting the Shakespeare model, transferred from the stage at various levels of social and cultural life. In the past twenty years, Shakespeare has become a paradigm of the theater and of culture in Romania as well as a vehicle for exporting Romanian theatrical expertise abroad, through the internationalized language of Shakespeare in performance. In a country more than twice the size of Hungary, and double in population, surpassed only by Poland of the Eastern European countries as regards surface and inhabitants, the prevalence of Shakespeare over many national and international playwrights has led to the existence of many events related to his theater. Besides the frequent current productions, there is an international Shakespeare Theater Festival every two years, a yearly Shakespeare conference for students, and several academic events related to Shakespeare studies. It appears that, following the existing globalization of culture, what used to be construed as the remote Dracula land of vampires and bloody deeds has turned into the Shakespeare land of Western civility and human concern, whose people are willing to learn the lesson of modernity through Shakespeare’s theater mainly, among other cultural matters.

Notes Chapter 1. Mapping Shakespeare’s Globe in a Global World 1. Stanley Wells, foreword to Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe, ed. A. Luis Pujante and Ton Hoenselaars, 7–9 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 7. 2. Wells, foreword, 9. See also Balz Engler, ‘‘Constructing Shakespeare in Europe,’’ in Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe, 26–39. Engler proposes the term ‘‘re-production’’ (28) instead of Brian Vickers’s controversial ‘‘appropriation’’ when discussing the European inscriptions of Shakespeare. 3. Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein, eds., Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 3. 4. Ibid. 5. K. Feig, ‘‘Richness and Poverty, Landlords and Peasants: the Magnificence and Misery of Ethnic Diversity,’’ in Eastern Europe: A Multicultural Arena, http:// www.omnibusol.com/easteurope.html, Internet Book Copyright, K. Feig, last full upgrade August 2001 (accessed February 28, 2005). 6. John Gillies, ‘‘The scene of cartography in King Lear,’’ in Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain, ed. Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein, 109–37 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 122. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 123. 9. An image of Dacia, appearing in Ortelius’s 1595 Latin edition, entitled Daciarum, Moesiarumque, Vetus Descriptio, can be viewed at the Romanian Academy Library Web page http://www.bar.acad.ro/www_rom/ortelius.html (accessed March 12, 2005). This page represents one of the seventy maps and fifty-seven plates of Ortelius’s atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. 10. Balz Engler, ‘‘Constructing Shakespeare in Europe,’’ in Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe, 31. 11. Ibid., 32. 12. Dennis Kennedy, ‘‘Shakespeare and the Cold War,’’ in Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe, 163–79.

Chapter 2. Early Translations of Shakespeare in Romania 1. Janet Adelman, ‘‘Iago’s Alter Ego: Race as Projection in Othello,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 136. 2. Daniel J. Vitkus, ‘‘Turning Turk in Othello: The Conversion and Damnation

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NOTES

of the Moor,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 147. For a summary of early modern texts that include English accounts of Turkish culture, see Samuel C. Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937), 100–186. Another study is A. J. Hoenselaars, ‘‘The Elizabethans and the Turk at Constantinople,’’ Cahiers E´lisabe´thains 47 (1995): 29–42. Hoenselaars argues that the negative references to the Turk in English Renaissance drama derive not from militant Christian discourse but from the inadequacy arising from the conflict between the desire to subdue Islam and to engage in lucrative trade with the Orient. 3. G. K. Hunter, ‘‘Elizabethans and foreigners,’’ in Shakespeare and Race, ed. Catherine M. S. Alexander and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 41. 4. Ibid., 47. 5. Ibid., 58. 6. A. J. Hoenselaars, ‘‘Shakespeare, Foreigners, and National Ideologies,’’ in Shakespeare: Varied Perspectives, ed. Vikram Chopra, 11–33, New World Literature Series 90 (Delhi: B. R. Publishing, 1996). 7. Arthur F. Kinney, ‘‘Imagining England: The Chorographical Glass,’’ in Soundings of Things Done. Essays in Early Modern Literature in Honor of S. K. Heiniger Jr., ed. Peter E. Medine and Joseph Wittreich, 181–214 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 209. 8. Jonathan Bate, ‘‘Shakespeare’s Islands,’’ in Shakespeare and the Mediterranean: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress (Valencia, 2001), ed. Tom Clayton, Susan Brock, Vicente Fore´s, 289–307 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 290. 9. Blaise Pascal, Penseés, Oeuvres Comple`tes (Paris: Hachette, 1858), 246. 10. Susan Bassnett, ed., Studying British Cultures: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1997), xxvii. 11. John Drakakis, ‘‘Shakespeare in quotations,’’ in Studying British Cultures: An Introduction, ed. Susan Bassnett, 152–72 (London: Routledge, 1997), 170. 12. Joseph G. Price, ‘‘The Cultural Phenomenon of Shakespeare,’’ in William Shakespeare: His World, His Work, His Influence, ed. John F. Andrews (New York: Scribner’s, 1985), 3:831–38. 13. Dennis Kennedy, ed., Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 14. Michael Hattaway, Boika Sokolova, and Derek Roper, eds., Shakespeare in the New Europe (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994). 15. John J. Joughin, ed., Shakespeare and National Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). 16. Thomas Healy, ‘‘Past and Present Shakespeares: Shakespearean Appropriations in Europe,’’ in Shakespeare and National Culture, 206–32. Healy explores European political appropriations and considers the implications of promoting either one dominant reading of Shakespeare or embracing all readings. I subscribe to Healy’s argument that studying a ‘‘Shakespeare of the past’’ (228) can help to understand how Shakespeare is used for present political purposes. 17. Francis Barker, ‘‘Nationalism, Nomadism, and Belonging in Europe: Coriolanus,’’ in Shakespeare and National Culture, 233–65. Barker uses his interpretation of Coriolanus to reveal the internal fissures in the ideal of a nation at an early stage of its formulation. Extrapolating Barker’s argument, we could explain the excellent popularity of Shakespeare at an early stage of the formation of the national Romanian state in the late nineteenth century.

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18. Robert Weimann, ‘‘A Divided Heritage: Conflicting Appropriations of Shakespeare in (East) Germany,’’ in Shakespeare and National Culture, 173–205. 19. Healy, ‘‘Past and Present Shakespeares,’’ 208. 20. Ibid., 227. 21. A. T. Parfenov and Joseph G. Price, eds., Russian Essays on Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998). 22. A. V. Bartoshevitch, ‘‘From Tragedy to Grotesque: On the Typology of Contemporary Shakespearean Production,’’ in Russian Essays on Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, ed. A. T. Parfenov and Joseph G. Price, 127–32, (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998). 23. Ibid., 128–29. 24. Ibid., 132. 25. Zdenek Strı´brny´, Shakespeare and Eastern Europe, Oxford Shakespeare Topics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 26. Zdenek Strı´brny´, ‘‘Eastern Europe in Shakespeare,’’ Acta Universitatis Carolinae Philologica 5: Prague Studies in English 22 (1997): 185–92. 27. Alexander Shrubanov and Boika Sokolova, Painting Shakespeare Red: An EastEuropean Appropriation (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001). 28. Krystyna Kujawin´ska Courtney and John M. Mercer, eds., The Globalization of Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003). 29. Peter Holland, foreword to The Globalization of Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Krystyna Kujawin´ska Courtney and John M. Mercer, i–v (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003), iv. 30. Krystyna Kujawin´ska Courtney and John M. Mercer, eds., introduction to The Globalization of Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century, xvi. 31. Marcu Berza, Shakespeare in Roumania (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1931). 32. Alexandru Dut¸u, Shakespeare in Romania: A bibliographical essay (Bucharest: Meridiane Publishing House, 1964). 33. Aurel Curtui, Hamlet ˆın Romaˆnia (Bucharest: Minerva, 1977). 34. Dan Grigorescu, Shakespeare ˆın cultura romaˆna˘ moderna˘ [Shakespeare in modern Romanian culture] (Bucharest: Minerva, 1971). 35. Leon D. Levit¸chi, Studii Shakespeariene [Shakespearean studies] (Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1976). 36. Leon D. Levit¸chi, ‘‘The First Romanian Critical Edition of Shakespeare’s Complete Works,’’ Shakespeare Worldwide 13 (1991): 13–21. In this study, Levit¸chi describes his Romanian-language edition of Shakespeare (1982–90), with comments on difficulties faced by translators and the nature of the commentary accompanying individual works. 37. Leon D. Levit¸chi, ed., Shakespeare: Opere Complete, 9 vols. (Bucharest: Editura Univers, 1988–95). 38. Dirk Delabastita, ‘‘More Alternative Shakespeares,’’ in Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe, 126. 39. Ibid., 125. 40. Ibid., 126. 41. The information on European Shakespeare translations is based on the Shakespeare in Translation section of the excellent site Sh:in:E. Shakespeare in Europe , University of Basel, Switzerland, updated December 2002, http://www.unibas.ch/ shine/translators (accessed March 14, 2005). 42. Maria Del Sapio Garbero, ed., La Traduzione di Amleto nella cultura Europea (Venezia: Marsilio Editori, 2002), 8. 43. For an account of the Danish critic’s interpretation of Shakespeare see Niels

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B. Hansen, ‘‘In Search of a Mastermind: Georg Brandes’s William Shakespeare,’’ in The Globalization of Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century, 161–74. 44. For an account of early productions of Shakespeare on the Polish stage (late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century) see Marta Gibin´ska, ‘‘Enter Shakespeare: The Contexts of Early Polish Appropriations,’’ in Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe, 54–69. 45. Martin Hilsky´ presents four Czech translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the 1990s in ‘‘ ‘Telling What is Told’: Original, Translation, and the Third Text— Shakespeare’s Sonnets in Czech,’’ in Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe, 134–44. 46. Strˇ´ıbrny´, Shakespeare and Eastern Europe, 60–61. 47. Michael Mullin, ‘‘Shakespeare across Cultures: Parallel Evolution in Germany, Japan, and Korea’’ (paper, Shakespeare in Translation Seminar, International Shakespeare Conference: Shakespeare and Religions, Stratford-upon-Avon, 2000), 2. 48. Berza, Shakespeare in Roumania, 3. 49. Ibid., 31. 50. Cezar Bolliac, ‘‘Teatrul Bucures¸ti: Othello’’ [Bucharest Theater: Othello], Curierul romaˆnesc 1845, 79. 51. Petre Grimm, ‘‘Romanian Translations and Imitations from English Literature,’’ Study of Comparative Literature, 1923, 284–377. This study is devoted mainly to Shakespeare. 52. Ion Horia Ra˘dulescu, in the study ‘‘Les interme´diares français de W. Shakespeare en Roumanie,’’ Revue de litte´rature compareé 1938, 252–71, offers an introspection of the early Romanian translations of Shakespeare based on French intermediaries. 53. C. S. Checkley, ‘‘Rumanian Interpretations of Hamlet,’’ The Slavonic and East European Review, 1959, 413–29. 54. Alexandru Dut¸u, Shakespeare in Romania, 1. 55. Mihai Eminescu, ‘‘Repertoriul nostru teatral,’’ in Shakespeare s¸i opera lui: Culegere de texte critice cu o prefat¸a˘ de Tudor Vianu (Bucharest: Editura pentru literatura˘ universala˘, 1964), 466. 56. Ibid. 57. Leon D. Levit¸chi, ‘‘Eminescu traduca˘tor al lui Shakespeare’’ [Eminescu, translator of Shakespeare], Secolul XX 6 (1976): 16–24. 58. Eminescu, ‘‘Ca˘rt¸ile,’’ in Shakespeare s¸i opera lui, 467. 59. Cezar Bolliac, ‘‘S¸akspear,’’ in Shakespeare s¸i opera lui, 461. 60. Ibid., 462. 61. Kenneth Muir, ‘‘The Advantages and Disadvantages of Secularity,’’ in Parallel Lives: Spanish and English National Drama, 1580–1680, ed. Louise Fothergill-Payne and Peter Fothergill-Payne, 211–23 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1991). 62. Peter Milward discusses the issue of Shakespeare’s supposed Catholic influences, though he finds no compelling evidence of his religious affiliation, in ‘‘Shakespeare’s Catholicism,’’ Shakespeare Yearbook 1 (1990): 133–40. In a more recent study, Shakespeare’s Apocalypse (Tokyo: Renaissance Institute, Sophia University, 2000), Milward analyzes the theme of doomsday in Shakespeare. Ian Wilson attempts to look dispassionately at all the diverse theories and approaches to historical Shakespeare, including his religion, in Shakespeare: The Evidence: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Man and His Work (London: Headline, 1993). For other studies on Shakespeare and the Bible see Naseeb Shaheen, ‘‘Shakespeare’s Knowledge of the Bible—How Acquired,’’ Shakespeare Studies 20 (1988): 201–14; Rowland Cotterill,

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‘‘Shakespeare and Christianity,’’ in The Discerning Reader: Christian Perspectives on Literature and Theory, ed. David Barratt, Roger Pooley, and Leland Ryken, 155–75 (Leicester, England: Apollos-Inter-Varsity Press, 1995). 63. George Barit¸, ‘‘Mila˘ dupa˘ Shakespeare’’ [Mercy, after Shakespeare], Foaie pentru minte, inima˘ s¸i literatura˘, 1840, 118. 64. George Barit¸, Foaie pentru minte, inima˘ s¸i literatura˘, 316–19. 65. Ibid., 319. 66. Vladimir Streinu, ed., William Shakespeare: Tragedia lui Hamlet, print¸ al Danemarcei (Bucharest: EPL, 1965), xi–xii. 67. Toma Alexandru Bagdat, trans., Biografia lui Viliam G. Sekspir dupe Le Tourneur: Urmata˘ de Romeo s¸i Julieta si Otello, sau Maurul din Venet¸ia (Bucharest: Typographia Ios Copainig, 1848). 68. George Ca˘linescu, Istoria literaturii romaˆne de la origini paˆna˘ ˆın prezent (Bucharest: Editura Minerva, 1982), 9–10. 69. Jacqueline Risset, ‘‘Mallarme´, ‘Amleto’ e il vento,’’ in La Traduzione di Amleto nella cultura Europea, ed. Maria Del Sapio Garbero, 17–42 (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2002). 70. Cesare G. De Michelis, ‘‘ ‘L’Amletto’ nella cultura Russa,’’ in La Traduzione di Amleto nella cultura Europea, 43–50. 71. Ibid., 45. 72. Adolph Stern, trans., Hamlet print¸ul Danemarcei: Tragedie ˆın 5 acte de William Shakespeare [Hamlet the prince of Denmark: Tragedy in five acts by William Shakespeare] (Bucharest: Typographia Dorotea P. Cucu, 1877), i. 73. Ibid., ii–iii. 74. Ibid., xxii. 75. Unless specified otherwise, the references to the Shakespeare text are keyed to William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (1988; repr., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 76. For Hamlet and the Bible see Maurice Charney, ‘‘Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the Context of the Hebrew Bible,’’ JDT: Journal of Theatre and Drama 2 (1996): 93–100; William Rossky, ‘‘Hamlet as Jeremiah,’’ Hamlet Studies 1 (1979): 101–8; Cherrell Gulfoyle, ‘‘King Hamlet’s Two Successors,’’ Comparative Drama 15 (1981–82): 120–38; Nona Feinberg, ‘‘Jephthah’s Daughter: The Parts Ophelia Plays,’’ in Old Testament Women in Western Literature, ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcik, 128–43 (Conway, AR: UCA Press, 1991); Peter Milward, Biblical Influences in Shakespeare’s Great Tragedies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 77. For the scriptural implications of revenge in Hamlet see R. W. Desai, ‘‘Hamlet as ‘the minister of God to take vengeance,’ ’’ English Language Notes 31, no. 2 (1993): 22–27; Peter R. Moore, ‘‘Hamlet and the Two Witness Rule,’’ Notes and Queries 44 (1997): 498–503; Gene Edward Veith Jr., ‘‘ ‘Wait upon the Lord’: David, Hamlet, and the Problem of Revenge,’’ in The David Myth in Western Literature, ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcik, 70–83 (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1980). 78. R.A.L. Burnet, in ‘‘Shakespeare and the First Seven Chapters of the Genevan Job,’’ Notes and Queries 29 (1982): 127–28, reviews previously noted echoes of the first seven chapters of the Book of Job in the Geneva Bible and discusses the cluster of parallels between Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy and Job 6–7. 79. For biblical allusions in King Lear see Michael G. Brennan, ‘‘ ‘Now gods, stand up for bastards’ (King Lear, I.ii.22) and the Epistle to the Hebrews 12:5–8,’’ Notes and Queries 37 (1990): 186–88; William Marling, ‘‘The Parable of the Prodigal Son: An Economic Reading,’’ Style 26 (1992): 419–36; Peter Milward, ‘‘The Biblical Language of King Lear,’’ Shakespeare Yearbook 2 (1991): 212–15; Arthur Dale Barnes,

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‘‘Kent’s ‘Holy Cords’: A Biblical Allusion in King Lear II.ii.74–76,’’ English Language Notes 22, no. 2 (1984): 20–22; Rodney Delasanta, ‘‘I stumbled when I saw and John 11:9–10,’’ Christianity and Literature 36, no. 2 (1987): 27–30. 80. For the book of Job and other biblical analogues in King Lear see D. Auerbach, ‘‘The Job Motif in King Lear,’’ Notes and Queries 26 (1979): 129–32; Joseph Candido, ‘‘Lear’s ‘Yeas’ and ‘Nays,’ ’’ English Language Notes 23, no. 4 (1986): 16–18; J. S. Gill, ‘‘A Source of ‘Nothing’ in King Lear?’’ Notes and Queries 31 (1984): 210; L. M. Storozynsky, ‘‘King Lear and Chaos,’’ Critical Survey 3 (1991): 163–69. 81. P. Grimm, ‘‘Traduceri si imitat¸iuni romaˆnes¸ti dupa˘ literatura engleza˘’’ [Romanian translations and imitations from English literature], Daco-romania 3 (1924): 333–35. 82. Scarlat Ion Ghica, trans., Regele Ioan. Regele Richard III. Negut¸a˘torul din Venet¸ia (Bucharest: Tipografia Gutenberg, 1892), 1. 83. Ibid., vi. 84. Ibid., 3. 85. Ibid., 14. 86. Dan Botta, trans., Regele Ioan (Bucharest: E.S.P.L.A., 1955). 87. Ghica, trans., Regele Ioan, 33. 88. References to ‘‘cousin’’ in the Shakespeare text are the following: 3.1.265; 3.3.2; 4.2.137, 159, 249; 5.7.51. 89. Gen. 18:27 has Abraham referring to himself as ‘‘I am but dust and ashes,’’ and Job 42:6 repents ‘‘in dust and ashes.’’ Other biblical allusions to death are to the ‘‘dust of death’’ (Psalms 22:15), ‘‘all are of the dust and all turn to dust again’’ (Eccles. 3:20), and ‘‘for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’’ (Gen. 3:19). The Bible: A Multimedia Experience (Cambridge, MA: The Learning Company, Inc., 1995) CD-ROM. 90. For biblical issues in The Merchant of Venice see Arthur G. Ross, ‘‘Literary Jews and the Breakdown of the Medieval Testamental Pattern,’’ in Jewish Presences in English Literature, ed. Derek Cohen and Deborah Heller, 113–27 (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1990); Patrick Grant, ‘‘The Bible and The Merchant of Venice : Hermeneutics, Ideology, and Displaced Persons,’’ English Studies in Canada 16 (1990): 247–62. 91. The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), AA.ii. 92. Ibid., AA.ii.

Chapter 3. Shakespeare’s Decalogue: English Histories in Romania 1. William M. Hawley, Critical Hermeneutics and Shakespeare’s History Plays (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), 11. 2. Ibid., 14. 3. Donald G. Watson, Shakespeare’s Early History Plays: Politics at Play on the Elizabethan Stage (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1990), 26. 4. Aurel Baranga, ‘‘Repertoriul: ˆı ntre exigent¸ e s¸ i concesii’’ [The Repertoire: Between Exigency and Concession], Contemporanul 36 (1975): 9. 5. Ibid. 6. Julia Briggs, This Stage-Play World: Texts and Contexts, 1580–1625, rev. ed. (1983; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 254.

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7. According to Brecht, the ‘‘distancing’’ effect of the epic theater corresponds to a mode of placing the events in historical perspective. This technique is actualized through songs, sets, film selections, and epic commentary. See Bertold Brecht, ‘‘Efectul de distantare ˆın arta teatrala˘ chineza˘,’’ Scrieri despre teatru, trans. Corina Jiva (Bucharest: Univers, 1977), 148. 8. Bertold Brecht, Teatru, introduction by V. Moglescu (Bucharest: E.S.P.L.A., 1958). 9. Ian Kott. Shakespeare contemporanul nostru, trans. Anca Livescu and Teofil Roll (Bucharest: Editura pentru literatura˘ universala˘, 1969). 10. See Dan Grigorescu, Shakespeare ˆın cultura romaˆna˘ moderna˘ [Shakespeare in modern Romanian culture] (Bucharest: Minerva, 1971); Dan La˘za˘rescu, Introducere ˆın shakespeareologie [Introduction to Shakespeare studies] (Bucharest: Univers, 1974); Leon Levit¸chi, Studii shakespeariene [Shakespearean studies] (Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1976); Aureliu Manea, Comentarii pe marginea teatrului lui Shakespeare s¸i confesiuni [Commentary on Shakespeare’s theater and confessions] (Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1986). 11. See John Elsom, Mai este Shakespeare contemporanul nostru? [Is Shakespeare our contemporary?], trans. Dan Dut¸escu (Bucharest: Meridiane, 1994). 12. Ian Kott, ‘‘Insemna˘ri despre Shakespeare,’’ in Shakespeare si opera lui: Culegere de texte critice, ed. Ana Cartianu et al. (Bucharest: Editura pentru Literatura˘ Universala˘, 1964), 456. This particular collection of critical texts, Shakespeare s¸i opera lui, published in the year of the Shakespeare jubilee, is a remarkable example of Romanian scholarly interest in Shakespeare. In its 763 folio pages it assembles significant Shakespeare criticism from Europe (as well as Romanian scholarship), USA, South America, and China, including such names as John Dryden, Nicholas Rowe, S. T. Coleridge, J. Dover Wilson, Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, G. Brandes, Anatole France, Goethe, Francesco de Sanctis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, etc. 13. Alexandru Dut¸u, ‘‘Pe scenele romaˆnes¸ti’’ [On the Romanian stages], Teatrul 4 (1964): 48–53. 14. Ana Maria Narti, ‘‘Pe scenele romaˆnes¸ti’’ [On the Romanian stages], Teatrul 4 (1964): 55–64. 15. Ibid., 57. 16. Ibid. 17. Nicolae Manolescu, ‘‘Realismul modern al lui Shakespeare’’ [Shakespeare’s modern realism], Teatrul 3 (1970): 33. 18. Florin Tornea, ‘‘Richard al III-lea,’’ Teatrul 3 (1964): 15. 19. Ana Maria Narti, ‘‘Richard al III-lea de Shakespeare,’’ Teatrul 4 (1964): 11. 20. Richard II, produced at Teatrul Mic, Bucharest, 1966, was directed by Radu Penciulescu, sets Toni Gheorghiu, Traian Nit¸escu, costume Dan Nemt¸eanu. 21. Mira Iosif, ‘‘Shakespeare: Richard II la Teatrul Mic’’ [Shakespeare: Richard II at the Mic Theater], Teatrul 10 (1966): 74. 22. Ibid., 75. 23. Ibid. 24. Ana Maria Narti, ‘‘Richard II: prima montare’’ [Richard II: the first staging], Teatrul 1 (1967): 16. 25. Henric al VI-lea, Partea a III a was produced at the Timis¸oara National Theater, October 20, 1976, directed by Ioan Ieremia, translated by Barbu Solacolu, sets by Emilia Jivanov. Review by Virgil Munteanu, ‘‘Henric al VI-lea de Shakespeare,’’ Teatrul 12 (1976): 28–30. 26. Henric al IV-lea was produced at the Nottara Theater, Bucharest, directed by Lucian Giurchescu, sets by Ion Popescu-Udris¸te, translation and adaptation from 1

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Henry IV and 2 Henry IV by Dorin Moga, Sorin Arghir, and Lucian Giurchescu. Review: Virgil Munteanu, ‘‘Henric al IV-lea de Shakespeare,’’ Teatrul 12 (1976): 30–32. 27. Jean E. Howard, introduction to 1 Henry IV, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus, 1147–56 (New York: Norton, 1997). Howard argues that the chorographical aspect of the play accounts for ‘‘the illusion of complex temporal simultaneity and social and geographical heterogeneity’’ (1149). 28. Richard II was produced at the Craiova National Theater, 1981, directed by Mircea Cornis¸teanu, sets by Tudor Ghimes¸, translation by Mihnea Gheorghiu. Reviews: Petrel Berceanu, ‘‘Richard II,’’ Ramuri 5 (1982): 7; Paul Tutungiu, ‘‘Richard al II-lea de Shakespeare,’’ Teatrul 10 (1981): 45–47; Ion Zamfirescu, ‘‘Richard II de Shakespeare,’’ Romaˆnia Literara˘ 47 (1981): 15. 29. Paul Tutungiu, ‘‘Richard al II-lea de Shakespeare,’’ 46. 30. C. W. R. D. Moseley, Shakespeare’s History Plays (London: Penguin, 1988), 127. 31. Richard III was produced at Teatrul Mic, 1983, directed by Silviu Purca˘rete, sets Adriana Leonescu, music Vasile S¸irli, translated by Anda Teodorescu and Andrei Bantas¸. Reviews: Justin Ceuca, ‘‘Richard III la Teatrul Mic,’’ Steaua (ClujNapoca) 7 (1983): 60; Constantin Ma˘ciuca˘, ‘‘Richard al III-lea,’’ Teatrul 6 (1983): 20–22; Monica Ghiut¸a˘, ‘‘Elisabeta—Richard al III-lea,’’ Teatrul 4 (1983): 72. 32. Ma˘ciuca˘, ‘‘Richard al III-lea,’’ 20. 33. Ibid., 21. 34. Paul Cornel Chitic, ‘‘Spat¸iu Shakespeare’’ [Shakespeare space], Teatrul 8 (1988): 86. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. King John, directed by Grigore Gont¸a, was produced at Teatrul de comedie Bucharest, 1988, sets by Ion Popescu Udris¸te. Reviews: Dinu Kivu, ‘‘Regele Ioan,’’ Contemporanul 18 (1988): 12; Valentin Silvestru, ‘‘Regele Ioan de Shakespeare la Teatrul de comedie,’’ Tribuna Romaˆniei 17 (1988): 12; Irina Coroiu, ‘‘Regele Ioan,’’ Romanian Review 44 (1990): 110–25. 38. Chitic, ‘‘Spat¸iu Shakespeare,’’ 87. 39. Richard III, directed by Mihai Ma˘niut¸iu, was produced in Romanian by the Odeon Theater, Bucharest, and in English at the Dancehouse, Manchester, 11–14 May 1994, costumes by Doina Levintza, music by Marius Pop. 40. Henric al VI-lea [1, 2, and 3 Henry VI], directed by Ioan Ieremia, was produced at the Timis¸oara National Theater, Romania (1995) and at Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (June 1995). 41. Falstaff dupa˘ Shakespeare [Falstaff after Shakespeare], directed by Victor Ioan Frunza˘, was adapted from 1 and 2 Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor, sets by Adriana Grand, produced at the National Theater Cluj-Napoca (December 1996). 42. Mircea Morariu, ‘‘Falstaff dupa˘ Shakespeare’’ [Falstaff after Shakespeare], Teatrul azi 3 (1997): 13. 43. Falstaff Story was produced at the Fantasio Theater Constant¸a (1996), directed by Alexandru Darian, music by Nicu Alifantis, sets by Alexandru Radu, choreography by Fa˘nica˘ Lupu. Review: Mihai Sorin, ‘‘Starea actuala˘ a revistei’’ [The current state in musical production], Teatrul Azi 4–5 (1996): 42. 44. Richard II, directed by Mihai Ma˘niut¸iu, was produced at the National Theater Bucharest, April 1998. Review: Cristina Modreanu, ‘‘Richard II,’’ Adeva˘rul Literar s¸i Artistic 417 (1998): 6. 45. Watson, Shakespeare’s Early History Plays, 147. 46. Joseph de Vos, ‘‘Shakespeare’s History Plays in Belgium: Taken Apart and Reconstructed as ‘Grand Narrative,’ ’’ in Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe, 211–22.

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47. Ibid., 213. 48. Ibid. 49. Dennis Kennedy, ‘‘Foreign Shakespeare’’ (lecture at the conference Four Centuries of Shakespeare in Europe, Murcia, Spain, 18–20 November 1999). 50. Pauline Kiernan, Shakespeare’s Theory of Drama, rev. ed. (1996; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3. 51. Ibid., 51.

Chapter 4. Romanian Metamorphoses: Comedies 1. Russell Jackson, ‘‘Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon: Summer and Fall, 2000,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 52 (2001): 110. 2. Ibid. 3. Dennis Kennedy, in Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), analyzes how scenography (including stage and costume design, lighting, the arrangement of the acting ground, the movement of the actors within it) affects audience reception and is related to changes in our understanding of Shakespeare and his place in the theater. Similarly, in ‘‘The Language of the Spectator,’’ Shakespeare Survey 50 (1997): 29–40, Dennis Kennedy associates the recent popularity of Shakespeare on stage to the intercultural, interlingual adaptability of the plays. 4. For a survey of the reception of Shakespeare’s comedies in Bulgaria during the Communist period, for example, in order to highlight the similarities, see Alexander Shrubanov and Boika Sokolova, ‘‘The Smile and the Bite: East European Negotiations of Shakespeare’s Comedy,’’ Folio: Shakespeare—Genootschap van Nederland en Vlaandren 6, no. 1 (1999): 17–31. 5. In 1959, the Taˆrgu-Mures¸ Theater produced The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Ko¨musvez Lajos, and the CFR Labour Theater Giulesti produced The Merry Wives of Windsor, directed by George Dem Loghin. In 1960, the same Labour Theater produced Two Gentlemen of Verona, directed by Lucian Giurchescu. 6. Ion Cazaban, ‘‘De ce numai comedia?’’ [Why only comedy?] Teatrul 2 (1960): 71. 7. David Willbern, ‘‘What Is Shakespeare?’’ in Shakespeare’s Personality, ed. Norman Holland et al., 226–43 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 232; 235. 8. I. Flavius, ‘‘Ce fel de Shakespeare juca˘m?’’ [What kind of Shakespeare are we playing?], Teatrul 6 (1958): 65. 9. Ibid. 10. W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 40. 11. Mihnea Gheorghiu, ‘‘Shakespeare la el acasa˘ s¸i la noi’’ [Shakespeare at his home and ours], Teatrul 5 (1959): 94. 12. Mircea Alexandrescu, ‘‘Regie ˆın slujba textului sau demonstrat¸ie de regie?’’ [Directorial action for the text or demonstration of directorial action?], Teatrul 8 (1961): 74–78, esp. 77. 13. Ileana Popovici, ‘‘Spectacole Shakespeare’’ [Shakespeare productions], Teatrul 9 (1964): 89. 14. Bogdan Ulmu, ‘‘Cum va˘ place de Shakespeare’’ [As You Like It by Shakespeare], Teatrul 4 (1979): 42. 15. Mira Iosif, ‘‘Carnet I. A. T. C.: Cum va˘ place de Shakespeare’’ [Theater-school notebook: As You Like It by Shakespeare], Teatrul 3 (1976): 37.

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16. Myriam Marbe belongs to the so-called ‘‘Golden Generation’’ of Romanian composers. In a modern musical language their work reflects an exploration of contemporary compositional techniques as well as early Romanian musical tradition. Myriam Marbe was born in 1931 in Bucharest, where she resided despite all the problems until her death in 1997. Together with the colleagues of her generation she took large steps in the direction of a new, unknown musical language. A typical mark of her music is its peaceful character. This has its roots in traditional music, in the vocal Doina, or ‘‘long song’’ (caˆntec lung). 17. Florian Potra, ‘‘A doua˘sprezecea noapte de Shakespeare’’ [Twelfth Night by Shakespeare], Teatrul 2 (1975): 64. 18. Ulmu, ‘‘Cum va˘ place de Shakespeare,’’ 42. 19. Mira Iosif, ‘‘Nevestele vesele din Windsor de Shakespeare’’ [The Merry Wives of Windsor by Shakespeare], Teatrul 6 (1978): 29. 20. Ibid., 30. 21. Ibid., 29. 22. Virgil Munteanu, ‘‘Iˆmblıˆnzirea scorpiei de Shakespeare’’ [The Taming of the Shrew by Shakespeare], Teatrul 12 (1980): 55. 23. Ibid., 54. 24. Constantin Paraschivescu, ‘‘Negut¸a˘torul din Venet¸ia de Shakespeare’’ [The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare], Teatrul 12 (1981): 37. 25. Alexandra Ca˘linescu, ‘‘Cum va˘ place de Shakespeare’’ [As You Like It by Shakespeare], Teatrul 4 (1982): 48. 26. Ibid., 49. 27. Constantin Radu-Maria, ‘‘A doua˘sprezecea noapte de Shakespeare’’ [Twelfth Night by Shakespeare], Teatrul 10–11 (1984): 89. 28. Ibid., 90. 29. Constantin Radu-Maria, ‘‘Cum va˘ place’’ [As You Like It], Teatrul 6 (1985): 56. 30. Ermil Ra˘dulescu, ‘‘Spectacol Shakespearean la Cluj-Napoca’’ [Shakespeare spectacle in Cluj-Napoca], Contemporanul 48 (1986): 13. 31. Victor Parhon, ‘‘Primatul teatralita˘t¸ii’’ [Theatricality comes first], Teatrul 8 (1988): 75. 32. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, eds., William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, rev. ed. (1988; repr., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 541. 33. Marian Popescu, ‘‘Alexandru Darie: ‘Noi nu mai tra˘im ˆıntr-o lume a simplita˘t¸ii’ ’’ [Alexandru Darie: We no longer live in a world of simplicity], Teatrul Azi 11 (1991): 14. 34. Ibid., 13. 35. Ibid., 14. 36. A Midsummer Night‘s Dream was directed and translated by Alexandru Darie, using the existing translations, and produced at the Comedy Theater Bucharest in 1990 and on tour to the International Theatre Festival in London, 1991; directed by Liviu Ciulei, it was produced at the Bulandra Theater, Bucharest, in 1991; directed by Vasile Nedelcu, it was produced at the Toma Caragiu Theater, Ploies¸ti, in 1995; directed by Ion Sapdaru, it was produced by the Iasi National Theater in 1998; directed by Victor Ioan Frunza˘, it was produced at the Cluj National Theater in 1999; directed by Tudor Ma˘ra˘scu, it was produced at the Ovidiu Theater Constant¸a, in 2000. Practically, theaters in most major cities in Romania produced this play at one time or other during the decade 1990–2000. 37. Dennis Kennedy, ‘‘Shakespeare without his Language,’’ in Shakespeare, Theory and Performance, edited by James C. Bulman, 133–48 (London: Routledge, 1996). Kennedy argues that while directors whose native language is English continue to

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be tyrannized by the Shakespearean text, other directors explore the plays more freely, focusing on physical over verbal expression. 38. Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Readings and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 39. Marian Popescu, ‘‘Visul unei nopt¸i de vara˘ de Shakespeare’’ [A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare], Teatrul azi 9–10 (1990): 48. 40. Dan Micu, ‘‘Liviu Ciulei da˘ forma˘ unui vis shakespearean’’ [Liviu Ciulei gives shape to a Shakespearean dream], Romaˆnia Literara˘ 22 (1991): 16. 41. Cristina Dumitrescu, ‘‘Dialog: Andrei S¸erban’’ [Dialogue: Andrei S¸erban], Teatrul azi 7–8 (1991): 9. 42. Valentin Silvestru, ‘‘Ma˘sura˘ pentru ma˘ sura˘ ˆı ntr-o dimensiune incomensurabila˘’’ [Measure for Measure in an unaccountable measure], Teatrul azi 5–6 (1995): 14. 43. Margareta Ba˘rbut¸a˘, ‘‘Visul ca teatru’’ [The dream as theater], Teatrul azi 7–8 (1995): 27. 44. Adrian Mihalache, ‘‘Pasiunea analitica˘’’ [Analytical passion], Teatrul azi 3 (1997): 14. 45. Alice Georgescu, ‘‘Comedie ˆın albastru’’ [Comedy in blue], Teatrul azi 12 (1997): 27. 46. Ibid. 47. Alice Georgescu, ‘‘Ma˘sura comediei’’ [The measure of comedy], Teatrul azi 3 (1997): 15. 48. S¸tefan Oprea, ‘‘Visul unei nopt¸i de vara˘??’’ [A Midsummer Night’s Dream??], Teatrul azi 7–8–9–10 (1998): 80. 49. Victor Ioan Frunza˘, ‘‘Visul unei nopt¸i de vara˘ de Shakespeare’’ [A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare], Teatrul azi 12 (1999): 14. 50. Lawrence Levine, ‘‘William Shakespeare and the American people,’’ in Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, ed. Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, 157–97 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 186. 51. Doina Modola, ‘‘Decupaj defectuos’’ [Defective dećoupage], Teatrul azi 10–11 (2000): 83. 52. Delia Voicu, ‘‘Bufonul nopt¸ii de armindeni’’ [The Midsummer’s fool], Teatrul azi 7–9 (2000): 107. 53. This term was coined by Michael Billington in ‘‘Was Shakespeare English?’’ in Shakespeare outside England (Program of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association Conference, 24–27 February 1992, University of Adelaide), 1.

Chapter 5. Shakespeare, Communism, and After: Tragedies 1. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance, 57. 2. This is the title of a play by the Romanian writer D. R. Popescu, directed by Alexa Visarion and produced at the Giulesti Theater in 1975. This symbolic play debates issues related to the relativity of truth and moral responsibility. 3. For studies examining how productions of Shakespeare were used in Communist Eastern Europe for ideological purposes, particularly to criticize totalitarian regimes, see Alexander Shrubanov, ‘‘Politicized with a Vengeance: East European Uses of Shakespeare’s tragedies,’’ in Shakespeare in the Twentieth Century: The Selected

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Proceedings of the ISA World Congress, Los Angeles, 1996, ed. Jonathan Bate, Jill L. Levenson, and Dieter Mehl, 137–47 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998); Boika Sokolova, ‘‘A Clockwork Brick in the Wall: Shakespeare and Communist Aesthetics,’’ SEDERI (Sociedad Espan ˜ ola de Estudios Renascentistas Ingleses) 8 (1997): 191–201; Robert Weimann, ‘‘A Divided Heritage: Conflicting Appropriations of Shakespeare in East Germany,’’ in Shakespeare and National Culture, 173–205; Maik Hamburger, ‘‘ ‘Are you a party in this business?’ Consolidation and Subversion in East German Shakespeare Productions,’’ Shakespeare Survey 48 (1996): 171–84; Zdenek Strı´brny, ‘‘Shakespearean Rates of Exchange in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1989,’’ Shakespeare Survey 48 (1996): 163–69. 4. Dennis Kennedy, in ‘‘The Language of the Spectator,’’ Shakespeare Survey 50 (1997): 29–40, relates the recent popularity of Shakespeare to the intercultural, interlingual adaptability of the plays. I would add that in the former Communist countries, Shakespeare is frequently evoked to ‘‘authorize’’ the director, or the critic, or received notions of theatrical practice. 5. See Paul Langfelder, ‘‘Ce e neobis¸nuit in dramaturgia lui Brecht?’’ [What is unusual in Brecht’s theater criticism?], Teatrul 10 (1957): 8–14. 6. ‘‘t.,’’ ‘‘Teatru Shakespeare’’ [Shakespeare theater], Teatrul 7 (1958): 16. 7. Val Munteanu, ‘‘Variat¸iuni grafice pe o tema˘ de Akimov’’ [Graphics on a theme by Akimov], Teatrul 4 (1961): 89. 8. Florin Tornea, ‘‘Printre noi’’ [Among us], Teatrul 4 (1964): 39–69. 9. Ana Maria Narti, ‘‘Pe scenele romaˆnes¸ti’’ [On the Romanian stages], Teatrul 4 (1964): 48–64. 10. Dana Criva˘t¸, ‘‘Shakespeare la lucru’’ [Shakespeare at work], Teatrul 4 (1964): 66–69. 11. Florian Nicolau, ‘‘Macbeth de W. Shakespeare’’ [Macbeth by Shakespeare], Teatrul 5 (1962): 67. 12. Ibid., 63. 13. Ibid., 64. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 67. 16. Florian Nicolau, ‘‘A doua distribut¸ie: Macbeth de Shakespeare’’ [The second cast: Macbeth by Shakespeare], Teatrul 6 (1963): 84. 17. Ca˘lin Ca˘liman, ‘‘Othello de Shakespeare’’ [Othello by Shakespeare], Teatrul 7 (1965): 37. 18. Mira Iosif, ‘‘Othello de Shakespeare la teatrul C. I. Nottara’’ [Othello by Shakespeare at the C.I. Nottara Theater], Teatrul 12 (1969): 136. 19. Traian S¸elmaru, ‘‘Un spectacol de cultura˘: Julius Caesar’’ [A cultural spectacle: Julius Caesar], Teatrul 5 (1968): 41. 20. Mira Iosif, ‘‘Regele Lear de Shakespeare’’ [King Lear by Shakespeare], Teatrul 11 (1970): 52. 21. Mira Iosif, ‘‘Macbeth de Shakespeare’’ [Macbeth by Shakespeare], Teatrul 5 (1976): 44. 22. Dorin Moga, ‘‘Coriolan de Shakespeare’’ [Coriolanus by Shakespeare], Teatrul 1 (1980): 47. 23. Ibid., 46. 24. Constantin Radu-Maria, ‘‘Coriolan de Shakespeare’’ [Coriolanus by Shakespeare], Teatrul 7–8 (1987): 117. 25. Ioan Valeriu, ‘‘Spectacol Regele Lear de Shakespeare’’ [Production of King Lear by Shakespeare], Teatrul 7 (1988): 90. 26. Corina S¸uteu, ‘‘Ta˘cerea lui Goneril’’ [Goneril’s silence], Teatrul 10 (1989): 45.

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27. Ibid., 43. 28. Mira Iosif, ‘‘Macbeth de Shakespeare’’ [Macbeth by Shakespeare], Teatrul 6 (1982): 37. 29. Dan Predescu, ‘‘De la obsesie la manie’’ [From obsession to mania], Teatrul azi 11–12 (1990): 38. 30. Maria Constantinescu, ‘‘Titus Andronicus de Shakespeare’’ [Titus Andronicus by Shakespeare], Romaˆnia Literara˘ 39 (1997): 16. 31. Victor Parhon, ‘‘Un spectacol de export.’’ [A spectacle for export], Teatrul azi 1 (1996): 14. 32. Ibid., 15. 33. Carmen Chihaia, ‘‘Timon din Atena este cea mai radicala˘ ma˘rturie asupra pasiunii mele shakespeariene’’ [Timon of Athens is the most radical testimony of my passion for Shakespeare], Teatrul azi 7–10 (1998): 95. 34. Delia Voicu, ‘‘S¸i a fost Timon din Atena’’ [And it was Timon of Athens], Teatrul azi 1–2 (1999): 63. 35. Ileana Berlogea, ‘‘Un rege Lear pe care nu-l vom uita curaˆnd’’ [One King Lear we are not likely to forget soon], Teatrul azi 7–9 (1999): 51. 36. Ibid., 52. 37. W. B. Worthen, ‘‘Deeper Meanings and Theatrical Technique: The Rhetoric of Performance Criticism,’’ in Shakespeare in Performance, ed. Robert Shaugnessy, 69–77 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 69. 38. Gabriela Simion, ‘‘Marele Will comprimat ˆın doua˘ ore de teatru’’ [The great Will compressed in two hours of theater], Cotidianul 11–17 June (2001), http:// www.cotidianul.ro/anterioare/2001/cultura/cult1117iunie.htm (accessed March 21, 2005.

Chapter 6. Staging Revenge and Power: Masks of Romanian Hamlets 1. Terence Hawkes, in a SHAKSPER posting, emphasizes the performative meaning of the term ‘playing’: ‘‘It seems to me that ‘playing’ in the early modern sense was a much more complex business than we allow, involving a far broader range of ‘performative’ activity than that implied by the term ‘acting.’ ’’ Terence Hawkes, ‘‘Re: Literary vs. Theatrical Shakespeare,’’ online posting, January 3, 2001, SHAKSPER: The Global Electronic Shakespeare Conference, http://www.shaksper.net/ archives/2001/0015.html (accessed March 21, 2005). 2. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Cavell warns that ‘‘you always tell more and tell less than you know’’ (83). In exchange, drama relies on showing rather than telling, and thus the possibility of equivocation on the part of the audience is slightly diminished. 3. Alex Newell, The Soliloquies in Hamlet: The Structural Design (Rutheford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991), 49. 4. For extensive studies tracing the reception of Hamlet in Romania see: Marcu Berza, Shakespeare in Roumania; Aurel Curtui, Hamlet ˆın Romaˆnia, which covers the areas of translations, criticism, and productions of Hamlet on the Romanian stage up to the mid-seventies; Alexandru Dut¸u, Shakespeare in Romania. Among the large number of Romanian critical studies of interest about Hamlet, only a few may be mentioned: Didi Cenus¸er, Hamlet, altfel? (Sibiu: Editura Universita˘t¸ii din Sibiu,

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1995); Al. Davila, ‘‘Hamlet,’’ Literatura s¸i arta romaˆna˘, 1898, 401; Mihail Dragomirescu, ‘‘Hamlet,’’ Critica˘ dramatica˘ 1904, 9–18; ‘‘Hamlet,’’ Critica˘ (Bucharest: Editura Casei S¸coalelor, 1928), 79; Al Dut¸u, ‘‘Problematica hamletiana˘ s¸i unele studii recente,’’ Revista de filologie romanica˘ s¸i germanica˘ 2 (1963), 341–51; B. Fundoianu, ‘‘Hamlet s¸i Electra,’’ Rampa, April 17, 1916, 1; Mihnea Gheorghiu, ‘‘Un Shakespeare al erei moderne,’’ Orienta˘ri ˆın literatura stra˘ina˘, (Bucharest: E.S.P.L.A., 1958), 5–67; Dan Grigorescu, Shakespeare ˆın cultura romaˆna˘ moderna˘ (Bucharest: Minerva, 1971); Eugen Lovinescu. ‘‘Hamletiana,’’ Rampa I 54 (1915): 15; Cornel Moldovanu, ‘‘Hamlet,’’ Autori s¸i actori (Bucharest: Editura Casa S¸coalelor, 1944); Dragos¸ Protopopescu, ‘‘Hamlet sau ˆıntre istorie literara˘ s¸i estetica˘,’’ Universul literar 3 (1926): 89; Raul Theodorescu, ‘‘Hamlet de Shakespeare,’’ Ritmul vermii 8–9 (1926): 209; Tudor Vianu, ‘‘Shakespeare ca poet al Renas¸terii,’’ Studii de literatura˘ universala˘ s¸i comparata˘ (Bucharest: Editura Academiei, 1963): 57–71; ‘‘Shakespeare s¸i antropologia Renas¸ terii,’’ Studii de literatura˘ universala˘ s¸ i comparata˘ (Bucharest: Editura Academiei, 1963), 71–9; ‘‘Umanitatea lui Shakespeare,’’ Steaua 10 (1956): 85–93. 5. See Ga¯mini Salga¯do, Three Jacobean Tragedies, rev. ed. (1969; repr., London: Penguin, 1965), 17–19. 6. The foreign theatrical companies producing Hamlet in Romania in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the following: Kristoph Ludwig Seipp, Sibiu, 1788; Franz Xavier Felder, Sibiu and Timis¸oara, 1794–95; Johan Gerger, Bucharest, 1825; Ferenc Kazinczy, Cluj, 1814–29, and Taˆrgu-Mures¸, 1841; Ludwig Lowe, Sibiu, 1850; Ernesto Rossi, National Theater Bucharest, 1877–79; ‘‘Teatrul mare,’’ Bucures¸ti, 1861. 7. Odette Blumenfeld, ‘‘Hamlet at the Craiova National Theater,’’ in On Page and Stage: Shakespeare in Polish and World Culture, ed. Krystyna Kujawinska Courtney, 197–210 (Krako´w: Universitas, 2000), 198. 8. Ionut¸ Niculescu, ‘‘Hamlet pe scena romaˆneasca˘’’ [Hamlet on the Romanian stage], Teatrul 2 (1989): 30. 9. The actors interpreting Hamlet in the same period in Bucharest are the following: George Calboreanu, Bucharest National Theater, 1941–42; George Vraca, Bucharest National Theater, 1941–42; V. Valentineanu, Bucharest National Theater, 1941–42. For reviews of these productions see Traian Lalescu, ‘‘Trei interpret¸i ai lui Hamlet’’ [Three interpreters of Hamlet], Universul literar 5 (1942): 2. 10. Niculescu, ‘‘Hamlet pe scena romaˆneasca˘,’’ 30. 11. Ibid., 28. 12. Ibid., 31. 13. Edmund Kean, Mounet Sully in Paris, Kacealov, and Kainz in Vienna. 14. Constantin Nottara, Tony Bulandra, Aristide Demetriad, Ion Manolescu, George Vraca, V. Valentineanu, and George Calboreanu. 15. Victor Eftimiu, ‘‘Interpret¸i ai lui Hamlet’’ [Interpreters of Hamlet], Teatrul 4 (1968): 37. 16. Theodor Ma˘nescu, ‘‘Manifesta˘ri artistice ˆın detent¸ie’’ [Art forms in detention], Teatrul 11 (1973): 41–43. 17. Mircea Alexandrescu, ‘‘Un spectacol de culoare la o piesa˘ de idei: Hamlet de W. Shakespeare’’ [A colored spectacle for a play of ideas], Teatrul 9 (1958): 81. 18. Ibid., 83. 19. Niculescu, ‘‘Hamlet pe scena romaˆneasca˘,’’ 32. 20. Marcela Ilnit¸chi, ‘‘Hamlet pe scena romaˆneasca˘’’ [Hamlet on the Romanian stage], Teatrul azi 7–8–9 (2000): 54. 21. Mircea Alexandrescu, ‘‘Hamlet de Shakespeare’’ [Hamlet by Shakespeare], Teatrul 6 (1961): 83.

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22. Virgil Munteanu, ‘‘Hamlet de W. Shakespeare’’ [Hamlet by W. Shakespeare], Teatrul 3 (1974): 42. 23. For reviews of this opera adaptation of Hamlet see Luminit¸a Vartolomei, ‘‘Introducere la Hamlet de Pascal Bentoiu,’’ Teatru 9 (1975): 20–22; ‘‘Opera Romaˆna˘ din Bucures¸ti: Hamlet de Pascal Bentoiu,’’ Teatru 10 (1975): 62–64. 24. Florian Potra, ‘‘Interferent¸e: Fuziune de arte’’ [Interference: Fusion of arts], Teatru 10 (1975): 65. 25. Laurent¸iu Ulici, ‘‘Totul despre Hamlet’’ [Everything about Hamlet], Contemporanul 52 (1985): 11. 26. Dinu Kivu, ‘‘Hamlet de Shakespeare’’ [Hamlet by Shakespeare], Contemporanul 14 (1987): 9. 27. Ludmila Pantajoglu, ‘‘Cu Richard Eyre, directorul Teatrului Nat¸ional din Londra, despre Hamlet la ora romaˆneasca˘’’ [Interview with Richard Eyre, director of the London National Theater, about Hamlet at the Romanian hour], Romaˆnia Literara˘ 18 (1990): 24. 28. Michael Billington, ‘‘Hamlet-ul romaˆnesc ˆın Anglia’’ [The Romanian Hamlet in Britain], Romaˆnia Literara˘ 41 (1990): 16. 29. Ion Remus Andrei, ‘‘Hamlet la Teatrul Nat¸ional din Craiova’’ [Hamlet at the Craiova National Theater], Luceafa˘rul 26 (1997): 18. 30. Incidentally, I have noticed that the director Matthew Warchus used the same artifice in the 1997 RSC Hamlet, with Alex Jennings in the title role. For a review of this production, see Cynthia Marshall, ‘‘Sight and Sound: Two Models of Shakespearean Subjectivity on the British Stage,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 51 (Fall 2000): 353–61. 31. Victor Parhon, ‘‘Hamlet la sfaˆrs¸it de mileniu’’ [Hamlet at the end of the millennium], Teatrul azi 3 (1997): 7. 32. Carmen Tudora, ‘‘Hamlet,’’ Adeva˘rul Literar s¸i Artistic 368 (1997): 7. 33. Magdalena Boiangiu, ‘‘Forma s¸i limitele vremii’’ [‘‘The whips and scorns of time’’], Romaˆnia Literara˘ 28 (2000): 17, www.romlit.sfos.ro/www/texte00/rl28/ tea.htm (accessed March 26, 2005). 34. W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance, 48. 35. Magda Petreu and Ion Vartic, eds., Vlad Mugur, spectacolul mortii [Vald Mugur, the spectacle of death] (Cluj Napoca: Biblioteca Apostrof, Teatrul National Cluj, 2001). 36. Ibid., 143. 37. Ibid., 109. 38. My references to the Hamlet text are to the Arden Shakespeare, edited by Harold Jenkins (London: Routledge, 1993). 39. Vlad Mugur, ‘‘William Shakespeare: Tragedia lui Hamlet, Print¸ de Danemarca; Versiune regizorala˘ de Vlad Mugur,’’ in Vlad Mugur, spectacolul Mort¸ii, 45. 40. Ibid., 113. 41. Ibid., 119. 42. Ibid., 120. 43. Ibid., 121. 44. Ibid., 126. 45. For online Romanian reviews of this production see Marina Constantinescu, ‘‘Hamlet sau despre moarte,’’ Romaˆnia Literara˘ 27 (2001), www.romlit.ro/www/ texte01/rl27/mar.htm (accessed March 28, 2005); Bedros Horasganian, ‘‘Julieta, Ofelia, Romeo s¸i Hamlet,’’ Observator cultural 93 (December 2001), www.observator cultural.ro/arhivaarticol.phtml?xid⳱841 (accessed March 28, 2005). 46. Cristina Modreanu, ‘‘Ca˘latorii init¸iatice ˆın prag de nou mileniu: Festivalul

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Nat¸ional de Teatru 2000’’ [Initiatory travels in the new millennium: The National Theater Festival 2000], Adeva˘rul Literar s¸i Artistic 545 (2000): 10. 47. Marin Sorescu, ‘‘Monolog despre Hamlet’’ [Monologue about Hamlet], Teatrul 3 (1988): 16. 48. Ibid., 15. 49. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘‘Hamlet ˆın Purgatoriu’’ [Hamlet in Purgatory], trans. Sorana Corneanu, Dilema 356, 357, 358 (December, 1999): 17, http://www.algo ritma.ro/dilema/fw.htm?current⳱379/index.htm (accessed March 26, 2005).

Chapter 7. Romanian Mental and Theatrical Maps: Romances 1. For an ample study of this production of The Tempest directed by Liviu Ciulei see Gheorghe Ghit¸ulescu, Furtuna, testamentul lui Shakespeare: ˆın regia lui Liviu Ciulei [The Tempest, Shakespeare’s testament: directed by Liviu Ciulei] (Bucharest: Editura Eminescu, 1985). 2. Irina Coroiu, ‘‘Furtuna de Shakespeare’’ [The Tempest by Shakespeare], Teatrul 11 (1983): 26. 3. Victor Parhon, ‘‘Furtuna de Shakespeare’’ [The Tempest by Shakespeare], Teatrul 6 (1987): 48. 4. Mircea Ghit¸ulescu, ‘‘Pericle de Shakespeare’’ [Pericles by Shakespeare], Teatrul 1 (1982): 33. 5. Furtuna, directed by Karin Beier, co-production by the European Theatres Union, Bu¨hnen der Stadt, Ko¨ln, WDR Television and Theaterformen Festival, 1998, was produced at the National Theater Bucharest in September 1997 by Volker Canaris. Reviews: Saviana Stanescu, ‘‘Euro-Furtuna’’ [The Euro-Tempest], Adeva˘rul Literar s¸i Artistic 387 (1997): 7; Ionela Lit¸a˘, ‘‘Integrarea Romaˆniei ˆın Shakespeare’’ [Romania’s integration in Shakespeare], Adeva˘rul Literar s¸i Artistic 387 (1997): 7. 6. Graham Keith Gregor, ‘‘Spanish ‘Shakespeare-manıá’: Twelfth Night in Madrid, 1996–97,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 49 (1998): 421. For an excellent account of Shakespeare’s presence in Spain, as a stage character and a cultural icon see also Keith Gregor, ‘‘Shakespeare as a Character on the Spanish Stage: A Metaphysics of Bardic Presence,’’ in Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe, 43–53. 7. Gregor ‘‘Spanish ‘Shakespeare Mania,’ ’’ 422. 8. See Rafael Portillo and Manuel J. Go´mez-Lara, ‘‘Shakespeare in the New Spain: or, What You Will,’’ in Shakespeare in the New Europe, ed. M. Hattaway et al., 208–20 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994). 9. Boika Sokolova, ‘‘Shakespeare: Man of the Millennium,’’ in Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe, 98–109, esp. 99–100. 10. Ibid., 101–2. 11. H. R. Coursen, Shakespeare in Production: Whose History? (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996), 27. 12. Ibid., 21. 13. This approach is naturally indebted to Terence Hawkes’s Shakespeare in the Present (London: Routledge, 2002). 14. Robert Weimann, ‘‘Bifold Authority in Shakespeare’s Theatre,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 401–17, esp. 409. 15. Manfred Pfister, ‘‘Shakespeare and Italy, or, the law of diminishing returns,’’ in Shakespeare’s Italy: Functions of Italian Locations in English Renaissance Drama, ed.

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Michele Marrapodi et al., rev. ed. (1993; repr., Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 295. 16. Ibid., 296. 17. Ibid., 300. 18. References to ‘‘Bohemian,’’ meaning a native of Bohemia or a gypsy or vagabond, appear in Measure for Measure (4.2.132) and The Merry Wives of Windsor (4.5.18) as well. As for Russia, there are several other references in Measure for Measure (2.1.129; 3.1.354) or Love’s Labour’s Lost (5.2.368), apart from those in The Winter’s Tale (3.2.118), but these have been ascribed to the trade relations and the historical event of the arrival in London of the Russian ambassador Possemsky and the establishment of an English trade company with Russia. 19. Eleni Coundouriotis argues that ‘‘Stoker is setting in motion a delegitimation of the Ottoman history of Eastern Europe through the figure of the vampire.’’ Eleni Coundouriotis, ‘‘Dracula and the Idea of Europe,’’ Connotations 9.2 (1999– 2000): 144. 20. It is probably an agreeable coincidence that Bram Stoker, the creator of the Dracula fictional character, was Henry Irving’s manager between 1868 and 1905. The English actor’s famous interpretations of Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and Shylock have contributed to the creation of the Shakespeare theatrical myth in the Western world almost as successfully as the dissemination of the Dracula metaphor in connection with Transylvania.

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formance Criticism.’’ In Shakespeare in Performance, edited by Robert Shaugnessy, 69–77. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. ———. Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Zamfirescu, Ion. ‘‘Richard II de Shakespeare.’’ Romaˆnia Literara˘ 47 (1981): 15.

Index Alarcoń, Pedro Antonio de, 40 Alecsandrescu, Dan, 181 Alifantis, Nicu, 111, 112 America, 19, 36, 43, 92, 138, 154, 181, 192, 193 Anatol, Constantin, 201 Antony and Cleopatra, 40, 42, 49, 50, 59, 161, 162, 166 Arad Theater, 128, 129, 143, 152 Arany, Janos, 44 Argentina, 34 Arghezi, Tudor, 198 Arghir, Sorin, 81 Armenia, 45 As You Like It, 12, 100, 102–4, 108, 109– 11, 117, 118, 122–24, 126, 128, 134, 145, 146, 150, 155, 164 audience: Elizabethan and Jacobean, 21, 22, 29, 50, 67, 151, 194, 195, 220; modern, 20, 30, 40, 48, 65, 68, 69, 72, 79, 82, 91–97, 99, 100, 114, 157, 187, 192, 197, 235; Romanian, 11, 13, 23– 25, 46–47, 50–54, 56, 57, 60, 63, 64, 66, 68, 70, 74, 75, 78–83, 86, 87–92, 94–96, 98–102, 104–8, 110–16, 118– 22, 124, 127, 128–46, 148–55, 157, 159, 160, 162, 166, 167, 169, 171–76, 178, 180–82, 185–89, 191–92, 196– 99, 201–4, 205, 206, 208, 209–12, 215, 216, 218, 221–28, 230–31 Austria, 20, 38, 39, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 188 Baca˘u Theater, 104, 106, 108, 110, 164 Bagdat, Toma Alexandru, 53 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, 134, 207 Balkans, 20, 34, 44, 45, 99, 220 Bantas¸, Andrei, 119 Barac, Ion, 52 Barborescu, Stefan, 197 Baˆrsan, Zaharia, 197 Baudissin, Wolf Graf von, 39

Bauernfeld, Eduard von, 39 Beckett, Samuel, 32 Beier, Karin, 229, 230, 231 Belgium, 93 Beligan, Radu, 75 Benda, Otto, 39 Bentoiu, Pascal, 205 Berechet, Mihai, 166, 168 Bible, 54, 65, 153 Bikelas, Dimitrios, 45 Bjurba¨ck, Olof, 41 Black Sea, 11, 21, 26, 27, 28, 137 Blanco-White, Jose´ Maria, 40 Boccaccio, 19 Bocsa´rdi, La´szlo´, 154, 155 Boddaert, P., 41 Bohemia, 227, 235 Bo¨hl de Faber, Juan Nicolas, 40 Bogdanovic, Milan, 44 Boito, Arrigo, 39, 40 Bokor, Petre, 192 Borgeson, Jess, 192 Bosy, Michal, 43 Botos¸ani Theater, 114, 209 Botta, Dan, 60, 88 Botta, Emil, 167 Bra˘ila Theater, 130 Brandes, Georg, 41 Bras¸ov Theater, 124 Brazil, 34 Brecht, Bertold, 32, 69, 70, 163, 186, 191, 226 Breugel, Pieter, 226 Brezeanu, Ion, 145 Britain, 20, 21, 23, 29, 30, 34, 44, 45, 59, 68, 84, 89, 94, 95, 97, 72, 110, 209, 232, 233. See also British Isles British Isles, 27. See also Britain Brook, Peter, 136, 139, 156 Bulandra Theater, 102, 103, 104, 127, 136, 166, 170, 190, 197, 206, 211, 212, 221, 226

266

INDEX

Bulandra, Tony, 197 Bulgaria, 31, 33, 41 Burgersdijk, Leendert Alexander Johannes, 41 Burton, Robert, 211 Byron, George Gordon, 197 Cajander, Paavo, 41 Calboreanu, George, 198 Ca˘lin, Tudor, 198 Caramitru, Ion, 207 Carcani, Giulio, 40 Carpathians, 21, 27, 35 Catholicism, 51, 219 Cassian, Nina, 215, 222 Ceaus¸escu, Nicolae, 13, 85, 86, 89, 117, 121, 122, 126, 162, 177, 179, 183, 184, 185, 208, 209, 222, 232 Cernescu, Dinu, 116, 142, 144, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 225, 226, 233 Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 162 chorography, 29, 30, 81 Christianity, 28, 36, 50, 51, 58, 63, 64, 65, 180, 188, 196, 201 Ciobanu, Nona, 145, 146 Ciulei, Liviu, 102, 103, 104,109, 110, 127, 128, 136, 137, 138, 170, 211, 212, 218, 221, 222, 223 Ciupe, Theodor, 111 Clark, Jaime, 40 Codreanu, Mihail, 197 Codrescu, Constantin, 201 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 196 Colpacci, Alexandru, 150 comedy, 13, 24–25, 55, 91, 99, 110, 114, 128, 131, 133, 139, 149; dark, 102, 109, 113, 115, 128, 142, 147, 151; and farce, 88, 101, 106; and grotesque, 120, 132; and ideological use, 33, 84, 85, 105, 226; and melancholy, 122–23; and parody, 125, 153; pastoral, 103, 117, 146; and psychology, 118, 135, 138; romantic, 29, 97, 103, 107, 119, 149, 150, 155; slapstick, 111, 119, 224; and social satire, 112, 113, 121, 127, 154 The Comedy of Errors, 45, 96, 100, 133, 134, 151 Comedy Theater, 11, 86, 88, 119, 134, 151

267

Communism: and censorship, 11, 24, 68, 71, 89, 90, 99, 122, 147, 153, 159, 160, 164, 165, 168, 171, 172, 184, 199, 201, 202, 234; in Eastern Europe, 12, 31, 32, 41, 70, 89, 110, 170, 178, 233; and the iron curtain, 132, 202; and propaganda, 97, 103, 159, 162, 163, 165, 167, 172; in Romania, 13, 23–26, 31, 35, 42, 68 –74, 79, 80, 83, 86, 89, 94, 97, 98–107, 110–15, 117–23, 125– 27, 132–34, 138, 139, 142–45, 147–48, 153–54, 156–81, 183–89, 191, 194, 199–209, 213, 221–24, 232–34. See also Socialism Constant¸a Theater, 155, 185 Coriolanus, 13, 64, 161, 172, 177–79, 187, 189 Cornis¸teanu, Mircea, 82, 83 Cozorici, Gheorghe, 200 criticism: and history, 67, 74, 93, 233; Marxist, 13, 70, 73, 107, 114; performance theory, 12, 56, 69, 101, 158, 159, 202, 217, 234, 235; and Shakespeare, 31, 33, 34, 37, 38, 47–49, 51, 57, 72, 74, 81, 82, 85–87, 89, 95, 97, 99–100, 102, 103, 105, 108, 110, 112, 113, 118, 120, 122, 128, 130, 136, 137, 145, 146, 150–51, 164–65, 167–68, 171–73, 177, 180, 183–84, 189–92, 199, 200– 203, 205–6, 211–12, 218, 221, 223, 225; social, 70, 72, 73, 112, 159, 167, 188; and theater, 11, 20, 68, 69, 70, 75, 79, 81, 82, 89, 91, 93, 99, 100, 101, 113, 161, 163, 164, 197, 211, 234 Croatia, 42, 44, 229 Cruz, Ramoń de la, 40 cultural memory, 12, 21 Cymbeline, 29, 221 Cyrillic alphabet, 42, 53, 56 Czech, 33, 42, 43 Dabija, Alexandru, 111, 119, 120, 147, 149, 151 Dahlgren, Fredrik, 41 Dan, Al. Dem., 197 Danube, 11, 21, 26, 27, 35, 41, 187 Darie, Alexandru, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 189, 226 Demetriade, Aristide, 197, 198 Demetrius, Lucia, 145 democracy, 35, 59, 69, 102, 132, 144,

268

INDEX

148, 154, 177, 178, 179, 184, 192, 225, 231, 236 Denmark, 41, 56, 188, 195, 197, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 212 dictatorship, 74, 86, 89, 126, 133, 144, 167, 178, 184, 191, 232 Diogenes, 126 director, 13, 24, 25, 37, 38, 43, 61, 68, 69, 70, 75, 78, 80–83, 84, 86–95, 97– 120, 122–25, 127–36, 138, 139, 141– 54, 156, 159, 160–66, 168–72, 174–213, 215–19, 223–27, 229, 230, 234, 235 Do¨brentei, Gabriel, 44 Dobsinsky, Pavol, 43 Do¨ring, Heinrich, 39 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 119 Dracula, 80, 131, 236 Dragomir, State, 197 Druzhinin, Alexander, 42 Ducis, Jean François, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 55 Dumas, Alexandre, 37, 56, 196 Duse, Eleonora, 40 Dutch, 41 Dut¸escu, Dan, 174, 215 Duval, Georges, 197 Eastern Europe, 12, 13, 19, 20, 21, 22, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 67, 70, 94, 152, 170, 189, 220, 233, 235, 236 Eleme´r, Kincses, 174, 223, 224 Elizabethan, 21, 28, 50, 51, 55, 67, 78, 87, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 102, 104, 110, 111, 150, 151, 166, 167, 170, 173, 195, 206, 211, 212, 234, 235. See also Tudor Empress Sissi, 45 England, 12, 14, 24, 29, 34, 37, 42, 46, 51, 56, 59, 61, 67, 72, 80, 88, 90, 95, 161, 167, 235 Enlightenment, 31, 32, 47 Eschenburg, Johann Joachim, 43 Etterle´, Fory, 201 Faccio, Franco, 40 Fascist regime, 12, 199. See also Hitler Fa˘tulescu, Florin, 124 Fick, Joseph, 39 Finland, 41, 189, 229

Flanders, 34 Foersom, Peter, 41 France, 25, 32, 34, 35, 37–38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 54, 55, 56, 62, 63, 80, 88, 108, 146, 188, 196, 197, 198, 203, 229, 232 Freud, Sigmund, 203 Frunza˘, Victor Ioan, 91, 94, 149, 150, 153 Ga´bor, Tompa, 210, 211 Galgot¸iu, Dragos¸, 130, 131, 132, 190 Galiano, Antonio Alcala´, 40 Garcıá, Manuel, 40 Geijer, Eric Gustaf, 41 geography, 20, 28, 35, 220, 227, 228 Gerbel, Nikolai, 42 Geric, Vladimir, 44. Germany, 20, 25, 31, 32, 35, 37, 38–39, 41, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 52, 55, 68, 70, 108, 188, 196, 198, 199, 213, 229, 230, 232, 233 Gervinus, Georg Gottfried, 47 Ghiurcescu, Lucian, 81, 94 Giules¸ti Theater, 142, 180, 225 Globe, the, 19, 29, 78, 91 Gnedich, Nikolai Ivanovich, 42 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 39, 47, 196, 225 Gogol, Nikolay, 162 Goldoni, Carlo, 163 Gont¸a, Grigore, 88, 89 Greece, 44, 45, 89, 181 Grigore, Dan, 207 Grigorescu, Dan, 34, 135 Guizot, François, 37 Hagberg, Carl August, 41 Hamlet, 12, 23, 25, 26, 28, 32, 34, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 49, 50, 52, 55, 56, 57, 58, 65, 68, 74, 75, 84, 100, 118, 132, 150, 160, 161, 176, 194–219, 233 Hannikainen, Pietari, 41 Hausvater, Alexandru, 227, 228, 231 Hebbel, Friedrich, 47 Heine, Heinrich, 47 Heinichen, Carl, 39 Henriad, 13, 38, 79–82, 90, 91, 94, 175 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 47, 196 Heufeld, Franz, 38, 39, 43

INDEX

Hilsenberg, Ludwig, 39 history, 11, 12, 13, 19, 20, 22–25, 28, 30, 32, 34, 35, 38, 40, 43, 44, 46, 47, 49, 55, 58, 59, 60, 63, 66–68, 71–75, 79– 86, 88–95, 97, 101, 103, 108, 115, 122, 142, 154, 156, 159, 165, 167, 173, 177, 179, 180, 183, 185, 186, 191, 197, 203, 205, 211, 221, 233, 235 Hitler, 85, 199. See also Fascist regime Holland, 41. See also Dutch Homer, 19, 225 Howell, Anthony, 96 Hughes, Ian, 96 Hugo, François Victor, 38 Hugo, Victor, 38, 47, 196 humanism, 31, 72, 94, 103, 150, 202 Hungarian Theater, 149, 210 Hungary, 33, 41, 43, 44, 46, 50, 174, 236 Ibsen, Henrik, 163 Ieremia, Ioan, 79, 80, 81, 91, 94, 179 Iordache, S¸tefan, 86, 204 Iorda˘nescu, S¸tefan, 143, 144, 152 Iosif, S¸t. O., 135 India, 31, 145 Iovit¸a˘, Cristina, 127, 128 Islam, 28, 36, 51, 65 Italy, 39–40, 46, 47, 55, 146, 188, 195, 196, 213, 229, 235 Iures¸, Marcel, 92, 211, 222 Jacobean, 21, 50, 220, 226, 235. See also Stuart Japan, 95, 149, 175, 176, 189 Jarry, Alfred, 184 Julius Caesar, 13, 41, 44, 49, 50, 52, 53, 59, 161, 170–71, 187, 189 Junimea society, 54 Kaufmann, Philip, 39 Kazinczy, Ferenc, 43 Keats, John, 196 King John, 11, 44, 50, 59–63, 86, 87–89 King Lear, 21, 23, 32, 38, 42, 44, 45, 50, 58, 59, 101, 162, 172–74, 179–81, 190–92 Kok, Abraham, 41 Ko¨rner, Julius, 39 Kostic, Laza, 44 Kott, Jan, 32, 70, 71, 73, 97, 177, 179, 180, 186 Kozmian, Stanislaus, 42

269

La Calle, Teodoro, 40 Lachmann, Karl, 39 La Place, Antoine de, 37, 55 Laroche, Benjamin, 37 Latin, 22, 35, 36, 57, 137, 235 Lembcke, Edvard, 41 Lemouton, Emilia, 44 Lennep, Jacop van, 41 Leonardo da Vinci, 221 Leoni, Michele, 39 Leoveanu, Sorin, 217 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 47, 196 Le Tourneur, 37, 44, 53, 56, 196 Levit¸chi, Leon, 34, 47, 48, 174, 215, 221 Lichiardopol, Mihaela, 155 Long, Adam, 192 Ludwig, Otto, 47 Lundblad, Sven, 41 Lungeanu, Mihai, 116, 117, 142 Lupu, Adrian, 128, 129 Macbeth, 13, 23, 32, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 54, 59, 162, 166–68, 172, 175–76, 183–86, 225 Machiavelli, 74, 85, 86 Macpherson, William, 40 Magna Carta, 59 Mallarme´, Ste´phane, 55 Manea, Aureliu, 109, 110, 175, 176 Ma˘niut¸iu, Mihai, 90, 92, 95, 128, 129, 183, 189, 190 Manolescu, Grigore, 56, 196, 197, 198, 211 Manolescu, Ion, 197, 198 Ma˘ra˘scu, Tudor, 143, 155, 156 Marbe, Myriam, 109 Ma˘rculescu, Constantin, 197 Marin, Mircea, 180 Marx, Karl, 31, 70, 72, 73, 74, 101, 103, 105, 106, 107, 112, 158, 162, 167, 171, 222, 234 Mato´ses, Manuel, 40 Measure for Measure, 38, 44, 108, 115–17, 132, 133, 134, 142, 143–44, 151, 153–55 Mediterranean, 27, 30, 96, 195 The Merchant of Venice, 33, 38, 45, 50, 52, 59, 63, 64, 114–15, 134 The Merry Wives of Windsor, 29, 42, 44, 91, 94, 100, 101, 108, 112, 113, 134, 151, 163, 164

270

INDEX

Meurice, Paul, 56, 196 Meyer, Joseph, 39 Mickiewicz, Adam, 42 Micu, Dan, 122, 123, 124, 137 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 108, 127–28, 133, 134–39, 151, 152, 153, 156, 211 Mihalache, Andrei, 185 Millo, Matei, 114 Moga, Dorin, 81 Moldova, 11, 27, 46, 47, 50, 54, 80, 112, 114 Molie`re (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 56, 163 monarchy, 75, 78, 79, 80, 83, 102, 137, 168 Monte´gut, Emile, 38, 196 Morand, Euge`ne, 38 Moratıń, Leandro Fernańdez de, 40 Morgenstern, Maia, 181 Mounet-Sully, Jean, 196, 197 Much Ado About Nothing, 38, 100, 101, 108, 131–32, 134, 147–49 Mugur, Vlad, 25, 104, 106, 200, 212–17 Nasta, Dan, 201, 202 National Opera, 205 National Theater of Bucharest, 75, 92, 120, 139, 163, 166, 169, 172, 196, 197, 198, 213, 229 National Theater of Cluj-Napoca, 91, 94, 109, 111, 129, 153, 181, 189, 197, 201, 212, 213, 215 National Theater of Craiova, 82, 168, 184, 187, 190, 197, 200, 210, 213 National Theater of Ias¸i, 104, 117, 127, 128, 152, 198 National Theater of Taˆrgu Mures¸, 152, 174, 206, 223 National Theater of Timis¸oara, 79, 90, 94, 155, 201 Nedelcu, Vasile, 144, 145 Negulici, Ion, 53 Nekrasov, Nicolaj, 42 New Testament, 58, 64, 65 Nicolau, Florian, 88, 104, 167, 168, 221 Nicolescu, Miron, 201 Nottara, Constantin, 114, 197 Nottara Theater, 79, 81, 94, 122, 123, 166, 175, 176, 192, 202 Odeon Theater, 90, 213, 227 Old Testament, 58, 63, 64

Olivier, Lawrence, 200 Olteanu, Ion, 201 Ortelius, 12, 22 Orthodox Church, 50, 51, 139, 196 Ortlepp, Ernst, 39 Østerberg, Valdemar, 41 Ostrovsky, Alexander, 42, 162 Ostrowskiego, Krystyna, 42 Othello, 23, 27, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 45, 47, 50, 53, 54, 100, 163, 168–70, 181–82, 192 Ottoman Empire, 26, 28, 36, 45, 50, 51, 59, 64, 96, 182 Ovenez-Dorosenco, Anca, 120 Ovid, 19, 28, 137 Paris, 51 Parker, Lynne, 96 Paszkowski, Jo´zef, 42 Penciulescu, Radu, 75, 78, 79, 172 Pepino, Cristian, 110, 111 Pericles, 13, 221, 225–26, 227–28, 231 Peto¨fi, Sandor, 44 Petz, Leopold, 39 Piave, Francesco Maria, 39 Picasso, Pablo, 142 Pintea, Adrian, 211 Pites¸ti Theater, 115 Pittis¸, Florian, 222 Plato, 139, 226, 231 Ploies¸ti Theater, 131, 144, 175 Poland, 33, 42, 46, 70, 229, 233, 236 Polevoj, Nikolaj, 55. politics, 11, 20, 24, 29, 35, 67, 73, 86, 88, 90–93, 96, 108, 111, 122, 123, 144, 148, 151, 156, 160, 161, 171, 173, 182, 186, 200, 201, 202, 205, 207, 209 Popescu, Cristian Theodor, 152, 189 Popescu, Horea, 75 Portugal, 55 Protestantism, 51, 219 Protopopescu, Dragos, 139, 221 Purca˘rete, Silviu, 84, 85, 184, 187, 188, 189 Purcell, Henry, 226 Purgatory, 219 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 196 Radoff, S¸tefan, 203 Ra˘dulescu, Ion Heliade, 53 Raicu, Mihai, 174, 175

INDEX

Raˆlea, Marian, 88 Rebengiuc, Victor, 222 Rebreanu, Liviu, 198 red curtain, 13, 132, 187 Reitzel, Holst, 41 Rembrandt, van Rijn, 148 Renaissance, 27, 30, 32, 74, 75, 131, 140, 146, 150, 181, 202, 220, 221, 235 Repan, Alexandru, 203 Richard II, 38, 75–79, 82–84, 95 Richard III, 32, 50, 59, 72, 74–75, 84–86, 91–92, 95, 100, 166 romance, 13, 26, 29, 41, 46, 57, 220, 221, 226, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 235 Romania, 11–13, 19–27, 29–42, 44–75, 79–80, 82–84, 86–92, 94–104, 106–9, 111–15, 117, 118, 120, 123–42, 144– 47, 149–72, 174, 175, 177–202, 204–6, 208–13, 215–16, 218–35 romantic, 25, 29, 32, 36, 37, 44, 47, 48, 49, 53, 55, 84, 97, 98, 99, 101, 103, 107, 112, 115, 119, 140, 141, 142, 146, 150, 152, 155, 157, 182, 194, 198, 199, 200, 211, 212, 213, 215, 217 Romeo and Juliet, 31, 33, 40, 44, 55, 59, 100, 153, 163 Rossi, Ernesto, 196 Rusconi, Carlo, 39 Russia, 27, 32–33, 42, 50, 55, 56, 79, 97, 108, 110, 122, 163, 165, 168, 182, 200, 201, 222, 229, 233, 235. See also Soviet Sade, Marquis de, 153 Sadoveanu, Mihail, 198 S¸ahighian, Ion, 74 Salvini, Tommaso, 196 Sapdaru, Ion, 152, 209 Sa˘sa˘rman, Mihaela, 143 Satu Mare Theater, 174 Sava, Ion, 185, 198 Scarlat, Nicolae, 206 Scheutz, Georg, 41 Schiller, Friedrich, 39, 41, 47 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 39, 41, 43, 47, 57 Schlegel, Friedrich, 47 Schro¨der, Friedrich Ludwig, 38, 39, 41, 43, 52. Schwob, Marcel, 38. S¸erban, Andrei, 139, 140, 141, 142, 150, 170, 171

271

Serbia, 33, 42, 44, 95 setting, 11, 36, 81, 82, 84, 88, 89, 98, 104, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 124, 131, 136, 137, 143, 147, 148, 150, 173, 186, 195, 204, 205, 210, 227 Sfaˆntu Gheorghe Theater, 154 Shakespeare, William, 11–14, 19–75, 78–112, 114–15, 117, 120, 122–25, 127–39, 141–42, 144, 145, 147, 149, 151–76, 179–84, 186–87, 189–92, 194–202, 205, 209, 210–13, 215–25, 227–36 Shaw, George Bernard, 163 Shiva, 145 Singer, Daniel, 192 Sla´dek, Josef Vaćlav, 43 Slavic, 36, 41, 45, 229 Slovakia, 42, 43 Slovenia, 188 Socialism, 31, 70, 72, 73, 74, 83, 101, 102, 103, 105, 107, 112, 113, 114, 118, 125, 147, 158, 164, 167, 174, 176, 178. See also Communism Solomon, Petre, 221 Sonnets, 45, 106, 118, 146, 163, 226 South Africa, 31, 188 Soviet, 25, 32, 33, 100, 163. See also Russia Spain, 40, 41, 55, 61, 188, 195, 231–32 Stalin, Joseph, 79, 99, 101, 109, 165, 171, 174, 200 Stoica, S., 53 Streinu, Vladimir, 215 Stuart, 14, 21, 50, 220, 226, 235. See also Jacobean Sturdza, Petre, 197 Sumarkov, Alexander, 55 Sweden, 41, 189 Taine, Hipolyte Adolphe, 47, 196 Ta˘nase, Maria, 109 The Taming of the Shrew, 12, 42, 100, 102, 108, 113–14, 129, 134, 151, 164 Teatrul Mic, 75, 79, 84, 145, 177 The Tempest, 44, 45, 71, 123, 127, 211, 221–25, 229–31 Teodorescu, Anda, 119 Teodorescu, Crin, 104, 105 Teodorescu, George, 166, 205 Teodorescu, Virgil, 145 Tha´m, Karel Hynek, 43

272

INDEX

Thomander, Johan Henrik, 41 Tieck, Dorothea, 39 Tieck, Ludwig, 39, 57 Timon of Athens, 48, 172, 174–75, 176, 189–90 Titus Andronicus, 13, 161, 187–88, 192 Tocilescu, Alexandru, 112, 113, 206, 207, 208, 209 Todea, Cornel, 169 Toia, Nicoleta, 117, 118 Tomori, Athanazius, 44 Topaˆrceanu, George, 135 tragedy, 13, 25, 32, 39, 50, 53, 54, 56, 58, 59, 75, 83, 88, 128, 131, 168, 169–71, 174, 175, 176, 179, 180–82, 185, 187, 191, 194, 195, 203–6, 211, 217 Transylvania, 11, 27, 38, 41, 45, 46, 48, 50, 52, 54, 129, 235, 236 Tudor, 12, 13. See also Elizabethan Turkey, 21, 27, 28, 35, 41, 43, 44, 45, 51, 56, 64, 96, 182. See also Ottoman Empire Twelfth Night, 12, 100, 101, 104–7, 108, 109–10, 120–22, 130–31, 134, 139– 42, 149–50, 151, 231 The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 100, 108, 119–20, 151, 164 Tyl, Josef Kajetan, 43 Ulrici, Herman, 39 Uylenbroek, P. J., 41

Valentineanu, Valeriu, 198 Velasco Rojas, Matıás de, 40 Verri, Alessandro, 39 Vienna, 35, 46, 51, 116, 117, 196, 197 Vigny, Alfred de, 37, 47 Vinea, Ion, 215 Viskovatov, Sergej, 55 Vis¸a, Iulian, 113, 114, 115 Vis¸an, Dorel, 92 Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet), 37 Vo¨ro¨smarty, Michael, 44 Voss, J. H., 39 Vraca, George, 74, 166, 198 Vulpe, Andreea, 180, 181 Walachia, 11, 27, 35, 46, 47, 50, 54, 80 Western Europe, 12, 22, 26, 28, 35, 37, 51, 53, 59, 112, 124, 132, 163, 177, 179, 181, 182, 189, 233, 236 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 38, 39, 41, 43, 47 The Winter’s Tale, 221, 226–27 World War II, 12, 25, 200 Wulff, Peter, 41 Youth Theater of Piatra Neamt¸, 112, 113, 147 Yugoslavia, 91 Zirra, Mihai, 201

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