The paper discusses recent Romanian Shakespeare productions of The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Bucharest. It argues that global mass culture, in the form of TV sitcoms and musicals, YouTube clips and computer games, is re-circulated on Romanian stages with the result of re-mediating the older forms of Romanian Shakespeare performances. The paper interrogates the popular character of the new type of productions, which are largely unpolitical and motivated by commercial reasons. The last part of the paper presents a radical deconstruction of Shakespeare’s text in the form of a computer game, which, however, re-introduces the political orientation of older, pre-1989 performances.
Mădălina Nicolaescu
Author
Mădălina Nicolaescu is Professor of English at the English Department of the University of Bucharest. She has published widely on Renaissance Drama and Women’s Writing. Her books on Early Modern Theatre include Meanings of Violence in Shakespeare (2004), Ec-centric Mappings of the Renaissance (1999) and Protest and Propaganda in 16th century English and German Theatre (1996). She edited two volumes on Shakespeare and translations: (In)hospitable Translations: Fidelities, Betrayals, Rewritings (2010) and Shakespeare Translations and the European Dimension (2012). Her recent contribution in collections of essays on Shakespeare include papers in Proceedings of the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress (Newark:University of Delaware Press, 2014), Great Shakespearians (Continuum, 2012), Visions of Shakespeare (Ashgate 2011), Shakespeare and War (Palgrave, 2008), Shakespeare in Europe: History and Memory (Jagellonian University Press, 2008).