Lucian Ghita

This review explores the cultural and theatrical reception of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus in post-communist Romania. It focuses specifically on the ways in which Romanian director Silviu Purcarete turned his stage adaptation of the play into a theatrical manifesto of sorts. Video clips are available on the Global Shakespeares open-access archive. Released in the immediate aftermath of the 1989 revolution, Purcarete’s production generated a great deal of controversy and critical interest on the domestic and international stages, and won several awards at theater festivals in Romania, Canada, and Brazil. The reviewers seized eagerly on the cultural analogies between Purcarete’s experimental adaptation and Peter Brook’s revolutionary production of 1955, which had injected new blood into Shakespeare’s long-forgotten play at a critical historical junction. In a subtle departure from his 1990 politically corrosive adaptation of Ubu Rex with Scenes from Macbeth, staged as a grotesque parody of political totalitarianism, Purcarete transplanted the Roman revenge tragedy into the troubled political atmosphere of the post-communist Balkans, plagued by social conflicts and fratricidal violence. The cannibalistic imagery of the play supplied a potent theatrical metaphor for absorbing contemporary Romanian anxieties surrounding political power, national and ethnic identity, as well as deep unresolved questions of religious and gender difference. As the country was painfully emerging from the collective trauma of its totalitarian past, Purcarete envisioned the play as a gruesome fable which remained eerily topical in its double preoccupation with grotesque humor and quotidian horror. Purcarete disputed several critical accounts that focused solely on the political and social resonances of his work: ‘‘I had no intention to make any connection with Romania’s political situation. It is more a link between the play and the state of world politics’’ (Purcarete 111). However, for an audience only three years removed from the atrocities of the Ceausescu regime, Shakespeare’s tale of absurd cruelty and bloody revenge spoke volumes. Defining his theatrical approach as one ‘‘you either love or hate’’ (Riding 1997), Purcarete used revenge tragedy conventions not only to emphasize the absurd and

There is quite a bit of tragic irony in the Trump/Bannon story. Clueless about Shakespeare’s history lessons, they both seem doomed to repeat them over and over again. If Titus can teach Bannon or Trump anything, it is that the destruction of a political body does not come from without, but rather from within. Shakespeare’s deadly cycle of revenge shows that Roman civilization cannot remain immune or insulated from the violence it perpetrates on others. The “noble” patricians wreak havoc in Rome on a scale that the “barbarous” Goths can hardly match. As the bodies are piling up outside the White House, it would be prudent for Trump to heed, like Shakespeare, the lessons and stories of the past.

The paper examines Julie Taymor's film adaptation of Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus" through the lens of her work as theatre maker and mixed media artist (puppetry, ritual, performance, woodcarving). It maps out the ways in which Taymor translates Asian theatrical vocabularies and contemporary media into an innovative cinematic style.

... Bibliography for the Study of Shakespeare on Film in Asia and Hollywood. Lucian Ghita, Purdue University. Recommended Citation. Ghita, Lucian. "Bibliography for the Study of Shakespeare on Film in Asia and Hollywood." CLCWeb ...

This essay won the 2005 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Renaissance Section.The production, circulation, and reception of women's texts in early modern Europe probe important questions about the status of women as writers of public influence within a male-dominated manuscript and print culture. Insofar as it foregrounds the semiotic exchanges between author, text, and reader in Phillips Sydney's Old Arcadia, Derrida's concept of supplementarity opens up new ways of interpreting the political and gender economy of Sidney's language in relation to the socio-cultural positions of women in early modern England. The Old Arcadia presents several scenes in which women, specifically Pamela, use writing as a self-reflective mode of negotiating a position of authority within an unstable semiotic space.

Why Andrei Serban and Artaud? Because Serban’s double bill Arden/Ubu at LaMaMa in 1970, which constituted his US directorial debut, claimed a direct Artaudian genealogy and paternity. Not only that; on some level, I think, Serban was seeking to finish Artaud’s own project; Artaud had planned to stage Arden in a cruelty manner but, like many of his planned productions of the 1930s, was never completed or staged and has reached us mostly as a collection of scattered ideas. Also, in Serban’s own words, he wanted to stage the two plays in a distinctly Artaudian manner.

This paper traces the development of a modern theatrical preoccupation with the Elizabethan Gothic from the eighteenth-century stage to the avant-garde fringe theaters of fin-de-siècle Paris. It explores how a dual preoccupation with the Gothic and the grotesque, dramatized in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, became incorporated into the modernist dramatic imagination, radically transforming its form and substance. The paper focuses on the modern genealogy of the Gothic by exploring the theatrical afterlives of Macbeth, from Jean-Francois Ducis’ 1790 staging of the play as a master trope of the French Revolution to Maurice Maeterlinck’s site-specific recreation of the play among the Gothic ruins of the Saint-Wandrille Abbey in 1909.

In an emblematic scene of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi, viewed by many critics as the inaugural moment of the avant-garde, Bougrelas, the sole surviving son of King Wenceslas, is visited by the ghosts of his dead ancestors which urge him to avenge his father’s cruel murder. In a mock-heroic reworking of Hamlet, Jarry insisted on casting a teenage boy in the role of the Polish prince - a previously unemployed device in French theatre – and making him carry a large sword. The starkly ironic image of a teenage prince strutting across the stage with an oversized weapon, haunted by his ancestors’ exhortation to revenge, was not only deliberately provocative, but managed to capture visually the conflicting endeavors of the nascent avant-garde movement. Haunted by the specters of a past which it sought to reproduce and repress at the same time, the avant-garde struggled to define its own paradoxical historicity: subverting the cultural and political status quo and experimenting with new forms while preventing its own innovations to harden into orthodoxies.
The anxiety of historical repetition and inheritance, which Marx famously pondered in The Eighteenth Brumaire, surfaced in the theory and work of the fin-de-siècle avant-garde practitioners. The debates revolved around two key Marxian ideas: an understanding of revolution as a circular process which inevitably conditions the future to be radically different from the past; and the fraught dialectic between a Romantic cult of the past and a modernist fetishism of innovation.
Using the emergence of the French experimental theater as a case in point, my paper explores the implications of rethinking the historicity of the early cultural avant-garde in terms of a broader literary and cultural network which extends beyond its immediate sphere of textual production and circulation. In other words, instead of locating the critical, experimental impulse of the avant-garde in a late nineteenth-century reaction against the social and political isolation of artistic practice, my goal is to uncover a series of deep-rooted ramifications which extend to eighteenth-century Gothic primitivism and seventeenth-century Elizabethan theater practices. During the period, Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights were read and performed alongside modernist pioneers like Strindberg, Jarry, and Maeterlinck, and gradually became household names in the Parisian avant-garde circles. The late nineteenth-century innovators broke with the French positivist tradition of realist representation and sought instead filiations with the dark, decadent English tradition. They found their models in Jacobean revenge dramatists like Webster, Tourneur, and Ford, as well as Gothic Romanticists like De Quincy and Shelley. A decade before the publication of Freud’s Traumdeutung in 1900, Maeterlinck and the Symbolists discovered in the macabre tragedies of Shakespeare’s age the dramatization of the unconscious impulses and conflicts they sought to explore in their own works.
Last but not least, by tracing this complex network of historical, textual, and performance practices from the Globe and the Comédie-Française to the small fringe playhouses of fin-de-siècle Paris, I suggest that an alternative literary and cultural history needs to interrogate not only accepted schemes of periodization, “but the very concept of periodization in and of itself” (Kronfeld 53-4).

Kronfeld, Chana. On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Los Angeles: U of California P, 1996).

Using methodological approaches from theatre history, performance studies, and literary/cultural analysis, our project shows how the emergence of theatrical modernism was closely bound up with the Parisian and London revival of the “dark Elizabethans,” which played a decisive role in the crystallization of avant-garde attitudes and ideas. By analyzing two French avant-garde revivals of Macbeth, namely the 1896 production of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi at the Théâtre de L’Œuvre in Paris and Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1909 site-specific production at the Saint-Wandrille Abbey in Normandy, Prof. Ghita builds on Dr. St Peter’s research on Barker’s Shakespearean experiments at the Savoy Theatre and shows how Shakespeare became a radical modernist innovator outside London. The experimental tradition of the Parisian “fringe theaters,” in which Jarry and Maeterlinck participated during the 1890s and which shaped to a large extent Barker’s own milestone Shakespearean productions, has remained a critically understudied aspect of European modernism. This “radical Shakespeare” which we have claimed as our contemporary for the past fifty years, we argue, was primarily an early twentieth-century French-British invention rooted in the Symbolist and expressionistic techniques of the experimental theatre makers on both sides of the Channel.