ABSTRACT
Directors and theatre professionals today often speak of the right timing in producing a play – directors will explain that they chose to produce King Lear because it speaks to our current society, or someone will explain the resurgence of Titus Andronicus, for instance, as being rooted in its relevance to today’s world and its problems. Richard Halpern refers to this practice of locating Shakespeare in our time in his account of the modernist notion of ‘historical allegory’; part of the modernist legacy is seeing Shakespeare both as belonging to the remote past and as being an immediate presence, in which ‘immediacy is always generated from and against historical difference’ (1997: 5). Halpern argues convincingly that our view of Shakespeare at the end of the twentieth century remains strongly influenced by the modernist beliefs of those who studied him at the beginning of the century. But to understand Shakespeare’s place on the modern stage, we must put alongside the modernist literary tradition the history of modern theatre. The two work together to give us a sense both of how Shakespeare is shaped in our theatres and how that shape is limited by the modernist parameters that make them possible.
