ABSTRACT

In an interview in Gambit in 1970, Edward Bond remarked that, as a society, ‘we use the play [King Lear] in a wrong way. And it’s for that reason I would like to rewrite it so that we now have to use the play for ourselves, for our society, for our time, for our problems’ (Hobson et al. 1970: 24). For Bond, ‘wrong’ Shakespeare is academic Shakespeare, while ‘right’ Shakespeare is a transformed and contemporary Shakespeare. Bond’s clear-cut division of approaches to Shakespeare is quintessentially modernist in its rejection of ‘museum’ Shakespeare in favour of a reworked classic for our time. In both his rejection of an ‘academic’ or literary Shakespeare and in his division of approaches into right and wrong may, surprisingly, be heard the echoes of Soviet Ukrainian modernism – the labelling of performance styles using moral, or even theological, terms.