ABSTRACT
The freedom to translate Shakespeare into an intercultural idiom-to yoke “divergent cultural materials and identities into pastiche, collage, and bricolage” in opposition to “the grand literary and theatrical narratives that would draw national and cultural boundaries around ‘Shakespeare’” (Hodgdon 81)—is resulting in more playfully eclectic productions in touch with a ludic sensibility which museum-like productions of Shakespeare have lost. Analogously, poststructuralist theory is liberating performance critics to act in a similar way: they delight in finding no fixed authority to which the theatre may appeal and revel in the jouissance of their own subjectivity. Insisting on the indeterminacy of meaning and on the radical contingencies which affect performance, critics themselves become performers who, in their acts of translation, play at constructing “Shakespeare.” This critical self-consciousness sharply divides them from their forebears in the Shakespeare revolution.
