Nineteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Students have been at the forefront of the project to decolonize curricula by calling for the removal of Shakespeare from undergraduate programmes. At the same time, recent decades have seen a steep rise in the number and variety of performances, adaptations, and translations of Shakespeare’s plays around the world. The research presented in this paper seeks to understand the tensions inherent in teaching the plays in a decolonised context at a time when the plays have also become a successful global commodity. Accounts of Shakespeare’s ‘universalism’ persist as the dominant narrative through which audiences articulate their relationship to Shakespeare. But the ideology of universalism is of little value in accounting for the social, economic, and material conditions that make performing Shakespeare possible, or desirable. To understand the ways Shakespeare remains entrenched in the global imaginary, we need to move beyond simplistic narratives of universalism. This paper shares and evaluates some of the findings from a collaborative research experiment undertaken with a cohort of students in Trinidad who take a compulsory Shakespeare unit. The students were invited to engage with a history of emotions methodology in order to ‘log’ their affective response as spectators to a range of live and recorded performances and to co-create an ‘intercultural audience archive’. They were also invited to use audience research methodologies to engage their peers and playgoers in interrogating the meanings of the performances and to think about ‘Global Shakespeare’ through the lens of a community archive of the emotions.