Contemporary Shakespeare: Dislocations and Disjunctions

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What is “contemporary” Shakespeare? And where might it be found?The most straightforward answer to the first question is a negative. “ContemporaryShakespeare” is not simply Shakespeare performed now: thebringing into the present of Shakespeare does not necessarily make theexperience of an audience member contemporary in any strict sense, simplybecause so much of Shakespeare in the now has been shaped by variousreadings of the past. A further problem of the contemporary is that itis only recognizably “contemporary” after the event, not in the now: thepresent moment enables us (whoever, or whenever, “we” are) to look backat past events (in, say, the East Germany that has gone or in a festivalexperience that is ephemeral even in respect of theater’s intrinsic fleetingness)and see them as contemporary, or rather as having been contemporary.As to the “where” question, the answer—to judge at least by theessays in this special issue—is not straightforwardly “in the theater.” Thecontemporary is, rather, often to be found beyond the theatrical stage, inperformance in the broadest sense of the term, or in an expanded formof theater in the street, on the web, during the festival, in the marginalor decentered nation.