TY - JOUR
AU1 - Santos, Kathryn Vomero
AB - Throughout 2016, the phrase “The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare” could be found on posters, postcards, tote bags, and t-shirts designed to advertise and commemorate what would come to be known as “Shakespeare’s American Tour,” or more colloquially, “the Folio tour.”1 Spearheaded by the Folger Shakespeare Library in association with the Cincinnati Museum Center and the American Library Association Public Programs Office, the tour was the product of a multi-year collaborative effort to send eighteen of the Folger’s eighty-two copies of the First Folio to sites in all fifty states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia in celebration of Shakespeare’s long legacy on the occasion of the quatercentenary of his death. The project was funded by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and garnered the support of several public and private sponsors. Host sites, which included universities, colleges, theaters, public libraries, and museums, were selected by way of a competitive application process on the basis of their ability to meet the strict environmental and security requirements for the rare book as well as their plans for public programming designed “to engage a large and diverse audience.”2 After all, the application guidelines declared, “Shakespeare’s appeal is universal.”3 In a lecture about his experience planning the stop at Florida International University in Miami, James M. Sutton incisively asked a series of questions about the tour’s ubiquitous title and slogan that put pressure on the premise of the larger project: “Who is the ‘Us’ imagined forth in the exhibition title, and how are ‘we’ supposed to, presumed to, respond in the presence of the ‘First Folio!’ and the authorial presence—Shakespeare—that radiates from its leaves? Why should we care about the book, and the author it creates?”4 For Sutton, the double task of attending to a “diverse, multicultural, multiracial, and multilingual community such as South Florida” while enshrining “Shakespeare” inside an alarmed and guarded glass case seemed to be at odds with claims about the playwright’s universality that appeared in the call for applications and in the promotional rhetoric governing the tour.5 The questions that Sutton asked of the tour’s animating discourse resonate in many ways with Ian Smith’s urgent call for literary critics to interrogate the “institutional power” that has accrued to the “we” in the long tradition of Shakespearean scholarship and performance that assumes a collective identification with Hamlet, the play that, perhaps unsurprisingly, stared back at visitors in each tour location as they peered into the glass case containing a copy of the Folio.6 In a Los Angeles Times article about the relevance of this rare book to issues of “race, inequality,” and “polarized politics,” theater critic Charles McNulty exemplified the white-focused universalizing approach to Hamlet by describing the decision to feature the introspective musings of the brooding Danish prince as an obvious one: “Naturally,” he writes, “the book is opened to Hamlet’s ‘To Be or Not to Be’ speech, the most famous soliloquy in all of Shakespeare.”7 There is little question that Hamlet has become “the most famous” among Shakespeare’s plays in the four centuries since his death, but what exactly is “natural” about the choice to center a text through which, as Smith describes it, “white, male interests were historically epitomized, reflected, and affirmed”?8 Is an invitation for a universal, or even an American, “us” to see ourselves in this text really as inclusive as it sounds? In their introduction to the 2016 Shakespeare Quarterly special issue on race in which Smith’s essay appeared, Peter Erickson and Kim F. Hall contend that such universalizing gestures designed to shore up Shakespeare’s legacy have come to rely on the “the erasure of race,” both in the early modern period and in the centuries since.9 Appeals to Shakespeare’s universality so often attempt to create what Ayanna Thompson has described as a “unified whole that is colorblind”; but in doing so, they perpetuate a default whiteness, causing his works to become an oppressive force rather than the progressive one that institutions would often like him to be.10 Indeed, as Vanessa I. Corredera sharply observes, many efforts to bring all of “us” into the fold of Shakespeare’s works do less to confirm the notion of a “universal human condition” than they do to expose the power structures that police and preserve “Shakespeare’s exclusionary whiteness.”11 Inherent in the collective pronouns “us” and “we,” in other words, is a fundamental tension between the two competing principles that would come to define the Folio tour: the desire to embrace multiculturalism and the tendency to make a homogenizing assumption about a shared identity and identification with Shakespeare and the supposedly timeless works enclosed in the glass case.12 Without a doubt, the tour successfully fulfilled its ambition to bring the treasured Folios safely out of the vault and to distribute their cultural capital into locations across the country. Because of these efforts, hundreds of thousands of people, including many young people, were able to view this culturally significant artifact that was otherwise inaccessible to them. It is also true that the individual host sites and their community collaborators were able to generate excitement for Shakespeare in ways that were specific to their locations, resources, and skills.13 Bound as it was by the needs and questions generated by the Folios themselves, however, this diffuse, artifact-centered project prioritized resources for and discussions about “the book” at the expense of meaningful conversations about who constituted the nation—the “us”—that was meant to commemorate Shakespeare’s legacy in 2016. As I argue in this essay, the discursive strategies that the Folger and its partners used to promote the tour reflected larger structural factors and institutional imperatives that enabled, and perhaps even encouraged, individual host sites to play into exclusionary and widely critiqued notions of Shakespeare’s universality rather than productively straining against them.14 In order to highlight and theorize the ways in which the universalizing artifact-focused framework of the Folio tour rendered issues of race marginal or entirely invisible, this essay focuses specifically on the institutional and cultural mechanisms through which Latinx artists, audiences, scholars, students, and communities intersected—and did not intersect—with the Folio’s visit to various sites. Although such a focus is by no means comprehensive, attending to Latinx perspectives—perspectives that Ruben Espinosa contends “have gone largely ignored in Shakespeare studies”—allows us to see the complex dynamics of race, language, coloniality, immigration, and national identity at work in the Folio tour’s attempts to make a book printed in London in 1623 relevant to American publics in 2016, a year in which longstanding racial tensions and immigration debates in this country came to the fore.15 When studied as part of a larger pattern, the distinct but interrelated instances in which Latinxs were either acknowledged or ignored by the tour bring into sharp relief the urgency and the value of creating public humanities programming that is informed and shaped by the methodologies of premodern critical race studies. As Margo Hendricks recently argued, such approaches hinge not only on “the study of race in the premodern era” but also on “the way those studies can effect a transformation of the academy and its relationship to the world.”16 After offering a critical analysis of the tour’s engagements with Latinx communities, or the lack thereof, in the first part of this essay, I will go on to show in the second and third parts that the seeds of such a “transformation” were already present in the Folio tour in the form of two productions by Mexican American artists that were included in the programming by happenstance, with little fanfare, and even less archival attention. Both are rich examples of how Latinx artists were working at the borders of both Shakespeare and America in an effort to engage creatively with the histories and present realities of race, language, and colonialism that shaped the pressing concerns of 2016 and, indeed, today. I hope to demonstrate how these productions and their Borderlands perspectives might serve as models for a future of Shakespearean public programming that is not interested in merely preserving Shakespeare and his whiteness but one that, as Thompson has advocated, works to destabilize the cultural authority of Shakespeare and does not simply radiate outward from the textual, institutional, national, linguistic, or racial center to the peripheries.17 Initiating an honest dialogue about what the next century of Shakespearean programming can look and sound like in this country will require critical attention to the multifaceted processes by which identity is constructed, performed, and deployed in relation to the profoundly interlinked concepts of “Shakespeare” and “America,” and it will demand actively supporting and carefully archiving forms of engagement that come from within communities rather than just from the vault and its attendant institutions. I. ¡Shakespeare para todos! I wish to begin thinking about Latinx intersections with the Folio tour by turning to the host site that is perhaps most politically on the margins of the United States: the Universidad del Turabo in Gurabo, Puerto Rico, whose faculty and staff played a central role in the creation of the first ever bilingual exhibit put on by the Folger and the only tour stop in the US territories.18 Newspaper ads and brochures designed by the advertising agency Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn (BBDO) to welcome the public to the exhibit and its companion events featured the lofty slogan “Shakespeare está entre nosotros”—or Shakespeare is among us, with us, in our midst—along with a stock image of a man dressed as Shakespeare sitting at a desk while examining a globe in a classroom among young Puerto Rican students. While the “nosotros” in the slogan certainly echoes the “us” in “The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare,” it also signals an underlying tension between a Puerto Rican collective and an American one. The staged photograph with which it is paired clearly attempts to create a sense of history and relevance to the “nosotros” invoked by the slogan by gesturing to the popular notion that Shakespeare is a “global” author and situating him within a curricular context. In the process of doing so, however, the ad ultimately, if inadvertently, calls attention to the ways in which Shakespeare’s presence on the island has less to do with his global status and more to do with the fact that Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States. While it is indeed noteworthy and commendable that the Folger set out to include this unincorporated territory in “Shakespeare’s American Tour,” the occasion of the Folio’s visit to Gurabo also served as a reminder of the reality that American imperialism has facilitated—and even forced—the introduction of Shakespeare into the curricular and cultural milieu of this and other US colonies.19 Such palpable ambivalence about the relevance of Shakespeare to Puerto Rico was similarly apparent in the program of events designed by several university partners and cultural organizations throughout the island to celebrate the Folio’s month-long stay at the Museo y Centro de Estudios Humanísticos in Gurabo. Among the robust list of events were educational workshops, theatrical and dance performances, a fashion show, and a screening of the 1961 film adaptation of the 1957 Broadway musical West Side Story. While in many ways an obvious choice given its connections to Shakespeare and Puerto Rico, the decision to include a film that uses brownface and problematic stereotypes about Puerto Ricans in the programming was a vexed one, according to museum director Carmen Ruiz de Fischler.20 On the one hand, the musical stands as a landmark moment in the cultural history of the Puerto Rican diaspora, and, as Carla Della Gatta notes, has also had a profound impact on what she calls the “Latino-ization” of Shakespeare that followed in its wake.21 On the other hand, Ruiz de Fischler and her co-organizers felt that it was equally important to acknowledge the fact that mainland American perceptions of Puerto Rican identity and migration have been mediated through, and even warped by, Shakespeare’s long legacy.22 In much the same way that the BBDO ad ended up highlighting the colonial history of Shakespeare’s presence on the island, the inclusion of West Side Story in the programming served as an uncomfortable reminder that Puerto Rico’s relationship to Shakespeare is inextricably bound up with its vexed relationship to the United States. The questions about nation, language, and empire raised by the Folio’s visit to Puerto Rico reverberated well beyond the island and throughout the rest of the tour. According to the Folger, the Spanish panels and exhibition materials created by Puerto Rican translator Luis Vizoso became a resource that “was used by many of the 52 host sites, and countless visitors.”23 For most tour stops, though, making these Spanish translations available in some form marked the full extent of their outreach to Latinx and Spanish-speaking audiences. Included among such sites was the Arizona State Museum at the University of Arizona, a public university positioned near the US–Mexico border that would be officially designated a Hispanic-Serving Institution just two years later in 2018, and Texas A&M University, a flagship research university in a state whose population is 40 percent Latinx.24 The month-long programming in both of these states was strikingly void of events designed to engage with the presence of Shakespeare and his legacy in the rich but fraught cultural heritage of the Southwest and the Borderlands.25 There was ultimately no explicit acknowledgment of the fact that the diverse identities and cultures in either state were relevant to Shakespeare or that Shakespeare was relevant to them. Some host sites recognized that simply providing the translated exhibition materials was an insufficient means of engaging with Spanish-speaking communities in their states. Making the connection between the proximate shared “deathiversary” of Shakespeare and Cervantes, or between Shakespeare’s England and Golden Age Spain more broadly, tour sites in Iowa, Colorado, Georgia, and Florida hosted scholarly lectures, readings, and seminars on early modern Anglo-Spanish connections and their contemporary resonances in the United States. At Florida International University in Miami, which I discussed at the outset of this essay, such events were paired with a symposium on race entitled “Shakespeare Across the Divide,” which was followed later in the year by a program called “Teaching Shakespeare in Diverse Communities.” As part of its remarkably wide-ranging programming that engaged directly with questions of race, language, and accessibility, Emory University in Atlanta hosted a staged reading of Lope de Vega’s Castelvines y Monteses, an early seventeenth-century Spanish dramatic adaptation of Matteo Bandello’s novella Giulietta e Romeo.26 And in the case of the New Mexico Museum of Art and its partners across the state, the online companion exhibition included a “Spanish Colonial Bibliography” of books that Spanish colonizers and settlers may have read in seventeenth-century New Spain.27 Attending to such contexts and connections in the Folio tour programming marked a noteworthy effort, not just to reckon with the Spanish colonial history of the United States and the Americas but also to redress the fact that, as Barbara Fuchs and William Childers have argued, Spanish literature of the early modern period has often been overlooked and marginalized in the Anglo-American academy.28 Using the occasion of Shakespeare’s American Tour to amplify the history and importance of Spanish as a language with a rich literary tradition has undoubtedly powerful implications in a country where it is so often repressed or derided. At the same time, however, relying on early modern Spanish literature to achieve such goals without also attending critically to the legacies of the Spanish Empire is also a gesture that risks uncritically celebrating another colonial power in ways that perpetuate the erasure of Indigenous Peoples and the conflation of European Spanish with the many varieties of Spanish spoken in the US and throughout the Americas.29 A more direct engagement with Spanish-speaking Latinx communities did not necessarily guarantee a productive outcome, though. In the case of Brown University, host of the Rhode Island tour stop, lead organizer Coppélia Kahn acknowledged the fact that 40 percent of Providence’s population is Latinx, and she worked with Felipe Martínez-Pinzón and Jill Kuhnheim from the department of Hispanic Studies to create “¡Shakespeare para todos!”—a program in which bilingual student volunteers from Brown worked with middle school students in several bilingual or Spanish-language middle schools in Providence to read Romeo and Juliet in translation and to create performances and adaptations of the text. The intention, Kahn noted in a university news story, was “to bridge the distance between campus and the community” and to communicate that the Shakespeare enclosed in the glass case “can be your Shakespeare, too.”30 Recognizing that creating linguistic access was only the first step in forging a connection “between campus and the community,” Kahn and her co-organizers made an effort to connect the play’s supposedly timeless themes to what they perceived to be the particular concerns of Providence’s Latinx community. In his capacity as advisor to the middle school program, Martínez-Pinzón explained that Romeo and Juliet is “a very good entry point” for discussing what he regarded as particular “cultural problems” in Latinx communities: “From machismo to gang culture, to the towering figures of the parents, this is a text about negotiating heritage.”31 It may indeed be true that aspects of Shakespeare’s play about feuding families and young lovers resonate with contemporary concerns among Latinxs in Providence and beyond, but making assumptions about these points of connection can also reproduce harmful stereotypes about the very communities a program such as this one purports to serve. As it set out to explain the program’s goal to “interpret this timeless play that’s also a play for our times,” the brief description of “¡Shakespeare para todos!” that appeared on the Brown University Library’s official First Folio! webpage inaccurately and quite troublingly claims that “Leonard Bernstein’s popular musical, West Side Story, transformed the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets into an urban gang war between the Krips [sic] and the Bloods.”32 Confusing the rivalry between the white and Puerto Rican street gangs of 1950s New York City, stereotypically depicted in West Side Story in the first place, with that of predominantly Black gangs that formed in Los Angeles in subsequent decades is more than a simple mistake. It is a prime example of how easily the universalizing impulse of “inclusive” programming such as that generated for the Folio tour can give way to racialized stereotypes. What it ultimately communicates is an assumption that the best way to make Shakespeare feel relevant to young Latinx people is to conflate their identities and lived experiences with gang violence that is explicitly not white, while simultaneously suggesting that those same experiences should be understood through the work of the canonical white author of the Anglosphere. Furthering this stereotypical framework, the website goes on to add that Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet film adaptation “transported the warring families to ‘Verona Beach’ in Florida or California,” presumably as a means of gesturing to two coastal states with high Latinx populations and to acknowledge that this adaptation depicts the Capulet family as Latinx. As Espinosa has astutely pointed out, however, Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet “perpetuates negative stereotypes of Latinxs” by portraying them as menacing and thereby “broadens” what he has identified as “the Shakespeare-Latinx divide.”33 While the faculty coordinators at Brown University developed a seemingly well-intentioned program that set out to fulfill the diversity and community outreach goals of the Folio tour and to create access to the cultural capital of Shakespeare “para todos,” it was nevertheless steeped in stereotypes and couched in ideologies of universality and uplift, which Thompson argues all too often go hand-in-hand with public programs of this nature as they “walk the tightrope between espousing the value of Shakespeare through the rhetoric of liberal humanism and espousing the value of Shakespeare through the rhetoric of neocolonialism.”34 In the process of attempting to make Shakespeare accessible and valuable to these young Latinx students, this program ended up reinforcing harmful hierarchies rather than breaking them down. The oversights and missteps I have discussed above point to an urgent need for deeper learning on the part of scholars and institutions. In the interest of such learning, I look beyond examples of institutionally developed outreach in the following sections and turn my attention to what I read as two hopeful and instructive instances in which the work of Mexican American theater practitioners and performing artists came to be incidentally included in the Folio tour stops in San Diego, California, and Storrs, Connecticut.35 Staged in geographically distant and quite different locations, these two productions, which might both be described as bilingual tradaptations, use Shakespeare and various forms of translation, translanguaging, and adaptation to interrogate the multiple forces of colonialism and oppression that continue to shape the US–Mexico Borderlands. In using the term “tradaptation,” which was first coined by Québécois poet, playwright, and actor Michel Garneau to describe his 1970s and 80s translations of Macbeth, The Tempest, and Coriolanus, I situate these bilingual productions within a tradition of translating Shakespeare for the purposes of critiquing coloniality and the contested boundaries of linguistic and national identity.36 Unlike tradaptations that bring Shakespeare’s texts into a single target language, these productions use a blending of languages to stage the dynamic and often tense relationships between English and Spanish in the US.37 Working from their unique bicultural Borderlands perspectives and with diverse audiences in mind, these artists do not simply recreate Shakespeare through translation but rather transform his plays into active zones of translanguaging in order to think about the social, cultural, and national issues that define America today and Shakespeare’s place in it.38 In so doing, they mark a decisive departure from the veneration of the book enclosed in the glass case and show that making Shakespeare accessible requires acts of translation that are neither unidirectional nor static. Remarkably and tellingly, however, neither production was reviewed or described in any detail in the tour highlights and archives, raising further questions about what an institution like the Folger values as it strives to make Shakespeare’s appeal broad and long lasting.39 II. Measure for Measure en La Frontera Early in 2016, San Diego-based theater-maker and dramaturg, Bernardo Mazón Daher, who had been commissioned to create and direct a bilingual Measure for Measure for a local arts foundation, was seeking a place to stage his production when the San Diego Public Library offered their auditorium space, some funding, and a connection to the series of events linked to the Folio’s upcoming visit in June of that same year.40 Having received a copy of the script from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2011 bilingual production of the play, Mazón set out to increase the percentage of Spanish in his 2016 Measure for Measure | Medida por medida, which would be both set and staged in a border town and would feature a majority Latinx cast.41 As he has described it, Mazón’s vision for bilingual productions—of Shakespeare and other plays—is to integrate the Spanish language in ways that go beyond simply “accenting certain parts of the story” and that are “inclusive to monolingual audiences on both sides.”42 Rendering parts of Shakespeare’s language into Spanish, or Spanglish in several instances, is not just a matter of translating the words for comprehension in his view. Attending to the formal features of Shakespeare’s heightened language and attempting to recreate their effects in Spanish is an act of what Mazón calls “language justice” for Spanish-speaking audiences.43 Such an audience-centered approach to translation renders both audible and visible the politics of accommodation and linguistic (il)legitimacy that Gloria Anzaldúa famously theorizes in Borderlands/La Frontera.44 By emphasizing how language is, as Carola and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco argue, “both a marker of identity and an instrument of power,” the bilingual nature of Mazón’s tradaptation reflects the political realities of its Borderlands setting by adding a crucial layer of linguistic complexity to the sexual and moral politics of Measure for Measure.45 Take, for example, the following exchange between Angelo and Isabella in the scene that corresponds to 2.2, precisely in the moment when Angelo’s lust begins to take hold: ISABELLA      Gentle señor, escuchame. ANGELO      I will bethink me: come again tomorrow. ISABELLA   Le puedo sobornar: Señor, turn back. ANGELO     How? bribe me? ISABELLA  Sí, con regalos que solamente los cielos podrían compartir. LUCIO      [Aside] Guao. ANGELO     Well; come to me to-morrow. LUCIO      Go to; ’tis well; vamonos! ISABELLA   Dios le cuida! ANGELO     [Aside] Amen:           For I am that way going to temptation,           Where prayers cross.46 Angelo clearly hears and understands Isabella’s repeated pleas in both Spanglish and Spanish, but his resolutely monolingual (Shakespearean) English responses here and throughout the play magnify the profoundly imbalanced power dynamics between the two characters and the two languages in this moment. Indeed, the fact that her pleas are partially or fully in a language that Angelo refuses to speak, in spite of his ability to understand, highlights the complicated role that language plays in border communities as well as the fundamental truth that drives the action of Measure for Measure: that there is nothing Isabella can say to convince Angelo to change his mind or stop his abuse. She will neither be heard nor believed in any language. Mazón has explained that he created the role of Angelo (whose name visually and sonically resonates with the word “Anglo”) “so that it could be played either by a white actor, supposing the character understood Spanish by being an elected official in the border region, or a Latino actor, supposing they opted out of speaking Spanish” based on “internalized racism.”47 One of the few times that Angelo utters a phrase in Spanish is in response to Isabella’s attempt to “entreat” him to “speak the former language” in 2.4. “Plainly conceive,” he responds in Mazón’s version, “te amo.”48 While Shakespearean editors have interpreted Isabella’s request to hear the “the former language” as a reference to the simpler, more intelligible nature of Angelo’s earlier lines, Mazón’s decision to make him respond in Spanish—“the former language” he otherwise cannot or refuses to speak—serves both to render the interlinguistic implications of Isabella’s line explicit and to make Angelo’s plain declaration of love ring even more hollow than it already does in Shakespeare’s play. What is most powerful about Mazón’s approach to translation, though, is that he does not merely recreate or intensify Shakespeare for Shakespeare’s sake. Rather, he uses Measure for Measure as a platform to elevate issues that directly affect members of his border community. Mazón’s revision of 2.3 offers an especially illustrative example of his production’s language politics. The dialogue that happens between the disguised Duke Vincentio and Juliet in Shakespeare’s version becomes a conversation among the Duke, Claudio, Juliet, and a social worker serving as an interpreter in an interview room inside the prison: DUKE VINCENTIO ¿Se arrepiente, caballero, de su pecado? SOCIAL WORKER (translating) Repent you, good man, of the sin you carry? CLAUDIO Me arrepiento de él y sobrellevo la vergüenza con paciencia. SOCIAL WORKER “I do; and bear the shame most patiently.” DUKE VINCENTIO    Le enseñare a examinar su conciencia              Y a probar si su penitencia es sincera o              Si es superficial. SOCIAL WORKER      “I’ll teach you how you shall arraign your conscience,              And try your penitence, if it be sound,              Or hollowly put on.” CLAUDIO      Aprenderé con gusto. SOCIAL WORKER      “I’ll gladly learn.” DUKE VINCENTIO   Love you the man that wrong’d you? JULIET         Yes, as I love the woman that wrong’d him. DUKE VINCENTIO   So, then, it seems your most offenceful act              Was mutually committed? JULIET          Mutually.49 By inserting a linguistic intermediary into a confessional scene that already plays into the blurred lines between religion and law, Mazón calls attention to the role that translation plays in everyday life for many Latinxs as well as to the legal consequences of creating or denying access to information in one’s native or home language. Within the fiction of the play, this instance of live translation seems to be happening not for the two Spanish speakers but for the benefit of Juliet, a “gringuita” who does not share their language. For the audience, this performance of live translation has at least two additional effects: First, it creates a brief moment of linguistic access for monolingual English- or Spanish-speaking listeners. Second, and even more significantly, it radically inverts the hierarchy between Shakespeare’s English and Mazón’s Spanish. As the scene unfolds in real time, Shakespeare’s words are not the original utterance but a translation, and a translation of Spanish lines spoken by Latinx actors along the US–Mexico border at that. While certain aspects of Mazón’s tradaptation illuminate the harmful power dynamics of language in the Borderlands, this and several other moments actively work to destabilize the linguistic and cultural boundaries that are so often drawn in service of oppression and discrimination. The geopolitical contexts of the production’s fictional and actual border setting featured prominently in the promotion of the show as well. Appropriating the iconic image of Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull that is nearly synonymous with Shakespeare and the white cultural supremacy and elitism he has come to represent, the poster that Mazón designed to advertise his production of Measure for Measure features an image of a brown-skinned hand holding a calavera breaking through a brick wall (see figure 1). Such imagery had become increasingly potent in early 2016 as then-candidate Donald Trump repeatedly called for a border wall that would allegedly be funded not by the United States but by Mexico. Rather than simply serving as a symbol of mortality as it does in the case of Hamlet, this wall-busting calavera is surrounded by flowers, creating an image that projects vitality in the act of crossing and dismantling borders and the linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries they so unsuccessfully enforce. Tearing down this border wall and all of its associations is more than symbolic, however, as it enacts Espinosa’s hope for the future of Shakespeare studies. “Breaking boundaries and crossing borders when it comes to Shakespeare,” he contends, not only offers “a fresh perspective on Shakespeare” but also opens his works up to new artists, new audiences, and new scholarly voices.50 Staged in a public library and open to everyone, Mazón’s bilingual production offers an example of the kinds of conversation and representation that can happen when boundaries between community and institution and between public and private are broken, too. Figure 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Poster for Measure for Measure | Medida por medida. Design concept by Bernardo Mazón Daher, graphic art created by Christa Miesner. Reproduced with permission. III. Macbeth among the Mexican Drug Cartels The linguistic, national, and racial politics of the US–Mexico Borderlands that shaped Mazón’s Measure for Measure | Medida por medida also served as the framework for another Shakespearean production that would find its way into the Folio tour programming. In March 2016, Mexican American actor and puppet artist Kalob Martinez debuted his bilingual one-man hand-puppet adaptation of Macbeth entitled El Beto at the Connecticut Repertory Theater in Storrs, Connecticut, home of the nation’s leading puppet arts graduate program and host of the Connecticut stop of the Folio tour.51 When the Folio came to town in September, Martinez was invited to reprise his version of Macbeth set on the border, not between Scotland and England, but between Mexico and the United States. In the process of translating and translocating the play to this particular Borderlands context, Martinez not only made Shakespeare speak a new language but he also used Macbeth and its politics to interrogate the complexities of the transborder identities and experiences that have been shaped by the manufacture and trafficking of narcotics in the Americas. While Martinez’s attempt to bring the clan culture of medieval Scotland into conversation with the power structures of Mexican drug cartels may initially seem to replicate damaging racialized stereotypes, his tradaptation uses a number of verbal, visual, sonic, and theatrical strategies to resist the monolithic conceptualization of Mexicans in the white American imaginary and to undermine the uncritical glorification and demonization of narcotrafficking in popular media. What El Beto points to instead is the complex geopolitical histories and profound human costs of such activities.52 A Houston native who trained and worked in the theater scene in Texas, Martinez moved to Connecticut to pursue his MFA in puppetry after realizing that puppet theater offered him far more creative control and could free him from the complex and often exclusionary practices of auditions.53 In the process of proposing and creating El Beto for his MFA project at UConn, Martinez quickly learned that there were unique challenges associated with staging a play with so many characters in this medium. Such challenges ultimately became an opportunity to assert his place on stage, however, as they led Martinez to explore the use of 3-D printing to create puppets that all “have [his] features.”54 In addition to serving as a corrective to Martinez’s attempts to find his place in human theater, this face-multiplying and molding technique created a heightened example of what Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein, and John Bell have described as “the theatrical co-presence of puppet and puppeteer,” an “intermingling of flesh and matter” that raises fundamental questions about “subjectivity, agency, or character.”55 By quite literally putting his face on Macbeth in a medium that required him to play many roles at once, Martinez was able to use Shakespeare’s play to tell a story about power and violence that affects people who, as his puppets do, look like him.56 As he transports Macbeth from Scotland and its fraught border with England to Mexico and its fraught border with the United States, Martinez makes the political stakes of his production abundantly clear even before the audience sees a puppet or hears a word of Shakespeare.57 The performance opens with an original narcocorrido—a subgenre of Mexican narrative ballads that chronicle and often celebrate the exploits of narcotraficantes—which serves as the soundtrack for a projected slideshow of photos taken directly from the Instagram and Facebook accounts of prominent members of Mexican drug cartels.58 Although the sonic and visual elements of this opening seem to work together in a kind of glorifying harmony at the outset, the lyrics of the narcocorrido begin to take on an ominous, contrapuntal quality as they recount the agricultural origins of the drug trade and acknowledge the fact that actors on both sides of the border are responsible for the brutal economic, physical, and psychological violence that has fueled its growth. Indeed, it was neoliberal economic policies such as NAFTA and US demand for drugs—“Gracias á los Estados Unidos,” as the lyrics put it—that incentivized poor Mexican farmers to stop growing food and start growing more lucrative drug-producing crops such as marijuana and opium poppies.59 As the song reaches its conclusion, the projected images of drugs, money, and guns fade into one another in rapid succession, but the transnational terror they represent lingers as they set the stage for Shakespeare’s gruesome tragedy, reminding the audience that what they are about to watch is not an abstract representation of a distant “medieval” past but an engagement with an immediate present. The visual and sartorial patterns in the images projected on the screen resonate most strongly in the production’s costumes, many of which riff on the branded “narco polo” shirts worn by well-known members of the cartels. As the puppeteer also playing the lead role of human Macbeth (who is later doubled by puppet Macbeth), Martinez’s costume consists of a polo shirt with a heraldic shield on the left breast that features an evocative combination of Mexican and Shakespearean iconography in the form of a calavera wearing a fool’s cap (see figure 2). “In telling the story,” costume designer Jelena Antanasijevic explains, “heraldry becomes one of the main tools. It underlines the royal aspects of both worlds, merged into one story of blood and lust.”60 Seen through this shared visual lexicon of kinship and power, El Beto is not simply Macbeth in a new setting but a new branch in a long genealogy of ambitious violence born out of oppressive hierarchical power structures.61 In other words, the atrocities associated with narcotrafficking are not just the purview of those positioned as racially other in the Americas of the present but are part of a longer transnational history of violence and coloniality in which whiteness is also implicated. Figure 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Kalob Martinez performing in El Beto. Photography by Radu Corcodel. Reproduced with permission. The heraldic imagery on Martinez’s costume echoes the fact that the three witches (tres brujas) are represented by three golden calaveras who move together as a single puppet connected by a weblike structure. The decision to render them as calaveras, Martinez explains, was inspired by the religious imagery and culture of worship surrounding the folk saint Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, one of the fastest growing religions in the Americas on both sides of the border. Although she is what R. Andrew Chesnut calls “a formidable multitasker,” whose growing body of devotees includes border crossers, immigrants, business owners, and spurned lovers, this female personification of death with Indigenous origins is most notoriously known for being worshipped by kidnappers and drug traffickers.62 Indeed, her association with such criminal worshippers and her frequent depiction as a bony doppelgänger for the Virgen de Guadalupe, patron saint of Mexico, has led Catholic leaders across the Americas to denounce her and Mexican authorities to destroy shrines dedicated to her, many of which are situated along the border.63 By invoking Santa Muerte in the context of a play that is governed by the feminine spiritual powers of Hecate and the three witches, El Beto challenges narrow moralistic views of the skeleton saint while highlighting the complex role she plays in regionally specific forms of resistance against both church and state.64 Like Mazón’s production of Measure | Medida, Martinez’s tradaptation of Macbeth strategically uses English and Spanish to amplify and, in some instances, redefine the psychological and geographical borders of the play. As he explains it, Martinez chose to use Spanish—in this case, drawn largely from Spaniard Luis Astrana Marín’s 1929 translation of the play—in places where Shakespeare is repetitive, allowing the doubled words or phrases to exist side-by-side in both languages, or in places where the characters are speaking in moments of intimacy, fear, or introspection.65 Spanish is the primary language of the tres brujas. The tense English dialogue between the Macbeths on the eve of Duncan’s murder is punctuated by exclamatory lines in Spanish. When Macbeth sees a puñal, or dagger, floating before his eyes, his soliloquy oscillates between the two languages, fulfilling an earlier prediction that “nuestras sangrientas acciones se vuelven atormentando a su inventor” and anticipating the ways in which human Lady Macbeth (played by actor Natalia Cuevas) will sing the Mexican folk song of “La Llorona,” or “The Weeping Woman,” as she finds herself unable to wash her hands clean in either language.66 The geographic specificity of the bilingualism that characterizes El Beto is perhaps most apparent when Macduff’s flight across the border to England is translated into a regionally relevant Spanglish statement: “Macduff is fled a los Estados Unidos.” It is in “los Estados Unidos,” of course, that he will join the US armed forces that later invade Mexico under the pretenses of restoring order. Demarcating a fluid border at the level of the sentence and inverting assumptions about which language falls on which side, Martinez subtly but powerfully underscores the transnational and colonial roots of the drug trade and the failed war on drugs. Martinez’s approach to translating Macbeth into the medium of puppet theater similarly allows him to heighten some of the most violent offstage moments of the play, demanding that his audiences reckon with the idea that the thousands of lives lost in the drug trade are not, in fact, abstract figures on the other side of the border or in the margins of our consciousness, but rather human beings whose lives are affected by the decisions and desires of many actors in the United States. Simultaneously inhabiting the character of Macbeth and the role of the puppeteer, Martinez exploits the ambiguity of the “theatrical co-presence of puppet and puppeteer” to render visible and audible the title character’s responsibility for two moments of brutal violence that occur offstage in Shakespeare’s version: the murders of Duncan and Macduff’s family. As he controls the sleeping puppet Duncan with one hand, Martinez-as-Macbeth “rises from below” the play board, “grabs DUNCAN by the head, covers his mouth, and slits his throat” with the other.67 This pivotal moment becomes all the more chilling when the same hand that manipulated Duncan immediately swaps out his lifeless body for a gleeful Lady Macbeth, who refuses to describe the murder scene as a “triste espectáculo.”68 Although the Murderer puppet physically stabs Lady Macduff and her children, it is Martinez, the puppeteer dressed as human Macbeth, who hands him the knife and laughs menacingly after their innocent bodies—all of which are connected as a single puppet—are stabbed and quickly drained of life. Using the medium of puppetry to move these key moments of violence from the margins of the play to center stage does more than point up Macbeth’s (and Macbeth’s) brutality, however. It actively pushes back against the desire to look away from a crisis in which the United States is complicit. The performance concludes as it opened: with a reprisal of the narcocorrido and another projected photo montage. This time, though, it is a collection of gruesome images of death, designed both to echo and to counterbalance the visual glorification of narcoculture with which the show began. The lyrics of the concluding corrido hauntingly explain that the dead bodies on both the stage and the screen will soon be replaced by even more bodies who will join this endless cycle of violence. As a depiction of the Virgen de Guadalupe fades into a final image of the similarly shrouded skeleton saint, Martinez thrusts the tres brujas once again into the air against this backdrop of “Most Holy Death” before the stage goes black. The murderous tyrant may have been toppled, but the violent system in which he rose to power persists in spite of, and perhaps because of, intervention from the other side of the border. There is ultimately nothing reassuring or redemptive about this ending. But what Martinez saw in Shakespeare’s play was an opportunity to use a familiar text to call attention to the largely unfamiliar complexities of narcotrafficking and the transnational systems of power and economic violence that continue to affect the US–Mexico Borderlands today. In the deft hands of artists like Martinez, Shakespeare’s legacy just might have a future. IV. Shakespeare Beyond the Vault While the two Shakespearean tradaptations I have discussed above were indeed included in the Folio tour, their inclusion was a product of coincidence rather than by design. One could certainly argue that the flexible localized model of the tour created an occasion and platform on which to showcase this kind of work as the tour organizers became aware of it, but it is clear that the cultural, linguistic, and racial perspectives that Mazón and Martinez brought to their respective tour stops were not prioritized at the early stages of planning. The commonalities that their productions share offer an important model, however, for the kinds of issues that ought to be foregrounded in future public programming of this nature. Both were conceived and executed by Mexican American artists; both are bilingual productions; and both remake Shakespeare’s plays and Shakespearean iconography in order to grapple with some of the most pressing issues in the US–Mexico Borderlands. The most striking commonality is that these artists worked with remarkably few resources to do these innovative things with Shakespeare that speak both directly and indirectly about their identities, communities, and relationships to the United States. Beyond, and in addition to, creative concepts that are informed by the lived experiences and concerns of Latinxs, a more visible and vibrant tradition of Latinx Shakespeare will require funding and support, if as Mazón noted in our conversation, Latinx theater artists are going to do Shakespeare at all.69 It will also be incumbent on scholars and librarians to archive, study, and teach these works and their complex contexts. The Folio tour and other global celebrations of Shakespeare’s legacy in 2016 coincided with a politically fraught moment that has already begun to transform the kind of scholarship, teaching, and public-facing work that early modernists and institutions like the Folger do. But it is worth pausing now and once again to consider the fact that in late 2015 and early 2016, a multi-generational group of early modern race studies scholars were already calling for a different kind of future in response to the marginalization and “erasure of race” in our field. In the introduction that I cited at the outset of this essay, Erickson and Hall set the year 2025 “as a landmark by which to measure subsequent progress toward establishing the field of early modern race studies.”70 As they see it, such progress will depend on creating “a stronger foundation through a wide spectrum of social issues, a broader scholarly framework, a larger academic audience, and deeper public engagement.”71 By including the public sphere as a key component in their vision for the future of Shakespeare studies, Erickson and Hall emphasize the urgency of bringing the activist scholarship of pre-modern critical race studies to bear on the work we do—or wish to do—among the many communities with whom we interact.72 Such work cannot be unidirectional. We must foster collaborative, accountable, and mutually informing relationships that continue to grow well beyond the occasional anniversary. The official press release for the Folio tour, which was amplified in various articles and promotional materials around the country, emphasized a key fact about the First Folio: without this book, “we” might have lost eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays, including Measure for Measure and Macbeth.73 There is no denying the importance of the book or of the research library that was built to house the largest collection of its surviving copies. But as we enter a new century of reading, performing, studying, and doing things with Shakespeare, it is time to flip the focus and reframe the discourse of potential loss in new terms: what will be lost if we do not listen to, think with, and collaborate with the diverse publics of today? The Folger’s current renovation plans represent a decisive move away from enshrining the book in a glass case and toward a new phase of public engagement that promises to foster conversations about how this artifact can speak “among us.” But if Shakespeare is to endure beyond the vault, future combinations of the words “Shakespeare” and “American” must be more intentionally inclusive and antiracist, especially when they are funded by national agencies, state humanities councils, cultural foundations, private corporations, and research universities. This work will require thinking hard about what kinds of knowledge have been privileged in Shakespeare studies and what kinds of scholars, teachers, and artists are called upon to think about the relationships between Shakespeare and “us.” This essay has benefitted from the keen insight and unflagging support of a long list of generous colleagues. Ruben Espinosa, Katherine Gillen, and Geoffrey Way were critical to the development of this project from start to finish, and I cannot thank them enough for reading and discussing multiple drafts. I am also deeply indebted to Brandi K. Adams, Liza Blake, Urvashi Chakravarty, Vanessa I. Corredera, Ambereen Dadabhoy, Jeffrey S. Doty, Jason S. Farr, Leticia C. García, Marissa Greenberg, Matthew Harrison, Mira ‘Assaf Kafantaris, Jeremy Lopez, Nedda Mehdizadeh, Kayla Padilla, Debapriya Sarkar, James M. Sutton, Ayanna Thompson, Katherine Schaap Williams, Nora J. Williams, Lehua Yim, and my anonymous reviewers for championing and sharpening this work. I am enormously grateful to Bernardo Mazón Daher and Kalob Martinez for taking time to discuss their productions with me over the course of many months. I would also like to express my gratitude to the wonderful audiences at Texas A&M University–San Antonio, West Texas A&M University, the University of North Texas, and the RaceB4Race: Appropriations symposium, where I presented earlier versions of this piece. Finally, I wish to thank the Folger librarians and Reading Room staff as well as the Folger Education team for their generosity and assistance while I was studying the archives of the Folio tour. Footnotes 1 The full title of the touring exhibit was First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare. Between November 19, 2016 and January 22, 2017, the Folger hosted an exhibit entitled First Folio! Shakespeare’s American Tour, which celebrated the return of the Folios to the library. 2 The application process was administered through the American Library Association (ALA) website, but the application guidelines were generated in collaboration with the Folger. The committee who made the decisions included representatives from the ALA, the Cincinnati Museum Center (CMC), the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). For the text of the guidelines, see “Shakespeare and His First Folio: A Traveling Exhibition,” American Library Association, posted June 6, 2014, https://apply.ala.org/shakespeare/guidelines. According to Stephen H. Grant, the program received 140 inquiries and 101 completed applications. Grant, “First Folio, the book that gave us Shakespeare: On tour from the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2016,” Johns Hopkins University Press Blog, February 14, 2016, https://www.press.jhu.edu/news/blog/first-folio-book-gave-us-shakespeare-tour-folger-shakespeare-library-2016. 3 “Shakespeare and His First Folio,” American Library Association. 4 James M. Sutton, “The First Folio in Miami: Opening the Book Towards a New ‘Community Shakespeare’?” (lecture, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX, November 17, 2016). Sutton generously shared the text of this talk with me. 5 Sutton, “The First Folio in Miami.” 6 Ian Smith, “We Are Othello: Speaking of Race in Early Modern Studies,” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1 (2016): 104–24, 107. 7 Charles McNulty, “Race, Inequality, Polarized Politics: Why Shakespeare’s 1623 First Folio Matters in 2016,” Los Angeles Times, June 8, 2016, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-shakespeare-folio-20160531-snap-htmlstory.html. 8 Smith, “We Are Othello,” 107. 9 Peter Erickson and Kim F. Hall, “‘A New Scholarly Song’: Rereading Early Modern Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1 (2016): 1–13, 5. 10 Ayanna Thompson, Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), 20–43, 23. 11 Vanessa I. Corredera, “‘How Dey Goin’ to Kill Othello?!’: Key & Peele and Shakespearean Universality,” Journal of American Studies 54.1 (2020): 27–35, 28. 12 On the tension between multiculturalism and the homogenizing forces of Shakespeare in the undergraduate classroom, see Kim F. Hall, “Uses for a Dead White Male: Shakespeare, Feminism, and Diversity,” New Theatre Quarterly 11.41 (1995): 55–61. 13 For specific details of the requirements, see “Shakespeare and His First Folio,” American Library Association. 14 See Thompson, Passing Strange, 6 and 20–43. See also Hall, “Uses for a Dead White Man,” 58–61. 15 Ruben Espinosa, “Beyond The Tempest: Language, Legitimacy, and La Frontera,” in The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture, ed. Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes (New York: Palgrave, 2017), 41–61, 41. See also, Espinosa, “Stranger Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1 (2016): 51–67. In this piece, to which I return below, Espinosa urges us to recognize how the perspectives and “multivalent cultural identity” of Latinxs that are “so often overlooked” can be used “to cast a different light on Shakespeare” (64). I wish to make my own perspective as a white woman who lives and teaches in South Texas explicit. My intention in this essay is not to speak for Latinx communities but to advocate for their meaningful inclusion in and contributions to the field of Shakespeare studies. 16 Margo Hendricks, “Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race” (keynote address, Race and Periodization: A RaceB4Race Symposium, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, September 5, 2019). For an account of this event that situates RaceB4Race within the history of the Folger, see Mira ‘Assaf Kafantaris, “Why ‘Race Before Race’ Now?” Petites Nouvelles 1, September 21, 2020. 17 Thompson, Passing Strange, 17–18. 18 According to remarks delivered by Maribeth Cote, the Folio tour’s Public Engagement Coordinator, at the opening of the exhibit in Turabo, this was “the first bilingual exhibition the Folger has ever put on.” UAGM-Gurabo, “Apertura Exhibición – ¡El Primer Folio!, el libro que nos legó Shakespeare,” YouTube Video, 10:24, March 10, 2016, https://youtu.be/J0bcJz7D214. The NEH’s record for the major grant that funded the Folio tour indicates that Puerto Rico was imagined as a stop from the outset. See “Shakespeare and His First Folio,” National Endowment for the Humanities Funded Projects Query Form, GI-50663-14, https://securegrants.neh.gov/publicquery/main.aspx?f=1&gn=GI-50663-14. Accessed December 19, 2020. The grant information and application guidelines show that the Folger and its partners originally intended to include the US Virgin Islands as well. 19 A bilingual pamphlet compiled by the Government of Puerto Rico’s Department of Education for teachers on the occasion of the tercentenary of Cervantes’s and Shakespeare’s deaths in 1916 presents an illustrative example of the role Shakespeare has played in Puerto Rico’s colonial history. On the very first page of the front matter, Puerto Ricans are described as having a “double interest in keeping alive these two names” who are the “noblest representatives of” the “Spanish and Anglo-Saxon races,” respectively. Because Puerto Ricans are, according to the pamphlet’s imperial logic, “[d]escended from one of these two races and politically united with the other,” the island is “providentially located and related to bring these races together, to bridge with enduring bonds of sympathy and mutual understanding gap which need not be wider than the Culebra Cut.” Cervantes-Shakespeare Tercentenary, 1616–1916: Biographical Notes, Selections, and Appreciations, ed. Paul G. Miller and José Padín (San Juan: Bureau of Supplies, Printing, and Transportation, 1916), 3. In 1917, nearly two decades after the US invasion of Puerto Rico that led to Spain’s cession of the island in 1898, Puerto Rico would officially be made a US territory. 20 Carmen Ruiz de Fischler, phone interview with author, May 3, 2019. 21 Carla Della Gatta, “From West Side Story to Hamlet, Prince of Cuba: Shakespeare and Latinidad in the United States,” Shakespeare Studies 44 (2016): 151–56, 152. 22 On the tension between West Side Story’s stereotypical representation of Puerto Ricans and its enduring popularity, see Richie Pérez, “From Assimilation to Annihilation: Puerto Rican Images in U.S. Films,” in Latin Looks: Images of Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. Media, ed. Clara E. Rodríguez (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 142–63; Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez, José, Can You See?: Latinos On and Off Broadway (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 62–82; and Frances Negrón-Muntaner, “Feeling Pretty: West Side Story and Puerto Rican Identity Discourses,” Social Text 18.2 (2000): 83–106. For a recent audience reception study that considers the perspectives of young Puerto Rican women, see Kennaria Brown, “West Side Story Read from Below: Young Puerto Rican Women’s Cultural Readings,” The Communication Review 13.3 (2010): 193–215. Even more recently, Carina del Valle Schorske argued in response to the 2020 modernized Broadway revival directed by Ivo van Hove that the harm caused by the musical’s depiction of Puerto Ricans cannot be undone or fixed. del Valle Schorske, “Let ‘West Side Story’ and Its Stereotypes Die,” The New York Times, February 24, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/opinion/west-side-story-broadway.html. 23 “First Folio! Shakespeare’s American Tour Exhibition Material,” Folgerpedia, last edited June 3, 2020, https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/First_Folio!_Shakespeare%27s_American_Tour_Exhibition_Material. 24 According to the US Department of Education’s website, a Hispanic-Serving Institution “has an enrollment of undergraduate full-time equivalent students that is at least 25 percent Hispanic students.” US Department of Education, “Definition of Hispanic-Serving Institution, last modified April 11, 2016, https://www2.ed.gov/programs/idueshsi/definition.html. According to the 2020 United States Census, 44.2 percent of Tucson’s population is Hispanic or Latino. In 2010, Hispanics or Latinos made up 41.6 percent of the city’s population. “QuickFacts, Tucson city, Arizona,” United States Census Bureau. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/tucsoncityarizona. Accessed March 23, 2022. For a more nuanced understanding of HSIs, see Gina Ann Garcia, Becoming Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Opportunities for College and Universities (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2019). For a detailed history of the fight for funding and access to comprehensive public university education in the US–Mexico Borderlands, see Richard R. Valencia, Chicano Students and the Courts: The Mexican American Legal Struggle for Educational Equity (New York: New York UP, 2008), 251–67. 25 For a review of the College Station Folio programming, see Lauren Liebe, “Folio Rodeo: Shakespeare’s First Folio Visits Texas,” Early Modern Culture 12.23 (2017): 115–21. 26 The programming at Emory included a “Shakespeare and Accessibility Symposium,” a screening of Vishal Bhardwaj’s Indian Shakespeare film trilogy (Maqbool, Omkara, and Haider), a staged reading of Barbara and Carlton Molette’s Fortunes of the Moor (a sequel to Othello), and a staged reading of Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête directed by Paul Carter Harrison. 27 The Institute for American Indian Arts, which was among the New Mexico Museum of Art’s list of partners, hosted a student-organized two-day program of events entitled “Shakespeare Our Way,” which brought crucial Indigenous perspectives to the Folio’s visit to New Mexico. The events included poetry and scene readings from Taos Pueblo playwright James Lujan’s Kino and Teresa (an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet set during the Spanish Reconquista of New Mexico twelve years after the Pueblo Revolt in 1680) and Choctaw playwright Randy Reinholz’s Off the Rails (an adaptation of Measure for Measure set in the context of an Indian boarding school in 1880s Nebraska) as well as a screening of the 2013 film From Above, whose screenplay by Ojibwe writer and filmmaker James Bird was originally titled Chasing Shakespeare. It is worth noting, however, that these events were not part of the main host site’s programming or listed on their otherwise detailed website. Other host sites that made noteworthy efforts to engage with Indigenous Peoples, languages, and histories included Hawai'i and South Dakota, where Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy was translated into Hawaiian by Puakea Nogelmeier and into Lakota by Armik Mirzayan, respectively. The University of South Dakota also hosted a pedagogical discussion about Native American students’ experiences with Shakespeare. For an account of the Folio’s visit to the National Music Museum at the University of South Dakota, see Jennifer Schuessler, “Shakespeare, the Book Tour,” The New York Times, March 25, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/26/theater/shakespeare-the-book-tour.html. 28 See Barbara Fuchs, The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2013), 95; and William Childers, Transnational Cervantes (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006), 234. As Childers puts it, the “neglect of Spanish-language literature, particularly of ‘classics’ whose cultural capital is comparable to that of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Dante, is complicitous, albeit inadvertently, with the marginalization” of the growing Latinx population of the United States (234). 29 For a detailed account of Spanish in the US that theorizes the relationship between language and identity, see Rosina Lozano, An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States (Berkeley: U of California P, 2018). 30 Gillian Kiley, “¡Shakespeare para todos! Providence’s Modern-Day Middle Schoolers Tackle the Bard,” April 28, 2016, https://news.brown.edu/articles/2016/04/shakespeare-todos. 31 Kiley, “¡Shakespeare para todos!” 32 Brown University Library, “‘¡Shakespeare para todos!’ Romeo and Juliet in Spanish for 5th–7th graders,” accessed October 1, 2020, https://library.brown.edu/create/firstfolio/programming/shakespeare-para-todos/. 33 Ruben Espinosa, “‘Don’t it Make My Brown Eyes Blue’: Uneasy Assimilation and the Shakespeare-Latinx Divide,” in The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, ed. Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobson (New York: Routledge, 2019), 48–58, esp. 48–49. See also, Espinosa, “Beyond The Tempest,” 50–51; and Margo Hendricks, “Gestures of Performance: Rethinking Race in Contemporary Shakespeare,” in Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, ed. Ayanna Thompson (New York: Routledge, 2006), 187–204, esp. 196–98. 34 Thompson, Passing Strange, 119–44, esp. 130. The Folger featured this programming in their 2015–2016 annual report, describing it as “special outreach by Spanish-speaking student volunteers from Brown University who encouraged Latino students in Rhode Island to write and perform their own versions of Shakespeare’s classics.” Folger Shakespeare Library, Annual Report July 1, 2015–June 30, 2016, 2016, 3, https://www.folger.edu/sites/default/files/Folger_AR15-16_Online%20FINAL.pdf. 35 Another noteworthy example was a bilingual storytelling performance by Marco Cortes, a Chilean storyteller, during the Community Day held on March 26, 2016, in Seattle, Washington, while the Folio was in town. 36 Garneau produced these tradaptations at the height of debates about language, culture, and sovereignty in Canada. As Leanore Lieblein explains, tradaptation “came to exemplify what was experienced as a double colonization of Quebec.” Leiblein, “‘Cette Belle Langue’: The ‘Tradaptation’ of Shakespeare in Quebec,” in Shakespeare and the Language of Translation, ed. Ton Hoenselaars (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004), 255–69, esp. 255. For a fuller account of this tradition, see Jennifer Drouin, Shakespeare in Québec: Nation, Gender, and Adaptation (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2014), 89–111. 37 Writing about the specific process of translating Shakespeare in Spanish-speaking Latin America, Alfredo Michel Modenessi explains that the process “demands an awareness of difference to bring his work into mutually critical and enriching conversation with cultures that have developed valuable, though always provisional, identities from a history of mix, conflict, and exchange, with former and present powerhouses.” Modenessi, “‘A Double Tongue Within Your Mask’: Translating Shakespeare in/to Spanish-Speaking Latin America,” in Shakespeare and the Language of Translation, ed. Hoenselaars, 240–54, 244. 38 Sara Vogel and Ofelia García explain that the concept of “translanguaging,” which is distinct from code switching, “challenges prevailing theories of bilingualism/multilingualism and bilingual development in order to disrupt the hierarchies that have delegitimized the language practices of those who are minoritized.” Vogel and García, “Translanguaging,” Oxford ResearchEncyclopedia of Education (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017). For a theoretical framework for understanding Borderlands Shakespeare adaptations and appropriations that critique and intervene in the colonial histories of this region, see Katherine Gillen and Adrianna M. Santos, “Borderlands Shakespeare: The Decolonial Visions of James Lujan’s Kino and Teresa and Seres Jaime Magaña’s The Tragic Corrido of Romeo and Lupe,” Shakespeare Bulletin 38.4 (2020), 549–71. 39 There is currently no single complete or systematically curated archive of the Folio tour. The primary “archive” to which I refer here is an uneven collection of ephemera, print publicity, newspaper clippings, and exhibition materials from tour sites held at the Folger under the title “First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare. Tour Archives.” Highlights from the tour were included in a November 2016 exhibition at the Folger entitled First Folio! Shakespeare’s American Tour, which is detailed in a Folgerpedia entry: Folger Shakespeare Library, “First Folio! Shakespeare’s American Tour Exhibition Material,” Folgerpedia, edited June 3, 2020, https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/First_Folio!_Shakespeare%27s_American_Tour_Exhibition_Material. Examples of tour-related programming were also described in various Folger publications, including the 2016 and 2017 annual Folger reports and a series of posts on the Folger’s Shakespeare & Beyond blog. Each tour site was required to submit a final report of their activities and experiences to the Folger, but these internal documents are not publicly available. To be clear, I am not suggesting that these productions were actively suppressed, but their absence in the robust though incomplete archives is noteworthy. 40 Measure for Measure | Medida por medida was performed on March 18 and 19, 2016. The timing had much to do with the rehearsal and production circumstances of an ongoing project. Despite the fact that these performances were advertised as “Measure for Measure with a Latino spin” in an official press release about the San Diego Folio tour stop by The Old Globe, Mazón explained in our conversation that he had no contact with the events that took place at the San Diego Public Library and The Old Globe Theatre when the Folio arrived in June. “Shakespeare Takes Center Stage This Summer in San Diego,” press release, February 24, 2016, https://www.theoldglobe.org/news–media/latest-news/press-release-page/first-folio/. Bernardo Mazón Daher, phone interview with author, March 21, 2019. 41 The Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2011 production of Measure for Measure, directed by Bill Rauch, was set in a border town in the 1970s and added an all-woman mariachi band called Las Colibrí as the Chorus. 42 Bernardo Mazón Daher and Kate Langsdorf, “The Fuñata and Spanglishisms with Bernardo Mazón Daher,” The Context, podcast, November 29, 2018. 43 Mazón, phone interview, March 21, 2019. For another reflection on the process and effects of creating bilingual Shakespeare, see Antonio Ocampo-Guzman, “My Own Private Shakespeare; or, Am I Deluding Myself?” in Colorblind Shakespeare, ed. Thompson, 125–36, esp. 129–30. See also Carla Della Gatta, “Shakespeare and American Bilingualism: Borderland Productions of Romeo y Julieta,” in Renaissance Shakespeare/Shakespeare Renaissances: Proceedings of the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress, ed. Martin Procházka, Michael Dobson, Andreas Höfele, and Hanna Scolnicov (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2014), 286–95. 44 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 53–64. 45 Carola Suárez-Orozco and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, Children of Immigration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001), 135. 46 This quotation is from Measure for Measure | Medida por medida, an unpublished script obtained from Bernardo Mazón Daher. The lines above correspond to 2.2.144–59 in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Lines 150–56 have been cut. My quotations and citations of Shakespeare’s plays are from The Norton Shakespeare, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016). 47 Bernardo Mazón Daher, personal correspondence with author, July 15, 2019. 48 The line in Shakespeare’s play reads: “Plainly conceive, I love you” (2.4.138). 49 These lines correspond, roughly, to 2.3.19–27. There are no quotation marks around the first English “translation” presumably because Mazón alters Shakespeare’s “fair one” to “good man” to account for the gender shift. The phrase “the sin you carry” loses its reference to Juliet’s pregnancy but still resonates with Claudio’s moral and legal burden. Juliet is on stage throughout the scene and speaks the remainder of her lines as they appear in Shakespeare’s text. 50 Espinosa, “Stranger Shakespeare,” 57. 51 Kalob Martinez, “El Beto MFA Summary Book” (Master’s thesis, University of Connecticut, 2016). The name Beto, which resonates sonically with the “beth” in Macbeth is a common nickname for Spanish names that end in “-berto,” such as Roberto, Alberto, and Humberto. The addition of the definite article “el,” or “the,” in Martinez’s title reflects a common nicknaming practice among cartel leaders, such as El Chapo, El Mayo, and El Chango. 52 As I have noted elsewhere, El Beto is part of a larger trend of “narco” Macbeths that draw on popular comparisons between Shakespeare’s play and the cultures of narcotrafficking in order to interrogate “the ongoing formation of ethnoracial ideologies and the policing of borders.” For a fuller discussion of this phenomenon, see Kathryn Vomero Santos, “Seeing Shakespeare: Narco Narratives and Neocolonial Appropriations of Macbeth in the US–Mexico Borderlands,” Literature Compass (2022). DOI: 10.1111/lic3.12636. 53 Kalob Martinez, Skype interview with author, March 20, 2019. Martinez’s experience is not unique. For an account of his turn to directing and producing after “many casting disappointments,” see José A. Esquea, “A Post-Apocalyptic Macbeth: Teatro LA TEA’s Macbeth 2029,” in Weyward Macbeth, ed. Scott L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 133–35, esp. 133. See also, Ocampo-Guzman, “My Own Private Shakespeare,” 125–36. 54 This quotation is taken from CTRepTheatre, “CRT Behind the Scenes - EL BETO - MFA PUPPET ARTS FESTIVAL,” YouTube video, 2:27, March 8, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuJvOeJRh_o. Two exceptions are Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff, whose faces are sculpted from images of Natalia Cuevas, the actress who played human Lady Macbeth in this production of El Beto. 55 Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein, and John Bell, “Introduction,” in The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance, ed. Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein, and John Bell (New York: Routledge, 2014), 1–13, 3. 56 By bringing his identity to bear on Shakespeare in general and Macbeth in particular through this unique “intermingling of flesh and matter,” Martinez joined a growing tradition of Latinx, Black, Asian, and Native American theater artists who, as Thompson puts it, “have seen themselves in Macbeth precisely because it is weyward: that is, weird, fated, fateful, perverse, intractable, willful, erratic, unlicensed, fugitive, troublesome, and wayward.” Ayanna Thompson, “What Is a ‘Weyward’ Macbeth?” in Weyward Macbeth, ed. Newstok and Thompson, 3–10, esp. 9. For a detailed list of recent Latinx productions and adaptations of the play, see Scott L. Newstok and Brent Butgereit, “Selected Productions of Macbeth Featuring Non-Traditional Casting,” in Weyward Macbeth, ed. Newstok and Thompson, 241–52. 57 My analysis of this production is based on a video recording available on Vimeo: Kalob Martinez, El Beto, 39:30, May 15, 2016, https://vimeo.com/166757782. 58 As Nicholás Kanellos notes, corridos have played an important role in Chicanx theater since the early days of the teatro movement that began with Luis Valdez’s Teatro Campesino in 1965. See Kanellos, “Folklore in Chicano Theater and Chicano Theater as Folklore,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 15.1 (1978): 57–82. Two of the most influential studies of corridos are Américo Paredes’s With a Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (Austin: U of Texas P, 1958) and María Herrera-Sobek’s The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis (Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1990). Several recent scholarly studies have analyzed the evolution, proliferation, and social contexts of the narcocorrido subgenre. See, for example, Juan Carlos Ramirez-Pimienta, “Del corrido de narcotráfico al narcocorrido: Orígenes y desarrollo del canto a los traficantes,” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 23.1 (2004): 21–41; Mark Cameron Edberg, El Narcotraficante: Narcocorridos and the Construction of a Cultural Persona on the U.S.–Mexico Border (Austin: U of Texas P, 2004); and Shaylih Muehlmann, When I Wear My Alligator Boots: Narco-Culture in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands (Berkeley: U of California P, 2014). 59 For an account of the agricultural origins of the drug trade in Mexico, see Ioan Grillo, El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), esp. 17–54. For more on the tactics that Latinx playwrights have used to critique the economic violence engendered by neoliberal capitalism, see Patricia A. Ybarra, Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2017). 60 Jelena Antanasijevic, “El Beto,” accessed April 22, 2019, https://www.jelenaantanasijevic.com/el-beto/. 61 On the practice and significance of heraldry in early modern England and in Shakespeare’s plays, see Nigel Ramsay, ed., Heralds and Heraldry in Shakespeare’s England (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2014). 62 R. Andrew Chesnut, Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), 24. In a recent article on Besos de azucar, a 2013 Mexican film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, Alfredo Michel Modenessi describes Santa Muerte as “the patroness of all things demonized in conventional society,” but this characterization does not account for the full complexity of her identity and the many roles she plays among worshippers. Modenessi, “‘Both Alike in Dignity’: Havana and Mexico City Play Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare Survey 71 (2018): 51–58, esp. 56–57. 63 On the denunciation of Santa Muerte and destruction of roadside shrines, see Chesnut, Devoted to Death, 44–47. 64 Martinez, Skype interview with author, March 20, 2019. 65 Kalob Martinez, personal correspondence with author, April 1, 2019. William Shakespeare, Obras Completas, trans. Luis Astrana Marín (Madrid: Aguilar, 1929). On the use and dominance of Astrana Marín’s translation in Spanish-speaking contexts outside of Spain, see Modenessi, “A Double Tongue Within Your Mask,” 246, and “Of Shadows and Stones: Revering and Translating ‘the Word’ Shakespeare in Mexico,” Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001): 152–64, esp. 154–56. 66 “Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return / To plague th’inventor” (1.7.9–10). 67 I am quoting from Martinez’s stage directions here. 68 “A foolish thought, to say a sorry sight” (2.2.24). 69 Bernardo Mazón Daher, phone interview with author, March 21, 2019. 70 Erickson and Hall, “A New Scholarly Song,” 3. 71 Erickson and Hall, “A New Scholarly Song,” 3. 72 Erickson and Hall, “A New Scholarly Song,” 10. 73 Folger Shakespeare Library, “First Folio! Shakespeare’s American Tour: The Largest Ever Display of First Folios in One Venue,” press release, accessed June 8, 2019, https://www.folger.edu/press-release-first-folio-shakespeare-american-tour-exhibition. © Folger Shakespeare Library 2022. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/pages/standard-publication-reuse-rights) © Folger Shakespeare Library 2022. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - ¿Shakespeare para todos?
JF - Shakespeare Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/sq/quac044
DA - 2022-11-21
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/shakespeare-para-todos-lOdWqkWb00
SP - 49
EP - 75
VL - 73
IS - 1-2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -