The Shakespearean scholar James C. Bulman suggests that acts of translation inevitably “subvert the authority of Shakespeare’s text” in that they do “ideological, ethnological, and cultural work that can only be achieved extra-linguistically in productions which remain faithful to the authorized text” (1996: 8). However, it must be noted that Bulman is actually encouraging native speakers to take their lead from “foreign” theatrical styles. These, in his view, serve to “revitalize the plays for contemporary audiences” – and thus overcome stagnant conventions of Shakespeare production that remain not only overly
beholden to an “authorized” text, but subject to its “tyranny” (1996: 8).182 His comments
also imply that translation itself might be understood as a form of performance, where creative choices are brought to bear on a text in much the same way as occurs when a director and a group of actors put on a production.
Bulman’s analysis of translation offers a useful guide to Ostermeier and Mayenburg’s approach. The director has characterised their process as un-German; he told Andrew Dickson (2013a) that German directors of Shakespeare are typically more interested in painting striking stage-pictures around the text (the example he used was asking actors to piss in buckets) than “going deep inside the text”. According to Ostermeier, he and Mayenburg are not interested in “stupid, modernized versions, using street slang” but instead strive “to be as truthful as possible to the meaning” of Shakespeare’s original lines (Modreanu 2010). As a result, they reject blank verse: Ostermeier has variously insisted that, because the German language uses far more syllables than English, attempting to preserve the poetry often distorts the sense (Modreanu 2010); that “[Marius] doesn’t respect the verse because he wants to have the thought” (Dickson 2013); and that he and Mayenburg endeavour to translate, in their German versions, “content against the form” (Easterman 2013). Positing such aims
182 Lyn Gardner made the same appeal to British directors in a Guardian blog, asking them to
learn from their foreign counterparts and “set classic texts free” (Gardner 2012). Fascinatingly,
she cited Ostermeier’s work on Ibsen and Katie Mitchell’s production of The Seagull (2006) as
(content, meaning, sense, thought), Ostermeier seemingly masks subjective valuations with terms that smack of objective clarity. However, he is also the first to acknowledge that the meanings they perceive in the text are contingent and limited, claiming “Every generation writes its own Shakespeare” (Modreanu 2010). The “sense” he and Mayenburg perceive in (and create from) the language of these plays is a product of, to
use Bulman’s term, their own “revitalising” gazes.183
An example from Hamlet serves to clarify their approach. Seeking to discover
possible meanings behind Hamlet’s response to Claudius, “I am too much i’th’ sun” (1.2.67), Ostermeier told Dickson (2013) that at least three interpretations immediately sprang to mind. He insisted that, although impossible to distil every meaning into a single German phrase, Mayenburg tries to get close to some of them as “it is worth trying to make the audience understand this complexity of thinking”. Hamlet’s words two lines later, “A little more than kin and less than kind” (1.2.65), fed into the meaning director and translator perceived in “I am too much i’th’ sun” (i.e. of the new king, who attempts to name me as his son, and I don’t want to be this close to him and his
corrupted kingdom184). In Mayenburg’s version, both lines were concentrated into a
single German sentence. In response to Claudius’s “Und nun zu dir, mein Neffe Hamlet,
und mein Sohn – ” (And now to you, my nephew Hamlet, and my son –), Hamlet cut him off
with “Näher verwandt, als mir lieb ist” ([We are] closer related than suits me)”. As the line was
slightly muffled (Eidinger churlishly scoffed chicken from a take-away carton as he was being addressed), Claudius asked him to repeat what he had said. Sacrificing the pun in the original, this example shows how Mayenburg’s translation fixes what an emotional
realist production might communicate “extra-linguistically” – form, wordplay, rhythm
183 Although Mayenburg is credited as the author of these adaptations, he works closely with
Ostermeier. At the beginning of the translation process for Hamlet, for example, they discussed the
adaptation together for ten days in Cuba, where Mayenburg had been invited to receive an award. Exploring key lines of Shakespeare’s play in English, they also generated ideas for the production’s visual aesthetic alongside the translation (Dickson 2013).
and imagery are understood by these practitioners as revelatory of a process of thinking, and they probe the psychology behind the poetry.
This approach to translation, however, has elicited criticism in Germany.
Reviewing Hamlet, Hartmut Krug (2008) argued, “Although Mayenburg seeks to
discover a functionalist language, which in its neutrality and sobriety should express the impression of the characters and the relationships of the court, one misses the poetic barbs of Schlegel’s translation or the sensual power of the translation by Erich Fried”.
Reinhard Wengierek (2010), reviewing Othello, similarly mourned the fact that
Mayenburg’s version in no way captured the fall from the heights of “the sublime to the
wretched, from sweet to sour, from purity to muck”.185 These critics perceive the
promotion of sense over sound and poetry as problematic. Manuel Brug (2008),
regarding Ostermeier’s Hamlet, went so far as to warn off literary purists: “Anyone
looking for the author Shakespeare will find instead the director’s bag of popular tricks.” What these critics fail to address, however, is that none of these German translations – from Schlegel to Fried – are Shakespeare. For example, Schlegel’s poetry encourages the listener or reader to see images, but often less precise ones than their English counterparts, using words with fewer or different resonances to those they
translate. Schlegel’s version of “A little more than kin and less than kind” (Mehr als
befreundet, weniger als Freund), when converted back into English, reads as “More than close
friends, less than friend”. Similarly his version of “I am too much i’th’ sun” (Ich habe zuviel
Sonne) means, literally, “I have too much sun”. In pursuing poetry, Schelgel invites us to hear Hamlet thinking about Claudius in terms of friendship rather than family, and his sun is limited to the one that shines; unlike the English equivalent whose status as a
homophone doubles its meaning, son in German (Sohn) is pronounced differently from
sun (Sonne). Despite the deep-seated admiration for these nineteenth-century Schlegel
185 Reviewing Maß für Maß, Dirk Schümers (2011) found it unfortunate that Ostermeier had
chosen a modern prose version, by Marius von Mayenburg, rather than the blank verse of Schlegel-Tieck: “Ostermeier’s routine, sparsely furnished, cool Regietheater cannot counteract this de-boning of the drama to a fast-food meal, this disenchantment of action that is only tolerable as a medieval fairy tale”.
and Tieck versions in German culture, Ostermeier finds them to be stranded in the gap between two cultures. He described these popular translations as written in “a strange language no one ever spoke […] a false German, with blank verse, with rhyme, with a loss of content and sense, and with a loss of rhythm and truthfulness to proper German” (Dickson 2011a).
Although Mayenburg’s versions are written in a recognisable modern idiom, in pursuing “sense” they inevitably impose choices on Shakespeare’s texts that limit their potential meanings; there is no possibility, for instance, of interpreting Lars Eidinger’s “Näher verwandt, als mir lieb ist” as a reference to the sun and light of the marriage celebration and its unwonted illumination of his own spiritual dolour. Tom Mustroph
(2008), in his Hamlet review, therefore described the “modern, fresh, fast” translation as
“flat, [having] lost a dimension of hidden significance”. Some have interpreted this
linguistic loss as a sign of Regietheater trumping writer’s theatre. Reviewing Othello,
Michael Shane Boyle found that “the shelving of Shakespeare’s rich and elegant language” signalled a director “adapt[ing] Shakespeare to his style” rather than his style to Shakespeare (Boyle 2012: 83). What these assessments fall short of indicating, however, is that Ostermeier doesn’t limit the text’s generative capabilities to verbal expression.
Shakespeare’s language is defiantly present on Ostermeier’s stage, serving to generate a multi-sensory form of scenic writing. Whilst doing their “extra-linguistic” work verbally, his productions find non-verbal means of staging Shakespeare’s original words. In harnessing writing to do sensory and sensual work in the theatre, these productions radically recast common definitions of textuality as a distinct ontological category from performance, exposing the intellectual and artistic limitations of binaries that hold in opposition page and stage, writer and director, words and sensuality, language (or text) and performance. At this juncture, it is therefore necessary to explore the line persistently drawn in the sand between performance and textuality in order to perceive how, perhaps unknowingly, Ostermeier’s productions ride roughshod across it.