This paper contributes to Shakespearean onomastics by investigating the ways of rendering six names of the mechanicals from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in ten Russian translations. It examines both well-known and little publicized editions of the frequently performed Shakespearean comedy. The research shows that the majority of the names were translated into Russian according to the commentaries provided in the 20th century British annotated editions. Under those interpretations, the mechanicals’ names reflected the occupations or associated qualities. In the analyzed Russian translations, the names were translated in eight, though with occasional inconsistencies in the semantics and register. The translations of Grigoryev, Lozinsky and Soroka showed a trend in applying the adequate equivalents based on the semantics of the occupations.
Although according to popular belief puppet theatre is a children's amusement while Shakespeare traditionally belongs to live theatre, in Hungary the two acting traditions seem to come together in the 2000s, bringing positive changes in both spheres. Theatre practitioners elsewhere in the Central European region have already experimented with ‘the third genre' (JURKOWSKI 2014: 33), namely, a new way of theatrical expression featuring actors and puppet elements on stage. Indeed, talented theatre directors could often find no work in any other domain. In Hungary, where puppet theatres were obliged to cater to no one else but a very young audience and were thus for the general adult spectatorship often overlooked, the time has come only in the post-1989 decades to explore this new and highly metaphorical theatrical language. The era has produced changes in puppetry training and puppetry as educational medium. Within this environment, relatively few stagings of Shakespeare were produced, although these included remarkable productions by Krofta and Balogh in 2006, and by Somogyi and Szikszai in 2018.
The article discusses an Indian film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream entitled 10ml Love (dir. Sharat Katariya, 2012). There is little scholarship on 10ml Love, which has been studied mainly as an independent film in Hinglish that depicts the lives of the cosmopolitan youth in urban India. Drawing upon recent readings of the play that identify elements of racism and whiteness as well as an analysis from an Orientalist lens that sees India as a gendered utopia, I suggest that the film adaptation highlights not racial/white supremacy but caste supremacy; furthermore, it indulges not in Orientalist tropes but tropes of indigenous Otherness based on religion, gender, caste, and class. I argue that this film presents two opposing political utopias-a right-wing utopia that stands for the maintenance of traditional values and a left-wing utopia that attempts to challenge, question, and subvert the conservative order. However, 10ml Love seems to endorse neither of the two utopias wholly; its reality appears to lie between the two utopias, a reality that is marked by stereotypes of Otherness. This paper analyses the audio-visual depiction of the tension between the utopias at both the ends of the political spectrum, as well as the realities of Otherness created by the presence of various social locations and identities in Indian society.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.