The present paper aims to explore the role of Queen Elizabeth I as literary patron and dedicatee of translations by focusing on the dedication that precedes Geoffrey Fenton’s rendering of Francesco Guicciardini’s Storia d’Italia. Fenton’s extensive dedication to the Queen is extremely revealing of the manner in which the system of patronage was understood in Elizabethan England. Moreover, it facilitates our understanding of the translator’s role and position at the Elizabethan court, of the political and cultural implications of choosing the Queen as the patron of a translation.
Translation has been essential to the development of languages and cultures throughout the centuries, particularly in the early modern period when it became a cornerstone of the process of transition from Latin to vernacular productions, in such countries as France, Italy, England and Spain. This process was accompanied by a growing interest in defining the rules and features of the practice of translation. The present article aims to examine the principles that underlay the highly intertextual early modern translation theory by considering its classical sources and development. It focuses on subjects that were constantly reiterated in any discussion about translation: the debate concerning the best methods of translation, the sense-for-sense/ word-for-word dichotomy - a topos that can be traced to the discourse on translation initiated by Cicero and Horace and was further developed by the Church fathers, notably St. Jerome, and eventually inherited by both medieval and Renaissance translators. Furthermore, it looks at the differences and continuities that characterise the medieval and Renaissance discourses on translation with a focus on the transition from the medieval, free manner of translation to the humanist, philological one.
The exploration of the multifarious ways in which cultural reworkings and translations have been involved in the transmission and circulation of various discourses, concepts and ideas in different historical periods and places, has become one of the most productive fields of inquiry in Early Modern Studies. Both translation and cultural reworking have been understood as forms of rewriting that involve altering, reinterpreting and adapting texts (Fischlin&Fortier, 2000; Lefevere, 1992). The main difference between the two concepts lies in their relation to the text/texts they are supposed to rewrite. Thus, translations are related to more direct and evident means of appropriation and rewriting, most often acknowledging themselves as attempts to render a specific text from one language/culture into another. Cultural reworkings, on the other hand, presuppose the appropriation and remaking of various texts and discourses in a more indirect manner, without necessarily pointing to the particular texts that are being rewritten. They represent threads that can be identifiable or at times altered beyond recognition, frequently leading to the creation of a completely different text. Therefore, cultural reworking involves the appropriation, rewriting and recontextualization - more or less explicit- of literary and non-literary texts and discourses that belong to the, cultural, political and ideological context of a certain work.
This essay discusses how productions of Shakespeare’s plays that transcend various geographical, national, and linguistic boundaries have influenced the theatrical-political discourse in East-Central Europe in the twenty-first century. It focuses primarily on the work of four internationally-established directors: Andrei Şerban (Romania), Jan Klata (Poland), David Jařab (Czech Republic), and Matei Vișniec (Romania), whose works have facilitated interregional cultural exchange, promoting artistic innovation and experimentation in the region and beyond. Among the boundary-crossing productions analysed in detail are Vișniec’s Richard III will not Take Place, Jařab’s Macbeth – Too Much Blood, Klata’s Measure for Measure, and Serban’s Richard III. The essay also notes that while there has been a relative scarcity of Shakespearean productions in this region engaging closely with gender and race inequalities, productions such as Klata’s African Tales or Vladimír Morávek’s Othello manage to work with these politically charged topics in subtler but still productive ways. The essay concludes that the region’s shared historical experience of totalitarian regimes followed by the struggles of nascent democracies, provides a fertile ground for a diverse and internationally ambitious Shakespearean theatre.
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