Shakespeare and authority :|the intersection of theatre, locality and politics in Turkey

Abstract

In this dissertation, I investigate the complex phenomenon of political Shakespeare adaptations in modern Turkish theatre and examine five distinct cases from independent theatre artists, Can Yücel’s Bahar Noktası (1980), Boğaziçi Gösteri Sanatları Topluluğu’s Kim Var Orada? (2015), Moda Sahnesi’s Hamlet (2013), Semaver Kumpanya’s Titus Andronicus: A Five Act Maganda Tragedy (2010), and Serdar Biliş and Sami Özbudak’s Romeo and Juliet (2016). Since the late twentieth century, William Shakespeare’s plays have become a common ground for addressing certain fundamental cultural and political transformations in Turkey, and adapting Shakespeare to the local context is often accompanied by a politically resistant desire to revisit the issues of ethnic difference and political otherness. My cases reveal that the practice of adaptation is carried out as a collaborative process, which embraces oftentimes neglected performance dynamics such as the historical/cultural background of the theatre site and concerns over Shakespeare’s politically loaded legacy. Theatre artists’ focus on the collaborative features of adaptation goes parallel to their major adaptation tendency: to unearth ethnic difference and/or political otherness in debating political fault lines in Turkey’s recent history. It also gives them room for untangling the issues of legitimacy, fidelity and cultural hegemony that have been central for Adaptation Studies. I argue that these theatre artists step outside the binary logic that surrounds the “original/adaptation” opposition since negotiating Shakespeare’s preserved, authorial status necessarily involves the questions of difference and identity that have marked modern Turkish history.