What is it about?
Analyzes threatened act 4 man-on-man violence in 2 Shakespeare plays, recently produced with implications for understanding re-citation, racial politics, and meaning through performance. The focal productions are Compagnia de' Colombari's 2016 "Merchant of Venice" in the Jewish Ghetto in Venice and The Public Theater's 2017 "Julius Caesar" in Central Park; the article's framing of the issues comes from Dr Martin Luther King's self-quotation of his "fierce urgency of now" phrase in his 1967 speech announcing his opposition to the war in Vietnam, exactly a year before his death.
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Why is it important?
We create traditions and meaning through both repetition and disruption of performance patterns, in art as in politics: this essay demonstrates the importance of this process in understanding Shakespeare's plays and our own fractured communities, with special attention to the role (and hope) of racial recognition amidst "the fierce urgency of now."
Perspectives
This is also a tribute to the eloquence and prescience of Dr. Martin Luther King's speech, which needs to be re-heard and heeded today, anew.
Diana Henderson
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: ‘Hard hearts’ resounding now: anatomising race, resistance, and community in The Merchant in Venice (2016) and Julius Caesar (2017), Cahiers Élisabéthains A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, July 2019, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0184767819851076.
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