Callie Kimball's The Rape of Lucrece (2007)

A Woman's Creative Response to Shakespeare's Poem

Authors

Krystyna Kujawinska Courtney University of Lodz

Keywords:

Lucrece, Performance Studies, Feminist Theory

Abstract

Though from their inception Shakespeare's works have been re-written, re-structured, and re-created in countless adaptations and appropriations, The Rape of Lucrece has rarely been recently included in this practice. After a brief survey of reasons why The Rape of Lucrece is generally excluded from contemporary critical discourse and has rarely been treated as an inspiration for interpreting one's own national history and literature, the main part of the essay presents Callie Kimball's creative response to Shakespeare's poem. The dramaturgical adaptation of this young American playwright, theater director, and actor was staged by the Washington Shakespeare Company, Washington, D.C., as a part of the 2007 annual Shakespeare Festival. Though this first ever woman's rendition of the poem was not of a feminist character, Kimball's appropriation attempted to establish Lucrece in the context of her time and world, while making her choices not just understandable, but inevitable to a modern audience. Both the text and the production suggest women's growing immunity to men's attempts to subject and objectify them in literary texts, culture, politics, and daily life.

Author Biography

Krystyna Kujawinska Courtney, University of Lodz

Krystyna Kujawinska Courtney is Associate Professor at the University of Lodz, Poland, where she chairs the British and Commonwealth Studies Department and serves as Vice-Dean at the Faculty of International and Politological Studies. Her research interests focus mainly, but not exclusively, on literary theory, especially gender and New Historicist studies: she initiated and edited a translation of Stephen Greenblatt's essays, introducing his concepts in Poland (2006). She has published, internationally and locally, numerous articles and essays on the long-term global authority of Shakespeare's plays and on his dramatic works in relation to theater and early modern culture. Her selected books include: Shakespeare's Local Habitations (with R. S. White), 2007; The Globalization of Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century (with John Mercer), 2003; On Page and Stage : Shakespeare in Polish and World Culture, 2000; The Kingdom on Stage: Shakespeare's History Plays in the Theatre (in Polish), 1997; "Th'Interpretation of the Time": The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare's Roman Plays, 1993. She is a member of the World Shakespeare Bibliography and has edited an annotated Polish Bibliography of Shakespeare, 1980-2000 (2005); she also co-edits (with Yoshiko Kawachi) an international periodical, Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation, and Performance (http://versita.metapress.com/content/122365). Her latest monographs (in Polish and in English) are devoted to Ira Aldridge (2009) and to European culture in diversity (2011).