Five Kings

Adapting Welles Adapting Shakespeare in Québec

Authors

  • Jennifer Drouin McGill University
  • Fiona Ritchie McGill University

Abstract

Five Kings: L'Histoire de notre chute is an ambitious adaptation in French of Shakespeare's two tetralogies of history plays. As the title suggests, the creators have been influenced by Orson Welles's adaptation of the same name, and in the program notes they express their desire to pick up where Welles left off. We can therefore read Five Kings as an attempt by these four adapters to stake their claim as artistic professionals and redoubtable Shakespeareans. The Five Kings creative team is to be congratulated for managing to stage the entire sequence of Shakespeare's eight history plays in the same five-hour time frame in which Welles staged the second tetralogy. Besting Welles is no mean feat.

Author Biographies

Jennifer Drouin, McGill University

Jennifer Drouin is the author of Shakespeare in Québec: Nation, Gender, and Adaptation (University of Toronto Press, 2014). She has also published numerous essays on Shakespeare and early modern drama, gender and queer studies, and film studies. She is working on a digital humanities project entitled Shakespeare au/in Québec (SQ). Formerly a tenured Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama, she is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (IGSF) at McGill University where she is also completing a double degree in Québec civil law and Canadian common law.

Fiona Ritchie, McGill University

Fiona Ritchie is Associate Professor of Drama and Theatre in the Department of English at McGill University. She is the author of Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and the co-editor (with Peter Sabor) of Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Her publications include essays in Shakespeare Survey, The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), and Shakespeare in Stages: New Theatre Histories (Cambridge University Press, 2010). She is currently researching women's involvement in British theatre outside London in the long eighteenth century and working on a collaborative project on Shakespeare and riot.

Issue Cover text: B&L, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2017. Image: A performer with full face paint and an ornate headdress stares right intensely.

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Published

2017-09-01

Issue

Vol. 11 No. 1 (2017): Global Shakespeares in World Markets and Archives

Section

Appropriations in Performance Reviews