Shakespeare and the Cultural Olympiad

Contesting Gender and the British Nation in the BBC's The Hollow Crown

Authors

L. Monique Pittman Andrews University

Abstract

As part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad celebrating both the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics, the BBC launched a season of programs, entitled Shakespeare Unlocked, most notably presenting the plays of the second tetralogy in four feature-length adaptations released under the unifying title The Hollow Crown. These plays so obviously engaged with the question of English nationalism suited a year in which the United Kingdom wrestled with British identity in a post-colonial and post-Great Recession world. Through its adaptative and filmic vocabularies, however, The Hollow Crown advances a British nationalism unresponsive to the casualties — often women and ethnic minorities — incurred over the course of Britain's self-formation and acts of self-defining. While the adaptation of Richard II strives to preserve a complex understanding of woman's role in British history, both parts of Henry IV and Henry V sacrifice such depiction to the manifest destiny of Henry V's apotheosis. The Hollow Crown admits little room for questioning a construction of British nationalism as essentially white, male, and validated by the cultural iconicity of Shakespeare's canon.

Author Biography

L. Monique Pittman, Andrews University

L. Monique Pittman is Professor of English and Director of the J. N. Andrews Honors Program at Andrews University. Her research explores theatrical, televisual, and cinematic performances of Shakespeare, She examines the ways in which assumptions about Shakespearean authority inflect the construction of gender and ethnic identities in performance, which is the focus of her monograph, Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Adaptation (2011). Recent work considers three productions of The Taming of the Shrew at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater (Shakespeare Survey, Fall 2014) and intertextual referencing in Ralph Fiennes's Coriolanus (Shakespeare Bulletin, 2015).