Shakespeare in Tehran
"My talk took more than an hour, and
when I brought it to a close, I expected there to be a rush for the exit. But
to my surprise, everyone stayed seated, and there began a question period, a
flood of inquiries and challenges stretching out for the better part of another
hour. Most of the questions were from students, the majority of them women,
whose boldness, critical intelligence, and articulateness startled me. Very few
of the faculty and students had traveled outside of Iran, but the questions
were, for the most part, in flawless English and extremely well informed. Even
while I tried frantically to think of plausible answers, I jotted a few of them
down:
In postmodern times, universality has repeatedly been
questioned. How should we reconcile Shakespeare’s universality with
contemporary theory?
You said that Shakespeare spent his life turning pieces of
his consciousness into stories. Don’t we all do this? What distinguishes him?
Considering your works, is it possible to say that you are
refining your New Historicist theory when we compare it with Cultural
Materialism?
In your Cultural Mobility you write about cultural
change, pluralism, and tolerance of differences while in your Renaissance
Self-Fashioning you talk about an unfree subject who is the ideological
product of the relations of power: Renaissance Self-Fashioning is filled
with entrapment theory. How can an individual be an unfree ideological product
of the relations of power and also at the same time an agent in the dialectic
of cultural change and persistence?
What the questions demonstrated with
remarkable eloquence was the way in which Shakespeare functions as a place to
think intensely, honestly, and with freedom. “Do you believe,” one of the
students asked, “that Bolingbroke’s revolution in Richard II was
actually meant to establish a better, more just society or was it finally only
a cynical seizure of wealth and power?” “I don’t know,” I answered; “What do
you think?” “I think,” the student replied, “that it was merely one group of
thugs replacing another.”
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