English professor gives talk about Shakespeare’s plays


On Wednesday, professor Emily Anderson hosted a presentation about the later adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. (Hyeonmi Shin | Daily Trojan)

Professor Emily Anderson gave a presentation about Shakespearean adaptations by playwrights and actors seeking to boost their own popularity on Wednesday night in Mark Taper Hall of Humanities.

Anderson started off by explaining that in the 18th century, William Shakespeare was considered a mediocre, second-string playwright whose works were nowhere near as popular as they are today. At the time, however, playwrights did not create many original works, mainly due to political pressures, and many drew inspiration from the past. As a result, some adapted Shakespeare’s work in various forms.

Most commonly, adaptations involved actively rewriting Shakespeare’s plays. Actors who performed Shakespeare’s plays put their own interpretations into scripts and altered the themes of the plays. Playwrights like David Garrick even omitted and rewrote parts of the original scripts, Anderson said.

The adaptations created from Shakespeare’s plays drastically changed their storylines as well.

In “The History of King Lear,” an adaptation of Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” playwright Nahum Tate turned a tragedy into a romance; while King Lear and Cordelia die in the original,  in Tate’s version, they live and Cordelia gets a romantic interest. To these playwrights, adaptation meant enhancing the core of Shakespeare’s stories.

While the playwrights claimed to edit Shakespeare’s plays to further his glory and recognition, in reality, they acted with ulterior motives of improving their own reputations, Anderson said. She added that, by elevating Shakespeare’s status, the playwrights hoped to associate themselves with his work  and ride the coattails of his success.  

“Many 18th century adapters of Shakespeare made him, for example, conform to the contemporary artistic preference for neoclassical ideals,” Anderson said.

While Shakespeare’s plays were already hundreds of years old by the 18th century, adaptations kept them relevant and appealing to contemporary audiences.

“Such sentiments led to some full scale Shakespeare editing, eliminating what 18th century readers saw to be confusing vocabulary or obsessive metaphor,” Anderson said.

After the presentation, the event opened up for discussion, during which the notion of adaptations changing the way consumers view an original text became a recurring topic.

“The play has an afterlife precisely because it can be rewritten,” Anderson said.