"A Feast of Languages": The Role of Language in the Globe to Globe Festival

Discussing an emotional reunion in The Winter's Tale, a gentleman states that "there was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture" (5.2.14). His words also best describe the experience of the Globe to Globe productions hosted by Shakespeare's Globe as part of the Cultural Olympiad in the lead up to the Olympic Games in London 2012. The audience was only given synoptic surtitles for each scene, with no other translations available during each performance. The thirty-seven international companies that performed during the festival relied heavily on movement, gesture and facial expressions to convey their characters' lines in thirty-seven different languages to a primarily Englishspeaking audience.However, the role of language in the Globe to Globe productions, both on stage and in rehearsal, was an undeniable and fundamental element of the performance choices and reception of these productions. Even though the audience was unaware of many of the linguistic choices that were made before the performance, they were especially significant to the companies performing. The translation of Shakespeare into thirty-seven different languages allowed the companies performing during the festival to think about the ways in which translating their play into a specific dialect or style might benefit not just the audiences at the Globe to Globe Festival, but their own language and culture as well. Several of the companies performing at the Globe to Globe Festival felt that the translation of Shakespeare into their native language offered insights into character, theme or style.Similarly, audiences watching performances in a language other than their own allowed for more focus on performance and emotion, rather than the spoken word. The Globe to Globe Festival provided a mutual benefit for actors and audiences through the translation, transfiguration, and mutation of language in performing Shakespeare. This article will explore the role that language played in the festival and the way in which language mediated direction and translation of various plays, specifically in the rehearsal room in anticipation for the performance itself. I will investigate the process of translating certain texts for the festival, considering the impact of the language barriers that existed even within individual companies, and shows that the specific choices around language certainly informed the ways audience members understood and interpreted the foreign languages and the narratives of the plays during the festival.My personal role at the Globe to Globe Festival involved interviewing the companies about their performance choices and style on the Globe stage. The interviews sought to create a digital archive of the actor's experience in the Globe space as part of a larger archival project of capturing responses from actors and directors after each season ends at the Globe. I, along with the research team at Shakespeare's Globe, interviewed each of the 37 companies that performed at the Globe across the six-week festival. We were able to interview two to three people from each company, sometimes including the director or designer, other times with three actors, depending on the availability of the company during their short time in London.The questions we asked the companies were pulled from a combination of questions about the Globe as a reconstructed theatre space with unique elements such as shared lighting, audience interaction and a distinct lack of artificial sound and lighting, as well as inquiries about cultural issues such as reception and popularity of Shakespeare in the home country of each company. During the interviews, I found that almost all companies could relate Shakespeare's plays to their own culture on a thematic and narrative level, but perhaps what was most surprising about the interviews, was that they revealed an experiment with language beyond that of the Globe to Globe performance schedule. Indeed, the companies involved in this project provided insight into the way their members considered and toyed with the idea of translation from English into their own native tongue. …