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Colonial Canadian Shakespeare: West Meets East at Stratford
In his essay “The Regional Theatre System”, Czarnecki picks up on the challenge
of creating a national theatre in Canada, but also articulates the central and defining
challenge in developing a unified sense of Canadian identity; Canada, because of its
immense span from ocean to ocean, is inevitably divided into regions distinct from their
provincial boundaries. The regional boundaries which identify the Maritimes as distinct
from French Canada and the Prairies as distinct from the West Coast, for example, imply
not only geographical, but also social, cultural and political differences between these
regions. Because Canada is a nation born from British imperialism, the colonial
relationship that exists even today between Canada and Britain is undeniable, though this
colonial relationship is by no means uniform across Canada. The different regional
attitudes towards Britain and Canada’s colonial history became evident to me when, as a
Western Canadian, I saw a production of Hamlet in Central Canada: at the Stratford
Festival in Stratford, Ontario. This production served to illustrate that Shakespeare
serves as a standard by which to measure the colonial relationships between a given
Canadian region and the British Crown; therefore Shakespeare also helps to illuminate
the discrepancies between these different regions in relation to Canada’s colonial history.
The Stratford Festival, whose mandate is to “produce, to the highest standards
possible, the best works of theatre in the classical and contemporary repertoire, with
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special emphasis on the works of William Shakespeare”, has become the place in Canada
to see productions of Shakespeare. As Cza...
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...ion to the production of Hamlet was only further proof, however, that
Shakespeare’s iconic position in Canadian culture originates in our shared colonial
history. Adaptations of Shakespeare are telling of regional differences, which is only the
case because Canada too is rooted in Shakespeare’s home country.
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Works Cited:
Czarnecki, Mark. “The Regional Theatre System.” Contemporary Canadian Theatre:
New World Visions. Ed. Anton Wagner. Toronto: Simon and Pierre, 1985. 35-
48.
Fischlin, Daniel and mark Fortier. “General Introduction.” Adaptations of Shakespeare.
Eds. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier. London: Routledge, 2000. 1-22.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Susanne Wofford. New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1994.
Full production details of the Stratford Festival’s 2000 production of Hamlet available at
http://www.paulgross.org/theatreindex.html#hamlet
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