Outside the Globe and Into the World: Shakespeare Among the Displaced
By Alexandra Kassinis
Currently, around the world, over 79 million people have been forced from their homes. Several European countries, including the United Kingdom, are becoming less accessible, less open to accepting those displaced by war, famine, poverty or persecution. In the face of this migrant crisis, in a world too often plagued by xenophobic, intolerant, and racist attitudes, some activists have once again turned to Shakespeare—but not all turns to Shakespeare are the same.
Shakespeare has been mobilized around the twenty-first-century refugee crisis in two different ways. Many students and scholars analyze the themes of compassion, tolerance and empathy in Shakespeare’s work, relating them to today’s migrant crisis. Professor Richard Wilson describes how Shakespeare “dramatizes acts of hospitality towards strangers.” Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt speaks of the generous imagination at work in Shakespeare’s plays as they “awaken our awareness of the human lives that are at stake.” The lives that are hanging in the balance are those of the “other,” the marginalized and disregarded members of any community. Characters like Othello and Shylock, discussed in Greenblatt’s essay, are frequently seen as manifestations of Shakespeare’s forward-thinking attitude towards those who are made “other.” Scholars point out that the playwright lived and worked among ethnic minorities and immigrants in sixteenth-century England, was alert to the discrimination they faced, and addressed social exclusion in stories of racially marked characters.
One speech in particular (believed to be some of the only lines we possess in the playwright’s own handwriting) is frequently cited in these discussions. In the play Sir Thomas More, the character of Thomas More stands against a mob of Londoners who are calling for immigrants, or “strangers,” to be banished. More’s response to the mob, which has been mobilized by actor-activists such as Ian McKellen and by refugees themselves, is used pointedly to critique nationalism and the exclusion of immigrants. Shakespeare’s More says,
You’ll put down strangers,
Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,
And lead the majesty of law in lyam
To slip him like a hound; alas, alas, say now the King,
As he is clement if th’offender mourn,
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you: whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbour? …
Why, you must needs be strangers, would you be pleas’d
To find a nation of such barbarous temper
That breaking out in hideous violence
Would not afford you an abode on earth.
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, not that the elements
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But charter’d unto them? What would you think
To be us’d thus? This is the strangers’ case
And this your mountainish inhumanity.
More’s speech lies at the “heart of Shakespeare’s humanity,” McKellen says. Dame Marina Warner characterizes it as a “magnificent protest against mountainous inhumanity” and calls its “portrait of exclusion and prejudice … eerily prophetic of conditions today.”
This first type of what can be called ‘Refugee Shakespeare’ is well-intentioned; creates good will and political momentum; raises awareness; and ennobles the context in which scholars, actors, and activists can and do grapple with issues of contemporary salience. Indeed, some Shakespearean actors, such as Dame Harriet Walter and Juliet Stevenson, work directly with refugees and immigrants in London.
However, inevitably, much of this first type of activism takes place some distance from the crises on the ground. Located chiefly in the realm of art and ideas and in comfortable, familiar classrooms, theaters, and cultural spaces, these approaches remain far away from the person who is far from home. In contrast, a second, revolutionary way of relating Shakespeare to refugee crises involves the performance of Shakespeare’s works in refugee camps.
In 2014, the Globe to Globe project began a tour that aimed to bring Hamlet to every country in the world. As part of this project, the cast performed Hamlet on makeshift stages in camps for displaced people from Zaatari, Jordan and Calais, France, to Mandjou, Cameroon and Obock, Yemen. In Cameroon, the troupe performed without costumes on the dusty ground of an outdoor bar. In Jordan, the audience battled a sandstorm; in Calais, they fought the cold. Here, Shakespeare was not presented through plays like Othello or The Merchant of Venice, where characters are marginalized based on religion or color, but through Hamlet, a play about a man’s confusion, suffering, and sadness — perhaps intended here to represent everyone’s confusion, suffering, and sadness. In the words of Dominic Dromgoole, the artistic director of the Globe to Globe Tour, performing Hamlet was “telling a story about people.”
In his account of Hamlet in the Zaatari camp, Dromgoole notes with a sense of profundity that while the stage may have been improvised, the conditions tragic, the audience distracted and the weather cataclysmic, the company still threw out Shakespeare’s “gorgeous words into the void.” He recalls, “Some had clearly found it mystifying, some a little ridiculous, some had relished a great story, and some seemed to have eaten up every moment.” Each individual was free to make what they wanted of Hamlet, no reaction less legitimate than any other. But from the reaction of the children watching the play in a refugee camp in Cameroon, it’s clear that Hamlet had some impact, if even a fleeting one. Under these conditions it may not even have been the words themselves that resonated, but something about the theatrical spectacle, the performance event.
In Calais, too, audience members were able to forge their own relationships with the play as it unfolded before them. Joe Robertson, co-founder of the theatre company that hosted the Globe’s Hamlet at a refugee camp in Calais, said the work they produce “either allows people to escape their situation or confront it.” Some audience members might have appreciated seeing their own struggles mirrored on stage; others found much-needed relief and distraction in the performance. One refugee in the Calais camp said, “I’ve read the play in a book but never seen it. It is good to see theatre, good to see the English tradition … It is good to enjoy something.” Action, drama, and excitement provided an escape from daily injustice and deprivation. Another resident of the camp confided that, “Life in here is very bad. We need refreshment. For two hours I can forget everything, except feeling cold.” Maybe they found community and conversation by having a shared artistic experience with others.
Shakespeare’s most well-known play presents lots of good theater: ghosts, fight scenes, humor, travel, plays-within-the-play, thwarted romance, and dramatic deaths. Beyond entertainment and visual stimulation — which are not insignificant — Shakespeare provides a common reference point across cultures. Oddly enough, given that he’s a Danish prince, Hamlet is a relatable figure. Like the displaced refugees in the Globe to Globe audiences, Hamlet struggles with anxiety and uncertainty, contemplates life and death, wrestles with day-to-day realities, and longs for what may seem ordinary but is proving unattainable — family, comfort, love, and acceptance. One of the directors of the Calais performance points out that “Hamlet is about a man who is confused, in doubt, who is contemplating life, who is contemplating death, who is in the middle of a decision ... And this is the situation and the reality for many young men in the camp.”
The Globe’s on-the-ground engagement with refugees in refugee settings sets the stage for future social justice-oriented Shakespearean projects. In his article “Shakespeare and Your Mountainish Inhumanity,” Professor Ruben Espinosa considers the relationship between Shakespeare and social justice. Espinosa is a Shakespeare scholar whose areas of study include Shakespeare and immigration, borders, and race. When it comes to events like the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, that was fueled by anti-immigrant, anti-Latinx ideology, Espinosa writes, “One might wonder, do we really need Shakespeare to understand this? My firm answer is: No.” But, he says, “I wholeheartedly believe that Shakespeare needs us. It is up to those of us committed to issues of social justice to locate in Shakespeare the moments that will allow for the candid and necessary discussions in our classrooms regarding race, racism, and white supremacy.”
What I have called the first type of “Refugee Shakespeare” undertakes this kind of work, finding moments that “awaken our awareness of the human lives that are at stake” as an aid to deconstructing racist ideologies and inspiring empathy and action. The second type goes beyond the classroom. It recognizes that Shakespeare and his works can be a bridge between well-off but far-off institutions, and the vulnerable, marginalized, and at-risk.
One might wonder, in line with Espinosa’s question, if refugee communities need Shakespeare. And again, the answer might be no. But at the same time, Shakespearean performances done in, for — and sometimes by — these communities can promote genuine reprieve and inclusion. They can extend hospitality. Richard Wilson wrote, “Shakespeare understood that every foreigner brings gifts.” For some actors and artists, Shakespeare is the best gift they have to give. Hopefully, bringing this gift directly to displaced communities can help create that sense of greater belonging that eluded Hamlet.
Alexandra Kassinis is a freshman at Harvard College considering majoring in a field related to environmental science. She is a writer for The Harvard Crimson’s Blog Flyby and on campus she is involved with Philips Brooks House Associations’ community engagement programs. Her first experience with Shakespeare was playing Desdemona in a children’s version of Othello in Othello’s Tower in Famagusta, on her native island of Cyprus.