Bakhtin, Shakespeare, and Theatre

This thesis makes a case for Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) as a critic of drama. It uses Bakhtin’s notes for revision of Rabelais and His World, written in 1942, as a catalyst for exploration of Shakespeare and of drama more generally. In the Rabelais revision notes, Bakhtin comments on Shakespeare’s major tragedies, identifying patterns in them that expand on, complicate, and darken the festive, utopian themes found in the main text of Rabelais and His World. He also discusses drama as a genre, in particular the ways that meaning is made in theatrical spaces by bodies onstage. Bakhtin is at times openly dismissive of drama elsewhere in his work but the Rabelais revision notes demonstrate an unprecedented engagement with theatre. This thesis close reads these notes, exploring them play by play and concept by concept, then constructs a Bakhtinian aesthetics of drama, split into sections titled ‘Dialogism’, ‘Embodiment’, and ‘Eventness’. The second half of the thesis takes this aesthetics forward to consider twenty-first-century Shakespeare performance, investigating each section of its theoretical chapter via different productions. These productions encompass work by Ivo van Hove, Ian Rickson, Thomas Ostermeier, Punchdrunk Theatre, Robert Lepage, the National Theatre of Scotland, Caroline Byrne at Shakespeare’s Globe, the RSC, and the Wooster Group. The thesis concludes with a consideration of broadcast and streaming theatre and looks at the current moment of recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as projecting forward to think about uses of technology in performance in the future. The analysis conducted stands as a reappraisal of Bakhtin as a critic of drama, and as an example of the ways in which his work can be used to explore theatre throughout time.