“These violent delights have violent ends”: Shakespearising the Balkans or Balkanising Shakespeare?

This essay deals with contemporary Balkan Shakespeare productions and suggests them as a new subcategory in studies of Global Shakespeare concerned with issues related to the Mediterranean. It aims at identifying some main features of Balkan Shakespeares, opening the debate on this definition and questioning whether the Balkan stereotypes of barbarity, violence and conflicts are expressed in the dramaturgic, representational and performative strategies of contemporary staging of Shakespeare in the Balkans. It focuses on two productions especially, Romeo and Juliet (2015) and Hamlet (2016), as two opposite possibilities for treating the issue at hand. While having in mind the tradition of performing Shakespeare in the Balkans with an emphasis on the ex-Yugoslav countries, this essay attempts to identify whether there is a pattern of self-representation when appropriating and adapting Shakespeare’s plays in a local Balkan context. If we assume that Balkan identities are labelled as Europe’s, and more generally the Western’s and the Mediterranean’s barbaric other, the main question is thus how this dynamic appears to be represented in Balkan Shakespeare productions: is it reproduced or questioned? Are those productions Shakespearising the Balkans or Balkanising Shakespeare?