{"id":626,"date":"2025-11-22T06:30:31","date_gmt":"2025-11-22T06:30:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/32\/?p=626"},"modified":"2025-12-29T17:28:34","modified_gmt":"2025-12-29T17:28:34","slug":"transhistorical-dialogues-recanonizing-shakespeare-on-the-contemporary-turkish-stage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/32\/transhistorical-dialogues-recanonizing-shakespeare-on-the-contemporary-turkish-stage\/","title":{"rendered":"Transhistorical Dialogues: Recanonizing Shakespeare on the Contemporary Turkish Stage"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Burak Urucu<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Turkish theatre has a deeply rooted tradition in oral and performative narrative styles such as ortaoyunu<\/font>, Karag\u00f6z shadow puppet plays, and meddah, which are integral to the country\u2019s cultural heritage. This study examines how these traditions are interwoven into five recent Shakespearean adaptations produced by independent companies from Istanbul. By dissecting these select adaptations, the study conceptualizes the mechanics of their rewriting process, shaped by metatheatricality, recanonization, and repertoire. Due to its comparative structure encompassing multi-layered rewriting strategies and traditional aesthetics, this study is positioned to stimulate broader discussions about temporality, cultural memory, and transhistorical performance studies.
Part 1<\/strong> explains the Adaptive Stage Matrix (ASM) <\/strong>and analyzes Baba Sahne\u2019s Bir Baba Hamlet (A Father Hamlet 2017) and \u00d6teki Tiyatro & Hayali Tasvir\u2019s Venedikli Tacir (The Merchant of Venice 2024) through ASM<\/strong>.
Part 2 will be published in the June 2026 issue of Critical Stages. <\/strong>This part analyzes Moda Sahnesi\u2019s Othello<\/font> (2024), Nos Tiyatro\u2019s Verona \u00c7\u0131kmaz\u0131<\/font> (Verona Impasse 2024), and Yu Studio\u2019s Othello! Seyircili \u0130ntikam Provas\u0131<\/font> (Othello! A Revenge Rehearsal with the Audience 2023) through ASM and has the full bibliography of both parts.

Keywords:<\/strong> Shakespeare, adaptations, Turkish theatre, transhistorical stage, recanonization, metatheatricality, cultural repertoire<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PART 1<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n
Introduction<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Turkish theatre derives its roots from an intriguingly rich blend of oral traditions, improvisational storytelling, and performative practices that have been generated and molded within the spheres of satire, ritual, and community engagement. Grounded in Ottoman multiculturalism and sociopolitical influences, as well as earlier Anatolian performative practices, certain tenets of traditional Turkish theatrical forms provide a versatile foundation that fosters metatheatricality as a transhistorical rewriting strategy in adaptations of Shakespeare and other canonical scripts recanonized on the Turkish stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Laughter and satire are fundamental elements in the development of traditional practices. Traditional forms such as meddah<\/em> (solo storyteller), ortaoyunu<\/em> (semi-improvised public performances), and Karag\u00f6z (shadow puppetry) all incorporate comic relief, direct audience interaction, immersion, and entertainment. Especially after the seventeenth century, when these traditional forms started to become ubiquitous in communal life, Karag\u00f6z puppeteers and ortaoyunu<\/em> actors enjoyed an artistic freedom, particularly during festivals and royal celebrations. Within these liminal spaces, performers could humorously poke fun at, tease, and even impersonate the Sultan himself, an act that would have been unthinkable in other contexts (Y\u00fcksel 37).[1]<\/sup><\/a> The theatrical conventions incorporating indirect satire, allegory, covert ridicule, and exaggerated characterization allowed them to generate social commentary under the guise of comedy. Despite being performed under an absolute monarchy, these performances capitalized on the ritualistic inversion of power that typically occurred during carnivals in European cultures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOttoman imperial festivals [were seen] as \u2018cultural performances\u2019 where the social hierarchies were enacted\/re-enacted\u201d (Erdo\u011fan \u0130\u015fkorkutan 20). For example, opium addicts were a part of Ottoman society, and their performances took place at \u201c1582, 1675, and 1720 festivals\u201d (Erdo\u011fan \u0130\u015fkorkutan 134). Their \u201cabnormal behaviors while under the influence of drugs\u201d featured \u201cperformances in their own right\u201d and attracted crowds as \u201cthings to be seen,\u201d creating a \u201cfestive wisdom free from all norms, social restrictions, and seriousness\u201d that evoked the Bakhtinian concept of \u201ccarnival and feasting\u201d with an embedded carnivalesque transposition of authority, control, and power dynamics (Erdo\u011fan \u0130\u015fkorkutan 134, 101). After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, theatre and particularly Shakespeare were \u201cinstrumentally used as a platform to spread progressive principles and reforms\u201d enacted in the post-1923 institutionalization and Westernization of the arts in Republican T\u00fcrkiye (Golban and \u00d6zg\u00fcn 2). Shakespeare’s acknowledged status has served as a useful tool not only to familiarize Turkish audiences with Western theatrical practices and canonical narratives but also to promote a national, secular repertoire for the culture. This tendency continues to influence Turkish stage productions that grapple with adapting, and reworking Shakespeare\u2019s legacy in modern T\u00fcrkiye. The process of adapting Shakespeare with local idioms is not just a cultural transfer; it is also a popular tool for theater productions that strategically utilize it as a springboard to explore social criticism, commentary, and critique of sociopolitical issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This study positions itself within the cross-cultural journey between Shakespeare\u2019s plays and their modern adaptations on the Turkish stage. It traces how urban, comic, non-religious traditional practices such as Karag\u00f6z, ortaoyunu<\/em>, and meddah<\/em>\u2014mostly performed in Istanbul, the imperial capital, and to a lesser extent in smaller urban centers and trade cities\u2014shape contemporary Shakespeare reinterpretations on the Turkish stage through their subversive energy, which blends improvisation, parody, and satire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here, it should be noted that the scope of this influence excludes ritual and devotional forms (semah<\/em> and Mevlevi<\/em> whirling) and seasonal village plays from Anatolia. In this vein, by analyzing five select, revoiced Shakespeare productions from the 2020s on Turkish stages, the study investigates how the enduring Shakespearean legacy is recoded and sustained through a multilayered process of recycling within Turkish cultural codes. Building on existing research on performance, theatre, adaptation, and intercultural translation, the study presents an alternative framework to the mechanics of adaptation, where the process of adapting canonical scripts (Shakespeare in this case) into Turkish stage productions takes place through local filters and traditional idioms. This approach, whose details will be illustrated in the following chapter, centers its structure around three practice-led, operative, and relational nodes: metatheatricality, recanonization, and repertoire (Taylor).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conceptualizing an Adaptive Stage Matrix (ASM)<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

In Linda Hutcheon\u2019s words, adaptation is \u201crepetition without replication,\u201d \u201c\u2026a creative and interpretive transposition of a recognizable other work\u2026a kind of extended palimpsest\u2026\u201d and it \u201c\u2026always involves both (re-)interpretation and (re-)creation\u2026\u201d even as it is enacted through various shifts of medium and point of view (Hutcheon 7, 8, 33). Adaptations, therefore, modify the tone, focalization, emphasis, and concerns of the source text while typically preserving the essence of recognition and its aura, allowing the audience to recognize the palimpsest. However, Julie Sanders makes a distinction between adaptation and appropriation, mainly emphasizing the level of proximity and how explicitly the source is signaled, with a pronounced focus on the critical intent of the rewritten text. Appropriations also actively engage with the source text, yet they represent \u201ca more decisive journey away from the informing text into a wholly new cultural product and domain,\u201d where the appropriated text or texts are not always as clearly signaled or acknowledged (Sanders 35). The rewriting process is often driven by \u201ca political or ethical commitment\u201d by the playwright, director, or performer, and \u201cthe intertextual relationship [between the original and the adapted text] may be less explicit, more embedded\u201d(Sanders 7, 3). There is certainly a continuum rather than a hard divide between the terms, where appropriations lead to more significant modifications during the process of adapting the source material.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The negotiation between borrowed and target scripts creates new contexts shaped and understood through cultural and performative frameworks. This has sparked scholarly discussion in various ways, such as the importance of cultural translation processing likened to an \u201chourglass\u201d (Pavis 1), and the concept of \u201crestored behavior\u201d to highlight the transformative nature of performance (Schechner 33), and the idea that \u201cthe theatre [\u2026] seems to resist remains\u201d and continues to circulate across bodies and time (Schneider 98). Moreover, archives and repertoires are distinguished, with the latter \u201callowing for an alternative perspective on historical processes of transnational contact\u201d (Taylor 20). These perspectives, although they come from adjacent fields (performance, theatre, and intercultural studies), help us develop an understanding that adaptations and appropriations are not just transfers but embodied and recontextualized transformations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within the framework of the case studies discussed throughout this paper, due to the strong influence of local filters and recontextualizations, the essential adaptive rewriting strategies are those of appropriations as defined by Sanders. However, since the sources are still openly signaled and used as the defining hypotext, the rewriting process aligns well with Hutcheon\u2019s idea of adaptation as the \u201cextensive transposition of a particular work,\u201d where the source remains recognizable in the final version, which becomes an appropriative adaptation (Hutcheon 7). I tend to use the umbrella term “adaptation” where necessary throughout this paper because these reworked Turkish stage pieces still acknowledge and allow reading a recognizable Shakespearean script, although the language, setting, politics, and genre might be subject to radical directorial and dramaturgical interventions. Considering the risks associated with the fluidity and complexities of terminology in adaptation studies, the plays analyzed in this study are (appropriative) adaptations due to the degree of transformation their rewriting strategies undergo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The existing Turkish scholarship has also tactfully laid out a distinctive framework for treating adaptation, metatheatricality, and recanonization on the Turkish stage. In her PhD thesis, Eylem Ejder develops the concept of recycling dramaturgies<\/em> to explain how \u201ccontemporary Turkish theater is characterized by a thematic, structural, and aesthetic recycling tendency,” where three interconnected nodes\u2014nostalgia, metatheatre, and utopia\u2014address gaps in the past, present, and future (Ejder 225). Her focus on \u201ctheatre as rehearsal\u201d as the primary driver of metatheatrical effects offers an argumentative opportunity for the plays examined in this study (Ejder 146). Melis G\u00fcnekan analyzes political Shakespeare adaptations in T\u00fcrkiye through a close examination of five productions that view adaptation as a collaborative, locality-driven negotiation of Shakespeare\u2019s authorial sovereignty, Westernization\/locality, and identity politics. The plays in her portfolio are processed through \u201clocal filters\u201d and incorporate traditional practices, local political dilemmas, and crises (G\u00fcnekan 166). Drawing on the concept of retranslation as value creation, Ba\u015fak Ergil conceptualizes \u201ctranslational recanonization,\u201d which is \u201cthe act of reintroducing a text or a cultural artifact into another national or transnational cultural canon\u201d (Ergil, \u201cSong Translation as Creative Mediation\u201d 214). Although Ergil\u2019s work provides a translation-studies perspective that emphasizes the logistics of translating to show how texts move across different canons to generate value, she argues that Turkish theater could develop its \u201cown voice\u201d by reworking or recanonizing canonical texts through humorization (\u201c\u2018Humourizing\u2019 the Theatre\u201d 88). Furthermore, Deniz Ba\u015far demonstrates how traditional Turkish theatrical practices are embedded in modern productions, revealing nine patterns of recycling in Karag\u00f6z and other conventional forms. Her study is a groundbreaking resource that highlights how traditional forms are revived in Turkish theater, playing a key role in the deep exploration of Karag\u00f6z’s heritage in modern adaptations (Ba\u015far <\/em>17). This interconnected line of scholarly work provided a precious backbone for the development of my conceptual matrix to explicate the essential traits of tradition-induced stage adaptations on Turkish stages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Building on and extending the conceptual framework initiated by recycling dramaturgies (Ejder), locality-authority negotiation (G\u00fcnekan), Repertoire: The embodied, repeatableKarag\u00f6z-based metatheatrical patterns and recycling paradigms (Ba\u015far), translational recanonization (Ergil), I propose a new concept, the Adaptive Stage Matrix (ASM) to illustrate how canonical works (such as Shakespeare in this study) are reimagined in performance through several interrelated nodes of operation that not only reshape scripts, transfer texts, or describe heritage, but also show how these journeys of transformation emerge as operative stage devices to generate rupture, catharsis, and affective audience engagement. Within the scope of this study, it is a relational system through which canonical works are rewritten after being processed by Turkish idioms (meddah<\/em>, ortaoyunu<\/em>, and Karag\u00f6z), staging devices, and audience reception. The ASM triangle model (Figure 1<\/strong>) illustrates the dynamics of the adaptive process, where recycling devices are in a synergistic interplay with each other. The operative engine of this framework is comprised of three parts:<\/p>\n\n\n\n