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RICHARD EYRE: But there is a Quebecois translation [of Hamlet]? I saw your Quebecois translation of Macbeth in Paris.
ROBERT LEPAGE: Yes. We called it Quebecois because it's much easier to describe it that way, but it was an archaic French, the French that people were speaking at more or less the time Shakespeare was writing his plays in England. Some words were very close cousins to the words Shakespeare used. Actually a lot of Shakespeare is French mis-spelt or mispronounced. So there you have it!
National Theatre Platforms Interview Series, January 10, 1997
The year 2002 saw the publication of Shakespeare in Canada, a collection of essays that, as its title suggests, aims at identifying and recording uniquely Canadian manifestations of Shakespeare. The book's preface announces its ambitious scope: "Is there a distinctly Canadian Shakespeare? Can we posit a specifically Canadian reading or production of Shakespeare? How can we theorize Canadian adaptations of Shakespeare?"1 Tellingly, the full title of the collection is not a declarative statement identifying a definitive playwright and nation; the full title is actually Shakespeare in Canada: 'a world elsewhere'?-the interrogative subtly hinting at the perpetual impossibility of resolving the preface's queries.2 In putting their title in the form of a question, the editors implicitly recognize the inherent difficulty in definitively locating "Shakespeare" or "Canada" within consistently identifiable frames or borders; both terms are too ephemeral, too diffuse, and will slip to "worlds elsewhere" when an attempt is made to contain them. Nevertheless, Shakespeare in Canada stands as testament to the fact that the sheer size and gravity of the terms "Shakespeare" and "Canada" attract, not repel, extensive scholarly energies. The impressive breadth of material in the collection is indicative of what has become a critical standard: that Shakespeare's plays are tools utilized by "cultures and societies seeking either to establish their independence from imperial influence or to identify, define, and assert their own national values or priorities."3 While the scope of the respective discourses seemingly precludes totalizing definitions or understanding, studying their symbiotic interactions allows us to approach their respective boundaries from unique angles: Shakespeare can tell us things about Canada, Canada can inform our conceptions of Shakespeare-it is possible to "interrogate each through the medium of the other."4 Understanding-never...