As She Likes It: Shakespeare's Unruly Women by Penny Gay

Abstract

Reviews305 are at odds and disintegrating on all sides. Being staged in numerous cities of the world in synchronized spectacles, its dramatization of symbolic and seemingly unrelated images thus comprises a unified image such as Pound perceived in Haiku. For all his scholarship Lee is sometimes confused about dates: for instance, he writes that the Japoniste painter Whistler introduced Japanese art through Ezra Pound to Americans in Paris who had contacts with Impressionist painters. However, by the time Pound was living in Paris and London, Whistler had already died (in 1903, when Pound was eighteen years of age). Likewise, it is odd to say that Gordon Craig first learned about Japanese art through his "friendship" with Whistler and Impressionist artists when, in fact, there was an age difference of nearly forty years between the two: rather, Whistler was the best friend of Craig's father, the Japoniste architect and theater designer W. E. Godwin. The Japanese translation is well executed in smooth, idiomatic expressions , with the exception of some technical terms that are vague. The overall presentation of intercultural and interdisciplinary research is illuminating and will help the reader understand the extremely intricate nature of theatrical inter-fusions over the past century. One hopes that this study will be made available to a wider audience through an English translation in the near future. YOKO CHIBA St. Lawrence University Penny Gay. As She Likes It: Shakespeare' s Unruly Women. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Pp. xii + 208. $16.95 (paperback). In As She Likes It: Shakespeare's Unruly Women, Penny Gay examines post-World War II British productions of Shakespeare's comedies from a materialist feminist position to demonstrate the "retextualization " that occurs in dramatic performance and its importance in stage representations of gender (p. 178). Her study, which focuses on the multiplicity of stage interpretations and the relationship between a director's conception of a play and contemporary cultural ideology, undercuts the traditional view of one pure Shakespearean text. As she puts it, "In our postmodern culture, directors know that there is no such thing as a simple 'trust in the given material'; it has no intrinsic life, and it must be read in such a way as to engage an audience which itself reads intertextually" (p. 72). Gay is strong in proving her main point, that no such thing as a '"true Shakespearean' criterion" exists, for "Fashions in gender performance are as much subject to historical change as any other fashions" (p. 26). Gay effectively demonstrates that 306Comparative Drama the belief in a timeless and apolitical Shakespearean production has been undermined in recent years through examination of the performance histories of five comedies: Twelfth Night, As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, and Much Ado About Nothing. In tracing the histories of these productions, Gay deals with the problem of comedy on which much feminist criticism of the 1980's was centered. In Shakespearean comedy, Gay contends, "a conventional (patriarchal) community is revitalised by the incorporation, through the institution of marriage, of the remarkable energies of a charismatic female presence; yet she has spent much of the play flouting patriarchal protocols" (p. 178). This paradox, she argues, can lead to productions that open up possibilities for feminist revisions less likely to emerge "in the study" of these plays (p. 178), but often these possibilities are closed off because of the anti-feminist social climate in which they are produced. In her study, Gay locates an overall pattern in the history of gender and the Shakespearean stage—a pattern that coincides with social conditions of the time. In the post-World War II era, for instance, productions endowed Shakespeare's unruly women with the illusion of an underlying, essential "femininity" to mitigate their threat to traditional gender ideology; in the I960's to 1970's, however, this attitude began to shift, and stage productions that were clearly influenced by the woman's movement challenged complacently conservative representations of Shakespeare's comic heroines. Conversely, in the early eighties (under Thatcher's tenure), an anti-feminist backlash transformed these same transgressive female characters into either "bitches" or "vulnerable outsiders" on stage (p. 179). Currently, there appears...