Colonial Transformations: The Cultural Production of the New Atlantic World, 1580-1640 by Rebecca Ann Bach (review)

Abstract

MLRy 98.1, 2003 173 period: this legitimates the 'modern, westernized Meji spirit' by giving the illusion that such ways of thinking already existed in that era (pp. 26, 27). Gillies, drawing on James R. Brandon (and Franz Fanon), suggests that there have been three Shakespeares in Japan: 'the Shakespeare of the canonic translations', a iocalized' Shakespeare whose 'plays are assimilated into indigenous theatre genres to the point of disappearance', and, more recently, a 'postcolonial, postmodern' Shake? speare (p. 238). In turn, these Shakespeares represent, he believes, 'capitulation', 'appropriation', and an 'agonized and fractured dialogue' (p. 239). Engaged in this collection are manifestations of all three Shakespeares, together with various miscegenations and mutations thereof. It is divided into three sections: 'Early Modern and Traditional Theatre Productions', 'Modern Productions (Post World War II)', and 'Interviews with Directors and Actors'. Performing Shakespeare inJapan both overlaps with and complements the same publisher's Shakespeare and theJapanese Stage, edited by Takashi Sasayama, J. R. Mulryne, and Margaret Shewring and published in 1999 (see my review in The Yearbook of English Studies, 32 (2002), 276-78). The volume under review here has much more of a postcolonial edge to it, but both books have essays tracing translation and performance challenges, successes, and failures from the Meji period on, and the centre of gravity of each tends to be the variably experimental productions of Deguchi Norio, Suzuki Tadashi, Ninagawa Yukio, and Noda Hideki. It is surprising that there is no explicit intercourse between the two books; this becomes an egregious oversight in Michael Shapiro's essay on 'The Braggart Samurai', a Kyogen adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor, given that an English translation of Takahashi Yasunari's Braggart Samurai, together with an essay by its author, appears in Shakespeare and theJapanese Stage. Among the essays focusingon specific performances, Paula von Lowendfeldt's cri? tical perspectives on Kurosawa's Throneof Blood and Ohtani Tomoko's astute analysis ofthe Takarazuka RevueCompany'sRomeoandJulietare outstanding. Lowendfeldt's geometrical approach is more than saved frompotential sterilityby the extent to which it allowsher to identifysome of Kurosawa's principal concerns as they manifest them? selves in his amplification of the role of Miki (Banquo). Ohtani's departure point is British critical rejections of the Takarazuka Romeo and Juliet as being 'sexless'. By refracting the performance through retrievals of 'Shojo' formations of sexlessness and its modern manifestations in Japanese 'cute' culture, she defends the play as a 'counter-attack on the ideology of patriarchy' and a celebration of consumption at the expense of production and reproduction (p. 164). Elsewhere, performance analyses raise questions about the value of pedantic, some? times rather static, descriptions of theatrical events often rather speculatively reconstructed . These essays are in the minority, however, in a collection that manages both to mediate in detail aspects of past, present, and continuing engagements with Shakespeare in Japan and vigorously to intervene in postcolonial critical discourse. University of the West of England Peter Rawlings Colonial Transformations: The Cultural Production of the New Atlantic World, 15801640 . By Rebecca Ann Bach. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2000. xiv + 290 pp. ?32.50. ISBN 0-312-23099-0. Few would now challenge the claim that such classic early modern texts as The Faerie Queene and The Tempest must be read within the context of England's colonial endeavours in Ireland and the New World. Today a growing number of critics, especially in America, are extending the search forcolonialism's traces beyond the list of usual suspects. As the historian Linda Colley has remarked, 'it can sometimes seem 174 Reviews that there is no English language text, no British art work or other cultural artefact, and no event in recorded British history that is not being scrutinized somewhere across the Atlantic with the prior determination offinding evidence of latent imperialism and racial prejudiceand/or anxiety' (LRB, 19 July2001, p. 23). Rebecca Ann Bach's book, with its readings of such unlikely 'colonial' texts as Spenser's Amoretti and Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, is an impressively successful example of the approach Colley describes. For Bach, colonialism is like pitch, leaving itsmark on everything ittouches. The title, Colonial Transformations, refersat once to England's effortsto transform alien lands...