Performing Shakespeare in Japan by Minami Ryuta , Ian Carruthers , John Gillies (review)

Abstract

172 Reviews interrogation, and the detailed referencing, notes, and bibliography leave the reader ready to plunge into deeper waters. No better single volume exists to enable this leap. Perhaps unsurprisingly in a broad survey, Taylor implicitly, sometimes explicitly, endorses the via media critical position. He quietly criticizes formalist criticism's tendency towards 'new absurdities and exaggerations in interpretation' (p. 91); he laments a preoccupation with sexual puns which 'up-ends the poise and balance of the dramatic situation' (p. 92); he regrets a criticism which gets 'out of hand' (p. 113) or is 'unhinged' (p. 18), and deems inappropriate 'the twentieth-century's obsession with the body' (my italics) and a 'vulgarized homoeroticism that obscures by its adolescent desire to shock' (p. 206). Conversely, praise is conferred on the reasonable and the moderate?like Raymond Williams's 'typically sensible manner' (p. 103). 'Some kind of compromise', Taylor writes in a characteristic weighing up of contrasting critical positions, 'is obviously in order' (p. 14). This is eminently sane and often judicious, but we might regret the implicit discouragement of critical radicalism. Taylor quotes Isobel Armstrong'scompellingcall to 'radicalize' Shakespeare (p. 185), and begins his volume with the important note that 'what seems to be marginal and eccentric now may well be the orthodoxy of the future' (p. vi). But the spirit of Taylor's middle way?'some kind of compromise'? rather undercuts this pleading. None the less, Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century will be welcomed by students of all levels of experience. It is a neat, compact, thoroughly useful text: eminently portable, and consultable, like those seventeenth-century duodecimos that summarized history or classical mythology for an aspiring readership. Taylor's vol? ume will prove an invaluable addition to those six billion words. University of Reading Adam Smyth PerformingShakespeare injapan. Ed. by Minami Ryuta, Ian Carruthers, and John Gillies. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2001. xiii + 259pp. ?45; $74-95- ISBN 0-521-78244-9. In his Afterword' to this volume, John Gillies outlines some of the key issues which, at their best, the fourteen essays and fiveinterviews included here address incisively. 'Shakespeare appears in this collection', he argues, 'as a sign of the globalization of Shakespeare as a contemporary cultural value, and?paradoxically?as a sign of the endurance and reassertiveness of the local in the face of that global value' (p. 236). The 'contemporist movement'?embodied forJapan in the work of Antonin Artaud, Jan Kott, and Peter Brook?left a vision 'of how to unlock performance from its supplementarity to the text' (p. 241). At the end of the nineteenth century, Mejiperiod adaptors modernized Shakespeare forJapan; but the later 'globalized practice of making Shakespeare "contemporary"', which stimulated the 'proliferation of new theatre groupings', enabled not just anappropriationof, and genuflection towards, the foreign, but a reflection on its ' "pedagogical" cargo, problematizing the local effects of that cargo, historicizing them and groping towards a new synthesis' (pp. 239-41). Gillies concedes, none the less, that the interviewwith Ninagawa Yukio and Yoshihara Yukari's powerful essay on a Meji adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, among others, indicate the extent to which the local 'is at some stage mediated by a for? eign, global, and exoticizing gaze' (p. 244). The 'universaP Shakespeare of the late nineteenth century, for Yoshihara, is one of the occidental determinants of Japanese culture; part of the means by which, that is, the 'local or national culture of Japan' was 'invented and constructed' (pp. 21, 22). Western concepts of 'industriousness and industrialization', she proposes, would have been alien to the Japanese; Zeni, the adap? tation under consideration, sets part of The Merchant of Venice in the (earlier) Edo 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...