Shakespeare's Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Characters by Frederick Kiefer (review)

Abstract

MLRy 100.3, 2005 765 with Marlowe's Machiavel, revenger, weak king surrounded by turmoil, irresistible warrior, magician, balcony scene, ete. Knutson's account thereby comprises a par? tial checklist of Marlowe's influence on his contemporaries, especially Shakespeare. David Bevington in 'Staging the A- and B-Texts of Doctor Faustus' also emphasizes commercial considerations, ones that led to the B-text's later, more elaborate pro? duction. Insightfully inferringthe staging requirements for each version, Bevington increases our understanding of B's spectacular effects,vaudevillian comedy, and militant Protestantism. In 'Tamburlaine the Great in Performance' David Fuller supplies an account of productions directed by Tyrone Guthrie (1951), Peter Hall (1976-77), and Terry Hands (1992-93). This essay reveals the variety of performance options that have been realized and also comments thoughtfully on performance possibilities. Fuller's essay is essential for Mario we performance study. The second section concerns genre, starting with Maurice Charney's argument that Hero and Leander supplied a model for Venus and Adonis. Charney's engaging appreciation provides, like Bevington's, a definitive overview of a familiar issue. Since there is no smoking gun, it really can be said to demonstrate how Marlowe's would have worked on Shakespeare's if it in fact did. Rick Bowers, 'Hysterics, High Camp, and Dido, Queene ofCarthage', finds Marlowe using pastiche, hyperbole, and Aeneas's hysterical grief to empty the classical tradition of its power, all for the liberating fun of it. Sara Munson Deats's 'Marlowe's Interrogative Drama' concerns genre less than a seminal Marlovian dialogical sensibility that founded the celebrated multiconsciousness of early modern drama. While the terms of some illustrative 'rabbit-duck' readings seem cramped, Deats places them in a rich context of rhetorical scholarship and theory,offeringpromising insights. The thesis deserves a book. The third section involves cultural contexts. Reworking material from her book on treason and drama, Karen Cunningham,'" For sake thyking and do but joinwithme": Marlowe and Treason', reveals the connections between the discourse oftreason in the Babington plot trials and in Marlowe's plays. That discourse contributes to emerging notions of nationhood and patriotism, and in the trials it accuses nomadism, per? sonal alliances, and subversive fantasies. Challenging this inflection, the plays present friendship as a disruptive but positive political force. GeorgiaE. Brown's 'Tampering with the Records: Engendering the Political Community and Marlowe's Appropriation ofthe Past in Edward IF explores another area where Marlowe's work challenges developing notions of Englishness: the writing of history. Where Holinshed offersa model of English character based on the repression of emotions, Edward II with its Ovidian rhetoric demonstrates that erotic desire and private experience are essential and legitimate, if disruptive, forces of English history. Finally, Randall Nakayama's ' "I know she is a courtesan by her attire": Clothing and Identity in The Jew ofMalta' is both learned and sophisticated. It takes up Edward II as well, showing how cloth? ing signifies and how it exercises power over wearer and observer, a power registered by statute. But what the wearer intends may diverge widely from what the observer perceives. University of Nevada Charles Whitney Shakespeare's Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Characters. By Frederick Kiefer. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2003. xiv + 358pp. ?50; $70. ISBN 0-521-82725-6. Frederick Kiefer's book is a lavishly illustrated and interesting account of how Shake? speare's personified characters would have been staged, based on pictorial traditions. In the introduction Kiefer argues that in Renaissance England 'the everyday objects 766 Reviews that people wore, handled, and used in their homes [. . .] reveal a delight in the vi? sual' (p. 6). Kiefer sees the theatre as the culminating site of this phenomenon, 'the intersection of a culture that, while investing the word with supreme (religious) im? portance, simultaneously finds both pleasure and edification in what the eyes behold' (p. 9). Kiefer looks specifically at 'literal abstractions' in Shakespeare's plays, 'figures that achieve a theatrical effectchieflythrough visual formand whose meaning involves symbolic interpretation', with a threefold purpose: to 'reconstruct the appearance of the personifications', to 'explain the symbolism of costumes and props', and to 'assess the significance ofsuch symbolic characters forthe plays in...