Sándor Hevesi’s experimental staging of Shakespeare in the 1910s

HAT Shakespeare is of an age but for all time is attested to by this ninth annual survey of nearly three hundred Shakespearian productions during the I958-i959 season in twenty-four countries around the world. And not only in volume and popularity of the plays today does Ben Jonson's tribute to his fellow playwright hold true. The productions bring out both the enduring universal values and also, as has been the case in every age, pertinent contemporary applications. Thus our current survey lists a production of The Tempest at the Popular Theatre in Krakow, Poland, using visual terms of modern art to show Prospero as a man of modern science and Ariel as a symbol of free human thought in bondage to the scientist and regaining his freedom at the end. A highlypraised French production of King Henry IV, Parts One and Two, by Roger Planchon, utilized modern stage techniques of Bertolt Brecht's epic theatre to present the action as symbolic of the decay of a state. Julius Caesar has been popular for many years as a play of modern political significance, and its modern-dress performance at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana, indicates that the popularity continues. And at Howard Payne College in Brownwood, Texas, a drama professor from England, Alex Reeve, conceived the idea of performing A Midsummer Night's Dream in the setting and costumes of cowboys and Indians of the American Wild West, and toured the production in England with great success. In Milwaukee, Mayor Frank Zeidler indicated his own interest in and knowledge of Shakespeare by modernizing the script of Macbeth for a production by the Milwaukee Players. As the notes on the productions indicate, more and more directors reflect in their staging the Elizabethan practice of uninterrupted flow of action from scene to scene and in their setting such features of the Elizabethan playhouse as the inner and upper stages, the platform stage, and the unlocalized locale. The University of Miami's Ring Theatre reconstructed the approximate area and features of the Elizabethan stage for their As You Like It, while Henry IV, Part One, at Loyola University in Chicago, although presented on a proscenium stage, incorporated in its setting the platform, portals, study, and chamber of Shakespeare's stage. In England, Michael Croft's Youth Theatre, made up of young people, uses boy actors in the female roles after the Elizabethan practice. Any year of Shakespearian production in the world is a banner one in which the two greatest actors on the English-speaking stage appear in plays by Shakespeare. Sir John Gielgud brought to America his production of Much Ado About Nothing and starred as Benedick. The production, which originated at the Stratford Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon and toured with great

In this article, Zoltán Imre investigates the major changes in the concept of a national theatre, from the early debates in Hamburg in 1767 to the 2006 opening of the National Theatre of Scotland. While in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the notion of a national theatre was regarded in most of Western Europe as a means of promoting national – or even imperial – integration, in Eastern Europe, the debates about and later the realization of national theatres often took place within the context of and against oppressive imperiums. But in both parts of Europe the realization of a national theatre was utilized to represent a unified nation in a virtual way, its role being to maintain a single and fixed national identity and a homogeneous and dominant national culture. In present-day Scotland, however, the notion of a national theatre has changed again, to service a diverse and multicultural nation. Zoltán Imre received his PhD from Queen Mary College, University of London, and is now a lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature and Culture at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, co-editor of the Hungarian theatre magazine Theatron, and dramaturg at Mozgó Ház Társulás (Moving House Theatre Company) and Természetes Vészek Kollektíva (Collective of Natural Disasters). His publications include Transfer and Translation: Intercultural Dialogues (co-editor, 2002), Theatre and Theatricality (2003), Transillumination: Hungarian Theatre in a European Context (editor, 2004), and On the Border of Theatre and Sociology (co-editor, 2005).

Granville Barker's 1912 production of The Winter's Tale is considered to be a landmark not only in the stage history of the play but also in the history of Shakespeare production. Dennis Kennedy writes that is one of the four or five most important Shakespeare productions of this century and that as the first of them has an undeniable place in the theatre history of our time.1 Although the historical evidence will be re-assessed in this study, it would be time ill spent to attempt to add any new information about the performance to the wealth of detail amassed by Dennis Bartholomeusz, J. L. Styan, Norman Marshall, and Kennedy among others. Rather, an attempt will be made to re-evaluate the production in the context of the period and to account for the great success that it has enjoyed among theater historians. William Poel (1852-1934) and Edward Gordon Craig (18721966) are often taken as the revolutionary figures in Shakespeare production during the early twentieth century. From 1894, Poel and the Elizabethan Stage Society had been performing Shakespeare in Elizabethan costumes on bare platform stages in an attempt to re-create the original conditions of production of Shakespeare's texts. Poel established a tradition of amateur performance which eschewed the lavish realism of the Victorian actor managers and re-established Shakespeare's texts without the cuts and interruptions of stage action that had become customary during the nineteenth century. Although Poel cut lines from the plays, he did not cut scenes, and his productions tended to vindicate the stageworthiness of Shakespeare's plays while concentrating attention on the stage action and the interaction of the characters.2 While Poel attempted to return Shakespeare's plays to the context of the Elizabethan theater, Edward Gordon Craig moved towards a modernist style. Like Poel, rejecting the realism of the

The Southern California Shakespeare scene continues to be dominated by two Globes: the relatively well endowed, nationally respected Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, and the professionally improving but still struggling Equity-waiver Globe Playhouse in Hollywood. Between these spheres in 1978 the offerings were, characteristically, as sporadic in frequency as they were varied in style, substance, and levels of professionalism. Almost all of the Shakespeare between the Globes is centered in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Within the city the primary event is the annual Los Angeles Shakespeare Festival, whose production this summer was a musical adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Again this year the Royal Shakespeare Company toured academic communities under the auspices of Santa Barbara professor Homer Swander's Actors in Residence (AIR) program. In downtown Los Angeles, the well-to-do Center Theatre Group, comprising the Ahmanson and Mark Taper Theatres (in addition to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion), let another year go by with no Shakespearean production. It must be noted, however, that the Taper is currently in the midst of plans to offer in spring 1979 a unique production of The Tempest. Area high school and college students will be invited not only to attend performances with postplay discussions, but also, perhaps, to observe pre-production activity. This community-related enterprise was another Swander inspiration, and it will also operate through the offices of his Actors in Residence program. The remaining examples of Shakespeare in the Los Angeles area were random offerings of local theatres, most of which are small houses operating under the Equity waiver. During the year these companies offered a Richard III, a Taming of the Shrew, a Hamlet, a Twelfth Night, a Much Ado About Nothing, a Measure for Measure, and two Tempests. R. Thad Taylor's Shakespeare Society of America continued to thrive in his Globe Playhouse in Hollywood. This year he produced ten plays in his long-range program of presenting the entire canon, in addition to such periodic diversions as The Boys From Syracuse, two operas (Romeo and Juliet and The Merry Wives of Windsor), and a thesis play, which Taylor himself wrote and directed, called Shakespeare's Manuscripts? Taylor, who has already received a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for his effort to produce the thirty-eight plays (including The Two Noble Kinsmen) in succession, is nearing the realization of his dream. As the year came to a close, the SSA was presenting its twenty-eighth successive play, with firm plans to complete the canon by the middle of October 1979. The Globe Playhouse consists of a reasonably conjectured half-scale replica of Shakespeare's Globe stage, complete with inner stage, upper chamber, and central thrust platform with trapdoor-all constructed within a corrugated steel warehouse located just off Hollywood's garish Santa Monica Boulevard. The regular patron of Taylor's Globe productions soon becomes accustomed to such inherent distractions as the hammering of rain on the thin metal roof of the building or the periodic wailing of sirens from the reallife street drama outside. With a little effort and experience, however, these distractions can be resisted, and the viewer rewarded with the rare phenomenon of Shakespearean theatre in the relatively natural environment of the replica stage. It is not necessary to rehearse in this review the many hazards-logistic and professional, not to mention aesthetic-which attend Taylor's endeavor to perform the canon on schedule and in these circumstances. Let it suffice to reassert what has been declared in previous SQ reviews-that Taylor's mission has already achieved remarkable results in heightening community awareness of Shakespeare's vitality in today's theatre. Moreover, the SSA presentations have shown consistent professional improvement. One approaches a Globe Playhouse performance prepared to make the necessary allowances for low-budget, volunteer-staffed, small-theatre production. Occasionally such allowances are warranted, but more often than not during the past year Taylor's theatre has been able to overcome its handicaps with surprising professional strength and verve. The Globe's first selection this year (in January) was, appropriately, The Winter's Tale. Under John Megna's direction, the production was charming and lucid, with one notable exception. In the crucial opening scene, Megna had Hermione (Sarah Saltus) literally "paddling palms and pinching fingers" in her exhortations to Polixenes to extend his stay in Leontes' kingdom. By choosing to portray this action unambiguously Megna immediately settled the question of the motivation of Leontes' jealousy; but in so doing he raised the troublesome additional problem of reconciling this intimation of Hermione's infidelity with her otherwise devoted character. Our in-

series captures global Shakespeares as they evolve.

Reviewed by: When Movies Were Theater: Architecture, Exhibition, and the Evolution of American Film by William Paul Wes D. Pearce When Movies Were Theater: Architecture, Exhibition, and the Evolution of American Film. By William Paul. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. 426 pp. $40 paper. With his new book, When Movies Were Theater: Architecture, Exhibition, and the Evolution of American Film, William Paul has provided readers with a revelatory way to think and critique the early years of film exhibition in the United States. Focusing primarily on the first thirty years of film exhibition, and with special attention paid to New York City, Paul challenges many of the mythologies surrounding the early years of American movie exhibition. Paul's book is meticulously researched and is a rewarding and provocative exploration of a history many people think they already know. Much of Paul's analysis concerns the study of how the architecture of the "movie house" affected both the reception and the evolution of the exhibition of movies. That is, despite the "infinite reproducibility" of the motion picture, Paul argues, "how the image is situated in architectural space" (5) greatly affects spectatorship. I am old enough, although just barely, to remember when movie houses had just one screen, when the interiors of movie houses where awash with outrageous architectural details (such as a proscenium stage) and gloriously campy decor, and when the auditorium fell silent as the giant curtains swept open to reveal the movie screen and the start of something "magical." It is this connection between the site of exhibition and the reception of the "performance," or, as Paul suggests, an "[o]ngoing reciprocal relationship between movies and theaters, between text and context, [End Page 342] that has shaped both our expectations and our actual experiences of what a movie is" (19), that occupies the core of this book. When Movies Were Theater is more than just a revisionist history of early American film history; it is part architectural history, part popular culture history, and part theater history. Of particular interest to theater scholars is Paul's contention that, until the late 1920s, film exhibition and reception (and to an extent production) were inextricably connected to the aesthetics and reception of "legitimate theater."1 Paul challenges the notion that film and legitimate theater were immediate rivals and references many instances in the first thirty years of the twentieth century when film borrowed heavily from legitimate theater in order to legitimize the "moving images." For example, in chapter 2, "Store Theaters: A Radical Break," Paul draws upon several sources, including theater impresario/ moving picture exhibitor S. L. Rothapfel to detail the importance of presenting a varied and deliberate program of moving shorts. This successful type of exhibition programing copied aspects of vaudeville: "The vaudeville inheritance, then, was not left behind when movies moved from the vaudeville theater to a different home [the storefront theater]: rather, it is key to the development of motion pictures" (65). Earlier, Paul suggests that reception of motion pictures and the acceptance of late nineteenth-century staging practices (i.e., realism) both benefited from a new architecture that rejected the horseshoe auditorium and replaced it with an auditorium in which all the seats faced the "picture frame" stage. This new architectural arrangement provided a solution that solved "issues around realism for both live theater and motion pictures" (41). "Realism on stage and realism in motion pictures were oddly connected for contemporary viewers" (41), but the shared experience of the "new" theatrical architecture, be it the storefront theater for motion pictures or a state of the art live theater, allowed spectators to internalize the commonalities of space and reception rather than the differences of the artistic form. One last example of how motion picture exhibition drew heavily from legitimate theater practices to normalize the motion picture experience is found in chapter 5, "Uncanny Theater." In this chapter, Paul discusses the increasingly common practice of motion pictures being exhibited in legitimate theaters and the ensuing problem of space, insofar as "screens at the time ranged from twelve to twenty feet, [and] an 'ordinary stage opening' is … 'forty or fifty feet across'" (195). The solution was the evolution of the...

Detailed written records only exist for a very small amount of human history. Researchers must therefore combine Indigenous traditional knowledge with scientific evidence, often collected with geochemical and spectroscopic techniques, to investigate ancient human biology, behaviour, and culture. However, acquiring meaningful scientific information about rare and culturally-sensitive materials without destroying or modifying them is extremely challenging. The four research chapters in this dissertation adapt and develop analytical frameworks for appropriately acquiring key data from archaeological biominerals and mineraloids to address the fundamental question: ‘What was the original context and condition of the archaeological materials we find?’ The first two research chapters focus on investigating the post-mortem histories and diagenetic alteration of archaeological bone using our novel ‘Perio-spot’ technique. In Chapter 2, we evaluate the depositional histories, stratigraphic provenance, and thus age of megafauna and Neandertal bones at Scladina Cave (Belgium). In Chapter 3, we assess the taphonomic state of archaeological bones and the effectiveness of acetic acid pre-treatment procedure used to remove diagenetic alteration, documenting that it may actually concentrate post-mortem signals in recrystallized, intensively-altered bones. The last two research chapters focus on enhancing the traditional techniques for sourcing obsidian (volcanic glass) stone tools in the Pacific Northwest. Our step-wise ‘Splitting Obsidian’ approach (Chapter 4) involves non-destructively investigating all artifacts in an assemblage for elemental concentrations and structural characteristics, then analyzing a subset of representative artifacts for lead (Pb) isotope compositions and more precise trace element concentrations using minimally-invasive techniques. In Chapter 5, we apply this approach to a suite of rare archaeological belongings in partnership with xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), an Indigenous community near Vancouver (Canada), and suggest ancient transport of obsidian over distances exceeding 1000 km in western North America. This supports the oral history and continuity of intricate xʷməθkʷəy̓əm social and material networks, providing additional key lines of evidence for how and from where people procured resources in ancient North America. In summary, the contributions made in this dissertation research provide unique and robust scientific techniques and data that support investigations of ancient human history while minimizing the destruction and alteration of valuable archaeological materials and contexts.

Three recent examples of public benefit following archaeological discoveries in London are presented, alongside an explanation of the policy context that supports them. The examples are provided from the perspective of planning archaeologists, who advise decision makers and developers on managing archaeological sites in compliance with local and national policy. The cases illustrate ad hoc public benefits secured following surprise discoveries at an excavation in Tottenham, as well as long-term benefits resulting from staged investigation and negotiation of two Elizabethan playhouses in Shoreditch and Aldgate. We discuss issues around encouraging and operating permanent visitor attractions and how to best secure the benefits deriving from those places through the UK planning system. We suggest some ways for this young field to develop further.

Reviewed by: Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance Deirdre O’Rourke Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance. Edited by James C. Bulman. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008; pp. 255. $52.50 cloth. Inspired scholarship, the unearthed remains of Elizabethan playhouses, and Gwyneth Paltrow in breeches, have not quenched the desire to recreate the experience of Shakespeare’s theatre. In Shakespeare Re-Dressed, James Bulman offers a collection of essays that take a fresh look at one aspect of the Elizabethan theatre experience: cross-dressing. While the authors discuss early modern conventions, their primary emphasis is on the implications of cross-dressing in contemporary Shakespearean productions. The eleven essays, which explore contemporary cross-gender casting, cover both male and female cross-dressing, US and British productions, unisex and mixed-sex casts, actors’ processes, and audience reception. The greatest strength of Shakespeare Re-Dressed lies in the points of intersection between the pieces that reveal conflicting and complementary perspectives on its subject. In the volume’s first essay, Jennifer Drouin uses contemporary understandings of cross-dressing to complicate the convention in Shakespeare’s plays. She attempts to distinguish between “cross-dressing, drag, and passing” and the slippages between them, both within the fictive worlds of Shakespeare’s dramas and their reception in production. Although the lines between the three remain blurred despite Drouin’s attempts to clarify them, the discoveries she makes in the process are revelatory and useful. Roberta Barker’s essay “Acting Against the Rules” engages existing scholarship on the eroticism of the “boy actress.” She contends that “only in a situation in which both actors and audiences risk losing detachment by participating in a theatrical cross-dressing that they recognize as an active part of their own world could we truly remember the erotic significance of the Shakespearean boy actress” (70). For Barker, this situation is created not by the reconstructed Globe’s all-male performances or Cheek by Jowl’s As You Like It, but rather by an all-male school production of As You Like It that she attended. Bulman follows Barker’s essay with the first of two contributions to the volume, this one focusing on Cheek by Jowl’s production in 1991 of As You Like It in which he outs the production’s queer agenda. Bulman’s analysis of the production’s victimization of the flamboyant Jaques reveals that the interpretation was intended as commentary on the violent homophobia prevalent during Thatcherism. Orlando’s simultaneous embrace of his feelings for both Rosalind and Ganymede, coupled with Jaques’s queering, illuminated the production’s queer agenda, which, Bulman argues, led to the “queering of the audience as well” (88). Although audiences were probably unaware of their queering, Bulman’s insightful application of queer theory to contemporary all-male productions is intriguing. In his analysis of the same production of As You Like It, Cary Mazer argues for cross-dressing as a means of inviting audiences into the theatricality of gender. Like Drouin, Mazer distinguishes among types of cross-dressing by putting the camp of Charles Busch’s Psycho Beach Party in conversation with Cheek by Jowl’s cross-dressed performances. Drawing on Rhonda Blair’s work on cross-dressing, Mazer argues that actors who embrace the “not me” and the “not-not-me” of their characters allow audiences a double vision that is not only pleasurable, but also questions gender essentialism. [End Page 139] P. A. Skantze’s and Andrew James Hartley’s pieces both analyze selectively cross-gendered productions. Skantze examines Mabou Mines’s Lear, which boasted a mixed-gender cast, cross-gender roles—including a female Lear—and cross-dressed characters. Skantze’s project is to tease out the implications of this gender play, its interaction with race, and its impact on the universality of Shakespeare’s plays. Skantze argues that Mabou Mines’s production choices disrupt the supposed universals of Shakespeare’s King Lear by focusing the narrative on a particular woman. Skantze’s response to Mabou Mines’s work reveals the possibilities opened up by subverting the universal Shakespeare. Hartley’s work as dramaturg for the Georgia Shakespeare Festival’s The Tempest informs...

Reviewed by: Reimagining Shakespeare's Playhouse: Early Modern Staging Conventions in the Twentieth Century Andrew Blasenak Reimagining Shakespeare's Playhouse: Early Modern Staging Conventions in the Twentieth Century. By Joe Falocco. Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2010. Pp. viii + 208. $90 (cloth). Joe Falocco's Reimagining Shakespeare's Playhouse attempts to ameliorate the ideological conflict between directors who use early modern staging practices for modern aims and critics who accuse them of indulging in, at best, aesthetic irrelevancy and, at worst, cultural imperialism. Throughout the book, Falocco repositions key Elizabethanists (William Poel, Harley Granville Barker, Nugent Monck, Tyrone Guthrie and Sam Wanamaker/Mark Rylance) as men devoted to advancing the present art of theatre rather than antiquarians concerned with constraining theatre practice in the guise of an "authentic" past. "Rather than indulging in archaism for its own sake," Falocco argues, "they looked backwards in a progressive attempt to address the challenges of the twentieth century" (1). Overall, the book is an illuminating, well-researched historiography of how these "reimagined" (not "recreated") stages are contemporary attempts to create a new theatre in the face of competition from recorded media. Falocco reveals how each artist—except Barker, on whom he performs quite the reputation assassination—had little care for textual fidelity, interpreted Shakespeare along populist rather than elitist lines, and reacted to the immediate demands of a struggling theatre and society. Although the emphasis on Shakespeare and the design of his theatre often overshadows the innovative and experimental practices of these directors, Falocco links Elizabethan practices with experimental theatre through their focus on creating a greater connection between audience and performers. By framing Elizabethanists as theatrical experimenters wishing to reshape the art of theatre, he is able to excuse the more bizarre attempts at recovering Shakespeare's theatres as the prerogative of an experimental theatre artist rather than the misguided efforts of an historian. The first of five chapters rehabilitates William Poel from antiquarian crank to pre-Raphaelite visionary. "By judging Poel as an antiquarian," Falocco claims, "critics have doomed him to failure, owing to the impossibility of absolute historical accuracy" (11). Falocco argues that pre-Raphaelite influences on Poel's artistic philosophy led him to search the past for ways to refute the positivist ideologies of modernism and the injustices of capitalism. Although his intent was to recapture a style of theatre that had lost its richness amidst modern technology, [End Page 481] critics, as exemplified by William Archer and George Bernard Shaw, differed in their perception of Poel's practices. In regards to the 1896 Doctor Faustus, Falocco claims Archer was blinded by his positivist mindset when he dismissed it as "an orgie [sic] of antiquarianism" (11). Shaw, however, saw value in the Elizabethan style of performance for Elizabethan plays, and he envisioned the style's ability to reach the audience in ways proscenium stages cannot, noting that the Elizabethan stage was "a picture of the past . . . [which] was really a picture of the future" (11). Tellingly, Archer and Shaw's divergent perceptions of the Elizabethanist movement remain familiar in the current debates over the intent and effect of re-imagined Elizabethan playhouses. In support of Shaw's view, Falocco connects Poel's "picture of the future" to the practices of many contemporary Shakespeare companies. Poel, unlike Barker, freely cut and revised Shakespeare's plays. He also performed variant texts and adaptations of Shakespeare's plays such as Q1 Hamlet (in 1881) and the German adaptation of Hamlet, Fratricide Punished (in 1924). Because of these practices, Falocco claims, "he embraced, in short, the very 'death of the author' which [W.B.] Worthen accuses performance critics and Elizabethanist practitioners of refusing to acknowledge" (15). Similarly, he separates Poel from other minimalists of the turn of the century (Gordon Craig and Barker) who had more positive philosophies regarding the use of technology. As with Archer and Shaw, Falocco claims that the stylistic divide between Poel and Craig continues in Shakespearean productions today: the spiritual heirs of Gordon Craig continue to mount elaborately stylized and highly conceptual productions, against which the contemporary descendants of Poel's Elizabethan revival compete with theatrical offerings that instead emphasize the human contributions of actors. This is the...

Reviewed by: The Comedy of Errors, and: The Winter’s Tale Arnold Preussner The Comedy of Errors Presented by the Riverside Theatre Shakespeare Festival at Iowa City, IA, High School, June 13–July 13, 2008. Directed by Kevin Harris. Costumes by Colleen Combs McGonegle. Set and Lighting by Paul Sannerud. Fights by Jason Tipsword. With Dennis Fox (Antipholus of Syracuse), Martin Andrews (Dromio of Syracuse), Tim Budd (Antipholus of Ephesus), Aaron Graham (Dromio of Ephesus), Leigh Williams (Adriana), Cristina Panfilio (Luciana), Ron Clark (Egeon, Dr. Pinch), Jody Hovland (Emilia), Bradley Mott (Solinus), R. Chris Reeder (Angelo), Patrick DuLaney (Balthazar), Adam Verner (Luce, a.k.a. Nell), and others. [End Page 144] The Winter’s Tale Presented by the Riverside Theatre Shakespeare Festival at Iowa City, IA, High School, June 20–July 11, 2008. Directed by Mark Hunter. Costumes by Colleen Combs McGonegle. Set and Lighting by Paul Sannerud. Musical Soundtrack by Don Chamberlain. With Dennis Fox (Leontes), Leigh Williams (Hermione), Liam Kaboli (Mamilius), Cristina Panfilio (Perdita), Tim Budd (Polixenes), Aaron Graham (Florizel), Bradley Mott (Camillo), R. Chris Reeder (Antigonus), Jody Hovland (Paulina), Ron Clark (Old Shepherd), Adam Verner (Clown), Patrick DuLaney (Autolycus), Martin Andrews (Time, Storyteller), and others. It was both auspicious and appropriate that the Riverside Theatre Shakespeare Festival chose two of Shakespeare’s shipwreck-themed plays for its summer 2008 repertory season. For, shortly before the plays were set to open in mid-June, severe flooding along the Iowa River led to the loss of the festival’s lovely quasi-Elizabethan open-air venue on city park land adjacent to the riverbank. The set was hastily struck and moved to higher (and drier) ground inside a local high-school auditorium, and the festival proceeded as planned. (Despite this heroic effort, the company’s main warehouse space in which its scene construction shop had been housed did fall victim to the flood waters.) That the company was taking their misfortune in stride was well indicated by the graphic design of the festival’s souvenir t-shirt, which depicted a hapless Elizabethan gentleman in a rowboat along with the caption, “Exit, pursued by a flood.” In its nearly decade-long existence, the festival has grown into a strong regional site for Shakespearean production, taking advantage of local theatrical training programs such as those at the University of Iowa and nearby Cornell College, and attracting actors with experience in regional theatre centers such as Chicago, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and Kansas City. For the 2008 season, the festival drew on a combination of returning veterans from previous seasons and actors making their debut with the company in filling the twelve most important roles in each show. Minor roles were taken, and in all cases ably performed, by student “interns” from regional academic theatre programs. The festival is family-friendly, and under normal circumstances stages brief “green show” performances before the actual show in order to familiarize younger viewers with the basic plot design of the relevant play. At the same time, the festival takes its interpretive work seriously, as was well demonstrated this year in its delivery of a simultaneously humorous and thoughtfully executed Comedy of Errors and a dramatically effective if somewhat uneven Winter’s Tale. [End Page 145] Both productions used the same basic bi-level set design featuring a raised platform extending across the rear of the proscenium stage and accessible from either end by means of staircases. Flanking each side of the platform were two tall but relatively slender tower-like structures, or pedestals, which actors accessed by means of ladders placed behind them. The set remained uncluttered for the most part during The Winter’s Tale, with the notable exception of the sheep-shearing festival in act four, for which bundles of wool were placed about the stage. For Errors, a variety of rather large barrels, boxes, and other shipping containers covered most of the upstage area, bringing Ephesus to life as a port city. The Errors set also featured a large clock face installed at the central and highest point of the rear-stage platform. The hands of the clock spun intermittently to remind the audience of the passage of the hours during the play’s neoclassical...

The history of performing Shakespeare in Europe and the establishment of European Shakespeare Studies have been closely connected with European culture and politics. The emergence of the European Shakespeare Research Association, ESRA, has coincided with the fall of Communism and the political transformations in Europe after 1989, as well as the growing professionalisation and internationalisation of Shakespeare criticism. In the twenty‐first century, European studies of Shakespeare continue to flourish, with vibrant research centres extending from Murcia in Spain to Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine, and with a dynamic European Shakespeare Festivals Network. At the heart of European Shakespeare Studies has been the examination of Shakespeare's reception in different national traditions across Europe. Performance criticism has played a crucial role in this process, given that theatre as a medium transcends linguistic barriers, while encouraging local traditions of translation and staging. Productions of Shakespeare have also provided a forum for articulating current political and social concerns, particularly in times of censorship, which has made them exceptionally appealing to scholars interested in national cultures and histories. This article outlines four aspects that represent Shakespeare's relationship with European performance: theatrical exchanges between England and the Continent as the beginning of the European Shakespeare tradition, translation as an integral part of stage practice, the significance of performance criticism in European Shakespeare Studies and the notion of a shared European theatre tradition. Their discussion combines elements of a historical narrative with a critical overview. The article concludes with new perspectives in the twenty‐first century Shakespeare productions, as the Eurozone debt crisis and immigration crisis pose new challenges and responsibilities for artists and academics.

Reviewed by: Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre by W. B. Worthen, and: Shakespeare, Spectatorship, and the Technologies of Performance by Pascale Aebischer Sarah Kriger (bio) Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre By W. B. Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 278. Shakespeare, Spectatorship, and the Technologies of Performance By Pascale Aebischer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 256. Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre By W. B. Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 278. Shakespeare, Spectatorship, and the Technologies of Performance By Pascale Aebischer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 256. During the COVID-19 pandemic, theater companies across the globe have turned in unprecedented numbers to technologies such as online streaming. This brave new world of liveness mediated through screens and software suggests many fruitful lines of questioning of the relationships between performance, meaning, and technological affordances. Though each of their books was written and researched pre-pandemic, theater scholars W. B. Worthen and Pascale Aebischer both address similar areas especially pertinent to studies of COVID-era productions. In Shakespeare, Technicity, and Theatre, Worthen explores the technicity of contemporary theater using recent performances, predominantly of Shakespeare or Shakespearean adaptations, as case studies. Worthen's "technicity" encompasses all the technologies of theater and theatricality: those representing technologies to the audience during performance (such as props), those that make the performance possible (such as audio equipment), and those made material in architecture, texts, and the bodies of performers. Worthen uses "technicity" to avoid reifying technologies as mere material tools used in theater, or oversimplifying theater by identifying it as another technology in itself; instead, he wants the reader to understand the blurry collaboration between ever-evolving technologies, human artists and audiences, and the acts of performance themselves. In the chapters that follow his explanation of the project's theoretical foundation, Worthen discusses the use of live-feed video via three recent productions adapted from Shakespearean sources; examines the technologies (particularly smartphone apps) used to manage the texts of plays for both pedagogical and production purposes; analyzes contemporary performance spaces' definition and application of technological practices alleged to resemble those of Shakespeare's time; challenges the idea of immersive theater as a distinct theatrical technology by considering the recent immersive re-working of Macbeth, Punchdrunk's Sleep No More; and reflects on the ramifications of what he terms an "algorithmic" model, in which text (such as script) is considered to be an algorithm that generates a specific theater piece. If this sounds both ambitious and eclectic, that's because it is; Worthen's book encompass a dazzling variety of texts, performances, and productions [End Page 652] and draws from various theories of theater as well as of technology. His thesis is less a standalone argument accessible to scholars of other disciplines as it is a rebuttal to certain perceptions of the role of technology within theater production and scholarship: theatrical technology can't be understood as a distinct set of tools with particular outcomes for performance but must instead be considered a fluid and ubiquitous network of contributors to the creation of meaning. Due to this context, familiarity with both theatrical scholarship and recent productions is necessary to follow several key threads of the book; Worthen doesn't linger on, for example, descriptions of the productions he credits as "collaborators" in his analysis, rendering some otherwise interesting examples opaque, nor does he precisely define the scope of his project. For instance, all but a few trivial examples draw from the Western European theater tradition that traces its roots to ancient Greece, but Worthen doesn't explicitly define the area or period of study, adding to his focus on contemporary Shakespeare productions extended examples from the work of mid-twentieth-century playwright Samuel Beckett. While this variety makes some fascinating connections possible, it can also make it difficult to follow each example's relationship with the stated overall argument. Overall, Worthen's marriage of fundamental concepts from the philosophy of technology to wide-ranging theories from theater scholarship may require readers to arrive to his text with more knowledge of the latter than most scholars of technology typically cultivate; however, for those with a background in both subjects, Worthen's analysis suggests many exciting avenues of exploration—not only...

The tapir in the room: Ancient Maya storage architecture

Baroque theatre spectacles are frequently celebrated for their overwhelming effects and marvelous technologies. However, little is known about how the mechanical knowledge for elaborate stage machineries was actually acquired by architects and engineers, and how it disseminated throughout European theatre cultures with regard to specific religious, social, political as well as economical contexts. So far unnoticed by historians of theatre and performance, the early seventeenth-century codex iconographicus 401 (Bavarian State Library) offers new insight to the transfer of mechanical knowledge and theater technology. This manuscript can now be attributed to Joseph Furttenbach (1591-1667), building master of the Swabian city of Ulm, today best known for his numerous publications on architectural theory. The codex incorporates technical drawings and descriptions of the theatrical machineries invented and designed by Giulio Parigi for the epoch-making festivals at the Medici court in Florence. The invention and construction of theatrical machineries was taught at Parigi’s Florentine academy of art and engineering, which Furttenbach attended. Besides an English translation of Furttenbach’s manuscript (originally written in German language), this volume collects studies at the intersection of theater, architecture, and technology, proposing an innovative approach to the historiography of early modern theater.