Talking Shakespeare: Shakespeare into the Millennium (review)

Abstract

188 Reviews Parergon 21.2 (2004) that his account presents. For challenges there are: how can we read the traces of the past so that women emerge as agents, making their own histories? Patricia Crawford Discipline of History The University of Western Australia Cartmell, Deborah and Michael Scott, Talking Shakespeare: Shakespeare into the Millennium, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2001; hardcover; pp. ix, 253; RRP£45; ISBN 0333777913. This wide-ranging and provocative set of essays considers Shakespeare in relation to the ways in which Shakespeare is encoded for us – in language. The editors begin their introductory essay: ‘Talking Shakespeare, as its title implies, focuses on the reciprocal relationship between past and present, the way Shakespeare talks to us, and the way in which Shakespeare, ultimately, is “all talk”.’ With their emphasis on aspects of talk, the editors and individual authors find a common bond between Shakespeare as instigator of text, Shakespeare and the survival of historic theatrical practice, Shakespeare, Shakespeare in the light of contemporary theory, and Shakespeare as the basis of adventures in film. The thirteen essays in this volume are mainly by scholars centred at De Montfort University in Leicester, with invited contributions from others. The first of the four sections into which the essays are grouped is headed ‘Shakespeare, Theory and Contexts.’ In the title essay, ‘Talking Shakespeare’, Michael Scott ranges widely through Shakespeare’s plays as artefacts that speak of themselves as repositories of language. He suggests that words create a force- field of signification that is not simply self-reflexive but is also out there in a way that impinges on our consciousness of our own lives. Nigel Wood, asking ‘How does Hamlet end?’, answers his own question with the divided perception that the way a text ends for an author and for an audience may be different matters. On the one hand, variant endings of Hamlet remind us of ‘the probability that there were coexistent texts without an authoritative source’ (p. 35). On the other hand, there is the issue of what Stanley Fish called ‘interpretive communities’, which leaves us wondering: ‘Is the reader or the text the source of meaning?’ (p. 25). Peter Davison’s chapter on Shakespeare on the road is in contrast to some of the heady theoretical issues which precede and follow it. His ‘Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Stage: Touring Practice in Shakespeare’s Day’ brings back to life, Reviews 189 Parergon 21.2 (2004) and very vividly too, the really gritty issues facing travelling players that have often been lost in the rosy glow of Shakespearian heritage. In another somewhat corrective piece, entitled ‘Studying Shakespeare and His Contemporaries’, Emma Smith argues cogently for considering Shakespeare in dialogue with his contemporaries rather than in the splendid isolation he has enjoyed in recent decades. Other writers have paid considerable attention to Shakespeare in dialogue with Jonson through their plays, but other dramatists have faded into the shadow of Shakespeare’s greatness. In examining three pairs of plays – Richard II and the anonymous Woodstock, The Taming of the Shrew and John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed, and Hamlet and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy – Smith revisits some old arguments and introduces some new ones. The section concludes with a review of New Historicism and its proponents by Dermot Cavanagh under the title of ‘Shakespeare and History.’Cavanagh find that an over-emphasis on French theorists and a correlative neglect of the Frankfurt School has skewed critical writing. He advocates more attention to Adorno, for whom ‘the capacity of art to explore the conflict and contradictions between antithetical values ... was a key factor in the complex relationship between art and ideology’ (p. 80). The second section contains a stand-alone essay by Colin Chambers on the cultural significance of the RSC: ‘“Home, sweet home”: Stratford-upon-Avon and the Making of the Royal Shakespeare Company as a National Institution.’ Apart from providing much important factual information about the RSC, some of it relatively little known, Chambers propounds an interesting argument about the cultural politics of the RSC in relation to wider political and economic forces within Britain. Section III offers three essays under the heading...