Reviewed by: Rescripting Shakespeare: The Text, the Director, and Modern Productions Leanore Lieblein Rescripting Shakespeare: The Text, the Director, and Modern Productions. By Alan C. Dessen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; pp. xii + 268. $70.00 cloth, $25.00 paper. Alan Dessen has probably done more than any other scholar to facilitate a modern reader's or performer's understanding of how Shakespeare's dramatic texts may have worked as play scripts in their own time. At the same time he has, over the years, through numerous theatre review articles, shown himself to be a scrupulous observer and thoughtful chronicler of Shakespeare in contemporary theatrical performance. Rescripting Shakespeare is the book that brings together these two sides of his work. In it he examines roughly 280 Shakespeare productions he has personally experienced over the past twenty-five years from the point of view of their relationship to the dramatic texts that survive. Recognizing the elusiveness of the Shakespearean texts, even in their earliest states, as well as the inevitable alterations that contemporary performance imposes, Dessen makes it his task to systematize and analyze the strategies used to stage Shakespeare today. He acknowledges that because of the constraints—among them such things as performance space, casting, budgets, and spectator attention spans, but also because of the obvious fact that our world is not Shakespeare's—the play text that emerges in any given production will reflect material considerations and interpretive choices. For this process of making the text work in its current context Dessen uses two terms: "For me, rescripting denotes the changes made by a director in the received text in response to a perceived problem or to achieve some agenda. For more extensive changes I use the term rewrighting to characterize situations where a director or adapter moves closer to the role of the playwright so as to fashion a script with substantial differences from the original" (3). In practice, the distinction between the two terms is not clear (how "substantial"?), especially since Dessen does not use the distinction as part of his argument or engage recent discussions that theorize Shakespearean adaptation. Nevertheless, rescripting Shakespeare in performance is unavoidable, and Dessen is alert to the multiple ways in which a director's choices are reflected in the performance script. In his discussion he makes visible elements of production that often get naturalized into invisibility. Such things as the dropping or altering of words, the shortening or reassigning of speeches, the combining of two characters into one or three plays into two, the disregarding of stage directions, the altering of an ending, the creating of a frame, the conflation of material from different quarto and folio versions of a play, the interpolation of non-Shakespearean materials, or the placing of an intermission, he insists, have consequences, consequences he illustrates in individual chapters. Other chapters focus specifically on compressing Henry VI, using material from A Shrew in The Taming of the Shrew, and rescripting Shakespeare's contemporaries. Dessen is sensitive to the complexity of theatrical production and to the multiple—including nonverbal—ways in which productions communicate, and he is certainly not unsympathetic to the practical and creative need for rescripting Shakespeare. He also asserts that he is not a "purist" determined to preserve at all costs an elusive Shakespearean "original." Nevertheless, given his focus on scripts, his evaluation of them with respect to the earliest surviving forms of the text, and a terminology of "price tags" and "trade-offs," his book is haunted by a sense of loss: "[M]y recurring questions will be: what is the cost or price exacted for these gains? What do such choices exclude or preclude? Wherein lie the trade-offs?" (5). Failure to do justice to the Shakespearean text in terms of such options as those elucidated in his own admittedly splendid readings may result in thrilling theatre. For him the thrill comes, however, at the expense of "Shakespeare." Dessen's prose takes on a polemical edge when he makes the case for giving Shakespeare more of a chance and argues in favor of examining and testing theatrically the options available in the [End Page 533] early texts before deciding against them. In a...