Shakespeare Scholars Research Articles

Beyond Materiality in Shakespeare Studies

Abstract“Materialism,” “materiality,” and “material culture” have become key terms in early modern studies and Shakespeare scholarship over the past two decades. Responding to perceived subjective shortcomings of the New Historicism and Cultural Materialism of the 1980s and early 90s, “new materialist” approaches have emerged in scholarship ranging from Book History and textual studies to affect theory and ecocriticism. This article reviews the debates over this materialist emphasis and points to new directions that Shakespeare studies might take, not in a return to idealism, but beyond the dichotomy between subject and object, mind and body, material and immaterial.

Celebrating the Tercentenary in Wartime: J. M. Barrie's Shakespeare's Legacy and the YWCA in 1916

This article isolates an instance of the 1916 Shakespeare Tercentenary celebrations to reveal some of the conflicts and tensions surrounding the appropriation of a national poet during the Great War – appropriation, not of his works, but of his iconic presence and his value as cultural capital with symbolic power. On 14 April 1916, a one-act play by J. M. Barrie was produced at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, for the benefit of the YWCA (Young Women's Christian Association). Shakespeare's Legacy, a skit in which the Swan of Avon is presented as a lad from Glen Drumly, was part of a charity matinée destined to raise funds for hostels, canteens, and rest rooms that female war workers were much in need of. Barrie's one-act play is not included in any edition of Barrie's collected works and has never been reprinted since it first appeared in print in 1916. Shakespearean scholars, who have paid attention to Barrie's speech, “The Ladies' Shakespeare”, have so far ignored Shakespeare's Legacy, a play that questions received notions of national identity, cultural value, and gender relations. Not even Schoenbaum's comprehensive Shakespeare's Lives (1991) records this Scottish Shakespeare that poses a challenge to the Englishness of the British bard. This article also explores further connections between Barrie, Shakespeare, and the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), paying particular attention to Barrie's collaboration with another charity matinée for YMCA's huts for soldiers which combined entertainment and moral indoctrination, just like the Bloomsbury “Shakespeare Hut” that was erected, around the time of the 1916 celebrations, on the plot of land originally acquired for the British National Theatre.

Directing the Hamlet Story in Hamlet—The Actor

MJCompany’s production of Hamlet The Actor, the three actor version of Hamlet, was first staged in 2012 and won ‘the 1st Korea Shakespeare Awards’ for Best Young Director and Best Actress. The production was restaged with a new cast in 2013 and attracted the attentions of international Shakespearean scholars in particular, who were invited to attend the International Shakespeare Conference organized by the Shakespeare Association of Korea, delighted with this production as an eye-opener to them, and convinced that Hamlet can be adapted to a purely theatrical play without involving cultural concerns and political arguments. Hamlet The Actor portrays Hamlet as a player-director, rehearsing with two players his own play on revenge to overcome the state of dissociation and witnessing instead the disastrous effects his revenge might have on his beloved Ophelia. Directing the Hamlet story becomes not about whether to kill Claudius or not, but about whether to continue a rehearsal or not. The play’s adaptive strategy is the making of a classical work, that is, the collaboration between Hamlet and two players; it is characteristic of what distinguishes itself from a metadramatic device. Hamlet relies on the rehearsal process for the realization of his intentions and expects two players to make a creative contribution. Their collaborative work is characterized as a dynamic process of reshaping a classical work by means of stage production. The play’s circular and open-ended structure facilitates the dynamic process and stimulates the audience’s imagination to fill gaps in the story.

“I do care for something”: Twelfth Night ’s Feste and the Performance of Character

ions; they decide what they, as characters, want, and they mount the stage to get it. Actors embody desiring subjects, and directors shepherd the conflicts and convergences of those desires in action. Interpreting Feste or Malvolio (and the play as a whole) may thus become one kind of project for the performance professional and an entirely different one for the literary critic who privileges an analysis of the text in ideological or historical context. But the methodologies of performers and critics are not necessarily mutually exclusive. This essay works at the intersection of performance practice and literary analysis to demonstrate how revising our understanding of character can open interpretive pathways that draw from both disciplinary perspectives. After summarizing the debate between the disciplines to identify key points of tension, we turn to performance practice in both the early modern and modern eras to account for how actors then and now transform written words into embodied characters.2 We then turn to our example from Twelfth Night to demonstrate how we put the approaches we outline here into practice. We hope to show that asking how Feste or Malvolio cohere as characters and what they desire may well become as productive for Shakespeare scholars as for the actors charged with performing the roles.

Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare edited by Madhavi Menon (review)

Reviewed by: Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare edited by Madhavi Menon Devin Toohey Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Edited by Madhavi Menon. Series Q. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011; pp. 512. Was William Shakespeare a queer theorist? Madhavi Menon argues as much in her introduction to this compilation of essays by forty-eight prominent queer scholars working in and beyond the early modern period. While the status quo in academia “ensures that a queered Shakespeare is never a queer Shakespeare” (1), Menon considers how the Bard’s own queerness might predate the word, the identity, and the academy around it. The essays in this book consider how the already-present queerness in Shakespeare’s texts may inform, or “Shake,” queer theory and thus establish a dialogue between it and early modern scholarship. Enabled by Carla Freccero’s Queer/Early/Modern (2005) and Jonathan Goldberg and Menon’s own “Queering History” (2005), as well as by the Bard’s own use of anachronism, Menon creates a framework that allows for a pliable relationship with periodicity. She argues that queerness “does not abide by the laws of a chronology [and insists] on redrawing, if not collapsing, the temporal divide between sixteenth century . . . and the twentieth” (2–3). Thus, we can accept that Shakespeare considered concepts and identities that would not emerge until centuries after his death. Additionally, many essays appear to deliberately flaunt their ahistoricism: for example, Bethany Schneider’s contribution reads Julius Caesar through the lens of the Lincoln assassination; meanwhile, Katherine Bond Stockton claims that “The Winter’s Tale was written with TV in mind” (421), as she compares it to the ABC culthit Lost. In an attempt to free themselves from older historicist assumptions, many of Shakesqueer’s contributors explicitly engage with little extant scholarship—the average number of citations per essay is fewer than ten works. The second major methodological assumption of this book is the unmooring of queerness from identity politics. Building on the work of scholars like Lee Edelman and Jack Halberstam, Menon argues that “queerness is not a category but the confusion engendered by and despite categorization” (7). Furthermore, considering that intense emotional experiences are not limited to the erotic, she states that “queerness is everywhere” (ibid.), from wordplay to power struggles. Thus, a play can be queer even without any self-identifying queer character, or even without any queer erotics. Through this expanded (or emptied) definition, writers are able to identify queerness in a variety of figures. Ellis Hanson reads the eunuch of Antony and Cleopatra as “unsexed and thereby oversexed” (49). Heather Love sees Macbeth’s ambition as a particularly queer character trait; she describes it as “a form of desire that does not respect temporal sequence and that produces situations of over-proximity” (201). Laurie Shannon challenges “human-exceptionalist applications” in her analysis of the universe as the locus of queerness in King Lear (171). Stephen Guy-Bray even uses gay in its locker-room definition of “weak” to evaluate less-celebrated works like Henry VI Part 2 and interrogate what we mean by praising a work as “Shakespearean.” With nearly fifty essays and no obvious thematic grouping (the essays are organized by their textual objects), Shakesqueer proves difficult to summarize. The rule of Shakesqueer is that there are no rules to queer Shakespearean scholarship. Essays can be only tangentially about Shakespeare, as is Ann Pellegrini’s Much Ado About Nothing piece that is far more about Stephen Sondheim’s Company, or Hector Kollias’s essay that is ostensibly about the lost Love’s Labour’s Won although it takes as its object the 2007 Doctor Who episode, “The Shakespeare Code.” The primary focus of an essay may be a production history, as Michael Moon’s contribution does for Titus Andronicus. Likewise, it could be a particular filmed version, like Robert McRuer’s reading of the erotics of disability in Richard Loncraine’s 1995 Richard III. [End Page 161] Artist Andrew Nicholls even adopts a queer drawing practice to produce a mostly wordless response to “Venus and Adonis.” Lost plays, poems, and even works with dubious authorship have a place in...

Stemmata for Shakespeare Texts: A Suggested New Form

Previous articleNext article No AccessBibliographical NoteStemmata for Shakespeare Texts: A Suggested New FormPervez RizviPervez Rizvi Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America Volume 108, Number 1March 2014 Published for the Bibliographical Society of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/680836 Views: 28Total views on this site © 2014 by the Bibliographical Society of America. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Shakespeare, Globalization, and the Digital Revolution

In an interview given during a lecture tour in Scandinavia organized by the universities of Copenhagen, Bergen, and Aarhus in October and November, 2012, Stanley Wells talks about his own career in Shakespeare studies and discusses past and present major changes and issues within the field, including his own Oxford Complete Works of 1986, co-edited with Gary Taylor et al., revision and collaboration theories, global Shakespeare, and new challenges for Shakespearean scholars. He shares thoughts on his own current and future research projects, which include a new monograph on Shakespearean actors through time, and he also comments on the relationship between academic scholars and theatre practitioners, and ways in which to understand the ever-shifting concept of a Shakespearean play in relation to performance, reading, and personal and critical responses. Following a long career of many publications and editions, Stanley Wells is now Professor Emeritus of the University of Birmingham, and Honorary President of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Anne Sophie Haahr Refskou is a Doctoral Fellow in English and Dramaturgy at Aarhus University, Denmark. She works with Shakespearean acting and dramaturgy, focusing on the relationship between text and performance, particularly in relation to the actor's body and physical expressions.

Sustaining Tradition with Inspiration from Modernity: Countering Elitism in Teaching Shakespearean Drama

The tradition of teaching English Literature in most universities round the world has evolved in such a way that a degree programme in English is not considered complete without a component of Shakespearean drama. Yet the poetics and the noetics of the Shakespeare plays written in a 16th Century dialect have become bitter delicacies for most students, as the comprehension and personalization of Shakespeare texts remain an unresolved challenge. The traditional mechanism of teaching Shakespeare texts involves reading the lines with a glossary, comparing the meanings with influential critical interpretations, reflecting on the implications either diachronically or synchronically, and writing unguided essays on topics related to classroom discussions. Most students fail in these activities as they find it difficult to internalize the meanings conveyed by word and action in relation to the historical settings depicted in the plays. Hardly a stage production of a Shakespeare play takes place in their environments to give them an idea about the actual form of it and therefore they are destined to remain totally segregated from Shakespeare. Unfortunately, this turns Shakespeare scholarship into an elitist pastime, and invites undue controversies from students who feel fenced off from the process. In attempting to develop solutions to the problems of teaching Shakespearean drama faced in this way, so much inspiration can be drawn from the numerous cinematic productions of Shakespeare plays. They present not only approximate models for pronouncing the lines but also lively simulations of the persons and situations concerned. Cultural commodities developed in a spirit of modernity prove effective only if they preserve the essence of tradition. There are numerous films on Shakespeare, very articulate in this sense. Therefore, using a series of exemplars developed on Shakespeare’s Othello, this article demonstrates how inspiration can be drawn from modernity in countering elitism in teaching Shakespeare.

Review: Learning from Frank Furness: Louis Sullivan in 1873; Furness in Space: The Architect and Design Dialogues on the Late Nineteenth-Century Country House; Frank Furness: Making a Modern Library—From Gentleman’s Library to Machine for Learning; Frank Furness: Working on the Railroads; Building a Masterpiece: Frank Furness’ Factory for Art; and Face and Form: The Art and Caricature of Frank Furness

Learning from Frank Furness: Louis Sullivan in 1873 Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia 6 October 2012–30 December 2012 Furness in Space: The Architect and Design Dialogues on the Late Nineteenth-Century Country House Canaday Library, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania 14 October 2012–21 December 2012 Frank Furness: Making a Modern Library—From Gentleman’s Library to Machine for Learning Kroiz Gallery, Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 5 October 2012–18 January 2013 Frank Furness: Working on the Railroads Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia 17 September 2012–19 April 2013 Building a Masterpiece: Frank Furness’ Factory for Art Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia 29 September 2012–30 December 2012 Face and Form: The Art and Caricature of Frank Furness Athenaeum of Philadelphia, Philadelphia 30 November 2012–19 January 2013 To mark the centennial of Frank Furness’s death, a number of educational and cultural institutions in and around Philadelphia collaborated on Furness 2012 , a series of exhibitions, a symposium, and a website that sought to place the architect, and by extension the city, securely within the modernist narrative. A quirky individual, Furness (1839–1912) wrestled with nearly every major building type of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Banks, railroad stations, libraries, educational and medical institutions, clubhouses, places of worship, urban townhouses, and country estates all bear his unmistakable stamp. Among his American contemporaries, only H. H. Richardson equaled Furness in both range and creativity. Why is Furness not better appreciated outside his native Philadelphia? That is the question Furness 2012 attempted to answer, and, in large part, it succeeded. Furness was born into a prominent and accomplished Philadelphia family in 1839, just as the city was transforming itself from a cultural capital into an industrial metropolis. He exhibited a temperamental personality, even at a young age, and he was slow in settling on a career path. A three-year placement in the Philadelphia office of the Scottish emigre architect John Fraser eventually led to a longer and more pivotal stay in the experimental New York atelier of Richard Morris Hunt, who had just returned to the United States from his studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Meritorious service in the Union cavalry during the Civil War interrupted Furness’s studies permanently and marked his life indelibly. Not long after his discharge, Furness began working again with Hunt in New York, this time as an assistant, but the lure of his native city soon proved irresistible. By 1866 he had returned to Philadelphia and formed Fraser, Furness & Hewitt, in partnership with his former employer and a former assistant …

“Speak What We Feel, Not What We Ought to Say”: Moral Distress and Bioethics

At the tragic end of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Edgar, the son of the Earl of Gloucester, clearly sides with the emotions as he laments the state of the king and his kingdom: “The weight of this sad time we must obey,/Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” (V.iii.323–324). Although long debated by Shakespeare scholars, these last lines, according to Russell A. Peck, illustrate Edgar’s passage from a naive and egocentric though dutiful son, who is deceived by his brother and disinherited and exiled by his father, to that of “a good man” (1967, 235) and even “a kind of universal son” (1967, 230), who “learns to see beyond himself” (1967, 224) and “empathize with and take upon himself the afflictions of his fellow men” (1967, 226). “Through his trials,” Peck notes, “Edgar attains maturity and even gains a kind of authority” (1967, 234)—but an authority beyond merely that of victor on the side of justice. Rather, he is painted as a philosopher, whose examined life (as Socrates would have it) through the donning of various disguises and identities enables him (and us) to answer “the most oft asked question in the play: ‘What are you?’” (Peck 1967, 231). Moral philosophers, of course, when reading this line outside of the context of the play surely would think Edgar has it backwards: that one “ought” to say (or do) what is morally required, not whatever fits best one’s inclinations. The “ought” in “not what we ought to say” as used by Edgar and Shakespeare, however, refers to the desires of others, particularly those in various positions of power that can bestow upon us pleasure or pain. And in phrasing the concept of “doing what is morally required” in this way—that is, in terms of “[s]peak[ing] what we feel, not what we ought to say,” Edgar and Shakespeare re-elevate that “unruly emotion,” long discredited as the disruptive and dark forces of “passion” and “Unreason” (Held and Lloyd cited in Held 2002, 54), and thus illuminate its role and essential value in the good. Peck translates Edgar’s and King Lear’s final lines in this way: “Behold and feel: that is all we may conclude. Bioethical Inquiry (2013) 10:277–281 DOI 10.1007/s11673-013-9470-7

Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race and Contemporary America by Ayanna Thompson (review)

Reviewed by: Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race and Contemporary America by Ayanna Thompson Francesca Royster (bio) Ayanna Thompson . Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race and Contemporary America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. x + 224. $55.00. Ayanna Thompson's Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race and Contemporary America represents a profound shift in the field. Works like Kim F. Hall's1995 landmark text, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in the Early Modern England, along with theoretical work by Arthur Little, Peter Erickson, Joyce Green MacDonald, Ania Loomba, Margo Hendricks, Dympna Callaghan, Jyotsna Singh, and others, have made race central to the study of the early modern moment. But in bringing to the fore the American racial experience of Shakespeare in the contemporary moment, Thompson's work brings these issues to a new light. Eschewing the assumption that the study [End Page 134] of Shakespeare is essentially "good for you" or even progressive, Thompson asks: "What does the history of Shakespearean scholarship and performance tell us about the possibilities for employing Shakespeare as a theoretical and practical tool for negotiating contemporary race relations?" (6); what then, she asks, is the intellectual and ethical value of studying practices like blackface in Shakespeare's moment as well as our own? How might Shakespeare's movement in contemporary culture as he is edited, appropriated, and revised impact our understanding of authenticity and authority? And how has such authority been used, progressively or otherwise, for marginalized or other groups, including incarcerated persons and youth of color? For this purpose, Thompson uses an expansive archive, including popular film, activist theater performances, YouTube sites and youth-generated videos, blackface legal cases, and original-practices productions of Shakespeare. The result is a dynamic and wide-reaching analysis, truly cultural studies in its most generous sense. In her introductory chapter, "The Passing Strangeness of Shakespeare," the author insightfully parses the traveling meanings of the word passing in order to highlight the book's major argumentative trajectories. Beginning with Othello's description of Desdemona's wonder at his "passing strange" biography (1.3.157-162), Thompson evokes both Desdemona's fascination with blackness as well as Othello's experience of being othered, and the melancholy connotations of both struggle and loss in his story. This moment will raise the key issues of authenticity, as well as desire, that are part of American racial experiences central to the book as a whole. As we move from Shakespeare to Charlotte Brontë to Robert Lewis Stephenson to Joseph Conrad, "passing strange" builds from Othello's experience of exceptionality to the fear of being othered by the Other, and a sense of risk, attraction, and repulsion. Such dynamics inform the debates around Shakespearean appropriation and borrowing explored in the text. Finally, Thompson brings us to Mark Stewart's (a.k.a. Stew's) recent hit Broadway musical Passing Strange, which deliberately alludes to Othello's masterful, if melancholy, storytelling with an American difference. Stew details his travels in Europe and his often convincing activation of fantasies of American blackness for his European friends and lovers. In Stew's self-exploration of what he calls "'black folks passing for black folks'" (10), he adds to Othello's first use of passing the consummately modern American anxiety about racial indeterminacy. We might link this indeterminacy to one of the book's major themes: the instability of Shakespeare's texts, image, and performances. In her second and third chapters, Thompson considers ways that popular texts appropriate Shakespeare both to decenter and universalize him, and in the process present different ideas of racial insiderhood. In her second chapter, "Universalism: Two Films that Brush with the Bard, Suture and Bringing Down the House," Thompson uses popular film—the art house psychological thriller [End Page 135] Suture and the "lowbrow" Queen-Latifah-as-fish-out-of-water comedy, Bringing Down the House—to show different cultural uses of the notion of Shakespeare as both universal and central to American consciousness. These films traffic in Shakespeare to illustrate ideals of colorblindness, as well as racial and national exclusivity, sometimes to critical effect. In her third chapter, "Essentialism: Meditations Inspired by Farrukh Dhondy's Novel Black Swan," Thompson thinks about the limits of...

Alexander C. Y. Huang, Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural ExchangeChinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange. Alexander C. Y. Huang. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Pp. xi+350.

<i>Alexander C. Y. Huang</i>, Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange<i>Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange</i>. Alexander C. Y. Huang. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Pp. xi+350.

Nothing like the Sun: Shakespeare in Spain Today

Today is more present in Spain than ever as a result of critical interest and spectacular growth of his popularity among Spaniards who recognise him as embodiment of cultural and literary values. Since celebration of Seventh World Congress in Valencia in April 2001, Shakespearean scholarship in Spain has provided new ways of understanding playwright. It has opened up debates on issues which have made possible new scholarly studies, translations and performances that have proved more active and vigorous than ever, and whose effects can be seen in different facets of Spanish culture and life.Which Shakespeare/ Which Spain?Who is today? Or, in Balz Engler's words, Does term refer to a person, to a set of printed texts, to a cultural icon, to a theatrical tradition, or to a combination of all these? (Engler 27) What does mean now? One can only say that means different things to different people: is constantly reshaped and refashioned in different places and situations; it is not but rather Shakespeare that really matters in Shakespace (Hedrick and Reynolds 3) where it is written and rewritten in an unending process of cultural reproduction. As no longer merely continues to signify Englishness (Joughin 1), it is possible to read within a distinct context without his language (Kennedy) for the meanings of Shakespeare's works (and of author) can constantly respond to needs, fantasies, preoccupations, and conflicts of moment (Lanier 230).Shakespeare's appropriation and adaptability become more problematic in new political mapping of Spain whose identity as a multilingual nation has become a burning issue today (Bejar). The debate about Spanish nation, its identity and language in new democracy, as both a historical and a contemporary political problem, is particularly complex due to legacy of Franco dictatorship which deeply eroded legitimacy of Spanish nationalism. During and since transition, Spanish nationalist discourse has evolved to meet challenge of new concepts of nation, identity and culture, and proposes different configurations of relationship between nation, state and language, as minority languages have co-official status with Spanish. While Constitution of 1978 defines Spain as a nation of nationalities, many politicians and intellectuals now claim that Spain is a nation of nations, while others that it is a post-national state (See Balfour). But what is really at issue is not whether Spain exists or not as a nation; rather, it is traditional ways of seeing Spain from both centre and margins, ways in which Spanish and other nationalities are projected and how they influence idea of Spain as a nation. It shows comparative rivalry between Spanish national identity and historic nationalities or regions like Catalonia, Basque Country and Galicia deriving from peculiar architecture of state in Spain, and their effect on social and political cohesion. We are witnessing a transformation of Spain from Spain of tambourine and Don Juan to multiple Spains, to a fragmented, multi-cultural society which nonetheless still (on whole) conceptualises itself as sum total of its long and rich cultural and political history (Gies 4). This radical change produces tension and conflict as a result of confrontation of two Spains, of traditional and conservative in contrast with modem and postmodern.Zara, Almodovar, and ShakespeareShakespeare's plays -like Zara's fashion house and Almodovar's movies- have been locally and universally accepted. They combine commercial and popular success. They represent values and aspirations that influence society and its institutions in various ways. They are cultural icons that remain in wide cultural circulation once the old division between high and low culture has been erased (Smith 2). …

Heaven or Havoc? The End of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;

Ever since A.C. Bradley sought to explain actually happens in the (93), there has been widespread disagreement among Shakespearean scholars about what does actually happen in Hamlet, and about what meaning to attach to the events of the play. In the broadest terms the critical debate divides into two lines of tradition. The first, which can be traced through C.S. Lewis, Maynard Mack, H.D.F. Kitto, G.B. Harrison, John Holloway, Kenneth Muir, Diana Devlin and others, interprets the play as the working out of divine purpose, or at least as justice finally being served and peace and order being restored. The second line, which includes G. Wilson Knight, L.C. Knights, Sydney Bolt, Eleanor Prosser and Graham Holderness, regards the play as presenting a rather darker and more problematic worldview. In this article, I offer a contribution to this debate by arguing that critics belonging to the second line do not go far enough - that in fact Hamlet represents the blackest of all Shakespeare's tragedies and expresses a vision of life which is unrelentingly bleak and pessimistic.

Randall Martin and Katherine Scheil, eds. Shakespeare/Adaptation/Modern Drama: Essays in Honour of Jill L. Levenson

RANDALL MARTIN and KATHERINE SCHEIL, eds. Shakespeare/Adaptation/Modern Drama: Essays in Honour of Jill L. Levenson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. xiii + 329 pp., 4 illustrations. In Shakespeare/Adaptation/Modern Drama: Essays in Honour of Jill L. Levenson, the editors bring together fifteen scholars whose work is possible because of Levenson's ground-breaking studies in the three title topics. Defending the seemingly arbitrary combination of topics in their introduction, the editors, Randall Martin and Katherine Scheil, argue: These asymmetrical but overlapping spheres have created a mega-field of intertextual relations, (3) and that these fifteen essays contribute to the historical and contemporary discursive relationships that partially constitute both and modern drama as adaptive fields (4). Throughout the introduction the editors play on a double meaning of the word 'adaptation.' Within the context of discussing dramatic and performative work, 'adaptation' means a new work derived from a sustained engagement with a literary text, as Julie Sanders defines it, whereas the term takes on Darwinian undertones when the editors shift to the use of 'self-adaptation.' Although this term is never explicitly defined in the introduction, I take it to be closely related to the New Historicist 'self-fashioning.' The essays have logically been compiled and organized into three sections: and Modern Drama, Shakespeare, and finally, Modern Drama. Part I focuses on in modern adaptation and performance, on stage, screen, and in narrative. This section broadly explores topics that include Hersh Zeifman's discussion of Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead as being heavily influenced by not only Waiting for Godot, but also Beckett's short stories and the Belgian philosopher Arnold Geulincx. Andrea Most examines Side Storythrough the lens of early- and mid-twentieth-century Jewish influences on the entertainment industry in West Side Storyand the Vestiges of Theatrical Liberalism. Peter Holland performs a reverse-chronological analysis of three adaptations for the stage in Unwinding Coriolanus: Osborne, Grass, and Brecht. Robert Ormsby and John H. Astington argue for performances of as reflections of nationalism in 'Bold, but Seemingly Marketable': The 2007 Stratford Ontario Merchant and Macbeth and Modern Politics, respectively. This section, not only the longest in the book, but also the most diverse in its subject matter, also manages to discuss representations of live performance on film in Margaret Jane Kidnie's Staging for 'Live' Performance in The Eyre Affair and Stage Beauty, as well as the various identities crafted for the Bard with the emergence of the memoir in Katherine Scheil's contribution. Part II moves toward discussing Shakespeare's stylistic evolution not only over time, but also within a single work. James C. Bulman's contribution on Editing the Bawdy in Henry IV, Part Two, explores the increased use of bawdy wordplay from Part One to Part Two of Henry IV, whereas Stanley Wells's Extremes of Passion examines the way that cues actors' emotional shifts within the text of King Lear. This section also seeks to challenge long-held assumptions of Shakespearean scholarship, as in Alexander Leggatt's Shakespeare and the Indifference of Nature, and Hanna Scolnicov's Lear's Conversation with the Philosopher, wherein they each seek to problematize canonical readings of these studied texts. …

Enduring Fictions of Possession

A failed reform bid to exclude ‘infidelity’ as a trigger for loss of control in the new loss of control defence introduced in England and Wales in 2009 occasions this return to an enduring puzzle: why should men who kill ‘unfaithful’ women continue to receive law’s compassion? The recent case of R v Clinton, Parker and Evans places this issue firmly back on the agenda. Informed by the latest wave of law scholarship that is exploring Shakespeare’s insights into a host of socio-legal questions, this article explores critical readings of Othello, that brilliant dissection of infidelity-inspired femicide that goes so far as to query the notion that a wife’s sexual infidelity warrants violent retaliation. The article highlights a strain of Shakespearean scholarship that reads Othello as a prescient examination of the operation of commodity fetishism. This reading, it is suggested, provides new insights into the purchase of fictions of possession still being retailed in cases of ‘infidelity’ homicide today.

New Directions in Renaissance Drama and Performance Studies ed. by Sarah Werner (review)

Reviewed by: New Directions in Renaissance Drama and Performance Studies ed. by Sarah Werner Shawna Mefferd Carroll New Directions in Renaissance Drama and Performance Studies. Edited by Sarah Werner. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. x + 226 pp. $80 cloth. In the introduction to New Directions in Renaissance Drama and Performance Studies, Sarah Werner establishes the focus of the volume: to give legitimacy to the study of performance of Renaissance drama. This book represents a third shift in Renaissance drama scholarship: a move beyond the first generation's naive assumption that performance practices and responses remain stable and consistent regardless of time, location, or culture and a rejection of the second generation's assumption that performances reveal modern theatre practice but [End Page 191] reveal little about the text. The essays included explore a multiplicity of new approaches to studying Renaissance drama and performance, giving space to explore what has been omitted from the field of scholarship. The authors look at what can be learned in Renaissance drama through various methodologies and lenses ranging from semiotic and phenomenological analyses of performances to case study and analogous exploration of text and film. Werner provides an excellent history of Shakespeare scholarship within her introduction and frames it in terms of "Shakespeare," not Renaissance drama, which exposes a central question of the book: How does one look at Renaissance drama without looking at Shakespeare? How can scholars move beyond the Bard? Several of the chapters explore this question and suggest opening the field to other relevant Renaissance drama. Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy is one such play for examination. Considering that the play surfaces as either a reference or a focal point in nearly half of the eleven chapters, it would seem that the play is quite prominent as a viable means of circumventing Shakespeare. Werner sets forth several probative questions in her introduction, but the book seems to return to a singular overarching one: In what ways can scholars continue to seek out worthwhile inquiry within the study of performance of Renaissance drama? The organization of the book is broad, divided into four major sections, but considering the various essays and perspectives, the divisions are fitting. The first section explores the ephemeral "dilemma" of performance and demonstrates scholars' struggles with "liveness." In "Replaying Early Modern Performances," William N. West explores the assumptions of an event's time and space and the concept of theatre as "replaying" rather than "loss" through an engaging analysis of The Wooster Group's Hamlet. The second section explores lessons gleaned from the intersection of literary and performance criticism. Overall, this was one of the more engaging sections, which includes critiques of self-fulfilling historiographic scholarship and of self-propagating performances and performance reviews. While the heading is inclusive, the topics explored in each chapter are quite varied. The third section of the book, "Resituating Shakespeare," attempts, through a variety of approaches, to decenter Shakespeare within the realm of Renaissance drama, suggesting that Renaissance drama is in need of a Derridean overhaul. The final section of the book, "Postscript," is a single chapter by Courtney Lehmann exploring Alex Cox's 2002 screen adaptation of Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy. Several chapters are noteworthy. In "Page and Stage Again: Rethinking Renaissance Character Phenomenologically," Andrew James Hartley uncovers the phenomenon of audience participation in the creation of character: we as audience [End Page 192] fill in the gaps of a character, so that regardless of discontinuity of character, using the actor's body and our own experiences, we, the audience, create a whole character. Hartley argues that regardless of some scholars' perspectives of modern treatment of character as historically alien to Renaissance performance, the connection between actor and audience is the same whether past or present. Paul Menzer's "The Spirit of 76: Original Practices and Revolutionary Nostalgia" critiques original practices (the New Globe and others) and historiographic scholarship that values the architecture, or the trace, over the performance. He suggests that scholars should seek out the gaps or blanks of history rather than clinging to the material traces, imaginatively exploring the empty spaces. In many ways, Menzer and other authors in this book seem to be encouraging...

The Merediths and Their Circle in 1856: A Letter from Peter Augustin Daniel to Henry Wallis

DESPITE intense biographical curiosity and speculation, little is actually known about the breakdown of George Meredith’s first marriage or his wife Mary Ellen’s affair with the painter Henry Wallis. Brief lives and chronologies still describe Mary Ellen as ‘eloping’ with Wallis to Capri in the autumn of 1858, even though she had been separated from her husband for about a year and had borne a child by her lover in April. A previously unknown letter from Peter Augustin Daniel to Henry Wallis, dated 24–26 June 1856, offers interesting glimpses of the Merediths and their circle of painter friends as well as the earliest evidence we have of Mary Ellen’s attraction to Wallis.1 Peter Augustin Daniel (1827–1917) was one of the Merediths’ oldest friends, having been a member of Richard Charnock’s literary circle and a fellow-contributor to the group’s manuscript periodical ‘The Monthly Observer’ in 1848–9. At that time, he was employed as a clerk in the Examiner’s Office of the East India Company, a position he held until 1861, when he received a pension of £367 a year (two-thirds of his final salary of £550). He was, however, a more interesting and more talented figure than Meredith’s biographers have realized. He had previously studied painting at the Royal Academy, and he exhibited his work there in 1853, 1862, and 1864, as well as at the British Institution in 1854 and 1865.2 In the 1870s and 1880s, he became a prominent figure in Shakespeare scholarship, publishing Notes and Conjectural Emendations of Certain Doubtful Passages in Shakespeare’s Plays (1870), and A Time-Analysis of the Plots of Shakespeare’s Plays (1879), as well as introductions to numerous facsimile editions or reprints of Shakespeare quartos or source texts. He later edited three plays in the first two volumes of A. H. Bullen’s incomplete Variorum Edition of The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (1904–12), where his work appeared alongside that of such distinguished scholars as E. K. Chambers, W. W. Greg, and R. B. McKerrow.3

Shakespeare, Sex, and Love (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare, Sex, and Love Elizabeth Klett (bio) Stanley Wells. Shakespeare, Sex, and Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. 304. $27.95. Stanley Wells is one of the few Shakespeare scholars, on either side of the Atlantic, to have attained anything like a popular readership for his books outside of the academy. Shakespeare, Sex, and Love is the most recent entry in a body of work that includes Shakespeare for All Time (2002) and Shakespeare and Co. (2006). Wells's goal with this new book is no small undertaking: he aims to provide a wide survey of attitudes toward love, lust, and sexual practices within Shakespeare's life, times, and works. He begins by noting the purging of sexuality in Shakespeare's plays by past generations of editors and directors, which has been balanced by an interest (particularly in recent years) in digging beneath the surface of the texts to find sexual meanings not immediately apparent. Wells explores the intriguing dialectic between negation and augmentation of sexuality primarily through a focus on the vexed relationship between love and lust, "the spiritual and the earthly" (7). Throughout this elegantly written study, Wells mediates between popular criticism and academic scholarship, between bolstering Shakespearean authority and contextualizing the plays by examining shared authorship and performance choices, and finally between when a reading is "gratuitous" or "pornographic" and when it is "true" to the text. The book is divided into two parts: in the first, "Life and Times," Wells delves into the sexual mores and practices of Shakespeare's times, with a particular focus on the scanty facts of Shakespeare's own life; in the second, "Plays and Poems," he provides readings of nearly all the works in the canon. In the introduction Wells critiques other works on the same topic for not encompassing the scope of the subject of sexuality. The historical sections in part 1 are generally more interesting than the textual analyses in part 2, primarily because the book as a whole sacrifices original close readings to breadth of coverage. Some of Wells's most persuasive points relate to homosexual practices and poetics; for example, in his analysis of Troilus and Cressida in part 2, he points out the homophobia of critics like Jan Kott who (assuming the role occupied by Thersites within the text) have used derogatory language to describe the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. Even more effectively, in the second chapter of part 1, he expands Mary Bly's assertion that there was a "self-aware homoerotic community in early modern London" by claiming that certain late sixteenth-century writers "were aware of a body of readers specially attracted by homoerotic literature, and that they attempted to satisfy those readers' tastes" (50–51). Wells focuses on Christopher Marlowe, Richard Barnfield (the only Elizabethan poet other than Shakespeare to address sonnets to a male), and Michael Drayton, who he argues formed "a group of poets with linked interests in homoerotic subject matter for poetry, and there are clear signs of direct influence and aesthetic fellowship among them" (57). [End Page 134] Part of Wells's point in theorizing a "homoerotic community" among these three poets is to separate Shakespeare and his work from this fellowship, with the implication that Shakespeare is superior. There is latent bardolatry in Wells's approach (although I suspect he would never use this term) that shows up throughout the book as a whole, marking it as popular, rather than wholly scholarly. Extravagant praises of Shakespeare are made mostly in passing, such as when he describes the plays as "whole and perfect" (122) and says of Romeo and Juliet, "Shakespeare deploys his mastery of language to differentiate character with virtuosic skill" (167). Other cues that Wells wrote the book primarily for a popular audiences (despite the fact that it was published by Oxford) include his accessible, almost breezy writing style, which employs contractions, the occasional colloquialism, and eschews jargon. He also plays down academic scholarship, sometimes omitting scholars' names within the body of the text and keeping the footnotes minimal. The title itself, with its three keywords guaranteed to appeal to a wide range of audiences, combined with the handsomely produced volume that...

The Recusancy of Hamlet

As Jane Austen would say, it is a truth universally acknowledged, even among Shakespeare scholars, that Shakespeare is the great enigma in English literature. To some extent this truth was partially covered up during the long period of Shakespeare scholarship when any discussion of Shakespeare's religion was considered taboo. But in the past couple of decades this taboo has been lifted to the extent that the theme proposed for the biennial Shakespeare Conference at Stratford in the year 2000 was ‘Shakespeare and Religions’. On the other hand, so far from resolving the Shakespearian enigma, the recent weakening of the taboo has only served to bring it more prominently into the foreground of scholarly attention and discussion. And of all the plays that may be said to centre on this enigma, it hardly needs to be said that Hamlet is not only one among many but the one play that may be called uniquely so—as being the most problematic of all Shakespeare's so-called ‘problem plays’.