The field of Shakespeare in performance has gained increasing importance over the last years, broadening not only the scope of Shakespeare studies but also the field of theatre studies. This is particularly true with respect to methodological questions. Considering the current discussion, studies on Shakespeare have allowed for a fresh view of the interrelation of textuality and performativity, as in the works of Robert Weimann or W. B. Worthen. Dennis Kennedy has opened the field of Shakespeare studies in a similar way by emphasizing not only the theatrical dimension of the texts but – even more provocatively – by questioning the anglophone claim on the Bard. According to these works, the interest in Shakespeare is rooted less in his canonical position than in the fact that his works fuel a permanent process of rereading. Here, the scholarly discourse mirrors a phenomenon well known from stage history: as the works of Reinhardt, Brook, Ninagawa and many others show, going back to Shakespeare often invites one to reformulate one's own aesthetic, or in our case scholarly, position.
Thus it is consistent that the three books under review do not merely offer new insights into Shakespearean performance but take an explicit methodological position – each of it with a special focus: Shakespeare in Stages focuses on marginalized phenomena and regions in theatre history, Popular Shakespeare concentrates on contemporary productions with an emphasis on the question of the ‘popular’, New Directions in Renaissance Drama and Performance Studies takes its point of departure from the recent interest in Renaissance (and non-Shakespearean) drama to discuss some general questions of drama, intermediality and performativity.
Christie Carson describes the impetus of Shakespeare in Stages as illustrating ‘how meaning has been created by a particular community at a particular time’ (p. 277). This wide scope embraces historical essays, such as Andrew Gurr's article on the impact of indoor rooms on the theatrical practices of the Elizabethan age, Lucy Munro's reading of William Poel's experiments with the platform stage at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Fiona Ritchie's article on the ‘actress in the age of Garrick’ (p. 107).
This historic focus is complemented by articles discussing Shakespeare with regard to identity politics in regional contexts such as Australia or South Africa, or to specific cultural contexts, as in Susan Bennett's article on the Shakespeare enthusiasm in rural Montana, challenging conventional distinctions of centre and periphery. Although the broad scope does not really allow for a coherent focus, these various articles instructively represent the diversity and inner dynamics of the various stages of Shakespeare.
Stephen Purcell, in contrast, has chosen a very clearly defined phenomenon: the ongoing popularity of Shakespeare. Purcell unfolds his argument on two complementary levels: on one level, he inserts short ‘Personal Narratives’ about his own experiences as a spectator and director, on a second level he tries to analyse Shakespeare's popularity with respect to several aspects that usually collide on our notion of ‘popularity’: the commercial theatre versus art, textual dimensions, questions of community building and so on. He develops these threads in his illuminating introduction, followed by six chapters discussing concrete productions in light of a theoretical concept, such as blasphemy or improvisation. Taking his examples from contemporary Shakespeare performances in the UK, Purcell analyses performances across all genres and develops an analytical perspective that touches on key issues of performance analysis, as for example in his instructive discussion of anachronism.
Sarah Werner, associate editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, has compiled an essay collection that uses the focus on performance to look at the recent wave of interest in early modern drama. She has gathered scholars from different fields and combines their various approaches: Robert Shaughnessy, for example, discusses the epistemological and ethical preconditions of Shakespearean performance criticism in a dialogue of his own experiences and the development of the field in general. Andrew James Hartley, in contrast, uses his experiences as a director to discuss the status of early modern theatrical figures from a phenomenological point of view, while Christopher Cobb revisits the methods and procedures of performance analysis. His original reading of metonomy and metaphor as parts of a ‘theatrical poetics’ is inspiring and invites for further consideration.
Under the umbrella of performativity, the volume also takes a look at early modern drama in other media, as in Courtney Lehmann's reading of Alex Cox's Revengers Tragedy (2002). A further highlight is Emma Smith's essay ‘Performing Relevance/Relevant Performances: Shakespeare, Johnson, Hitchcock’. In contrast to common assumption, Smith rejects all too fashionable claims of an immediate relevance of early modern drama for our contemporary culture. She rather takes an explicitly distanced scholarly point of view that looks for ‘formalist parallels and performance possibilities’ (p. 153). Her innovative use of the concepts of parabasis and prosopopoeia revisits the axioms of theatrical representation with a fresh approach. Her call to ‘disrupt historicist conventions and promote an anachronistic dialogue between different types of performance’ (p. 159) could be the beginning of a creative revisiting of the often too easily dismissed question of page and stage/media.
While theatre studies appear to undergo a phase of self-reflexivity and of reconsidering its premises and paradigms, the three books under discussion deserve broad attention: not only because they make valuable contribution to Shakespeare studies but because they also address issues that have been at the core of our methodological discussions in recent years. Remarkably, the allegedly too-well-known point of reference of Shakespeare seems to grant a special freedom to experiment with concepts and methods beyond the usual paths.
