Both Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance, edited by Paul Yachnin and Patricia Badir, and Shakespeare Re-Dressed, edited by James C. Bulman, interrogate the ways in which Shakespeare's plays intersect with performance and culture. Both contain contributions from some of the most exciting Shakespeareans working today, yet these two books could hardly be more different from each other. Although both rely heavily on the concepts of “culture” and “performance,” each collection defines these crucial terms very differently.

In Yachnin and Badir's book, the term “performance” rarely refers to theatrical performance; more often the word signifies the way Shakespeare's plays, or characters within the texts, perform social interactions in a variety of different settings—legal, religious, and interpersonal. Similarly, “culture” is interpreted differently in individual essays: some contributors look at early modern playgoing, legal, monetary, or religious culture, whereas others explore moments in more recent cultural history; Badir and Yachnin call these moments “particular provinces of culture” (3). Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance attempts to carve out an original niche in the field of Shakespeare studies by examining alternatives to traditional “historicist critical practices” (2), especially ways of describing the phenomenology of performance while connecting the theatrical event (or playtext) to a particular cultural moment. This admirable goal leads to mixed results, however, because several of the essays seem instead to be traditional works of literary criticism.

The six contributions in Part I, “Shakespeare and Early Modern Cultures of Performance,” are more textually based, New Historicist–influenced literary criticism, informed by an extremely wide variety of scholarship from many fields. David Bevington, in his opening essay, mentions abstract “actors” (21), and Anthony B. Dawson actually speaks of performers, acting technique, and the audience, but this general lack of reference to stage performance occasionally proves troubling, especially when Lynne Magnusson seems to conflate the performance of the character Armado in the play Love's Labour's Lost with the performance of the actor who will be playing Armado. Bevington's essay “Shakespeare and the Theatrical Performance of Rusticity” is a superb close reading of country scenes in several Shakespearean plays. It is followed by two essays on The Merchant of Venice: Linda Woodbridge reads the play as a “revenge comedy” (29), in which retribution and remuneration are linked through the concept of debt and repayment, whereas Sean Lawrence approaches the play from a more traditional angle, examining “contractual, rather than dramaturgical performances” (41) in the Venetian society of rabid mercantilism.

Chapters 5 and 6 are the most fascinating in the first part, in which Huston Diehl and Anthony B. Dawson explore religion in The Winter's Tale. Diehl argues that Shakespeare draws upon “Protestant interpretations of Paul and his preaching” (71) in the character of Paulina, particularly the Pauline rebuke, in order to examine the performativity of language, the ways in which words and rhetoric can change human behavior. Diehl carefully marshals substantial evidence to support her argument, especially in the section where she discusses Stephen Gosson's arguments against stage rhetoric. In contrast, Dawson sees the theatre as a “secular, and secularizing, institution” (84). Using Hermione as an example, Dawson argues that the technique and presence of actors lead audiences toward a state where “[t]heatrical belief replaces religious faith” (97), even in situations where characters express religious sentiments. Unlike Diehl, Dawson is clearly more interested in theatre than theology.

Part II of the book, “Shakespeare and Modern Cultures of Performance,” is more directly related to theatrical performance, and the most successful essay of the three in this group is Coppélia Kahn's “Forbidden Mixtures: Shakespeare in Blackface Minstrelsy, 1844,” a fascinating analysis of Thomas Dartmouth Rice's Otello, A Burlesque Opera, which was performed in Philadelphia. Kahn relies on extensive research into both blackface minstrelsy and Shakespearean burlesques, as well as nineteenth-century theatrical culture, to expose the radical politics of Rice's blackface minstrelsy text. She argues that Rice's burlesque is not simply a racist cheapening of Shakespeare's play, but is a “translation” (143) that allowed the author to explore and challenge American racial stereotypes and Jim Crow. Kahn's eight well-chosen illustrations are also the only images in the collection.

Edward Pechter's Afterword, “‘Performance,’ ‘Culture,’ History,” is far more than an ideal summation and reflection upon the preceding essays, although it certainly accomplishes that goal as well. Pechter engages more thoroughly with the terms “performance” and “culture” than do any of the other authors, drawing upon both academic theorists—especially Elin Diamond, Thomas Postlewait and Tracy C. Davis, Judith Butler, and W. B. Worthen—and popular culture from Starbucks to Syriana. Pechter acknowledges that “Performance may indeed be everywhere in life” (171), but he argues against comprehensive “sweeping transformational narratives” (179), advocating instead for extremely detailed analyses of particular moments in history. In the third section of his essay Pechter poses serious challenges to current “Presentist celebrations of an unfettered interpretive will” (184) while also making the canny observation that the secularism, liberal democracy, and scholarly inquiry promised by the Enlightenment and championed by many Shakespearean scholars may be the most deceptive sweeping cultural narrative of all.

Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance, which came out of a seminar at the Shakespeare Association of America in 2004, examines a far more specific type of performance: the performance of gender within cross-dressed Shakespearean performance. Although many scholars have chosen to explore the Elizabethan boy player, this collection eschews early modern historical analyses in favor of an examination of contemporary performance through the lens of cultural analysis; many of the productions discussed were staged after Judith Butler's influential assertion that gender is performed, not ontological. Several key performances, especially Cheek by Jowl's all-male As You Like It (1991) and the Globe's all-male Twelfth Night (2002) (the source of the fabulous cover illustration of Mark Rylance as Olivia), are examined in multiple essays, yet this is accomplished without any sense of redundancy. Many essays also draw heavily upon the same gender theorists, critics, and Shakespeareans of the late 1980s and early 1990s: Butler is cited by many contributors, as are Bruce R. Smith, Jean Howard, and Stephen Orgel, as well as Alisa Solomon for Re-Dressing the Canon (1997), to which the title of this collection alludes.

Although this book is obviously of great interest to scholars working on cross-dressing in Shakespearean drama, or on any of Shakespeare's gender-bending plays, and most of the contributors write in vivacious, attention-grabbing prose, the book is not without several flaws. Each chapter contains both a set of endnotes and an individual list of “Works Cited”; yet many works are cited in multiple chapters, and a single bibliography at the end would have been more useful. Many of the essays are surprisingly short, and some feel like conference papers that had not been substantially reworked or expanded for publication. Several—especially P. A. Skantze's examination of Mabou Mines' Lear, Robert Conkie's close reading of Rylance's performance as Cleopatra in 1997, and Judith Rose's detailed close reading and review of the Globe's all-male Twelfth Night—are primarily meditations, open-ended explorations, or ruminations on a specific topic. While fascinating and well-researched, these chapters seem to lack clear arguments. The collection could also have used illustrations from many of the productions discussed.

In fact, the only illustrations in the book are in Jennifer Drouin's opening chapter, which examines the distinctions between cross-dressing, drag, and passing. Drouin argues that there is “the need for a theoretical distinction … and for a more precise application of these terms to discussions of Shakespearean and early modern drama” (23); she supports this assertion by referring to critics from Butler to Homi K. Bhabha and examples from Shakespeare to the 1993 murder of Brandon Teena, a biological female who passed as male. The terms used in the chapter and the theoretical questions explored successfully inform the rest of the collection.

The fourth chapter, Cary M. Mazer's “Rosalind's Breast,” serves as a neat counterpoint to Drouin's essay on the theories at play in criticism of drag, cross-dressing, and passing. Reading specific moments in the Cheek by Jowl production of As You Like It, directed by Declan Donnellan, Mazer wonderfully articulates the theatrical and affective possibilities of cross-gendered casting, “without recourse to—and perhaps in defiance of—queer theory, performativity theory, and the more sexual readings of early modern performance by cultural historians” (100). Juxtaposing his examination of Donnellan's production with Charles Busch's 1986 Psycho Beach Party, and exploring moments when male actors as female characters refer to breasts that are obviously not there, Mazer sees theatrical cross-dressing as a “not-so-secret secret” that allows audiences to “vicariously cop a feel” (97).

Mazer's contribution is juxtaposed with Bulman's taut, carefully and economically argued essay on the Cheek by Jowl As You Like It, which he calls a “touchstone for all-male productions during the following decade” (80), but points out that the production has led critics (except Alisa Solomon) to discuss cross-dressing on the early modern stage instead of the contemporary stage. Along with this argument, Bulman successfully historicizes Donnellan's production, reading it in light of British state-sanctioned homophobia in the early 1990s. Equally successful is Bulman's concluding chapter, “Unsex Me Here: Male Cross-Dressing at the New Globe,” in which he argues that the “original practices” label can be used to open audiences to queer readings of plays. As in his earlier essay, Bulman is sensitive to cultural forces such as gender and identity politics and the effects they may have on an audience.

Also noteworthy are contributions by Melissa D. Aaron and Andrew James Hartley. Aaron, examining all-female Shakespeare companies, uses fascinating examples from a contemporary Los Angeles–based company, one in women's correctional facilities, an early twentieth-century British troupe, and the Japanese Takarasuka-Za; she is the only author in either collection to refer to non-Western performance. Hartley, focusing on a production of The Tempest in Georgia in 2003 in which four characters written as male—Prospero, Antonio, Gonzalo, and Ariel—were played by and as women, examines how cross-gendered casting can “work” in the theatre and with audiences. Hartley uses this example to argue persuasively against critics who claim that an actor's race does not necessarily signify onstage whereas an actor's sex always does; he also posits that theatre, and in particular Shakespearean performance, should be treated as a constructive enterprise, not an interpretive one.

Shakespeare Re-Dressed and Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance are both useful collections of essays, filled with fascinating contributions. Both are also—as nearly any collection of essays is doomed to be—somewhat uneven. In general, the essays in both collections seemed a bit too brief, not always allowing the contributors to provide sufficient evidence or examples; this problem was magnified in Shakespeare Re-Dressed, which used very large type.

As a Shakespearean, I found Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance an engaging work of skilled criticism; however, as a scholar of theatre I was disappointed, and saw its title as potentially misleading. I had hoped to read far more about theatrical performance, and the only cultures mentioned in the book were British, American, and English-speaking Canadian; in a collection of essays with “Culture” in the title, particularly one focused on Shakespeare, it would have been useful for the editors to follow Marvin Carlson's suggestion to “become less provincial.” For scholars of theatre, gender, or performance studies, Shakespeare Re-Dressed is certainly a more useful collection: its chapters are more unified around the central theme of reconsidering gender and sexuality in relation to Shakespearean performance. Both of these studies approach the concepts of culture and performance in new and invigorating ways.