The Shakespeare Effect: A History of Twentieth-Century Performance (review)

The Shakespeare Effect is not "a straightforward history of twentieth-century Shakespearean performance" but an examination of a few significant events and individuals within that history (13-14). Shaughnessy is concerned with the relationship between the cultural authority newly claimed for performance in the twentieth century and the theatrical and political radicalism of the modern and postmodern avant-gardes. His work is "as much a consideration of the texts that are generated by Shakespearean performance as it is about performance itself (if, indeed, such an entity is ever recoverable)"(14).

The Shakespeare Effect focuses on three figures important in the standard history—William Poel, Terence Gray, and Tyrone Guthrie—the experiments each attempted in the field of performance, and their reception in subsequent criticism. Much of Shaughnessy's work is concerned with exposing social, ideological, and psychological discourses running through ostensibly aesthetic practices, and with the contradictions in invoking the authorizing figure of Shakespeare in these contexts. The chapter on William Poel begins with a typically demystifying gesture, as Shaughnessy notes that Poel's "Elizabethan" staging of the First Quarto Hamlet at St. George's Hall in 1881 has achieved a disproportionate significance "given that in most contemporary accounts it was judged to be a misguided venture bungled by its amateur performers" (17). He connects the Victorian production of facsimile versions of early Shakespeare texts with the antiquarian authenticity practiced by Poel. Shaughnessy also considers the relation between Poel's experiments with gender in casting and "the very nature of masculine and feminine identities at a moment of critical social change" (40). He perceptively examines changing views of Romeo and Juliet in terms of age, nationality, and sexuality. Only at the end of the chapter does Shaughnessy push into speculative psychoanalysis that begins to strain credulity: "Shakespeare's stage is for Poel as for so many of his followers, not just a space of play and embodiment but an object of desire, a liminal, shiftingly-gendered, sexualised entity which serves as a focus for much more than fantasies about Shakespearean staging" (53-54). This rhetorical tactic is characteristic: a move from a detailed contextualizing of some person or event, to a suggestion that there is "rather more at stake" than the recorded evidence admits (80). Nonetheless, Shaughnessy writes with such control, clarity, and intelligence that these leaps are often persuasive.

Shaughnessy's chapter on Gray discusses the iconoclastic director of the Cambridge Festival Theatre in terms of the European avant-garde theater of the 1920s and '30s. Entitled "Cambridge Irish," the chapter also explores the significance of Gray's heritage and his interest in Irish dance-drama. The chapter ends with a discussion of Gray's famous 1931 production of Henry VIII, which presented the characters as Alice-in-Wonderland-style playing cards and ended with the puppet Princess Elizabeth being tossed into the audience. His observations on the complex reception, and subsequent afterlife, of this notorious performance are grounded in a well-researched and compellingly rendered account of the production itself.

The most substantial section of the book, over one third of the total, is devoted to Tyrone Guthrie. Shaughnessy reads Guthrie first psychoanalytically, focusing on his relationship with his mother and his career-long preoccupation with Hamlet and Oedipus. Shaughnessy also considers Guthrie's Irish identity, in relation to the political dimensions of his experimental stagecraft and in terms of his reception in Canada. But he focuses primarily on Guthrie's championing of the "open stage," a modernist extension of William Poel's experiments with Elizabethan stage practice. Shaughnessy centers his discussion on two touchstones in the open-stage movement: Guthrie's 1937 production of Hamlet at Elsinore and his opening season at the Stratford Festival, Canada, in 1953. Shaughnessy debunks the celebrated opening performance of Hamlet at Kronborg Castle, Elsinore. Due to rain, the performance was moved indoors to a hotel ballroom, where the audience sat around a bare playing area, an improvised "open...