Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe (review)

Would Shakespeare be a global author if English were not a global language? After reading this book, one can surmise that the Bard would be delighted to see his own strategy of drawing from various foreign literatures, genres, and texts being reduplicated centuries later as numerous national literatures and different media draw from his works. Europe's fascination with Shakespeare is affirmed by recent translations and bilingual editions of his plays and poems in virtually all European languages; by three issues of the Shakespeare Yearbook devoted respectively to France, Hungary, and Italy; and by several international conferences in the 1990s. The title of this volume derives from that of a conference held at the University of Murcia in 1999. The table of contents identifies the four areas around which the volume is built: introductions to contextual and methodological issues, appropriations, translations, and productions. Balz Engler's "Constructing Shakespeares in Europe" demonstrates that a diachronic perspective is indispensable even to the perception of the synchronic varieties of Shakespeare in geographical space. His focus on "scholarship, the theater, and common culture" (30), and his distinction of three phases of Shakespeare's reception—"beyond the rules, beyond criticism, and beyond the text" (31)—set a good methodological perspective from which to grasp the complexity of Shakespeare's re-production. The volume documents, through detailed examinations, how the reaction against neoclassical poetics enlisted Shakespeare in the Romantic and avant-garde movements all over Europe. Marta Gibi´nska's "Enter Shakespeare: The Context of Early Polish Appropriations," Isabelle Schwartz-Gastine's "Shakespeare on the French Stage: A Historical Survey," and Rafael Portillo and Mercedes Salvador's "Spanish Productions of Hamlet in the Twentieth Century" competently illustrate specific national paradigms. European nineteenth-century Shakespeares embodied the victory of imagination over rules and started the gradual transformation of the dramatist into an icon and even into a fictional character, as shown in Keith Gregor's "Shakespeare as a Character on the Spanish Stage: A Metaphysics of Bardic Presence."

The twentieth century seems to have made the most of the Shakespearean text's flexibility. The self-transforming and expanding power of the plays is such that a whole galaxy of original works has grown out of Shakespeare, not only in drama but also in literature, film, and other media. In his foreword to this volume Stanley Wells observes that Shakespeare's "writings have proved . . . acceptable to cultures different in both place and in time from those for which they were conceived. Textually indeterminate and susceptible to wide ranges of interpretation though they are even in English, they change, sometimes drastically, in the process of translated performance" (8). If a new Marxist Shakespeare can be said to have begun after Brecht's Coriolanus, the 1960s and '70s also saw "an absurdist Lear, a 'flower power' Twelfth Night" (211); and today, of course, we have an updated, postmodern Shakespeare, wonderfully discussed by Jozef de Vos in a chapter titled "Shakespeare's History Plays in Belgium: Taken Apart and Reconstructed as 'Grand Narrative,'" as well as by Sylvia Zysset in "Apocalyptic Beginnings at the End of the Millennium: Stefan Bachmann's Troilus and Cressida," and by Boika Sokolova in "Shakespeare: Man of the Millennium."

Despite its division into sections on appropriations, translations, and productions, this book shows that these categories often overlap. Appropriations and translations frequently address political issues, which in turn influence productions. In Europe, just as elsewhere, appropriation has been inflected by national interests and, more recently, by global interests as well. Reception and re-creation have been responsive, either alternately or simultaneously, to national histories, to the status of national literatures, to various aesthetics, and to local cultural norms. Translations and productions have served both subversive and normative cultural agendas. Shakespeare's popularity has always gained from the interaction of these factors.

Evidence of a "political Shakespeare" is abundant in this volume: we find a "fascist" Shakespeare, a "liberal" Shakespeare...