Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe (review)

Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe is a collection of fifteen essays originally presented at a 1999 conference of the same name held at the University of Murcia in Spain. The volume has some of the character of a literary conference: it is wide-ranging rather than comprehensive, brilliant in some places but pedestrian in others. In short, the book reflects the infinite variety of continental Shakespeare scholarship, translation, and production.

Perhaps because the book bears such an overreaching title, editors A. Luis Pujante and Ton Hoenselaars are at pains to impose order on their broad topic. They organize the volume's fifteen essays into four discrete categories: "Introductions," "Appropriations," "Translations," and "Productions." This structure nevertheless produces an oddly balanced assortment of chapters. There are two introductions, three essays on Translations, and five essays each on Appropriations and Productions. So while the translator may find the book a bit thin, scholars of performance studies ought to find enough material here to keep them occupied. Moreover, most of these essays eventually transition into discussions of production and reception, because Shakespeare's afterlife on the continent is a decidedly performative one. His plays enter the European consciousness by way of the stage.

The essays grouped in the "Appropriations" section throw a wide net over the ways in which Shakespeare's plays and sonnets have been adopted and reinterpreted on the continent. Every appropriation of Shakespeare is also a reinvention of his work, a negotiation between the original English text and the social, political, and aesthetic exigencies of the country and language into which that text is carried. In his essay "Shakespeare as a Character on the Spanish Stage: A Metaphysics of Bardic Presence," Keith Gregor argues that early Spanish playwrights and producers gravitated less to the text of Shakespeare's plays than to "an iconic presentation of the man 'himself'" (44). Appropriations such as Ventura de la Vega's 1828 Shakespeare Enamorado [Shakespeare in Love] represent him not only as a "romantic and authorial . . . creator of great dramas," but as "a character of other people's dramas" (44). Indeed, Shakespeare Enamorado is the first in a long line of Spanish plays that feature Shakespeare as a protagonist. Perhaps this interest in the "man himself" is consonant with the culture that produced—and was in turn produced by—Cervantes's Don Quixote. Poland, too, discovered in Shakespeare a proto-Romantic. Marta Gibínska, in "Enter Shakespeare: The Contexts of Early Polish Appropriations," explores the nexus of political and intellectual movements which precipitated the "discovery" of Shakespeare during the nineteenth-century Polish Enlightenment. Whereas the Spanish and Polish appropriations of Shakespeare contextualize the Bard within an emerging spirit of Romanticism, some other European appropriations are of a decidedly political nature. In "Route 66: The Political Performance of Shakespeare's Sonnet 66 in Germany and Elsewhere," Manfred Pfister contrasts the "popularity and admiration that Sonnet 66 enjoys in Croatia and . . . elsewhere on the continent" with the "disregard" it has found in Anglo-American criticism (71–2). A poem beginning "Tired with all these, for restful death I cry" resonated with German and Austrian writers and critics living under the Third Reich in a way it seems never to have for their English and American contemporaries. The poem remained relevant for critics living in East Germany after the war, and through frequent translation and commentary has become a part of German "Trümmerliteratur, the 'literature of ruins and shambles'" (79). G. D. White stays closer to home in his essay "Shakespearean Fascist: A.K. Chesterton and the Politics of Cultural Despair." White explores the relationship between Chesterton's championing of Shakespeare and his movement toward British fascism. Chesterton sheds light "on the ways in which idealist conceptions of literary production can be employed to legitimate ultraconservative, nationalist and generically fascist ideologies" (89). The last essay in "Appropriations," Boika Sokolova's "Shakespeare: Man of the Millennium," takes a long...