Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare across Time and Media (review)

Diana Henderson's Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare across Time and Media is implicitly a book about adaptations: theatrical performances, films, and novels that take as their immediate subject either the whole matter of plays such as The Taming of a Shrew and Henry V or use plots and character configurations as well as full or partial quotations from Othello, Cymbeline, and Antony and Cleopatra as touchstones for elaborative development. I say "implicitly" because from the start Henderson studiously avoids deploying the word adaptation, or its more politically charged cousin, appropriation, to describe these transactions, preferring instead a professedly less impersonal, more interactive terminology cued by the notion of collaboration, and the somewhat looser, less theorized concept of Shake-shifting, which seems to cover all forms of working or performing variations on Shakespeare. As she writes in her introduction:

[U]nlike the disembodied vocabulary of much theoretical writing on intertextuality or the zero-sum economics implied by "appropriation," collaboration focuses on the connections among individuals, allowing artists credit and responsibility, but at the same time refusing to separate them from their social location and the work of others. It also makes space for emotion as part of art's appeal and reality, both for its creators and its audiences.

(8)

Henderson's style of address throughout is nothing if not generous, and informs her effort to find a nonpolemical way of framing and discussing the interactive commerce between Shakespeare and his sources on the one hand, and Shakespeare and his latter-day "collaborators" on the other. But in making her case for collaboration, Henderson draws fairly reductive comparisons between the alleged "zero-sum economics" of appropriation and the avowed humanity, interactivity, and "emotion" of collaboration. (Is there really only one, winner-takes-all way of conceptualizing the act—and art—of appropriation?) And in pressing her case home, she does it little service by quoting from an interview with Neil Bartlett, a contemporary director of Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage, in which Bartlett (speaking of Marlowe) gushes, "I want people to meet this wonderful man" (9), a statement that arguably says more than it wants to say about Bartlett's lack of acquaintance with the historical Marlowe while sentimentally conflating the work with the man. Though Henderson's own commentary on this example is comparably effusive—"That's Marlowe, that's Bartlett: in the wink of an eye, centuries disappear and sensibilities correspond, even as the artwork itself remains 'strange and wonderful' in its otherness" (9)—it also reveals how hard she is working to "make space" for a more interpersonal and exploratory understanding of artistic and cultural transactions than more objectified accounts of adaptation and appropriation may provide.

Of course, even space-clearing gestures need to persuade readers whom Henderson casts as "skeptics" that "the term 'collaborator' accurately describes the dead man in this partnership" (10), namely, Shakespeare. Henderson addresses this problem in three ways: 1) by evoking the highly social "collaborative economy" within which Shakespeare himself labored, borrowed, and performed; 2) by applying an unusually interactive model of Eliot's theory of "tradition and the individual talent" to the collaborative exchange itself; and 3) by supplying a lexical history of the word collaboration itself, which seeks (again) to "make space" both for "the 'uneasy' (dominantly sociopolitical) dimensions of working with Shakespeare across time and media" and its "celebratory, empowering incentives" (13). Situating "anti-authorial theorists" and "theorists of power" to her left, aesthetic celebrants of "the solitary mind" (like Harold Bloom) to her right, while effectively "appropriating" the left's concern for the social and political, as well as Bloom's devotion to the "willful, productive dialogue between artists and their forbears" (13–14), Henderson makes a strong drive here to claim a middle ground of her own as she sets out "to describe the mutually reinforcing aspects" of Shake-shifting and collaborations with the past (14).

In the wake of her closely argued introduction, which blends an outline of what's to come with elaboration of its interpretive strategies, Collaborations with the Past structurally divides into two parts, each consisting of two chapters. The first part treats "novel...