Alternative Shakespeares 3 (review)

The notion that the meanings of "Shakespeare" are not fixed or timeless but mutable and contested animates all three volumes of Alternative Shakespeares, including this, the most recent installment. The first two iterations made a splash because they effectively demonstrated the instability and polysemy of "Shakespeare" as a cultural text. This volume, then, could be said to belong to a fortuitous scholarly lineage, which only seems appropriate, and Alternative Shakespeares 3 rises admirably to the challenge of redefining "alternative" scholarship. The collection captures some of the gusto of its predecessors by offering fresh scholarly perspectives that engage with Shakespeare as a text that continues to be both decoded and produced in new ways. As such, it is—like its predecessors—more concerned with the timely than the timeless. Those of us who cut our scholarly teeth on Alternative Shakespeares 1 and 2 should not expect a reprise of the first two books but will find it every bit as readable and instructive.

In her engaging introduction, Diana E. Henderson responds to the challenge posed by the logic of the "alternative," a term that seems incommensurate with the establishment of what amounts to a tradition. In answering "Can there still be an alternative Shakespeare?" (1), she posits that the present volume is better seen as "a collaborative daughter rather than a murderous son" (5). The emphasis on the word "still" suggests that in the early modern sense of the term—meaning both "ongoing" and "always"—the Bard is always-already alternative. Indeed, when Henderson inverts her own question, "Can there not be?" (1), the rhetorical flourish indicates just how far Shakespeare scholarship has come since 1985. What was alternative then is hegemonic now. As Henderson writes, "Will Shakespeare has attained a new kind of pop celebrity even as the Bard remains in some quarters the last bastion of community and inherited values. Thus if we take the title as descriptive, it is assured that any representative collection of Shakespeare essays today will indeed be about alternative Shakespeares" (1).

If there is one theme that ties the essays together, it is a shared interest in retheorizing and rehistoricizing the media of cultural transmission of and within the Shakespeare text. Henderson's previous work on the filmic Shakespeare and digital media no doubt informed her decision to emphasize—and problematize—textuality and transmission. The present volume thus evinces a certain thematic cohesiveness while also showcasing at least as much scholarly variety as the original collection. Topics range widely: performance theory, media studies, textual scholarship, philology, the construction of gender, translation, materialism, and collaboration. Most chapters strive to complicate our understanding of the material status of the Shakespearean text, received readings of specific scenes and plays, or both; many would have been inconceivable before the advent of digital culture.

For instance, W. B. Worthen's "Shakespeare 3.0, or Text versus Performance, the Remix" makes us rethink "the ways in which we imagine the interface between writing and performance" by arguing that "the rise of digital culture has provided important ways for reimagining the book, and so for resituating what I will call an 'information theory' understanding of drama" (55). Situating the plays within "the destabilizing cultural relationship between Western drama and the technologies that produce it: writing and performance," Worthen notes that "plays had a very subsidiary life as printed texts" (55). From the stage to the page to the stage again: the notion that stage productions enact a theatrical reproduction of what came to be understood as a textual artifact is what is meant by "Shakespeare 3.0." For Worthen, the advent of electronic media provides a historical vantage point, and a metaphor, for the complex material status of the plays.

Other chapters rather straightforwardly challenge traditional assumptions. In "Shakespeare for Readers," Lukas Erne makes a strong case for Shakespearean drama having been produced for print from the start, arguing that "Shakespeare wrote his plays with a double reception in mind, the page and the stage, and...