The Tempest (review)

Shakespeare in Production: The Tempest. Edited by Christine Dymkowski. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xxxii + 373. Illus. $64.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Christine Dymkowski's edition of The Tempest represents the fifth entry in Cambridge University Press's Shakespeare in Production series and, like its predecessors, functions as a "theatrical variorum," ¹ compiling an exhaustive account of staging choices employed since the play's inception. The edition essentially reprints David Lindley's New Cambridge version of the text, but it substitutes, in place of Lindley's apparatus, Dymkowski's own notes, which chronicle stage settings, actors' performances, textual alterations and cuts, and the contemporary reception of various productions. This exclusive emphasis on performance renders such editions inadequate for beginning students yet invaluable for theatrical practitioners and stage-centered scholars alike. Compared to previous volumes in the series, Dymkowski's edition is somewhat broader in scope, going beyond major British revivals to examine regional and fringe productions, nineteenth- and twentieth-century American stage versions, and recent performances in Australia, Canada, France, Italy, and Japan. It also includes a more detailed list of productions and two appendices, the first devoted to selected textual variations and the second to a list of principal players.

Throughout her edition Dymkowski emphasizes the cultural significance of historical trends in the play's theatrical representation, particularly in the characterization of The Tempest's primary characters. Because the play is "unusually elastic," she argues, it serves as "a mirror powerfully reflecting contemporary concerns, be they social, political, scientific or moral" (1). Dymkowski illustrates this function at length in a six-part introduction, three sections of which are devoted to changing patterns in the stage portraits of Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban. The segment on Prospero documents the figure's evolution from a wise, semi-divine patriarch to a more complicated, flawed human being struggling with his own creative and destructive urges. The part of Ariel, Dymkowski shows, functions as a vehicle for the expression of gender ideology, particularly with regard to the sex of the performer assuming the role. And Caliban, who appears as a comic monster in most early productions, gradually develops into a more sympathetic victim of colonialist oppression, a symbol of all exploited indigenous peoples. The section devoted to Caliban is the least original of the three, deriving many of its insights from previous work by Alden and Virginia Vaughan and Trevor Griffiths, ² but Dymkowski adds evidence from her vast store of performance choices to illustrate the crucial importance of cultural attitudes toward race, imperialism, and democracy in the portrayal of Prospero's slave. At the same time, she resists the temptation to propose overly simple cause-and-effect relationships between cultural attitudes and theatrical traditions; rather, she carefully delineates how a concept such as colonialism influences the complex interconnected relationships among all three characters. For example, in the early-twentieth century, as Caliban becomes recognizably human, Ariel comes to be established as a male role, and Prospero's treatment of both servants begins to seem increasingly exploitative.

Of the remaining three sections in the introduction, the first is dedicated to setting The Tempest in the historical context of its composition. Here Dymkowski aims her remarks at nonspecialist readers, and scholars will find little that is not already familiar. The second section deals with Restoration adaptations of the play, especially those assembled by Davenant and Dryden, which established many of the trends in staging and characterization that continued into the nineteenth century. After the segments devoted to Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban, Dymkowski returns to broader staging issues in her final section, which covers three topics: theatrical representation of the storm scene, the island setting, and thematic approaches to the play as a whole. In this conclusion she documents how, during successive eras, spectacular, realistic, or stylized presentations of the storm and the island have tended to dominate. Recently, however, directors in search of a conceptual framework for the play, such as metatheater, have tended to view the setting as...