Shakespeare Performed: Essays in Honor of R. A. Foakes (review)

Of the festschrifts I have read, Shakespeare Performed strikes me as one of the most successful. The sixteen essays and afterword, though varied in theme and methodology, mark a genuine attempt to engage with the life's work of R. A. Foakes as an enterprise that has shaped Shakespeare studies as the field exists today. The resulting volume is, in effect, a survey of the current state of the field, or one crucial part of it. As Grace Ioppolo points out, the choice of title in this regard is no mere coincidence. "Throughout his teaching and publishing career," she writes, "Reg insisted that a dramatic text should first be seen as a performing and performative text and second as a literary and reading text" (8). If that observation sounds like a truism or something you find yourself repeating to students over and over again, then it is because Foakes's work helped to make it so, effecting a sea change in ways of reading so that it is now difficult to imagine a world in which "textual study, editing, theatre history, and performance criticism should [not] be linked" (8). Shakespeare Performed recognizes Foakes's singular achievement in integrating these fields of study and assumes that such collaboration is common practice. Accordingly, Ioppolo writes that her collection aims to "re-examine what Shakespeare as performed in his own time can tell us about Shakespeare as performed in our time" (8).

The essays are divided into two groups along these lines, but, on closer reading, it becomes clear that the historical pattern Ioppolo identifies is but part of a larger theoretical concern that the best of these essays share regarding how the "performance" of the Shakespearean "text" creates different "Shakespeares," which is to say different worlds and different futures—some desirable, some not. Though the organization of the volume subordinates these latter concerns to an orthodox historical practice, presenting the gains of historical research in the service of the present, some of the most interesting moments in the collection arise from careful considerations of how different performances (understood very broadly to include reading, editing, cutting, as well as filmic translation) create different ontologies for play and playwright, and how this process of"making" Shakespeare marks a form of continuous cultural recycling.

Part 1, "Shakespeare Performed in His Time: Theatre, Text, Interpretation," begins with "Shakespeare's Foolosophy" by Jonathan Bate, which attempts to resolve the perceived opposition between "those [critics] whose primary interest is ideas and those whose primary interest is performance" (17) through a reading of King Lear in relation to the philosophical essentials of Erasmus's and Montaigne's "Counter-Renaissance." In the wittily titled "Shakespeare's Sense of Direction," M. M. Mahood reconstructs the meaning of inner- and outer-door exits on the early modern stage. Peter Davison's "Commerce and Patronage: The Lord Chamberlain's Men's Tour of 1597" provides a crash course in the realities of touring in the period. Peter Wright explores what reconstructing stage directions for music and sound effects in 2 and 3 Henry VI and The Contention tells us about the realities of their performance. Ian Donaldson parses the relation between Julius Caesar and Sejanus, finding in the former a world of ambiguity and innocent misconstrual but in the latter a more stark vision of absolutes. Alexander Leggatt considers what he calls "detachable scenes" from Quarto or Folio versions of plays (the fly-killing scene in Titus Andronicus, the deposition scene in Richard III, and the presence of Fortinbras in Hamlet's soliloquy in 4.4) and how they alter the meaning of the play. In "Tenders and True Pay," Philip Edwards wrestles with truth-telling and unmasking on the Renaissance stage and the problem of having actors do the work of unmasking. The first part of the book closes with a meticulously...