Performing Heritage: Research, Practice and Innovation in Museum Theatre and Live Interpretation, and: The English Renaissance in Popular Culture: An Age for All Time, and: Filming and Performing Renaissance History (review)

Shakespearean performance studies have begun to embrace an ever-larger variety of manifestations of Shakespeare’s works and persona in popular culture and elite texts. The three books under review represent the latest form of this expansion: no longer confined to Shakespearean manifestations, the inquiry has moved on to the cultural work performed by the Renaissance, as represented by its political and literary figureheads, plays by a variety of playwrights, architectural features, legal histories of “ordinary” men and women (including witches), and combat techniques. Sometimes (but by no means always), the aim is to shed light on Shakespeare’s very particular status within the larger renaissance of the Renaissance. In the process, what began as a literature- and performance studies-based inquiry into the Renaissance “heritage” has begun to intersect with several cognate fields, which are represented in the three collections reviewed here: film studies, historiography, cultural studies, and museology.

Anthony Jackson and Jenny Kidd’s Performing Heritage: Research, Practice and Innovation in Museum Theatre and Live Interpretation is the book Shakespeare Quarterly readers are least likely to pick up. Based on a British Arts and Humanities Research Council project, “Performance, Learning and Heritage,” to which the first four chapters quite ploddingly refer, the volume examines the theoretical and pedagogical underpinnings of performances in heritage contexts, drawing on the insights of practitioners and scholars. Some of the schematic approaches to heritage performances in the book are rather reductive and there is a tendency, in some contributions, toward the fanciful. But there are several strong contributions. Marilena Alivizatou’s chapter opens up theoretical questions that are helpful in thinking through what it might mean, for example, to liken original practices performances at Shakespeare’s Globe to “museum theatre”: Alivizatou compellingly argues for an inclusive approach to the idea of authenticity that allows us to see such performances not as “fake culture” but as “‘metacultural’ performances” that express “the complexities of contemporary identities” (92). Meanwhile, Mark Fleishman and Laurajane Smith challenge us to see heritage not as material traces of the past but as “an event”: “something we do in the present with the past for our present purposes” that crucially “has the capacity to change the situation; to bring something new into being, a new way of seeing the world” (Fleishman, 237). For Smith, “Heritage is a process or a performance, in which certain cultural and social meanings and values are identified, reaffirmed, or rejected” (69). She examines the “authorised heritage discourse” that sees heritage as “a thing” that has comforting qualities and urges the need to find ways of contesting and changing that normative middle-class discourse (71). Fleishman’s understanding of heritage as a potentially transformative event and Smith’s notion that “all heritage is dissonant and controversial, and what may be inclusive and comfortable to one person or community will always be exclusionary and discomforting to another” (70) are worth bearing in mind when turning to the two volumes that are more narrowly concerned with performances of the Renaissance heritage.

In Greg Colón Semenza’s The English Renaissance in Popular Culture: An Age for All Time, ethical reflection on practice of the kind found in Performing Heritage is at times secondary to the collection and presentation of material often receiving its first critical analysis; Semenza’s introductory remark that his “is the first book to cover ways in which the Renaissance figures generally across popular culture media” (3) conveys the pioneering spirit that infuses...