Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural History (review)

It is rare that a book fundamentally redefines a rapidly growing discipline. Michael Dobson’s brilliant, provocative, impressively learned, and enjoyably witty exploration of the cultural history of non-professional productions of Shakespeare does exactly that—and the field of Shakespeare and performance will thankfully never be the same again. The narrative that has driven analysis of Shakespeare and performance has been controlled by a theater history that descends from early modern professional theater and has kept its emphasis on “professional.” It has expanded from an early and traditional narrow focus on British and (to a markedly lesser extent) American theater to a more consciously, although still often geographically patchy, global purview. Scholars, critics, and theater historians have become willing to look at contemporary productions beyond the Royal Shakespeare Company and at theater history beyond the Anglophone to China and Japan, Germany and France, India and Brazil. But they (we) have hardly ever acknowledged that the field of vision has been limited to a small fraction of the available productions— how small a fraction is something that nobody has ever tried to calculate from reliable data.

In recent years, Shakespeare Bulletin has reviewed campus productions from time to time. Articles in Shakespeare Quarterly have looked at Shakespeare in education, most especially in the special issue on “Teaching Shakespeare” (35.5 [1984]). Shakespearean Educations, the volume derived from a recent Folger Institute conference, has traced that history in America from 1607 up to the 1930s.¹ But where might one look for analysis of the thousands of productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in schools, let alone colleges? The play constitutes such a familiar staple of the canonical school play repertory that, for instance, it can comfortably be the core plot feature of high-school movies such as Get Over It (2001) or Were the World Mine (2008), but no one has looked at the breadth of occurrence and the forms of the phenomenon that underpin it.

To be fair, Dobson’s work does not provide the answer to such matters either. As he acknowledges in the introduction, he has little to say about “the performance of Shakespeare by students, whether at schools or at universities” (20), although his assertion that “the large subject of Shakespeare and education has been discussed so extensively elsewhere” (20) seems overgenerous. Nor does he discuss Shakespeare in prisons (already a well-studied topic), except for his remarkable account of performances by British prisoners-of-war during both world wars, primarily in German camps. Nor does he offer anything on amateur Shakespeare in America, Europe, Africa, or Asia, except as performed by British citizens abroad. Implicitly, the book’s title should be read with the word “British” controlling “Amateur Performance.” To mention these gaps is not to complain, for the book covers a remarkable range without their being addressed; if the book has the impact that it deserves, fine accounts of such areas will be published in the future. One can hardly complain that Dobson was not prescient enough to know that what long seemed to be the earliest accounts of nonprofessional Shakespeare—those performances on board the Red Dragon anchored in the mouth of the Mitombo River in September 1607—would prove to be forgeries, probably by Collier.²

Dobson’s examples, the many hundreds of examples of productions he has researched in the archives or watched, add up to a definition of the remarkable range of consequences of the desire to “do” Shakespeare rather than reading him, as if the First Folio’s injunction were to be denied: don’t read him again and again, don’t even watch him again and again, but act him again and again and again. As he movingly and passionately emphasizes in his final pages, commenting on an outdoor production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by the staff of Cambridge University Press to mark the press’s 475th birthday (and what other study of...