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414 LEITERS IN CANADA 1981 centre of his argument. This is a study full of alert reading and refreshing common sense, and anyone who caresaboutShakespeare will read it with pleasure. (ALEXANDER LEGGAIT) Ralph Berry. Changing Styles in Shakespeare George Allen and Unwin. xi, 124. $15.95 us Though librarians will probably classify Ralph Berry's latest book as stage history, he himself disclaims any such intention. He offers quick sketches of a few recent productions of selected plays, the aim being not stage history per se but 'to describe something for which the stage is a working model:our changing perception ofShakespeare, and the ways in which we have refashioned Shakespeare after our own image' (p 1). The productions he draws on are mostly English, though there are more than passing references to Stratford, Ontario. The range of investigation bears out his promise to be 'consistently unsystematic' (p 13): he takes Coriolanus back to the eighteenth century, Twelfth Night to the nineteenth , and Measure for Measure to 1950. With such a range, and with so little space at his disposal, he can only suggest connections. Some of these are familiar: we hear again that the rediscovery of Troilus and Cressida and the reinterpretation of Henry v are connected with our critical and unromantic view of war. Others are more provocative, but underdeveloped.It used to be assumed that at the end of Measure for Measure Isabella accepted the Duke's proposal; since John Barton's 1970 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Isabellas have refused or failed to respond. This calls attention to an important feature of the text: even critics who insist that Isabella accepts must now cope with the fact that she has no lines in which to do so. Berry attributes the new belief that the marriage will not take place to a rejection of the "'marriage" and "motherhood'" ideals of the 1950S (p 42). (He notes, by the way, that in the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1978 production Isabella once again - and quite eagerly - accepted the Duke; dare we believe that marriage is about to become respectable again?) The connection between Measurefor Measure and women's lib may be a valid one, but made as quickly as it is here it sounds a bitglib. And it is a pity Berry could not pause longer over a problem he identifies in the recent fashion for apolitical productions of Coriolanus, especially as it seems to go against his thesis: 'It is curious that political theatre was extenSively mounted in the England of the 1970s, but that Coriolanus was not a part of that movement' (p 33). It is curious indeed, and one would like to know more about the possible reasons. The strongest chapters are on Henry vand Twelfth Night, where Berry provides tight, concentrated accounts of the Zeitgeist atwork. The history play has become less romantic, more thoughtful, with a certain 'moral queasiness' (p 80) about war. Something as simple as a changing attitude to practical jokes has given us a new, darker Twelfth Night. Hamlet presents a more difficult case, and while Berrygives admirable accounts of Michael Redgrave's mature, intellectual prince and David Warner's gangling undergraduate, the attempt to relate them to other productions in a coherent pattern of change does not come off. In general the strength of Berry's work lies not in its overall argument butin local details. Veteran scholarly playgoers look back to the 1940S and 1950S as a golden age when directors respected the text instead ofslanting it towards their own interpretations. By studying promptbooks Berry establishes that in that 'golden age' plays like Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida were cut at an angle, to serve a particular interpretation, and that in recent years cutting has been lighter and more honest. He suggests, interestingly, a connection between the recent war experience of the audience and the crisp military style of Anthony Quayle's Coriolanus and Richard Burton's Henry v. He gives a sensitive appreciation of Olivier's film of Henry v, and of the effect of the sea-sounds in John Barton's 1969 Twelfth Night. Finally, it is no slight on him to say that the best...

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