In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Shakespeare, Trauma and Contemporary Performance by Catherine Silverstone, and: Shakespeare / Adaptation / Modern Drama: Essays in Honour of Jill L. Levenson ed. by Randall Martin and Katherine Scheil
  • Dan Venning (bio)
Shakespeare, Trauma and Contemporary Performance. By Catherine Silverstone. New York and Abindon, UK: Routledge, 2011. Illus. Pp. x + 176. $149 cloth, $48.95 paper.
Shakespeare / Adaptation / Modern Drama: Essays in Honour of Jill L. Levenson. Edited by Randall Martin and Katherine Scheil. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Illus. Pp. xiv + 330. $65 cloth.

Shakespeare scholars have come to see studies of films, contemporary performances (including high-concept directorial visions), and textual adaptations as routes for achieving a more thorough understanding of Shakespeare’s work. New editions of plays such as the Arden Third Series and Oxford World’s Classics, as well as the Cambridge Shakespeare in Production Series routinely—and sensibly—examine these works in order to show the multifaceted ways that Shakespeare’s plays continue to be performed and transformed in contemporary world theater. Two new studies that contribute to this scholarship are Catherine Silverstone’s short monograph, Shakespeare, Trauma and Contemporary Performance, and Randall Martin and Katherine Scheil’s edited collection Shakespeare / Adaptation / Modern Drama, a Festschrift in honor of Jill Levenson. These two very different books are both welcome additions to the field.

Silverstone’s book is a clearly and engagingly written study of recent films, theatrical productions, and adaptations of Shakespeare plays, analyzing them “in terms of how they ‘work through’ traumatic cultural histories and events” (58) such as apartheid in South Africa, and legacies of colonialism, homophobia, racism, and war. While maintaining a readable jargon-free style throughout her book, Silverstone illuminates performances by drawing upon a wide range of critical theorists. Particularly central to her study are Cathy Caruth’s examinations of trauma as a term for shattering events, both medical and social, that create a “psychic wound, forcing the subject to return again and again to the event” (13).

In her first chapter, Silverstone examines Greg Doran’s 1995 staging of Titus Andronicus, starring Antony Sher as an Afrikaaner Titus. Despite the production’s honest attempt to address the problems of apartheid, which Silverstone examines by relying thoroughly on Woza Shakespeare!, Sher and Doran’s production memoir, Silverstone argues that it “tracked straight back into a reiteration of racial stereotypes and inequalities that post–apartheid South Africa seeks to redress” (32). She shows how what was intended as a “traumatic working through” of apartheid was “resisted by local audiences” (54) both in South Africa and the United Kingdom. Chapter 2, “The Legacy of Colonisation: Don C. Selwyn’s The Maori Merchant of Venice and Aotearoa New Zealand” is her strongest, examining a 2002 film adaptation into the Māori language and cultural idiom. Silverstone examines how the film, while in a celebratory fashion placing Māori culture first and “displacing the primacy of Shakespeare” (67), nevertheless can be read as the result of and reaction to the trauma of colonialism. Silverstone then effortlessly transitions to a chapter [End Page 362] on The Tempest. Here Silverstone examines how the play has been mobilized to address institutionalized homophobia in Britain. Silverstone focuses on Gay Sweatshop Theatre’s This Island’s Mine (1988), as well as Derek Jarman’s 1979 film of The Tempest. In her final chapter, she examines Nicholas Hytner’s 2003 National Theatre production of Henry V. She explores this production’s relation to the British and American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the post–9/11 world, examining the complex interrelationship between history and ongoing military actions abroad. She argues that the production “identified the failure of representational theatre to articulate the horror of war and the messy affectiveness of the trauma that it generates” (111), but she undermines her argument through vivid descriptions of the production, such as Hytner’s brutal staging of the execution of the prisoners. Ultimately, Silverstone sees realistic representation, however affecting it is for audiences and performers, as a problematic way of working through trauma.

Shakespeare, Trauma and Contemporary Performance has a few notable drawbacks. It seems disingenuous to call productions fifteen to twenty...

pdf

Share