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  • Tales from Shakespeare: Creative Collisions by Graham Holderness
  • Christy Desmet (bio)
Tales from Shakespeare: Creative Collisions. By Graham Holderness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xvi + 246. $45.99 cloth.

Graham Holderness’s Tales from Shakespeare is elegantly theoretical but also fun to read, returning to Shakespeare criticism not only Horace’s first requirement for poetry (to instruct) but also his second (to delight). Tales from Shakespeare puts the more familiar form of literary-critical essay in dialogue with creative pieces in different genres to create a satisfyingly Bakhtinian ethos while also setting for itself a particular theoretical task: to tease out “meaningful connection[s] between Shakespeare and not-Shakespeare” (ix).

The preface proposes that “the basic primary activities constituting Shakespeare studies—scholarly editing; historical contexualisation and analysis; critical and theoretical interpretation; theatrical or cinematic production; creative adaptation—exist in a continuum, and when compared, prove to be remarkably similar to one another” (xi). All of these activities are, in fact, appropriations of Shakespeare, which means that the presumed divide between “logical” literary criticism and “intuitive” creative writing no longer holds. To an extent, Holderness’s project flips the position taken by 1980s poststructuralists, in which the advent of literary theory promoted criticism to a form of literary art. With a further twist, Holderness declares that “the best criticism is actually creative writing” (xiii). First, theory makes criticism into an art form, then criticism is subsumed altogether into creative writing.

The theoretical framework for the book is complex and involves a metaphorical shift in the governing metaphors for reworkings of Shakespeare. Appropriation studies have been plagued by an internal contradiction: while there is no “originary” text in a poststructuralist world and “we can only know the work by reinventing it,” nevertheless appropriation or “reinvention is conceived as a violent assault on the work’s original identity” (4). The solution to this quandary, Holderness argues, is to recognize the continuum that articulates relations among all the appropriating activities, from scholarly editing to short-story writing. If everything, even reading, is appropriation, then paradoxically all Shakespearean appropriations are also “Shakespeare.” (To use a different metaphor, Proteus is a shapeshifter, but he is always Proteus.) Holderness explores this paradox through Descartes’s meditation on why melted wax is still wax, despite the complete transformation of its qualities through the application of heat. After reviewing other metaphors drawn from the sciences, he settles on particle physics and the “behaviour of subatomic particles in experiments such as those conducted in the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland” (16). In this phenomenon, when a great deal of energy is concentrated in a small space, “particles that were not previously present can sometimes be created out of that energy” (17). The paradox now works the other way: while wax can shift its material state completely but remain beeswax, the “collision” of subatomic particles can create something new. For the remainder of the book, “collision” [End Page 392] remains the master metaphor, so that the, at times, violent collisions of Shakespeare with not-Shakespeare are, in effect, creative appropriation.

The remainder of Tales from Shakespeare is constructed as a dialectic between more or less traditional academic analyses and creative pieces on the same subject. Part 1 discusses the performances of Hamlet and Richard II that took place in March 1607 on board the Red Dragon off the coast of what is now Sierra Leone. No records of the performances are extant, but their traces persist in nineteenth-century citations of “General” William Keeling’s lost journal. In the performance of Hamlet for officers and a “visiting African dignitary,” we have a moment of historical significance: “As far as we are aware, this was the first performance of a Shakespeare play outside of Europe; the first performance of a Shakespeare play on board a ship; the first amateur performance of a Shakespeare play; and presumably (given that the visiting dignitary understood Portuguese but not English), the first performance of a Shakespeare play to be translated” (24). This moment also marked the unheralded “beginning of the long process that eventually made Shakespeare a completely globalised, international, and multicultural author, performed in many different languages, admired in many...

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