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Shakespeare: Text and Theater, Essays in Honor of Jay L. Halio (review)
- Shakespeare Quarterly
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 52, Number 2, Summer 2001
- pp. 300-303
- 10.1353/shq.2001.0026
- Review
- Additional Information
Shakespeare Quarterly 52.2 (2001) 300-303
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Book Review
Shakespeare: Text and Theater, Essays in Honor of Jay L. Halio
Shakespeare: Text and Theater, Essays in Honor of Jay L. Halio. Edited by Lois Potter and Arthur F. Kinney. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1999. Pp. 346. $38.50 cloth.
This thematically organized festschrift comprises a cornucopia of twenty-one essays that elucidate issues of text and/or performance, representing a just tribute to Jay L. Halio--editor, scholar, critic, mentor, and colleague extraordinaire. Although one should resist judging a book by its cover, this one is promisingly suggestive. The cover illustration, which derives from Mr. William Shakespeare, The Life and Times Of (1995), features Graham Clarke's delightfully detailed etching "Full House," an actor's perspective from behind the tiring-house door as he views the thrust stage with its two duellists in action surrounded by the three-tiered, packed-house audience of the public theater. Through essays illuminating some fifty different works by or attributed to Shakespeare, [End Page 300] this volume itself presents a full house of critical perspectives that applaud Halio's multiple contributions to textual and theatrical studies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. If we adopt Prospero's explanation in the Epilogue that his "project . . . was to please," then a wide range of readers, Shakespearean specialists and nonspecialists alike, will find something to please them among the rich variety of essays housed here.
Editors Lois Potter and Arthur F. Kinney present an attractively edited book, organizing the essays in three parts that correspond to Halio's abiding interests in editing, performance, and cross-cultural Shakespeare: "Part One: Texts" (five essays); "Part Two: Performances" (nine essays); and "Part Three: Text and Performance" (seven essays). The success of this book may be partly attributable to their editorial wisdom in providing such a focus while allowing for variation in format and length, giving us a "collection [that is] fun to read, and an appropriate tribute to a scholar who likes a good argument at least as much as he likes reconciling disputes" (12).
Under the rubric of "Texts," the authors consider the significance of the First Folio, general as well as specific editorial practices, trends in textual interpretation, and Shakespearean attributions. Although Heminges and Condell delimited Shakespeare's works "within the straitjacket of three [generic] categories" (30), Stanley Wells reinvestigates the significance of the First Folio by inquiring where we would be without it regarding editorial procedures that have influenced subsequent generations (for better and for worse) and the presence of eighteen plays that might never have been transmitted to us. Affirming the importance of correct naming, Susan Snyder in "'All we like sheep . . . '" examines editors' reluctance to question "time-honored character designations in the Dramatis Personae" so that "'misunderstanding'" results (33) when we should instead be challenging ourselves "to think every detail afresh" (39). George Walton Williams, returning to Mistress Quickly's description of Falstaff's death in Henry V, resuscitates the debate about the vexed crux of the Folio phrase "and a Table of greene fields" to support an English audience's hearing of the comforting message of the twenty-third Psalm (57-58). Centered on what the play is "about" or what the experience of the play is "like," Tom Clayton engages academic and theatrical viewpoints for characters and themes in A Midsummer Night's Dream that he thinks "have suffered neglect or occasionally worse" (63). Donald W. Foster reevaluates unpublicized Shakespearean attributions that have been relatively neglected by scholars, concluding that "even bad 'Shakespeare' and 'bad' Shakespeare can be viewed as a small gift to literary studies" (103).
The "Performances" section offers some essays in which particular productions or performances are critiqued. Most of these reviews focus on the stage, such as those by Grace Tiffany, who analyzes three contemporary cross-cast productions with traditionally male roles played by women; Avraham Oz, who compares the political contexts for two Hebrew translations of the same "frighted peace" speech from 1 Henry IV in relation to an ideologically adapted...