Shakespeare and Feminist Performance: Ideology on Stage (review)

Recent years have seen an increased emphasis on examining performance practices in the teaching of Shakespeare. In Shakespeare and Feminist Performance: Ideology on Stage, Sarah Werner addresses the ubiquity of Shakespeare and the inherent ideology underlying performances of Shakespeare. Werner advocates the study of Shakespeare through examining the work of theatre artists, encouraging students to "see meaning located in the web of social relations between individual texts and cultural ideologies" (17). The subtitle may set up the false expectation that this book will only examine staged examples of feminist performance, when in fact Werner also looks at related performance issues of actor training, rehearsal, and audience response.

Shakespeare and Feminist Performance is one of the latest volumes in Routledge's Accents on Shakespeare series. General editor Terence Hawks has designed the series as a platform for potentially contentious younger scholars to "report from the forefront of current critical activity" (x) with sometimes radical challenges to the status quo. Although disappointing in some aspects, Shakespeare and Feminist Performance succeeds when viewed specifically as a part of the Accents on Shakespeare project. This volumedoes not claim to be a thorough study of current practices in feminist performance of Shakespeare. In Werner's feminist readings of Shakespeare performance, however, the book does offer the teacher of undergraduate Shakespeare literature courses a work that can spark discussion about how performance practices influence our understandings of Shakespeare's plays.

Werner is especially keen to problematize meanings ascribed to Shakespeare (whether approached as written or performance text) and emphasizes the roles of local interpretative theatre productions in meaning making. As her primary example, Werner examines gender politics at work in the Royal Shakespeare Company and uncovers challenges faced by women within this prominent cultural institution. The focus on the RSC was chosen because it "conceives of and markets itself as the world's premier performer of Shakespeare" (18). Werner attempts to expose the ideology of "universality" that drives the RSC and to show that this is not only not a neutral stance, but that it also limits the company to patriarchal interpretations and conditions. Although some women have made notable contributions, Werner notes that the perception that permeates the RSC is that the real work is done by men (49).

Werner denounces the lack of opportunities for women in the RSC and points to women voice teachers who, although highly influential (22), have been marginalized as "supplementary" while the more public figure of director John Barton takes precedence (49). Werner closely examines the pedagogy of Cicely Berry, voice coach for the RSC since 1970, as well as colleague Patsy Rodenburg. Werner gives the sense that Berry is a feminist pioneer in the RSC, yet argues that Berry's work allegedly supports the patriarchally oppressive system; she claims that the work of these voice teachers, in stressing "natural voice," dehistoricizes Shakespeare's female characters. The approach to voice training advocated by the RSC, according to Werner, "sets up a falsely universal notion of character that relies on a male norm of interpretation, ignoring the problems that character reading has for Shakespeare's female roles" (19). Werner's call for the historicizing of subjectivity and heightened awareness of gendered stage dialogue is well argued. She is especially concerned with the naturalizing and potentially essentialist use of the word "organic" and fears that the approach of Berry and Rodenburg sounds dangerously like self-help pop psychology (27). This chapter is an outgrowth of Werner's earlier research, which resulted in rebuttal articles. Although Werner has tempered some of the polemical tone of her argument since her earlier articles and has dropped Kristen Linklater from her criticism, she still undermines her arguments with hyperbole, such as "Berry and Rodenburg want to heal our twentieth century neuroses by bringing us closer to the Shakespeare within" (27-28).

In the second chapter, Werner attempts to uncover the feminist impetus from within the RSC to form the Women's Group, and the ideological barriers—both within the institution and between the members...