Shakespeare in Canada: 'a world elsewhere'? (review)

According to Diana Brydon and Irena R. Makaryk, the seventeen essays that constitute the "first book-length study of Shakespeare in Canada" share the twin aims of investigating "the history and reception of Shakespeare in Canada" and addressing a series of interrelated questions ranging from the contentious "Is there a distinctly Canadian Shakespeare?" to the more academic "To what extent has Canadian Shakespeare scholarship been influenced by Canadian national concerns?" (xi). Shakespeare in Canada: 'a world elsewhere'? is on this account impressive for its size, modest in its aspirations, and interrogative in its mood. How tempting then to label it a typically Canadian project. But to resort to such stereotyping would be to resist too thoroughly the efforts of the collection's editors and its many authors to query through the "prism of Shakespeare" (4) the chimera that is "Canadian identity." And indeed, at its best, this volume does substantially more than raise a set of purely local, Canadian concerns. As a number of the pieces collected here demonstrate, the story of Shakespeare in Canada is also the story of postcolonial Shakespeare, of Shakespeare in performance, of Shakespeare and popular culture, of Shakespeare and national/regional/ethnic/linguistic identity.

The essays that make up the collection vary considerably in scope, texture, and focus. Clearly recognizing the threat to coherence that such diversity might pose, Brydon and Makaryk have divided the collection into four roughly chronological sections. The editors have also chosen to include a brief preface, a lengthy introduction, a set of introductory notes to each section of the book, and an afterword. While this multitude of editorial interventions creates a sense of shared purpose and textural fluency, it also leaves the distinct impression that Shakespeare in Canada is working hard to manage its readers.

The most clearly unified of the collection's four parts is its first, "Beginnings: Institutionalizing Shakespeare." This section gathers four essays that focus on the early years of two of Canada's foundational cultural institutions, CBC Radio and the Stratford Festival, as well as on two less well-known municipal organizations, the Shakespeare Society of Toronto and the 1892 Toronto Industrial Exhibition. Distinguished by meticulous historical research, these pieces—by Marta Straznicky, Margaret Groome, Karen Bamford, and Heather Murray, respectively—manage to avoid the brittleness that can characterize archival projects driven by local concerns by presenting compelling narratives about the varied uses to which Shakespeare has been put in the construction of a national culture.

The second and longest part of Shakespeare in Canada is devoted to an extended conversation about Shakespeare on the Canadian stage. Analyses of the role of the Stratford Festival—now the largest classical repertory theater in North America—in shaping both Canadian theater and the rhetoric of Canadian nationalism are well represented here in pieces by C. E. McGee and Jessica Schagerl. This section also includes important explorations of the development of Canadian theatrical traditions beyond both the geographical limits of Upper Canada and the aesthetic boundaries of mainstream theater in Leanore Lieblein's "'Le Re-making' of le grand Will: Shakespeare in Francophone Quebec," Peter Ayers's "Learning to Curse in Accurate Iambics: Shakespeare in Newfoundland," and Michael McKinnie's "Liberal Shakespeare and Illiberal Critiques: Necessary Angel's King Lear."

The final two sections of the collection are its most compelling and its most eclectic. Gathered under the general rubrics "Critical Debates and Traditions" and "Reimagining Shakespeare" is an armful of essays whose ideas are engaging for their timeliness, their intellectual rigor, and, on occasion, their quirkiness. From Anthony B. Dawson's use of two University of British Columbia theater department productions of Shakespeare as a springboard to an artful imagining of a rapprochement between literary and theatrical training, to Alexander Leggatt's use of Cymbeline to explore both a personal and critical sense of what it means to read Shakespeare in a Canadian context, the essays that round out this volume investigate the ideas of...