Revisionist Shakespeare: Transitional Ideologies in Texts and Contexts, and: Shakespeare's History Plays: Performance, Translation and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad, and: Local Shakespeares: Proximations and Power (review)

Ever since the First Folio, the history of Shakespearean scholarship has been one of fitting the square peg of Shakespeare's plays into the round holes of historical, political, cultural, or theatrical contexts. These three recent volumes attempt to understand Shakespeare's plays in new frames, all with varying degrees of success.

Shakespeare's history plays remain the most resolutely English in nature, as the comedies and tragedies cross national and cultural borders much more easily. The purpose of Shakespeare's History Plays, edited by Ton Hoenselaars, is "to study the various national responses to the plays with an eye to the process whereby different political and cultural contexts have tended to accommodate the plays' implicit 'Englishness', that is, the notion which led Hemmings and Condell in 1623 to present these ten plays as 'Histories'" (9). The volume is divided into three parts of four essays each, along with an introduction and a foreword by Dennis Kennedy. The first section explores the histories from the points of view of nations represented in them: Ireland, Wales, and France, with an additional essay on Japan. As Hoenselaars notes in his introduction to the section, "as Shakespeare's histories are appropriated, they come to mediate between medieval past and contemporary politics in a way the other genres are less likely to do; thus writing modern history both in Britain and abroad" (39). Among the more interesting essays in the volume, Andrew Murphy explores Ireland and Lisa Hopkins constructs Wales as liminal spaces not quite English but not quite foreign, and their respective roles as "a place of collective cultural fantasy" (72).

The second section, "The Appropriated Past," features four essays on foreign productions of Shakespeare's histories within the past two centuries. Mariangela Tempera explores Italian adaptations, while James Loehlin explores the shaping influences of Brecht on theatrical practices and understanding of the three Henry VIs. Edward Burns provides a fascinating analysis of the twentieth-century tradition of presenting the plays in cycles. The final essay in the section is an overview of Shakespeare's histories in Bulgaria. The third and final section considers adaptations of the histories in Vienna, Spain, France, and Belgium.

The book is an interesting one, and the intertextuality of the individual contributions weaves a tapestry of mutual European influences on the production, translation, and understanding of Shakespeare in general and history plays in particular. As with most anthologies, the quality of the essays is uneven, although the diverse subject matter and the light shown in lesser-studied corners of "foreign Shakespeare" make the volume useful. What is missing from Hoenselaars's collection is a discussion of the history plays in spaces other than European ones. At the very least, attention should be paid to anglophone nations in the Commonwealth. But this is a minor quibble and, hopefully, a cause for a follow-up volume.

Given the concern with exploring the process by which Shakespeare's plays accommodate shifts in geography and time, Martin Orkin's Local Shakespeares offers an intriguing manner of considering the canon in a new context, although it actually reads like two books in one, as the title belies the other half of his subject matter. Using different themes, motifs, and methodologies, Orkin explains "the usefulness of local knowledge for the understanding of Shakespeare" (4), arguing that the reader or audience member always brings the knowledge of his or her community to the plays. Orkin is interested specifically in encounters with the Bard outside the centers of theatrical production, the "Shakespeare metropolis." He chooses to focus on the local contexts...