A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance (review)

The new Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare and Performance is an exciting collection of essays that will undoubtedly, and deservedly, have a wide impact on the field. With thirty-four essays and an introduction, this collection, one might imagine, would be an exhaustive (if perhaps exhausting) account of the state of studying Shakespeare and performance. And indeed, many of the field's permutations are represented here and most of its prominent practitioners are included. But there are some odd disconnections and lacunae that suggest the field itself still has room to grow.

The Companion is organized into six sections under the headings "Terms of Performance," "Materialities: Writing and Performance," "Histories," "Performance Technologies, Cultural Technologies," "Identities of Performance," and "Performing Pedagogies." The topics of the essays themselves range over nearly the entire map. There are pieces on "Shakespeare the Victorian" (Richard W. Schoch), "Maverick Shakespeare" (Carol Rutter), "Shakespeare on the Record" (Douglas Lanier), and "Shakespeare on Vacation" (Susan Bennett). We find Shakespeare in corporations (Peter Holland), in India (Ania Loomba), in Canada (Ric Knowles), at Lincoln Center (Diana E. Henderson), in the classroom (James N. Loehlin and Peter Lichtenfels), and especially at the Globe (Robert Shaughnessy, Paul Prescott, Susan Bennett, G. B. Shand, and James C. Bulman). There's all-male Shakespeare (Bulman), all-female Shakespeare (Shand), intercultural Shakespeare (Yong Li Lan and Joanne Tompkins). There's Shakespeare in different media—not only on stage, but on records (Lanier), in films (Richard Burt, Peter S. Donaldson, Elizabeth A. Deitchman, and Courtney Lehmann), on DVD (Laurie E. Osborne), and in video games (Donaldson). There's Shakespeare in different textual forms—scholarly editions (Anthony B. Dawson, Wendy Wall, and Michael Cordner), screenplays (Osborne), cues (Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, in a co-authored piece), speech prefixes (W. B. Worthen), and adaptations (Margaret Jane Kidnie). There's something for everyone here.

According to Barbara Hodgdon's introduction, the aim of the collection is to "mark a move from the essentializing orthodoxy of performance criticism to the theoretical heterodoxy of Shakespeare performance studies, a more encompassing, expansive, expressive, and relational arena for rethinking performance" (7). Given this aim, it should not be a surprise that it's hard to find a common thread connecting these essays or any consensus on what performance is and what the study of Shakespeare and performance is. And it is thrilling to encounter such a wide and rich variety of work. It is much to the editors' credit that this collection includes so many pieces on forms and locations of Shakespeare that are not regularly examined. But it is striking that the essays rarely seem engaged with each other. If we've moved from orthodoxy to heterodoxy, wouldn't it be exciting to see some back-and-forth between scholars of performance studies? It can, of course, be difficult to get contributors to share their work in draft form and to engage in a public debate about their positions. But to have two different contributors write about intercultural Shakespeare, both focusing specifically on Shakespeare and Asian theatre, and not address each other feels like a missed opportunity.

Part of my response arises from reading the collection through from beginning to end. If I were to have used the collection as it is more likely to be used—as a companion to be dipped into—I would have been less likely to look for an overarching theme or interconnected conversations. On the other hand, I might have found navigating the collection more difficult. The section titles are less helpful than they might be in marking the location of subjects or approaches that might be of interest. I think I understand the rubric "Identities of Performance"; the articles in this section discuss performances through the prisms of race, interculturalism, (post)feminism, queer desire, and feminism (and in that counter-intuitive order). But I never quite got how "Histories" was to be understood; it seemed to be a catch-all section for discussions of past theatrical periods...