Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare across Time and Media (review)

Diana E. Henderson's Collaborations with the Past is a serious and challenging book, which uses four detailed case studies to interrogate and complicate the question of Shakespeare appropriation. An introductory chapter focuses on this question theoretically, taking some time to distinguish "diachronic collaboration" (1) from appropriation, although not from adaptation. Following this are chapters on novels by Sir Walter Scott and Virginia Woolf and on a variety of film and stage versions of The Taming of the Shrew and Henry V. What Henderson seeks to do is to "[refocus] attention on some key writers, directors, and actors who have kept 'Shakespeare' at center stage" (2). Her aim is to reveal the "sociopolitical resonance" of these writers' and filmmakers' "specific, personal choices" in creating a work of art by "collaborating with a dead man," the "exceptionally absent presence," William Shakespeare (8). To varying degrees, these choices involve strategies of substitution for, revision of, justification for, and rehistoricization of the Bard (33). In analyzing these strategies, she seeks both to "emphasize . . . the 'uneasy' (dominantly sociopolitical) dimensions" (13) of adaptation and to underscore human and creative agency, indeed even the emotions involved in it.

Henderson's second chapter, on Scott's Elizabethan romance novel Kenilworth, is an excellent example of her method, which aims to locate a given "diachronic collaboration" within its own cultural moment and, in this case, to recuperate the novel from harsh critique for its whitewashing of Othello, its jingoism about its contemporary moment, and its superficiality about the past. Returning Kenilworth to its nineteenth-century context requires an examination of particular sites in cultural, economic, and political history, including English hegemony and Scotland's deterioration; the effect of commercialization on theater production and book publishing; the presentation of Othello on the stage; and the promotion of Shakespeare as a transcendent poet. Such examination allows Henderson to present a complicated picture of this novel and its erasure of the black hero of its source text. Assessing Scott's substitution of the Cornish Tressilian in his domestic tragedy, Henderson unearths a "veiled allegory of internal colonialism" (85) and a subtle critique of English policy toward the "Celtic fringe" (48), which somewhat balances the novel's contributions to racism and to the promotion of Shakespeare as vessel of transhistorical literary value divorced from sociopolitical contests of the day, or any day.

Virginia Woolf 's relationship to Shakespeare is "more complicated [than Scott's], and the discontinuities within her diachronic collaboration show it" (20). Woolf evinces a stronger desire to correct the Shakespeare myth, as she attempts to re-gender the author figure. At the same time, as Henderson's chapter title suggests—"A Fine Romance: Cymbeline, [Jane Eyre], Mrs. Dalloway"—Woolf also negotiates a complicated relationship to Charlotte Brontë, particularly as Woolf "underplays the ways in which Brontë consciously altered . . . both her received literary tradition and the representation of female experience" (106). In short, "Woolf effaces those aspects of Brontë's writing that anticipate her own" (106). Denying a direct debt to Jane Eyre in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf instead turns to Shakespearean romance and "the dramatic, confused Britain of Cymbeline" (144) and thus "simplifies her genealogy" (112). Rather than confront the "oppressively close Victorian kin" (148) or "the vexatious nineteenth-century foremother, whose realist conventions and stylistic breaks she deplores" (112), Woolf offers a "corrective" (148) vision of Shakespeare—" 'Fear no more' " (110)—in order to rethink the novel's conventions and "render female subjectivity in a more satisfying fashion" (112). At the same time, Shakespearean romance shields Woolf from confronting fully the sexism and classism of her own established social order, and so Mrs. Dalloway "not only represents but also participates in a more conservative social order than do several of Woolf 's subsequent writings" (125).

Kenilworth and Mrs. Dalloway "struggle with both history and their own modernity"; playing with Shakespeare "helps blur the distinctions" (23). Performing artists, too, confront this challenge: "Moviemakers can...