Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women's Re-Visions in Literature and Performance (review)

Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women's Re-Visions in Literature and Performance. Edited by Marianne Novy. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. Pp. viii + 264. Illus. $45.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.

Do women "do" Shakespeare differently? When women direct, perform, adapt, rewrite, and generally "talk back" to the Bard, does a "transformed" Shakespeare emerge? The thirteen essays Marianne Novy has gathered in this collection yield thirteen nuanced answers to these questions, demonstrating the range of concerns (from gender, race, and violence to environmentalism, eco-feminism, and tourism; Shakespeare relocated to LA, Toronto, the West Indies, the Midwest, Bosnia), the complexity of response (not least in the manipulation of form, the exploration of genre), and the energy of debate released when women put themselves in dialogue with Shakespeare on stage and screen, in poetry and prose--and criticism: twelve of these essays on women "doing" Shakespeare are "done" by women critics.

Novy's project of "re-vision" is grounded in what I want to call a politics of engagement. Increasingly, women "do" Shakespeare in different voices because that's how they hear him: Jane Smiley, whose 1996 address to the International Shakespeare Association World Congress is printed here as "Shakespeare in Iceland," an account of how she came to write A Thousand Acres, remembers reading Lear "with real seriousness for the first time" as an undergraduate supervised by Harriett Hawkins in the late '60s (163). For Smiley, "Harriett's was, simultaneously, a voice of authority, dispensing the conventional wisdom about the play, but also a woman's voice, slightly recasting the whole argument" (163). (Lucky Smiley: for me, even in grad school in the '70s, Shakespeare's tutorial voice was invariably male.Not now.Smiley's--and my--generation was the first not just to colonize but to naturalize the lecture theater as female space--and to naturalize, for subsequent generations of undergraduates, the female voice as an "authentic" voice of Shakespeare.) In a nutshell, tracing the woman's voice and discovering how it "recast[s] the whole argument" is what each of the essays in Novy's book sets out to do.

Part I looks at performers and performances. In "Making it New: Katie Mitchell Refashions Shakespeare-History," Barbara Hodgdon maps a mini-history of the history play as traditionally performed at the RSC before reading Katie Mitchell's Henry VI: The Battle for the Throne (RSC, 1994) as triumphantly deconstructing that "boy's own" tradition to open up a space for materialist-feminist critique. Hodgdon brilliantly observes the revisionist elements of Mitchell's staging to show how this production used women's bodies and voices to disrupt Henry VI's dominant male narrative, centered on titular claim, kingship, dynasty--and atrocity. Writing about "Recent Australian Shrews: The 'Larrikin Element'," Penny Gay borrows an Aussie colloquialism, "larrikinism"--whose sense fuses ideas of nonconformism, irreverence, vulgarity, and impudence--to theorize three postcolonial productions, ending with Australian Gale Edwards's at the RSC in 1995, the only one, for Gay, to go beyond the carnivalesque but resolutely masculinist ethos of "larrikin" to position "the feminine, colonized, objectified, and (for a while) silenced Other" as "the inescapably powerful center" (47) of attention. Francesca T. Royster sees Shakespeare's Cleopatra "commandeered" by African American performers and reincarnated for popular street culture via the 1973 blaxploitation film Cleopatra Jones. Her "Cleopatra as Diva: African-American Women and Shakespeare Tactics"--a terrific essay that moves as fast as the action film it reads--sees the appropriation of Shakespeare in Jones as a strategy for "addressing and performing social and cultural marginality" (105)--a strategy made imperative, I would add, by white culture's total white-out of Cleopatra from the black narrative Shakespeare scripts for her. (To see how a contemporary black woman poet takes on Shakespeare, turn to Peter Erickson's "Rita Dove's Shakespeares," the collection's single essay on poetry. Erickson sees Dove's wonderfully vigorous...