Shakespeare and The Problem of Adaptation (review)

Margaret Jane Kidnie’s Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation is a superb addition to the crowded field of Shakespeare performance and appropriation studies. She begins by invoking the belief, frequently expressed by journalistic reviewers, that Shakespeare’s plays survive—somewhere, somehow—despite theatrical productions that ostensibly deform the dramas. Kidnie’s response to this idea, a response which becomes the principal argument in the book, is “that a play, for all that it carries the rhetorical and ideological force of enduring stability, is not an object at all, but rather a dynamic process that evolves over time in response to the needs and sensibilities of its users” (2). Consequently, Kidnie avoids describing adaptation in reductive terms of relationships between text and performance. Instead, she employs the term “work” to refer to the ideal state of a drama so often invoked by theatre practitioners and reviewers to judge the purported authenticity of any given performance or edition of that drama. This ideal work is not “an objective yardstick against which to measure the supposed accuracy of editions and stagings” (7) but something that “emerges in history as that which its adaptations are not, and becomes known . . . by means of the reception afforded its productions” (9). In other words, “work” names an ideal that an interpretive community applies to a performance or edition in order to define the supposed “legitimacy” of that performance or edition. As Kidnie’s title suggests, in this scheme, adaptation becomes the “problem”—that which is deemed by an interpretive community to fall short of the ideal.

In chapter one, “Surviving Performance,” Kidnie develops the term “work” in relation to several aesthetic theories about the relationship between original artwork and derivative incarnations of that original. Contrasting F.W. Bateson’s idealist stance that drama’s authentic origins are located in the author’s mind with James McLaverty’s insistence that literature’s ontological status is fundamentally affected by its material bibliographical existence, she moves on to Richard Wollheim’s “type-token thesis” (17) in which a particular copy of, say, Ulysses is a token or instance of the idea of the work of art known as Ulysses. Any aspect of the token “that is not purely the consequence of the token’s material existence may be transmitted from a token to its type” (18). The virtue of this approach is that it recognizes that elements of the token of performance will inevitably not be assimilated with the type known as, say, King Lear.

However, as Kidnie remarks, for dramatic literature, Wollheim’s model does not discern between the essential elements of either type or token. To address this problem, she offers an overview of some recent concerns in performance and textual-bibliographical studies, arriving at Joseph Grigely’s notion of “textualterity,” according to which no text can ever be repeated exactly and, therefore, each text “is just another in a long string of texts by which an idea of the (necessarily unfinished) work endlessly comes into being” (25). Although Kidnie draws on Grigley’s understanding of the work as process, she departs from his “radical textual democracy” that posits a “work without a centre” (29). At the same time, she rejects Bateson’s location of this centre in the author’s intentions. Instead, she opts to construct “a provisional definition of the ‘truth’ of the work through ongoing debate,” by which she means “[a]n individual instance ‘counts’ as the work if, and so long as, readers and spectators are willing to confer recognition on it as being a legitimate instance of, for instance, Hamlet” (30).

Kidnie’s extensive and lucid conceptual ground-clearing results in a flexible understanding of work and adaptation. She demonstrates this flexibility in subsequent chapters by applying the ideas of work and adaptation to a wide range of Shakespearean manifestations, including theatrical productions, television programs, and printed editions. The insights she generates in assessing these treatments of Shakespeare’s drama reveals how productive her...