Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (review)

Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation is not, strictly speaking, a book about Shakespeare. While various Shakespeare productions play a major role in the book, they are not the primary focus; rather, the productions mentioned are used as case studies to enhance Margaret Jane Kidnie's valuable contribution to the ongoing effort to define "adaptation." We may all claim to know it when we see it, but what does it mean to call something an adaptation? In this treatment of the subject, Kidnie complicates distinctions between text and performance to provide her own useful definition of the term.

Kidnie begins by situating her book in the growing field of adaptation studies, providing various definitions of adaptation by others who have studied it, while briefly describing their works (for instance, Ruby Cohn's Modern Shakespeare Offshoots and Linda Hutcheon's A Theory of Adaptation). This overview introduces the topic while allowing Kidnie to position her own analysis of adaptation as new, but also indebted to the work of earlier scholars. Kidnie uses the introduction to describe what she perceives as various problems with previous definitions of adaptation. For example, she questions the common assumption that distinctions between an original work and its adaptations are stable, while also challenging scholars who suggest that all production is in fact adaptation, thereby emptying the word of its meaning.

Using textual studies and theories of reader response and reception as her framework, Kidnie devotes the first chapter to a systematic description of the steps that brought her to her own understanding of adaptation. For Kidnie, a working definition of adaptation does not rely on the distinction between the text-as-origin and various performances of it; instead, she uses the term "work" to describe the play as an ongoing process. Neither the text nor the performance is the work. Rejecting the idea that the text is the original and the performance a second-order adaptation, Kidnie argues that, "performance and text are both, in their different ways, instances of the work" (28). Adaptation, then, is "an evolving category" (6); "[t]he criteria that are sufficient to mark out 'the work'—and so separate it from adaptation, or what is 'not the work'—constantly shift over time, sometimes subtly, sometimes suddenly and drastically, in response to textual and theatrical production" (7).

This definition of adaptation offers a new approach to the analysis of Shakespeare in production, because it emphasizes the politics of creation and reception. Rather than attempting to distinguish the original, authentic work from its adaptations (something she argues is impossible), one could use Kidnie's theoretical lens to explore the manner in which a production of, for instance, Hamlet may from one perspective be considered "the work," and from another perspective be considered an adaptation or even a corruption. Throughout the book, Kidnie presents case studies of various Shakespeare productions; some of the artists discussed here call their productions adaptations, while others do not. These case studies further elucidate her theory of adaptation and suggest how this theory might usefully be applied.

The book covers a broad spectrum of Shakespeare productions, including the BBC's ShakespeaRe-Told series and performances by the Reduced Shakespeare Company, but the second and third chapters best demonstrate the range of applications for her theoretical analysis of work and adaptation. Chapter 2 compares two productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC): Matthew Warchus's Hamlet, produced in 1997, and Gregory Doran's 2003 production of All's Well That Ends Well starring Judi Dench. The chapter focuses on "the issues of identity raised by a conception of the work as process" and analyzes various factors that led critics to designate one production (All's Well) as authentic and truthful and the other (Hamlet) as inauthentic (8). Kidnie focuses on the critical reception of these productions at their specific moments in RSC history, arguing that in the case of All's Well, "what was recognized as authentic Shakespeare resulted in part from what could...