Shakespeare's World/World Shakespeares: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Brisbane 2006 (review)

This rich collection of 27 papers is book-ended by a prologue and epilogue which demonstrate the depth and diversity of work on Shakespeare presented at the International Shakespeare Association Conference in Brisbane in 2006. The majority of essays come from practising academics, reflecting the participants at the conference, but the opening 'prologue' by Anwar Ibrahim, former Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia, reminds us that Shakespeare has many lives beyond the academic community which sometimes thinks it owns him.

Ibrahim's essay is in some ways quite confronting, as it charts his engagements with Shakespeare in the six-year period of his incarceration. Confronting because it suggests that 'the West has defined itself in opposition to the East' (p. 21), a statement that is gaining greater currency and understanding, with significant implications for Early Modern studies, as Ania Loomba notes in her essay. At the same time, Shakespeare is described as the 'most universal genius that ever lived,' a statement which comes from a rather more traditional framework. Confronting too because of his criticism that, from his perspective, academics have not necessarily given the life to Shakespeare that others, experiencing Shakespeare from less structured or formal engagements, might have done. In this sense, his paper contains inherent criticisms of the 'frigid perspective of academia' (p. 23). The paper is a formal record of a moving account of one such personal engagement, and in some ways sets the tone for the range of events that made up the conference.

It is impossible to comment here on all the papers, but they truly reflect the internationalization of Shakespeare and the diverse forms that that internationalization has taken, from inclusion of participants from more than 30 countries, to detailed accounts of performance of the plays in specific locations and times. There are two papers on Shakespeare in Korea (Dong-Wook Kim, Hyon-U Lee), one on Japanese contexts (Yoshiko Kawachi) and one on Shakespeare in the Jewish Cultural Association during the Third Reich (Zoltán Márkus), just for example. New dimensions of Shakespearian study are evident in a number of papers on different aspects of space: Ruth Morse's exploration of the ethics of landscape, Lisa Hopkin's discussion of mines and caves, and Michael Hattaway's discussion of perspective are particularly illuminating. Overwhelmingly, the essays deal with Shakespeare's drama, and perhaps it is disappointing that there is little on poetry.

The variety and range of the written material is augmented by the inclusion of 30 black and white photographs and illustrations which range from stills of specific theatrical productions or films of Shakespeare's plays to sketches on perspective. They add to and illuminate the written material, and round out the sense of Shakespeare as a historical and international phenomenon. The diversity of written and visual material attests to the multiple dimensions in which the work of Shakespeare is now understood.

An interesting tension that recurs throughout the collection and across a number of essays is the sense that there is 'an authentic Shakespeare', consisting of the original language, and a modernized or adapted Shakespeare, altered for different contexts and different kinds of audiences. Paul J. C. M. Franssen particularly addresses this tension in relation to producing Shakespeare's works for children, arguing that some of the issues here are specific to what he describes as 'bardic' cultures (p. 162), an Anglo-Saxon habit which is not universal and constitutes different kinds of possibilities in different nations. His argument that the absence of an historical and national veneration for the Bard leads to an absence of a 'moralistic and monological trend in adaptations for children' (p. 163) is very suggestive.

The structure of the collection is rather uneven, with the four main sections (Shakespeare's World; Children's...