Shakespeare and his Contemporaries in Performance (review)

182 Reviews To indicate that Edelman's book is not perfect is not to say that it is not very good: it certainly makes a significant contribution to our knowledge and understanding of the subject it has chosen to cover. Joost Daalder Department ofEnglish Flinders University Esche, Edward J., Shakespeare and his Contemporaries in Performance, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2001; cloth; pp. vii, 364; R.R.P. £45.00; ISBN 0745600467. The 20 essays in this collection come from the Scasna conference held in Cambridge in 1997. By the time of their publication here, seven of them had already appeared in journals—one, Peter Thomson's engaging essay on Tarlton in this journal—or, in the case of Janette Dillon's and Wilhelm Hortmann's contributions, as sections of books (in Theatre, Court and City and Shakespeare on the German Stage: The Twentieth Century respectively). Though one is sympathetic to the difficulties faced by editors in getting such volumes into print, one would like to see more of the individual essays appearing for thefirsttime. The essays are grouped in five sections: 'Shakespeare on Film', 'Nineteenthand Twentieth-Century Contexts', 'Renaissance Contexts', 'From Text to Performance', and 'Female Roles'. Scaena's distinctive emphasis on performance thus entails a focus on theatre history, plays in their historical contexts, performance as contributing to cultural history, and performance analysed from the perspective of gender politics. Two essays appear in this last category: Diana E. Henderson discusses the absence of Isabel, Queen of France, from Branagh's film of Henry Fand the implications for the role of Henry, and for the impression of women as agents. Randall Martin analyses cuts in the role of Margaret of Anjou in four recent productions of Henry VI part III and makes a persuasive argument that responses to the power wielded by Margaret Thatcher resulted in a simplifying blackening of Shakespeare's Queen. He terms this reduction 'underachieved Shakespeare' (p. 336), a helpful formulation that might well also be deployed in Pamela Mason's account of Benedick in that currently much taught comedy, Much Ado. Mason censures conventional speech-prefix emendations in 2. 1, along with the 'usual [theatre] cuts' for promoting a 'soggily romantic' (p. 242) version. Reviews 183 Readers ofParergon are thoroughly familiar with collections such as this where the essays vary in style, from plain to polysyllabic theoretical, in length, and in scope, from the staging ofa single production to an extensive theatre history, as in the accounts ofPoonam Trevedi and Kaori Kobyashi ofearly performances of Shakespeare in (respectively) India and Japan. Using 'sharply focussed snapshots', his own phrase (p. 89), Hortmann makes an impressively complex discussion of Shakespeare in the German theatre of the Nazi period and later. Nanower essays can be equally rewarding. Barry Gaines and Peter Happe, writing on the anonymous The Yorkshire Tragedy and Jonson's late comedy The Magnetic lady, return to plays they have edited to address topics of apparently little scope yet both raise widely relevant issues of performance history. Happe examines how a rarely-acted play acquires a reputation ofbeing 'unactable', a novel question pertinent to Jonson particularly but also to other seldom seen plays of the period. The merit of post-conference collections depends on such thoughtprovoking essays but incidentally they also provide an indication of prominent features or indeed fashions of current critical and theoretical writing. A dominant presence is Dennis Kennedy's Foreign Shakespeares: Contemporary Performance (1993). Kennedy's 'Shakespeare and Cultural Tourism', the introductory essay, extends investigation of performances of Shakespeare in non-English speaking theatres into a specifically 'cultural' area, a move evident in the essays on performance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition to the contributions of Trevedi and Kobayashi, there is, for instance, Richard W. Schoch's discussion of Charles Kean's productions: 'Shakespearian Medievalism on the Mid-Victorian stage'. This goes beyond the parameters of conventional theatre history and interprets Kean's desire to recreate a medieval past on the Shakespearean stage as a manifestation ofmid-Victorian anxieties about the state ofEngland and Englishness. Those looking specifically for essays on Shakespeare's contemporaries may be disappointed since only seven are non-Shakespearean. In his Preface the Editor indicates that this 'area...