Shakespeare and Modern Theatre: The Performance of Modernity, and: Shakespeare and Feminist Performance: Ideology on Stage (review)

Kathleen McLuskie and Michael Bristol offer an engaging introduction to a collection of essays that explore the cultural and institutional production of Shakespeare's plays in the twentieth century. Opening with a discussion of the "outlandish liberties" that modern theater often takes with these "valued works" (1), the editors try to balance the desire not to read performance as derivative of text against the reluctance to see performance ignore entirely the authority of the plays as literature. This difficult relation between literary and theatrical Shakespeare, and how this perceived boundary may have shifted over the twentieth century, is an important focus of Shakespeare and Modern Theatre: The performance of modernity. Forms of theatrical modernism driven by a desire to uncover the hidden meanings of Shakespeare's plays are set apart from later, postmodernist accommodations of mass culture, and an emphasis on changing material and historical conditions prepares us for the diverse and specialized interests of the essays that follow.

This introductory essay sets out a powerful account of Shakespearean production over the past century tinged, perhaps, with a sense of regret that performance, and thus the literary text, should have surrendered so completely to consumer capitalism. In the first of the collection's eight essays, "Modernity, modernism and postmodernism in the twentieth-century's Shakespeare," Hugh Grady explains his idea of the aesthetic paradigm, a nuanced model of periodization according to which modernity, stretching from the Enlightenment to the present day, is characterized by distinct, occasionally iconoclastic stages of development. Within this model, Grady argues for postmodernism as a mid-twentieth-century aesthetic revolution, a loose but identifiable form of artistic innovation which has made itself felt only recently in theatrical and critical Shakespeare production. Postmodernism is just the most recent stage of modernity, and one that is prompting artists, yet again, to refunction, rather than jettison, Shakespeare's drama. This essay provides the volume with a helpful theoretical framework but also makes more visible the absence of any sustained analysis of postmodernist production in a collection almost entirely focused on the legacy of modernism. One could wish that more space had been devoted to this most recent development, not least as a means to test the periodizing model argued for in the introduction and opening chapter. The editors' acknowledgment that a shift from modernism to postmodernism has occurred in recent years (or partially occurred, or is still occurring) leads to some confusion around the precise use of such terms as modern, modernism, modernity, and contemporary, as the discussion of twentieth-century Shakespeare and its institutional practices keeps collapsing into modernist Shake-speare.

Various, even competing responses to questions of meaning in relation to literary drama and modern performance are developed by a number of the volume's contributors. Irena R. Makaryk offers a detailed account of a still-controversial avant-garde production of Macbeth reworked or rather, according to some critics, "deformed" by Les' Kurbas in 1924. "Heresies of style: some paradoxes of Soviet Ukrainian modernism" explains how Kurbas appropriated Shakespeare and disrupted the assumptions of illusionist theater in order to make the classics newly relevant to a Ukrainian national and cultural revival. Maarten van Dijk advocates a return to Brecht's "aesthetics of cheek"—the treatment of literary high-culture artifacts as usable raw material—as a low-culture strategy to counter the deadening effect of modern classical theater. As van Dijk concludes in "'Lice in fur': The aesthetics of cheek and Shakespearean production strategy," nonantagonistic vandalism may not always keep the audiences awake, but it is "something to get on with, 'brauchbar' (usable), as [Brecht] would say—Shakespeare as...