Shakespeare Survey 40: Current Approaches to Shakespeare Through Language, Text, and Theatre ed. by Stanley Wells (review)

82Comparative Drama the work of a cultivated and enquiring mind, and is a highly effective treatment of a mass of fascinating information which is presented with skill. In the terms I have proposed it is a departure from the REED project in some ways—but a highly successful one. PETER HAPPÉ AIresford, Hants Stanley Wells, ed. Shakespeare Survey 40: Current Approaches to Shakespeare Through Language, Text, and Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Pp. ? + 243. $42.40. While in the past Shakespeare Survey has offered a range of special topic issues. Volume 40, "Current Approaches to Shakespeare Through Language, Text, and Theatre," can only be called a miscellany. With Volume 41, "Shakespearian Stages and Staging" then in press (and now published), Volume 40 seems in part to have collected those essays that could not fit in the later volume, then filled space with a variety of other essays justified by their attention to "language" and "text." Hence articles by theater people (Charles Marowitz, Peggy Ashcroft), scholars (Robert S. Mióla, Ruth Nevo), performance critics (Maik Hamburger, Roger Warren), and textual critics (Manfred Draut) become unsuspecting bedfellows, producing a volume that is more than a ménage à trois. Nor are all the essays "current approaches." Terence Hawkes, of course, always seems new, even when he is not, and "Take me to your Leda," like much of his work, questions the validity of literary criticism, devoted as it is to recovering a "prepackaged, coherent, and unified 'meaning'" (p. 32). Modeling the controversy through conversations carried on over the last fifty years, he ends with no resolution to the question of whether meaning is determined by the writer or by the reader. William O. Scott's "The Speculative Eye: Problematic Self-Knowledge in Julius Caesar" does a fine job of bringing together traditional and postmodern approaches to character to problematize the concept of selfknowledge in Julius Caesar. "Learning by Talking: Conversation in As You Like It" by Martha Ronk Lifson, which provocatively explores the "what if" nature of the play, notes parallels between the rhetorical action and the "process of psycho-sexual growth for Orlando and Rosalind" (p. 92), and Ruth Nevo's "Measure for Measure: Mirror for Mirror" explores sexuality in this problem play, concluding that the "text remains radically split, in its view of the beneficence of sexuality" (p. 122). Undisguised traditional approaches may be found in Guy Hamel's "Time in Richard III," which speaks of the three kinds of time operative in that play (actual, fictional, historical) and is particularly intriguing in its exploration of the shadow language of the Elizabethan afternoon. Similarly, Günter Walch's "Henry V as Working-House of Ideology" examines the role of the chorus in Henry V, conventionally arguing for its place in the play's dramatic strategy. Robert S. Miola's "Shakespeare and His Sources: Observations on the Critical History of Julius Caesar" provides a fascinating look at the etymology and semantics of "source" and related words in order to expose the assumptions that "determine Reviews83 what constitutes a source and what kind of evidence for sources is valid" (p. 71). And what can be more traditional than Antoinette B. Dauber's "Allegory and Irony in Othello," which examines that play as a Spenserian tragedy? This is not to question the worth of any of these essays, all of which yield insights into language and text, but to suggest that readers looking to update their knowledge of newer critical approaches may be disappointed . The real contribution of this volume (though this judgment may simply reflect my own current interest) is in its performance-oriented work. Marowitz's essay is especially compelling, an apology for adapting, revising, and updating the plays that academic Shakespeareans, in the name of fidelity ("a high-sounding word for lack-of-imaginative-output" [p. 2]) have fossilized. Interested in a tendency of modern directors to become "authors" themselves, Marowitz categorizes directorial approaches in three ways: the fundamentalist approach, in which the director discovers more nuances in the text, rendering service to Shakespeare by re-establishing "the supremacy of the work"; the reform approach, in which the director, adding ideas of his own, produces an alienating effect; and the...