Experiencing Shakespeare: Essays on Text, Classroom, and Performance by Charles H. Frey (review)

92Comparative Drama the reader with the latest meretricious cant. The best writers, like the best teachers, present texts with a willed simplicity. I daresay Norrish's unpretentious book will be readable into the future. Although he does mention a director or a production from time to time in passing, the author does not really discuss the plays in the theater. This might prove a disappointment for the student of theater, who is accustomed to assess the "stageworthiness" of plays he reads about, and previous productions of them, and to speculate about whether they could be done today, and in translation. This is by no means a judgment against the author, who cannot have had the intention to present these plays in such a light. Certainly the translations of dialogue that he occasionally inserts are very sensitively done and are decidedly a cut above many published English translations of the plays he discusses. Indeed, one of the greatest difficulties the author of such a book faces is that the reader who must explore these postwar French dramatists in mediocre translations does not see in them what is apparent in the French text. They are major plays and deserve thoughtful re-examination. VENNE-RICHARD LONDRÊ Univ. of Missouri-Kansas City Charles H. Frey. Experiencing Shakespeare: Essays on Text, Classroom, and Performance. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988. Pp. xvi + 207. $24.00. The eleven "free-standing" essays in this collection "date from 1975 to 1985" (p. vii). Most of them appeared as journal articles and/or "evolved from" (p. xi) conference papers. Frey has arranged them chronologically to demonstrate how his central concerns have shifted from the explications of texts to the analysis of assumptions underlying such explications. Because similar changes have occurred in the profession as a whole, it is useful to witness the process in the work of a single critic. Like others who had forged a working synthesis of new criticism and old historicism, Frey has been forced to greater self-awareness by the work of feminists, new historicists, cultural materialists, and deconstructionists. In the early essays, Frey tries to reconcile opposing tendencies into harmonious syntheses. The opening piece exhorts us to balance theatrical and literary approaches, as does the third by juxtaposing one-sided critical responses to the resurrection of Hermione. The second essay celebrates As You Like It for its "harmonization of disparate impulses" (p. 25). In some of the middle essays, Frey struggles to absorb and deflect different strains of feminism. The fifth essay argues that daughters in the late romances first restore the patriarchal order by bringing their fathers a son-in-law and then humanize that order by guiding their fathers toward "a new found love and forgiveness" (p. 72). The sixth essay maintains that the sexual polarization of Shakespeare's imagined universe permits his tragic heroes to grow by learning to be more like his women—"though too late and imperfectly" (p. 89). By the ninth Reviews93 essay, however, Frey has isolated a darker, misogynist strain in Shakespeare 's imagination, associating "women's tongues with sexual desire, nursing, the snake, the devil, and food-appetite" (p. 115) and leading the dramatist to plots which silence women by murder. Frey then deepens this familiar "feminist" reading by noting "new critical" ambiguities in which Shakespeare poetically designates these murdered heroines as wellsprings of life and then laments their loss. In the final essay, Frey identifies Latinate bombast as a virile, aggressive, public style unsuited to affectionate, domestic, intimate moments. He ends the essay with a rebuttal of this position, and then, in the Afterword, resolves the tension by celebrating the dialectic itself. Here, as throughout the volume, Frey's impulse to reconcile is apparent, but the efforts required become progressively greater. In the later essays, Frey is sometimes willing to embrace indeterminacy and irreconcilability. In the eighth essay, for example, he attacks current editions of Shakespeare for imposing editorial whim in areas of uncertainty, even to the point of skewing the status of women and commoners in lists of dramatis personae. He uses the specificity of performance to rebuke critics who promote more abstract aesthetic, formalistic , and ahistorical readings, but seems to blur the distinction...