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Reviews83 Some desirable journal titles cannot be found in the IBT list. English Song and Dance, Poetic Drama & Poetic Theory, Renaissance Drama Newsletter, Bibliographic Guide to Dance, and Dance Notation Journal should be included because of their specialization. Other serials open up general bibliographical resources—e.g., Bulletin signaletique. 532: Histoire et sciences de la littérature (Centre national de la recherche scientifique), which surveys much work in France. Omissions such as these do not detract from the worth of IBT but they make it less useful than it could be. As essential information banks fall into the hands of commercial presses, scholarly data becomes traded as a commodity. The Theatre Research Data Center serves thousands of scholars world-wide in collecting and disseminating seminal academic information at a cost within their means. Every researcher has some obligation to use and if possible to support enterprises such as IBT, which will grow in significance as the record of work in theatre research does. IAN LANCASHIRE New College, University of Toronto Simon Williams. Shakespeare on the German Stage, I: 1586-1914. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. xiii + 245. £27.50. The book under review is a strange mixture of original thinking, genuine research, and a good deal of mere repetition of older and often more substantial German surveys—e.g., Ernst Leopold Stahl, Shakespeare und das deutsche Theater (Stuttgart, 1947), or Alexander von Weilen, Hamlet auf der deutschen Bühne bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin, 1908). Phrases such as "My account of this production follows closely that given by . . ." (p. 184, n. 39), "quoted in von Weilen . . ." (p. 80, n. 31), "The figures are taken from . . ." (p. 100, n. 44), or "See . . . for a detailed account . . ." (p. 148, n. 6; cf. p. 151, n. 17) recur with rather tell-tale frequency in this study. On the whole, Williams' survey deals not merely (as the somewhat misleading title suggests) with Shakespeare in performance but also with the reception of his plays in general, "some attention being paid to the crucial impact of Shakespeare on German critical thinking and on Germany's great contribution to Shakespeare in criticism, not only because such material is of consequence in itself, but because it can also lead us to an appreciation of both the achievement and the shortcomings of the German theatre in rising to the challenge of Shakespeare's plays" (p. xi). Williams also pays attention to the rise of the director in Shakespearean production. In his final chapter, for instance, he describes the successful activities and failures of the highly-regarded Deutsches Theater before the outbreak of the First World War under the directorship of Adolphe L'Arronge and his colleagues, later under Otto Brahm, and finally under Max Reinhardt, whose "work might not represent the culmination of 150 years of Shakespearean performance in the German theatre." According to the author, Reinhardt "went far towards assembling Herder's 'ruins of the colossus' into a coherent structure that was nearing completion" (p. 220). 84Comparative Drama Williams also analyzes some of the actors' interpretations of leading roles. There is, for example, a whole chapter on the history of playing Shylock (pp. 132-46), discussing some of the famous performances from Friedrich Ludwig Schroder's " 'splendid imitation of Jewish customs and demeanour'" (p. 133) to Friedrich Mitterwurzer's interpretation of an "impressively morose and turbulently angry Shylock," with strong reminiscence of Inland's interpretation of the role (p. 146). This chapter is certainly worth reading, though one would have welcomed some comparison with other famous roles. Nor is any detailed information about the characteristic features of the late nineteenth-century German theater provided in this chapter. It is therefore not easy to discover the exact context of this analysis within the complex history of Shakespeare on the German stage. The same can be said about Williams' comments on the German translations. Since there is a close interdependence between the theater and the first German renderings by Wieland, Eschenburg, and "SchlegelTieck " (i.e., August Wilhelm and Caroline Schlegel, Ludwig and Dorothea Tieck as well as Wolf Heinrich Graf Baudissin), it would have been much better to consider them chronologically in one chapter. Instead, Williams prefers to enter on...

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