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  • Canadian Shakespeare: Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English, vol. 18 ed. by Susan Knutson
  • Kailin Wright (bio)
Susan Knutson , editor. Canadian Shakespeare: Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English, vol. 18. Playwrights Canada Press. 2010. xxii, 218. $25.00

Often heralded as Canada’s most popular playwright, Shakespeare continues to be a fixture of the Canadian stage. Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English explores this very phenomenon in its special issue, Canadian Shakespeare. Edited by Susan Knutson, the collection of essays examines not only how Shakespeare influences Canadian productions but also how Canadian productions transform Shakespeare. Knutson explains, ‘As a Canadianist who wandered into Shakespeare studies via Canlit, I am grateful for what Canadian writers and dramaturges have been doing with Shakespeare. As a human being in need of solace in these difficult times, I am equally grateful for those things that Shakespeare has been doing with us.’

With its collection of significant essays from 1988 to 2010, Knutson’s special issue exemplifies the changing field of Canadian adaptation studies while also demonstrating the wide range of adaptations that include verbatim restagings, modern retellings, spin-offs, and intertextual allusions. Although Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) at times eclipses the many other examples of Shakespeare adaptations in Canada, Canadian Shakespeare collects critical pieces on Michael O’Brien’s Mad Boy Chronicle (MacKay and McKinnon), Margaret Clarke’s Gertrude and Ophelia (Burnett), Tomson Highway’s Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing (Folkerth), Yvette Nolan and Kennedy Cathy MacKinnon’s Death of a Chief (Moll), and Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet (Dickinson) among others.

There is a provocative array of material including scholarly articles, interviews, and personal accounts of theatre productions. Helen Peters, Moira Day, Michael McKinnie, and Anthony B. Dawson examine specific productions of Shakespeare’s plays in the contexts of aboriginal culture, bilingualism, employment equity, and transhistorical universalism, respectively. Readers of Canadian Shakespeare hear from such directors and playwrights as Steven Bush, Kate Lynch, Yvette Nolan, and Judith [End Page 611] Thompson. Denis Salter’s ‘Teaching, Performing, and Responding to Shakespeare in Multicultural (Postcolonial) Canada and Quebec’ offers a rare look into the pedagogical ramifications of Canadian adaptation studies. Linda Burnett works ‘Towards a Theory of Shakespearean Adaptations in Canada’ by arguing that adaptation is the postmodern manifestation of parody because of their shared strategy of revision. The essays framing Burnett’s piece, namely Ellen MacKay’s analysis of gender performativity and Peter Dickinson’s examination of ‘Black Diasporic Theatre,’ illustrate Burnett’s central tenet that theatre can change the way we think about gender, racial, and cultural differences. In his persuasive ‘Duets, Duologues, and Black Diasporic Theatre,’ Dickinson uses Sears’s Harlem Duet (a prequel to Othello set in present-day Harlem) to complicate the hierarchal relationship of the source and adaptation until ‘it is no longer clear which of these playwrights is calling and which is responding to whom.’ Taken together, this special issue on Canadian Shakespeare nicely engages with what Knowles highlights as three mutually constitutive components of performance analysis, that is, the conditions of production, the performance text, and the audience reception (‘Encoding/Decoding Shakespeare’).

Canadian Shakespeare joins the ranks of notable works on Canadian Shakespeare adaptations, an already impressive field that includes digital resources like Daniel Fischlin’s Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (2004), Diana Brydon and Irena R. Makaryk’s edited collection Shakespeare in Canada (2002), and Ric Knowles’s Shakespeare and Canada (2004), as well as special issues on Adapting Shakespeare in Canada for Canadian Theatre Review (Fischlin and Knowles, 2002) and Canadian Shakespeares for Borrowers and Lenders (Fischlin, 2007), to name a few. With its range of perspectives and collection of key essays, Knutson’s Canadian Shakespeare offers an essential compilation for scholars and theatre practitioners interested in one of Canadian theatre’s most adaptable resources – the Bard.

Kailin Wright

Department of English, St. Francis Xavier University

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