The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance ed. by James C. Bulman (review)

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance’s introduction and thirty-six essays draw together theories, practices, and methods related to contemporary performances of Shakespeare. The volume makes the case that performance is undeniably at the center of how Shakespeare makes meaning now, and demonstrates the unique contribution that studies of performance make to the study of culture. The volume addresses a wide range of ideas—including liveness, immersion, mediation, and gender and race in casting—that will be of interest to performance scholars outside of Shakespeare studies.

The first section, “Experimental Shakespeare,” begins with Susan Bennett’s long view of creative experimentation with Shakespeare. Her argument that today such creativity is a marketing tool used “to consolidate a moneymaking commodity called Shakespeare” (25) is a fair point, but excludes performances beyond the marketplace in, for example, amateur companies and schools. Indeed, essays throughout the volume often neglect the vast array of nonprofessional performances that might resist or nuance theories based solely on the practices of commercial companies like the RSC or the Globe. Two essays in this section, however—Bridget Escolme’s on problematic depictions of class in recent British Othellos, and Roberta Barker’s on gender and racial bias in the reception of Antony and Cleopatras—are exemplary for the way they synthesize multiple analytical perspectives on a single play in order to illuminate the social work done by theater practitioners and audiences. Kathryn Prince’s account of the political stakes of immersive and epic Macbeths in the following section is excellent in similar ways.

The “Reception” section begins with Ayanna Thompson’s important exploration of Oregon Shakespeare Festival audience surveys in order to trace instances of racial bias, with a call to arms for Shakespeare scholars to document and address this issue. Pieces by Peter Holland on the phenomenon of forgetting, Robert Shaughnessy on jet lag and anachronism, and Rob Conkie on perambulatory performances in Melbourne provide profound revelations on unexpected topics.

The third section on “Media and Technology” is chock-full of brilliant work, but its repeated discussions of Ivo van Hove’s Roman Tragedies and of live cinema broadcasts get a little repetitive. Analyses of iPad apps and Google+ feeds in this section already feel dated, which perhaps simply reveals the dynamism of this subfield. Stephen Purcell’s nuanced account of “liveness” in broadcasts, immersive theater, and original practices is a standout that will age well, as will Pascale Aebischer’s analysis of how technology can create new opportunities for ethical engagement. Courtney Lehmann’s detailed depiction of black female director Liz White’s all-black 1966 Othello is perhaps the highlight of the volume for its close reading of gender and racial politics and the way it embodies the problems of the performance archive: Lehmann viewed one of the few extant copies of the film in a library, and that copy has since been lost.

The final section, “Global Shakespeare,” is at its best when scholars such as Alfredo Michel Modenessi, Colette Gordon, Michiko Suematsu, and Yon Li Lan describe performance in the regions in which they live and work. While Dennis Kennedy, Robert Ormsby, Christie Carson, and especially Sonia Massai provide powerful critiques of the exoticizing tendencies of “intercultural” Shakespeare in England and North America, over half of this section’s essays discuss the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival in London (there are five separate accounts of the National Theatre of China’s costumes being stranded on a ship). Yet there was little to no discussion anywhere of non-English European theater (save Roman Tragedies, which everyone viewed in London), or of performance in South America, the Middle East, Russia, or the Indian subcontinent; and, with few exceptions, productions in North America outside of major Shakespeare centers such as New York and Stratford, Ontario were also neglected. The volume would have benefited from more pieces like Modenessi’s, which describes the adaptive processes of...