Shakespeare and Middleton at the RSC and in London, 2008

A review of “The Revenger’s Tragedy” at the National Theatre and “Hamlet” and “The Taming of the Shrew” at the Royal Shakespeare Company, summer 2008. This essay analyzes the way theatrical effects in these productions were developed out of an overlap or collision between different performative rhetorics and vocabularies: filmic, televisual, and theatrical. And it attempts to raise some complex questions about the role classical repertory theatre can play in providing spectators access to the radical cultural, temporal, and ideological otherness that makes early modern dramatic literature such a fertile field for critical engagement and interpretation.