Big-Time Shakespeare by Michael Bristol (review)

192 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 the past, even as such a relation is,insome productions, radically put to the question, this book performs an admirable function. In addition to introducing readers perhaps unfamiliar with them to the range of adaptive theatrical practices associated with Shakespearean textuality, the book makes substantive and significant theoretical interventions into areas that radicalize Shakespeare studies - from queer theory to postcolonial adaptation to micropolitical mises en scene staged from within contemporary imperial culture. As such, the book bravely ventures into difficult territory while thoughtfully avoiding facile conclusions in which the 'shifting' Shakespeare phenomenon simply ventriloquizes the past even as it articulates , however disingenuously, the amnesia of the present. Bennett concludes that if I the contemporary sign is doomed to dream of signs of the past, its signification need not be bound to narratives of a single History. So shifting Shakespeare is both easy and not so easy. His texts are and have always been subject to the modifications of the cultures that produce them. But, in the end, shlfting Shakespeare is precisely what makes space for all kinds of future performances.' Out of the multiplicity of past 'histories' comes the promise of new contingencies. Thus, Be1U1ett's book serves as a thoughtful preamble to perhaps the last uncharted territory in Shakespearean studies: the future performatives that will unerringly shape the relatiqns of past to present, of desire to possibility. (DANIEL FISCHLIN) .Michael Bristol. Big-Time Shakespeare Routledge. xvi, 256. $83.95 cloth, $24.95 paper Big-Time Shakespeare is a measured, scholarly, and thoughtful contribution to the ongoing bardbiz debate, centring on the origins of such issues as the difference between Shakespeare and 'Shakespeare' and the authority which the name Shakespeare has come to command in world, not to say Western, culture. While Bristol stands firmly in the left-wing camp, he gives serious attention to the older, moreestablished and accepted conservativeviews on Shakespeare the Great, thereby fortifying his own more moderate stance, whose politics is complicated but enriched by a readiness to acknowledge what is valuablein the opposition. Thus, while he dissects the conservative politics by which Shakespeare studies have traditionally been driven, he sees value where others have seen defensiveness and self-aggrandizement. Harold Bloom, the self-appointed scourge of the Left - the 'school of resentment ' - is, surprisingly, a looming presence in this book. Bristol takes Bloom more seriously than most of his left-wing detractors have done and, in so doing, confronts some of the knottiest questions posed by the complex relationship between 'Shakespeare' and the author of the same name; such as, how 'great' was Shakespeare and what on earth does the question mean? HUMANITIES 193 Bristol has some fine and intelligent things to say on the subject of Shakespeare and aesthetics and the 'internal good' of the craft of writing. Is Shakespeare merely the creation of the industry which has grown up in and aroundhis name, or was he instead or equally a transcendent universal genius? The more purelypolitical matter ofShakespeare's authority within the burgeoning culture industry is a fascinating subject, comprehensively and wittily discussed in thisbook. Suchissues are closely tied to the history of 'Shakespeare'; the plays were composed within the context of an incipient culture industry and were transformed during that period from cultural capital into simple capital. The process has, of course, continued into the present. Big-Time Shakespeare supplies a fascinating history of the commoditization of Shakespeare through the centuries, noting the advent of the entertainment. industry as coeval with the earliest phase of capitalism. Attendant and coincident issues of the star system (Garrick in particular is important to this enterprise) and its direct and immediately dependent relationship to the status and authority of Shakespeare are examined. The various transmutations and developments of that authority as a defining elementin the industry are also comprehensivelysurveyed. The theatre, the book, and the film are the obvious bases of the transmogrification of Shakespeare from author to industry. A long chapter on the symbiotic relationship of Shakespeare to the theatres of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries clarifies the process of transformation from author to icon. Shakespeare's popularity in the theatre made him an exploitable commodity in the...