Robert Shaughnessy. 1994. Representing Shakespeare: England, History and the RSC. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester/Wheatsheaf. 222 pp. ISBN 0-7450-1560-3. £12.95.

1. Robert Shaughnessy's stimulating book implicitly, perhaps unwittingly, confronts criticism with an issue of contemporary signification. Since Greenblatt's heart-on-the-sleeve construction of cultural poetics - with, for example, his pronouncement that 'the questions that I ask of my material and indeed the very nature of this material are shaped by questions I ask of myself' - ideological critics have interrogated the interrelationship of individual and social identity. In this, they have examined the contradictions of selfhood within an esoteric and radical yet ultimately failing political agenda. Dollimore and Sinfield are prime examples when they state that they write in the context of a cause which is directed towards 'the transformation of a social order which exploits people on grounds of race, gender and class'. It is a laudable sentiment but one which is presently vacuous. It has little to do with the political agenda in Britain in the 80s and 90s. As the United Kingdom moves towards its mid-90s general election, the absence of intellectual debate influencing the political agenda in the way that Dollimore or Sinfield would advocate is deafening in its silence. To put it crudely, cultural poetic and cultural materialist critics have not yet provided the intellectual alternative to, or compensation for, the collapse of the Marxist-Leninist social programme, as they have not either for the prevailing capitalism of post-Thatcherite Conservatism. Consequently, they remain at best politically impotent and at worst self-examining in an incestuous metacritical posturing. In this context their criticism - from undeniably honourable motives - of the liberal-humanist constructs of the RSC from the 1960s onwards bears the emptiness of 'sounding brass or tinkling cymbal'.

2. Shaughnessy in his well-researched book has to allow for such critical fashion. He rightly notes that 'less attention has been paid to the cultural politics of Shakespearean theatre production, still less to the politics of theatre criticism itself' adding that this produces 'significant implications for my own project' (5). Trying to encompass post-structuralist critical ideology he makes the overt declaration: 'I evaluate the productions discussed not on the grounds of what they allegedly do to Shakespeare, but on what they do to (and for) us' (7). In this, he reveals the contradictions of the material he is to examine - productions of Shakespeare's history plays by the RSC between 1963 and 1988 and the cultural predilections of a wide spectrum of literary criticism ranging from E.M.W. Tillyard to the New Historicism. Shaughnessy's discourse, for example, thereby unquestionably accepts the Tillyardian terminology of a first and second tetralogy and yet simultaneously calls to mind Terence Hawkes's statement that 'Shakespeare doesn't mean: we mean by Shakespeare'. The problem in an ongoing critical crisis is that if the RSC 'means' by Shakespeare it is in danger of critical condemnation for political or historical incorrectness. Whereas if the cultural materialists 'mean' by Shakespeare they condemn themselves for their inability to influence current political agendas. It is not a crisis in English studies or theatrical criticism, but a crisis in discourse, meaning and communication.

3. Shaughnessy demonstrates that in the context of the RSC's political agenda of the 1960s, which could, in its liberal humanism, bask in the knowledge that National Socialism had been defeated and that the Communism of the Cold War could be decried, the Company found a pertinence in contemporary relevance. In this period of super-power politics, Peter Hall and John Barton's cyclic rendering of the Henry VI plays and Richard III was exemplary of RSC artistic and ideological policy. As Shaughnessy notes, their The Wars of the Roses produced 'a secularised mystery cycle, a universal drama of fall, decay and corruption with no hope of redemption in this world or the next' (47). I would hold that liberal-humanist audiences at this period were happy to accept such an intellectual vision as according with their own predilections. Yet ironically they could simultaneously reject the vision as having any influence on their own individual sense of purpose; that is their own selfhood. This proves to be a contradictory element in the consideration of theatrical relevance. Nevertheless, as Shaughnessy demonstrates, by the early 1970s the RSC was finding a new authority not only in the 'hallucinogenic mysteries' of Peter Brook's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1970) (14) but, more significantly for Shaughnessy's argument, in John Barton's 1973 production of Richard II. In this, Richard Pasco and Ian Richardson alternated the roles of Richard II and Bolingbroke. The production has become part of RSC legend. It was conceived almost as cyclic in itself but in this it raised significant issues. Capitalising on the fashion for metadramatic Shakespeare, as in part exemplified in the scholarship of Anne Barton, the director's wife, the production's success 'stemmed not from its apparent modernity but from its conservatism: from the fact that it seemed to eschew 1960s-style 'relevance' altogether' (102). Interestingly, Shaughnessy here recognizes the shifting political parameters at the RSC during the period under discussion. Serious debate was to decline into extraneous spectacle and Adrian Noble's Henry V (1984), with Kenneth Branagh, replicated the ideological conditions of the second world war in the context of the Falklands. Yet there must be a question about Shaughnessy's positioning in all this. In his evaluations he too needs to recognize that the literary-critical empty space cannot be ideologically neutral. Despite drawing attention to his own metacritical position, it is unclear where he actually stands unless it is in an affinity with the changing ideology of the RSC itself, which I doubt.

4. Fortunately, he tackles the minor plays and/or less fashionable directors from an alternative perspective. King John is considered in detail with the 1988 production by Deborah Warner being the focus of a pertinent chapter. The key issue here is that Warner was working in the Studio theatre at Stratford, The Other Place. John Barton's adaptation of the same play in 1974 had 'one major advantage: [the play's] unfamiliarity suggested that hardly anyone in the audience would know (or care) enough about the play to be able authoritatively to evaluate his intervention and adaptation' (134). This is fair enough but Shaughnessy could extend the argument in his consideration of Howard Davies's Henry VIII at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre (1983). Henry VIII similarly is an unfamiliar play, yet Davies's radical left-wing political rendering raised important conceptual issues related to production policy and evaluation.

5. In the theatre signification is hard to achieve if the producers and receivers of signs do not share the same communicative culture. Violation of familiar conventions may be a legitimate method of frustrating audience expectation, but if a common understanding of image and environment does not exist between performers and audience, the theatrical process fails. This is not to say that the RSC could not produce radical theatre, but that to do so they had to construct an appropriate expectation for the audience. In playing Bond or Edgar at The Other Place, they succeeded. In asking Edgar to adapt Henry VIII for the main auditorium, they failed. This was not because Edgar was less talented in his socialist adaptation than Barton had been in his liberal-humanist adaptations, but because the conditions for performance and adaptation were not conducive to the experiment in which Edgar and his director, Howard Davies, wished to engage. The audience going into the RST was not sufficiently primed, despite the radical nature of the programme notes to which Shaughnessy refers. In this respect, Shaughnessy's book by concentrating on the realisation of the history plays in performance, loses an element of the debate which a wider brief may have given him. Focus is always important but he appears constrained by the one selected. The RSC during the period he covers did not produce only history plays, and although passing reference is made to other genres and productions and something is made of the different acting spaces, an overall context is in danger of being lost.

6. Nevertheless, Shaughnessy in this intelligent analysis of a genre during a specific period of theatrical history in the life of a single major company, raises important issues. He contributes thereby to a critical tradition in performance studies which is politically pertinent in its methodology and scholarship. His book will prove a valuable contribution to the evaluation of the Royal Shakespeare Company during the period discussed.