Michael Bristol and Kathleen McLuskie with Christopher Holmes. Eds. 2001. Shakespeare and Modern Theatre. London and New York: Routledge. 208 pp. ISBN 0-415-21984-1. £50 hb / ISBN 0-415-21985-X. £16.99 pb.

1. At the core of Sarah Werner's Shakespeare and Feminist Performance and of the collection of articles edited by Michael Bristol and Kathleen McLuskie with Christopher Holmes is a many-sided and far-reaching debate over Shakespeare in reading and Shakespeare in performance and media. As the succinct title of the latter collection suggests, the individual authors – if they problematize this complex dichotomy directly – emphasize that an evaluation of a performance of Shakespeare should not resort to seeing it as an ephemeral and partial derivative of a written text that is supposed to have a stable identity and a plethora of guaranteed meanings. Both studies under review cover major aspects of modern-day appropriation of Shakespeare in terms of forms/genres and underlying ideologies.

2. In her interdisciplinary venture, Sarah Werner focuses on how the way of acting Shakespeare is shaped by different ideologies. She looks at a number of areas to demonstrate some current issues to do with staging Shakespeare in a feminist way. Werner draws attention to the practice of the Royal Shakespeare Company from the aspects of voice work, the history of the RSC Women's Group and a specific performance of The Taming of The Shrew, directed by Gale Edwards. Summing up her view of what factors should be taken into consideration when evaluating a performance, the author elaborates on an experimentalist university performance of Two Gentlemen of Verona. The book has numerous examples of how the film industry adapts Shakespeare for larger audiences. It does not belittle the value of Werner's study that the chapters seem to read better as loosely linked individual articles with a more or less mutual leitmotif rather than as consecutive parts of a book.

3. To prove the importance and contemporaneity of the topic, Werner commences her argument with up-to-date film evaluations. In the discussion of 'Shakespeare's colonization of Hollywood' (which I would paraphrase as 'Hollywood devouring Shakespeare') she provides a list of the twenty-seven American and British films made of/on Shakespeare in the past decade. She is particularly good when making a well-contextualized comparison between Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love, seeking an answer to the question why the latter is the more accomplished. She also sheds light on the rather complex representation of gender in Shakespeare in Love, demonstrating, for instance, how different scenes of cross-dressing (Viola as Thomas Kent and Shakespeare as Viola's nurse), as well as the putting of Juliet's words in Shakespeare's mouth in the lovemaking scene, allow for a witty challenge to notions of heterosexual desire and the image of masculinity.

4. The study gives a special insight into the history of the Royal Shakespeare Company, which, as Werner emphasizes, has striven to define itself as 'the cultural custodian of Shakespeare' (43), and succeeded in gaining an institutional prestige comparable to that of Oxbridge. Werner's specific focus is how voice training affects the theatrical interpretation of Shakespeare. The spotlight on the ideological implications of this seemingly neutral and impersonal activity is one of the cardinal merits of Werner's study. Werner underlines that the RSC's chief voice coach Cicely Berry and her colleague Patsy Rodenburg (head of Voice at the Royal National Theatre as well as the Guildhall School of Music and Drama) have created through voice training a widespread style of acting Shakespeare. Having claimed that 'Without an ensemble of actors, a consistent circle of directors or a clearly articulated company policy, the RSC identity is largely driven by and maintained through the presence of Cicely Berry, its long-time voice coach' (21), Werner goes as far as concluding 'Not only has Berry helped to develop a coherent RSC style, she has made that style influential throughout Anglophone theatre' (22). A highly formative experience for Berry was the collaboration with Peter Brook in 1970, to which the ideology of her teaching method can be traced back. Berry recontextualized Brook's term 'the empty space', saying the empty space where an actor can find him/herself, is the body – 'your voice is your inner self'. The underlying ideology is that the natural voice is blocked by the 'conditioning of a warped society'. Carrying out a conscientious close reading of Berry's and Rodenburg's ars poetica (available in a number of books on voice training), Werner points out the hardly reconcilable contradictions in their rhetoric, for example that the speaker of Shakespeare is both a new author and the vessel of the writer (in Rodenburg). Privileging the character motive on the basis of voice training hinders a critical approach to the playwright's own motives or to ideological structure. Moreover, the different subject position of Renaissance and contemporary women does not allow for a smooth, unproblematic acting of Shakespeare. A de-culturized Shakespeare is a deception. Werner also highlights a few differences between the agendas of the two voice coaches. She stresses that their actual teaching practice is said to be occasionally divergent from the written principles. Werner refrains from far-reaching conclusions, but one puts down the book with the impression that the work of the two female voice specialists (despite having been identified as feminist by a few) does not contribute to a questioning attitude to acting Shakespeare.

5. Underlying this, one can find the patriarchal system of the RSC in which the paterfamilias ('who' is not a person, of course, but the authoritarian mechanism itself) strictly regulates the rights and duties of the family members (in order to maintain a consistent image for the outside world). The telling title 'Punching Daddy, or the politics of company politics' precedes a chapter on the history of the RSC Women's Group, which, arising from the noted Fortnight's Women's Weekend of 1985, wished to challenge the general negligence of female practitioners by the male-dominated company management. Werner, having conducted interviews with Fiona Shaw, Juliet Stevenson, Susan Todd and others, engages in following the thread of the network of people involved in this enterprise rather than making sharp statements. Regarding the provisional artistic programme of the group, director Todd consulted Angela Carter, who suggested they should do a subversive Macbeth performance. After the refusal of Terry Hands the co-Artistic Director, the remainder of the group did a performance of Deborah Levy's Heresies with a few outsiders (so, not a Shakespeare!). The lack of a coherent political agenda as well as the limited means of attempting to interrogate the ways of the institution from the inside, resulted in the dissolving of the group.

6. Werner takes up the very problematic task of assessing ephemeral art in two thoroughgoing case studies. Her discussion of Gale Edwards's 1995 RSC performance of The Taming of The Shrew epitomizes what points of view one can use for performance analysis: the cultural background of the performance, the context of its theatrical and literary reception, reliance on reviews (with a pinch of salt), own viewing experience (which can help with evaluating the reviews), interviews with the cast, and so on. When illustrating how costume, lighting, scenery, music and other nonverbal constituents (which she collects under the umbrella term 'theatrical ephemera') shape a performance, she cites Cary Mazer's provocative Two Gentlemen of Verona (University of Pennsylvania, 1999) as an example. This show is a radical rewrite of the play in the sense that it comprises an inserted frame-scene, which allows the actors – who are co-authors here without any doubt – to 'change into' their roles on the spot, replace or complement verbal language with physical action at certain points, and to express how they feel about their parts. Whether it is more useful to view such productions under the rubric of (the appropriation of) Shakespeare, feminist performance or contemporary theatre remains an open issue. This is the point where the author could clarify her position on theatre semiotics, a (sub)discipline that indeed engages in work of this kind, but she avoids this.

7. It is apparent that Sarah Werner writes against the primacy of the text in the reception of Shakespeare. She emphasizes that the same starting point characterizes both sides in the stereotypical page and stage dichotomy; they both 'prioritize a literary notion of text' (104) and a stability of meaning. 'Literary scholars see Shakespeare's meaning as contained in the text and elucidated through performance; theatre scholars prioritize performance as the source of meaning and believe the text is incomplete until it is acted on stage' (104). What Werner convincingly argues for is that performances of Shakespeare should be understood as localized, imbued with ideology and, as a result, not neutral realizations of the text.

8. In Shakespeare and Modern Theatre, W. B.Worthen, taking the recent cultural event of the opening of the Globe on the Bankside as a starting point, convincingly argues that the theatre has its own tradition of behavioural conventions, hence, historicity takes on a different meaning in this context. 'Acting […] is perhaps the epitome of citational behaviour' (129). As a result, coming to terms with the past is not a privilege of literary practice and literary studies. Working on the stage is indeed just as intertextual (though he does not use this term) as a literary reading is, yet in a different way – with 'citational behaviours' pertinent to the theatre: 'Performance in the theatre is not the citation of texts, but the incarnation of texts as behaviour: the "text" never appears as a text in performance, but only as it is transformed into something else, someone lying, pleading, commanding, wooing, seducing, and so on.' (129)

9. In like vein, a close attention to the importance of tradition in the theatre is apparent in Catherine Graham's in-depth comparative analysis of Lawrence Olivier's and John Gielgud's Hamlets (the former investigation is based on the 1948 film, the latter on Gilder's detailed description of a performance in 1938). While Olivier pronouncedly and consistently turns away from a traditional way of acting Hamlet (certain petrified criteria of which have almost become part of 'the playtext'), Gielgud's 'more tradition-centred portrayal' (72) focuses on Hamlet's contradictory attitude to social norms. In both cases, the formation of the character reflects how the actors interrogate prevailing theatrical norms. Catherine Graham contextualizes her case studies in the tradition of the impersonation of Hamlet as an epitomous task for an actor claiming professional status. In this respect, Olivier's Hamlet is displayed as one whose mind has firm control of the body. This is shown as a parallel to the actor attempting not to let the industrial institution of the theatre dominate his physicality. Catherine Graham points to Gielgud's insistence on using the predecessors' physical action in interpreting the text alongside checking out professional readings of the written playtext as opposed to merely imitating these past actors.

10. Irena R. Makaryk's study of the polymath Les' (Oleksandr Stepanovych) Kurbas is conscientiously contextualized in the political climate of early twentieth-century Soviet Modernism. Due to a long-term ban on domestic as well as European literature and theatre (excepting Russian) in the Ukraine, Shakespeare inevitably became of foundational importance in the re-establishment of Ukrainian culture. Educated in Western Europe and very familiar with Modernist trends, Kurbas argued for a subversive and anti-bourgeois performance of Shakespeare. As Bristol and McLuskie stress in their introduction, Kurbas's modernizing attempt was aimed at a variety of aspects, such as 'the classic, plot, role, character, hero, time, space, acting, prop, costume, lighting' (16). His sparing use of alienating devices, such as the on-off technique (a form of constant play with the actors' and characters' identities), the doubling and tripling of roles, or the daring eclecticism of costume and props in his 1919-20 Macbeth is, as Makaryk parenthetically notes, about ten years ahead of Brecht's epic theatre. Les' Kurbas's experiment met with a mixed response – it was understood as both sacrilege and as a rather bourgeois, that is, intellectually elite (l'art pour l'art) performance.

11. Brecht and his innovations also deserve considerable attention in this volume. Maarten van Dijk draws on Peter Sloterdijk's notion of Frechheit (cheek) to foreground the much neglected non-Platonic tradition of kynicism deriving from Diogenes. He relies on this concept as well as Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque to elaborate on the subversiveness of Brecht's theatre and his take on such classics as Shakespeare. Brecht saw raw material in Shakespeare instead of some venerable sacred text. He felt free to adapt Shakespeare's works with a special emphasis on the corporeal, deploying 'creative vandalism' (Jonathan Dollimore's term). Discussing the three Cs – Consistency, Canonicity, and Containment – van Dijk gives a brief overview of tendencies in staging Shakespeare from the nineteenth century on. After the consistency of the historical literalism of the naturalist theatre, William Poel initiated often provocative modern dress 'concept' productions of Shakespeare. (This tradition is still alive, and the scope of interpretation it offers is rather limited, according to van Dijk.) Canonicity has a delimiting effect in the theatre, due to the institutional demand for a transhistorical Shakespeare. The mainstream Shakespeare productions of the RSC are perfect examples of a style promised as radical and relevant but, in fact, addressing 'a largely middle-class audience whose ideology was both reflected and reinforced' (164) by these performances. This phenomenon underlines the validity of the theory of containment, according to which, 'any demystifying, subversive, critical, or dissident potential of Shakespeare […] is always already contained by a dominant ideology, since any classic is a hegemonic instrument, part of an ideological state apparatus, both shaping and instilling the dominant culture' (164-165). A 'cheeky' and carnivalesque attitude to Shakespeare (and the theatre) is discerned by van Dijk in the style of the English Shakespeare Company. (However, I would risk the question if this approach is an exception to the aforementioned entrapment.)

12. An attempt at calling into question the long-established authority of the Royal Shakespeare Company by the so-called RSC Women's Group is the main concern of Sarah Werner's article, which can also be read in the above reviewed book. On the basis of written documents (such as reviews) and interviews conducted with the relevant theatre practitioners and some related outsiders, Werner engages in the reconstruction of the history of a feminist enterprise of challenging a male dominance over Shakespeare within the RSC. The project was not fully successful, in part because of a lack of support from the RSC management and, in part, owing to a want of a shared manifesto, consistency and perseverance within the group itself. Sarah Werner's article is a diligently and thoughtfully conducted exercise in semi-contemporary theatrical historiography.

13. Hugh Grady's article proposes that a complex, deeply troubled and often controversial attitude to Shakespeare did not start with the postmodern; the modernist paradigm paved the way for this. 'The appropriation of Shakespeare as a modernist meant a thorough revision of his nineteenth-century image as a Romantic and realist' (21). The Modernist Shakespeare was constructed to meet the 'criteria' of the emerging Modernist aesthetics (antilinearity, myth, new notions of time and space, and so on). This applies to the avant-garde treatment of Shakespeare, as well. Grady also emphasizes that the vision (deriving from Eliot) of the whole world having turned into 'a vast waste land' inevitably resulted in a recanonization of the classics, including Shakespeare. Hugh Grady gives a clever overview of Adorno's, Horkheimer's, Kuhn's, Habermas's, Hassan's and others' theories to provide a context in which a new paradigm of Shakespeare studies (cultural materialist, poststructuralist, feminist, and so on) developed. Grady also states that postmodernist productions connected to Shakespeare, such as Al Pacino's Looking for Richard have had an effect on academic writing. Grady sees recent film productions based on Shakespeare as deploying postmodernist disunity and pastiche; for instance, Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet alludes without irony to other films and uses 'cameo appearances by media icons' (31).

14. Paul Yachnin goes even further back in time, striving to formulate a sociological and at the same time literary pattern of bardicide. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the field of cultural productions, he contends that bardicides such as Ann-Marie MacDonald in Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), Charles Marowitz in his Shrew, Jane Smiley in A Thousand Acres, Schwarzenegger in Last Action Hero, Richard Curtis in The Skinhead Hamlet or even Ben Jonson 'cannot help but preserve Shakespeare's position as what Harold Bloom calls "the centre of the canon" ' (51). Drawing on Bakhtin's notion of historicity in language and literature, Yachnin underlines the paradoxical nature of subversion in which identification and rejection go together. 'If Jonson was the first bardicide, then, he was also the first to consecrate Shakespeare's authorship' (49). Or, as MacDonald emphasises with regard to her play, '[It] obviously takes a lot of wicked cracks at Shakespeare, but essentially it's a tribute. Because it's written with a Shakespearean attitude' (quoted on 41). Yachnin argues that a similar sort of self-conscious engagement with previous literary works was already, as a factor in 'marketing', at play in Ben Jonson's eulogy of Shakespeare. In order to establish himself as a master-poet, Jonson contributes to the construction of Shakespeare's authority. Yachnin uses the term metadrama in connection with Renaissance texts, which definitely challenges an exclusively postmodern notion of intertextuality.

15. In his essay entitled 'Translation at the Intersections of History', Jean-Michel Déprats, the accomplished academic and literary translator (who has translated and adapted Shakespeare, Ford, Woolf, Wilde and Synge into French), cites examples of the translation and adaptation of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Vergil and others to illustrate what choices are available for the translator when putting across a text written in a different period. As Déprats argues, the time-gap between the time of the original and that of the translation cannot be ignored. Whichever translation strategy is opted for – deliberately archaic or deliberately modern – a 'lie' or a 'fiction' has to be formulated within the translation to account for this gap. Archaizing translations often try to imitate a version of the receiving language at the time of the conception of the original, for instance, Shakespeare in mock sixteenth-century French as there are no French translations of Shakespeare from this period. (It has to be noted that translations can be reminiscent of other times as well, such as the time and language of the first/most canonical versions of a certain author in a language. For instance, much of the Hungarian literary register into which Shakespeare has been translated recalls nineteenth-century language, even in the 1980s.) Modernizing translations aim to create the illusion that the text was written at the 'present' moment (or, let me add, to show a commonplace-like attitude of promoting the author as 'our contemporary'). As a result, 'The historicity of the original text has been occluded and short-circuited' (82). This is the reason Déprats gives for the phenomenon of retranslation.

16. It is noteworthy that the collection is accompanied by an immensely helpful introduction. The statement from the general editor's preface, according to which Shakespeare and Modern Theatre brings together 'a particularly strong line-up of contributors from across the literary-performative divide' proves much more than an enticing phrase in describing both books. Some sites of the appropriation of Shakespeare addressed in the two volumes include performances, films (and their relation to the text), translations, Hamlet as an identity-providing role in theatre history, a feminist handling of Shakespeare, an avant-garde Shakespeare, Shakespeare's reception in (a few) cultures other than English, and so on. Several questions that have been posed in a most versatile way will remain with us in our everyday scholarly work, such as the never-ending issue of ideology and the reworking of Shakespeare. There is no end to the list of the ways of appropriation. This morning, before finishing off this review I watched a contemporary Polish film with great delight. In the film A Yellow Scarf (2000), one of the marginal characters, a drunkard, starts reciting Hamlet's great soliloquy when treated to a glass of vodka in the pub and asked about how he survives and what his refuge is. This is one of the appearances of the recurrent suggestion of the possibility of suicide in the film. Appropriations of Shakespeare seem likely to provide critics with endless opportunities in the future.