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Shakespeare Survey 73 Shakespeare and the City
Edited
by Emma Smith
Cambridge: University Press, 2020 Hardcover. x+302
p. ISBN 978-1108830539. £90
Reviewed by Sophie Chiari Université Clermont Auvergne
The topic of this
new issue of Shakespeare Survey has
already been addressed in a number of books and academic journals. In 2010 for
example, the Société Française Shakespeare organised a congress devoted to
Shakespearian cityscapes, the proceedings of which can easily be found online. Ten years later, Emma Smith’s edited collection paves the way for a variety of fresh approaches to the theme of ‘Shakespeare and the City’. While some of the cities analysed belong exclusively to Shakespearean dramaturgy, others refer to places where Shakespeare is (or was) being sold, bought, or performed. In ‘Caesar and Lear in Hong Kong’ for instance, Miriam Leung Che Lau examines Hong Kong Shakespeare, and she explains how Shakespeare performances in this Asian territory are ‘rooted in local culture and theatrical practices’ [96]. Consequently, she explains, plays such as Julius Caesar and King Lear often deviate from the source text and get involved with the social and political issues at stake in Hong Kong. Similarly, in ‘Continental Shakespeare’, which opens this issue, Karen Newman associates Shakespeare with a town which, from the seventeenth century onwards, developed an important Shakespearian trade. The author considers a Shakespeare advertisement that appeared before the First Folio was published ‘and which apparently offered it for sale on the Continental book market’ [2] as early as 1622. Against all odds, she remarks, ‘in a supplemental listing of English books to an English reprint of a Latin catalogue’ for a fair which took place in Frankfurt, Germany, the Folio was offered for sale [3]. Interestingly, Newman accounts for this by the presence of English travelling players on the Continent. English troupes indeed used to perform plays at the Frankfurt fair, and they probably contributed to turn Shakespeare into ‘an incipient global cultural commodity’ [9]. In the next article, Nandini Das takes a look at Shakespeare’s Ephesus in The Comedy of Errors, a play which insistently
questions the stranger’s place (and, above all, the stranger’s rights) in a
given community, and which is notoriously informed both by Plautus’ Menaechmi and by St Paul’s Epistle to
the Ephesians. These two sources, Das sustains, ‘throw a raking light across
both Shakespeare’s play and that backlash against strangers in early modern
London’ [11]. If, in Ephesus, hospitality happens to be ‘a matter of reciprocal
transaction’ [17], in the end, the native and the stranger realise that they are
united by blood. ‘The space of the theatre’, Das finally contends, ‘makes it
possible for them to exemplify overtly what scripture would have us take on
faith about human connection’ [20]. Following up on Das’s enlightening
contribution, Alice Leonard analyses the same play but insists instead on city
origins and the loss of identity—a rather traditional, nonetheless interesting,
issue in connection with The Comedy of
Errors. She first dwells on the textual errors which filled the original
Folio edition of the play before paying attention to the emendations and
corrections of a few seventeenth- to eighteenth-century readers. Paradoxically,
far from clarifying it, these interventions generally increased the obscurity
of the text. Leonard also meticulously examines copies intended for use in the
theatre, which similarly introduce ‘further obfuscation’ [31]. In today’s
editions of the play, Leonard observes, Antipholus of Ephesus is of course no
longer confused with Antipholus of Syracuse, and Dromio of Ephesus is no longer
taken for Dromio of Syracuse. However, ‘[w]hat is lost by correcting Errors is a historical effect of error,
of confusion not easily remedied, and the memory of this experience by previous
readers and performers’ [41]. Lars Engle’s article, by contrast, brings to the
fore an unexpected and somewhat innovative approach as he investigates the
urban noise of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.
In order to distinguish the voice (which he also calls the ‘signal’) from its
urban environment, he ‘compare[s] Caius Martius […] to someone who announces at
every turn that he seeks to attend a voice that speaks of the essence of
things: St Augustine’ [80]. Engle’s analysis soon makes us realise that Coriolanus is a play remarkable for its
attention to sounds, while The
Confessions imagine ‘an unmediated, noise-free condition of complete
reception of the divine signal’ [85]. Yet both Coriolanus and St Augustine must
learn to become not only good speakers, but also competent hearers. While the
parallel between Shakespeare’s tragedy and St Augustine’s autobiography is not always
very convincing, Engle’s study addresses a relevant issue, especially as the
auditory focus, central to the world of the stage, has been surprisingly
neglected since Bruce R. Smith’s seminal book, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England : Attending to the
O-Factor (Chicago, 1999) and Kenneth Gross’s Shakespeare Noise (Chicago, 2001). Yet one may regret the fact that
the article is more preoccupied with sound- than with cityscapes. In fact, it
soon appears that this particular issue of Shakespeare
Survey, for all its fascinating insights into the early modern world, is
not as neatly focused as the previous one (which
dealt with the issue of ‘Shakespeare and War’). For example, while the third
article of Shakespeare Survey, devoted
to ‘The Circulation of Youthful Energy on the Early Modern London Stage’, is truly
fascinating in its innovative exploration of the London stage, it is but
loosely linked to the chosen theme. Harry R. McCarthy’s argument lies
elsewhere. McCarthy indeed suggests that the presence of boy actors and, more
generally, of children companies, strongly influenced the repertory of the
period. The boys were ‘known to spectators as individuals’ [51], and they had a
genuine impact on the dramaturgy of the companies they joined. Unsurprisingly,
then, early modern playgoers probably ‘followed their transitional careers’ [53],
McCarthy observes. Among the cases selected by the author, those of Stephen
Hammerton and Nathan Field are particularly intriguing. ‘Celebrity actors such
as Field’, McCarthy concludes, ‘demonstrate the portability and memorability of
boy actors’ skills—many of them physical—across companies and repertories’ [59].
Similarly, Chi-Fang Sophia Li shows little concern for the issue of ‘Shakespeare
and the City’. She supplies instead a thoughtful analysis on ‘Social Insanity
and Its Taming Schools in 1 and 2 Honest
Whore’, two highly successful productions imagined by Dekker and Middleton (1 Honest Whore, printed in 1604) and by
Dekker alone (2 Honest Whore, printed
in 1630). Doing so, she explores the intertwined issues of love and madness that
run deep throughout the two plays, and she shows that the Honest Whore plays partake of a conversation with Shakespeare on
themes such as ‘moral hypocrisy and double standards’ [67]. Li extends her
analysis to a comparison between an ambiguous Shakespearean character, Duke
Vincentio in Measure for Measure, and
‘Dekker’s foremost moral pillar, Orlando Friscobaldo’ [74]. As a result, the
author seems much more interested in ‘Dekker’s Shakespearian indebtedness’ [68]
and in what she calls ‘Dekkerian optimistic realism’ [78] than in the Jacobean
London deceivingly advertised in the full title of her essay. As usual, the
second section of Shakespeare Survey touches upon a variety of
different themes and includes articles from renowned scholars like Neil Rhodes
or Charlotte Scott. In a remarkable essay entitled ‘Before we Sleep : Macbeth and the Curtain Lecture’, Rhodes
highlights the ‘extraordinary intimacy between husband and wife’ [107] foregrounded
by a play obsessed with the ‘clearly defined space of the curtained bed’ [111].
As made clear by his title, Rhodes dwells on the curtain lecture, also known as
the ‘bolster’ or ‘canopy’ lecture, often endowed with an obvious sexual
dimension. This lecture, he asserts, ‘draws together many of the features that
have long been recognised as part of the special ambience of Macbeth’ [118].
Scott, as to her, analyses ‘the role of story, as a reflexive model of change’ [120]
in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play
oscillating between tale and history. Other contributions broach emerging
topics in the vast field of Shakespeare studies as they include Nicholas Luke’s
‘A Lawful Magic, New Worlds of Precedent in Mabo
and The Winter’s Tale’, Michael
Cordner’s ‘“Cabined, Cribbed, Confined” : Advice to Actors and the
Priorities of Shakespearian Scholarship’, Peter J. Smith’s ‘“What Country,
Friend, is This?” Tim Supple’s Twelfth
Night Revisited’, Jennie M. Votava’s ‘Through a Glass Darkly : Sophie
Okonedo’s Margaret as Racial Other in The
Hollow Crown : The Wars of the Roses’ and Gemma Kate Allred’s ‘“Who’s
There?” Britain’s Twenty-First-Century Obsession with Celebrity Hamlet (2008-2018)’. Bridging the gap
between film and text studies, this entertaining and well-documented last essay
refers to the Hamlets played by Tennant, Law, Cumberbatch and Scott, and it examines
‘how textual choices and staging are influenced by a new target audience’ [185].
The rich
reviews that shape the distinctive identity of Shakespeare Survey are still there and are worth reading carefully.
They allow us to catch a glimpse, for example, of the Shakespeare performances
that took place in England in 2019. As usual, Stephen Purcell goes to great
lengths to make us share his theatrical experience in an especially vivid way.
Joe Hill-Gibbins’s Richard III at the
Almeida Theatre, Robert Hastie’s Macbeth—‘the
first Shakespeare of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’ [205]—and the Globe’s trilogy
of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V are among the plays presented in
detail. The French students taking the agrégation
national competitive exam in 2021 or 2022 will be especially interested in the
review of Henry V, a production in
which the English king was performed by the black actress Sarah Amankwa (who
has incidentally been chosen to illustrate this issue of Shakespeare Survey). Purcell, among other pieces, also focuses on
the three productions of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream that were performed in London during the summer of 2019.
Nicholas Hytner’s and Sean Holmes’s productions, he explains, both emphasised
the carnivalesque dimension of the comedy, while Dominic Hill’s Dream at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre
‘provided a much darker counterpoint to these more jubilant productions’ [217].
Oddly enough, the forest, in Hill’s Dream,
‘was consistently underscored by drones, hoots, bird and insect cries’ [218]. Then, from
page 223 to page 239 of the volume, Paul Prescott discusses the state of
Shakespeare performances in England, i.e.
outside London, and he observes that 2019 was a year ‘in which it became
almost normative for women to play lead male roles’ [239]. James Shaw comes
immediately after and supplies an apt recap of ‘Professional Shakespeare
Productions in the British Isles’ for the year 2018. He is followed by
Charlotte Scott: the onus is on her, for the last time,* to review no less than
thirteen contributions to Shakespeare critical studies, from Patricia Akhimie
and Bernadette Andrea’s collection of essays,Travel and Travail : Early Modern Women, English Drama and the
Wider World (Lincoln and London, 2019), to Emma Whipday’s compelling monograph,
Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies :
Violence in the Early Modern Home (Cambridge, 2019), which unpacks the
domestic / tragic binary and reappraises the genre of domestic tragedy in the
light of Shakespeare’s works. This issue of Shakespeare
Survey is rounded off by Russell
Jackson’s ‘Shakespeare in Performance’, a lengthy review of fifteen books
devoted to Shakespeare on stage / screen, and by Peter Kirwan’s ‘Editions and
Textual Studies’, which notably dwells on Jane Kingsley-Smith’s book The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge,
2019), ‘the first monograph to deal with the critical, editorial and creative
afterlives of the Sonnets’ [285]. As stated
earlier, while this 73rd issue could probably have been more focused on its
main topic, its various sections are consistently insightful, and its articles
successfully illuminate the multiple facets of early modern drama. As a result,
Shakespeare and the City conjures up context,
analyses, allusions and parallels, promotes a dynamic exchange of ideas, and finally
proves an erudite issue and a valuable addition to Shakespeare studies. _ * In the next issue of Shakespeare
Survey, after many years of meritorious service, Charlotte Scott will be
replaced by Jane Kingsley Smith. Similarly, Stephen Purcell and Paul Prescott
will be replaced by Lois Potter and Peter Kirwan (theatre reviews).
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