Shakespeare's Genders, Then and Now

Theater Books Cather ine Sheehy Dryden and Pithine ss A Look into The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre Raises the Question: What Are Friends For? The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre edited by Deborah Payne Fisk 2000: Cambridge University Press It’s alternately comforting and creepy to know that we are never or at least never need be — in anything we do — alone. From the Cliffs Notes on Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain to Garrison Keillor’s public-radio cute guide to life on the prairies to the oceans of hand-holding how-tos in the For Dummies series, God bless companionship; nothing need seem strange to us anymore. We have traveling companions and longtime companions, and, too, we have Cambridge companions. And I guess the success or failure of such camaraderie has much to do with what you’re looking for in the relationship. Now I like variety of conversation, ready wit, ironic detachment, political attachments, and a forgiving nature. This is probably why heretofore I’ve found English Restoration theater such good company. Its appeal for theater makers and scholars alike is clear, and the fact that there is in it still much undiscovered country (from whose bourne Aphra Behn is only lately returned) makes it more attractive still. This book’s editor, Deborah Payne Fisk, in her persuasive preface cites the vitality of the plays with constant and recent restagings, the significance of women’s contributions to the work (as actors and authors), and the volatile and fascinating relation between politics and art in the era as the catalysts that called this volume into being. What follows, however, is a little disappointing. Although there are thorough, useful bibliographies and a good chronology, the essayists seem unable to communicate an appreciation of these plays as plays — as opportunities for actors, directors, designers, and dramaturgs to breathe themselves on. (The exception to this is the essay by my colleague Joseph Roach titled “The Performance.”) Plays, unlike most other art forms, are vital things patiently awaiting reanimation. Too often here the plays are treated merely as disquisitions or cultural artifacts to be dusted off and tortured under a microscope of scholarly exegesis. However much Fisk and company assure us that “restoration theater need no longer apologize for its considerable claims on our attention,” the cumulative effect of these essays is a kind of protesting too much — a bullying and elbowing out a place in the canon based almost exclusively on the drama’s connection to 76 Published by Duke University Press Theater and subversion of prevalent political forces. That connection is very interesting and difficult to overstate, but these playwrights were at once artists and professionals who often wrote, as a Henry Fielding character so baldly put it, “to amuse the town and bring full houses.” So did Shakespeare; so did Molière. It is the fact that they did so with wit and vitality and extraordinary elegance of expression and situation that separates them from other boulevard playwrights in their era and ours. Anyone who has worked in the theater knows just what an act of virtuosity great playwriting is, and it should be celebrated as such — especially when the target audience is, as it is here, students. The book has an extremely tight critical palate. Its citations of plays and commentaries, indeed, the same passages in those texts, come up an astonishing number of times — so much so that students may be led to underestimate the variety of the era and overestimate modern critical consensus. On the other hand, if John Dryden’s Conquest of Granada, Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Lancaster Witches don’t enter the repertory of college theater troupes, it won’t be the Cambridge Companion’s fault. And truly, the regeneration of interest in these and other neglected texts is one of the volume’s clear victories. If only that interest could have been dramaturgically as well as academically evoked. With friends like The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre, English Restoration theater needs still more friends. Cl audia Orenstein Ac t i n g L o c a l ly : A r o u n d t h e Wor l d w i t h Eugene van Erven Community Theater: Global Perspectives by Eugene van Erven 2001: Routledge Eugene van Erven’s Community Theater: Global Perspectives illustrates both the difficulties and the rewards involved in creating community theater, an art form that, as he says, “operates on the cutting edge between performing arts and sociocultural intervention.” Van Erven argues that the international academic community, while embracing intercultural and postcolonial issues, has examined the work of internationally recognized artists but neglected the field of community theater, which attempts to give artistic voice to ordinary individuals from marginalized groups by engaging them directly in the artistic process. He seeks to fill this gap by providing a model for studying community theater that includes documenting and assessing the process of creation as well as the product and its effect on spectators and participants. Van Erven takes his cue from Australia’s Sneja Gunew in supporting a new criterion for excellence in this kind of work, one that goes beyond pure aesthetic form to include cultural content and social relevance. In the end, his study makes a strong case for assessing community theater as a serious art form, while advocating increased financial support and artistic recognition of community theater projects globally. The book centers on six case studies of community theater projects from around the world: the Philippines, the Netherlands, the United States, Costa Rica, Kenya, and Australia. Each study begins with what van Erven 77 Published by Duke University Press Theater orenstein calls a brief “sociocultural impression” of the area in which the community theater project is taking place, a history of community theater and related theater practices in the area, and background on the group and community creating the theater piece. Then van Erven offers day-by-day or, for longer projects, week-byweek accounts of the particular piece as it takes shape. Each chapter ends with a description of the performance that emerged as it was presented to its intended community and an evaluation of the project based on interviews with spectators and participants. Van Erven chooses this methodical approach to help the reader appreciate each project within its proper sociocultural context. This method, though at times programmatic, gives structure to the recording of a process that is often fraught with unforeseen problems and blessed with serendipitous events. Van Erven’s documentation honestly records many of the challenges of this difficult art, in which practitioners working with nonprofessionals from different communities attempt to create plays dealing with controversial personal and social issues on a small budget. Unlike productions in which directors ask actors to leave their personal problems at the door, community theater’s purpose is to use theater as a way of engaging with the lives of those involved. However, directors (or “facilitators,” as they are often called in community theater) must simultaneously juggle personal and social issues with other artistic concerns. Marlies Haustwurst of the Netherlands’ Stut Theater recalls working on their 1994 production of The Day and the Night, based on the shared concerns of women in the Dutch, Moroccan, and Turkish communities. The development process came to a standstill when the husband of one of the Moroccan women forced her to quit because he felt that his friends would consider his wife a whore for being involved in theater. For Tears in the Rain, the Stut Theater project van Erven witnessed, similar problems arose in trying to find participants from the Moroccan community. Sally Gordon, heavily influenced by Robert Alexander’s work with Living Stage and now running her own projects through the Hathaway Family Resource Center in the Highland Park area of Los Angeles, faces a different set of cultural issues. Although she has done work with “at risk” youth in the community, she feels that this work is “doomed to fail, because it is impossible to break down gang rivalries.” In Gordon’s Saquen la sopa ya! (the project van Erven documents), one improvisation leads a participant to a tearful disclosure of an incestuous relationship in her own family. True to her goal of using theater as a way of coping with such problems, Gordon leads the participants through further improvisations about incest within the fictional world of the play they are creating. The richness of van Erven’s study lies in the range of theatrical projects he describes through a look at both process and product. As he says in his conclusion, “Stylistic and formal options available to community theater are considerably broader than documentary realism alone. They include melodrama, naturalism, comedy, verse drama, parody, surrealism, musical theater, movement, masks, stilts, fireworks, and women playing men.” Among the most innovative pieces van Erven documents is one by Australia’s Urban Theater Project called Trackwork. In an attempt to celebrate the ethnic diversity of Sydney’s western suburbs and “offer a more balanced view of the west than the negative stories about minority youth gangs that usually made up the pages of The Sydney Morning Herald,” company members embarked on a logistical nightmare of a production that took place on City Rail trains and at railway stations throughout the area. After ten weeks of development, the piece, performed on two weekends, came off only after City Rail, which 78 Published by Duke University Press Theater bo oks had opposed the project, at the last minute gave the company permission to perform on the trains. Community performers, who had collected facts and stories about the various ethnic groups in western Sydney, served as guides for the spectators on the trains. The performers told anecdotes about the different regions the trains passed through and sang folk songs from different cultures. In a remarkable example of cooperation and coordination, the passengerspectators were also treated to music, dance, and dramatic performances by local groups as they waited at the stations for connecting trains. The most unusual process van Erven describes is that of the Kawuonda Women’s Theater of Sigoti in Kenya. Unlike the other groups covered in the book, this one has no leaders or artistic facilitators from outside the community of participants. Moreover, the women’s playmaking process is completely interwoven with their daily housework and farming tasks, many of which are done collectively. The pieces emerge out of the stories the women tell one another during breaks from their work. “One of the women begins to tell a story during a natural break from work, after which they collectively decide to turn it into drama.” Then, as one participant puts it, “if the play takes us to a point where we should be tilling the land, then we actually go and till so that our drama coincides with the work.” The women use the process to examine intergenerational concerns about women’s roles in this largely traditional society. While some plays are developed for public performance, the women “sometimes use the same process for off-limits, in-house improvisations on more delicate women’s issues.” While the Australian and Kenyan projects are the most striking, the theatrical inventiveness with which all the community artists and facilitators treat sociocultural issues is amazing. Sally Gordon’s project in Los Ange- les, which seemed to take a fairly realistic approach to enacting the concerns of the immigrant community, offered surprising surreal flights with two fairy-tale dances in the final performance. A six-day project by the Philippines Educational Theater Association (PETA) dealing with the medical, economic, and environmental consequences of a local mine disaster began with a movement piece and then used a group chorus and a “collectively composed choral poem” to link, contextualize, and comment on a string of realistic scenes. This theatrical richness lends enormous support to van Erven’s plea that we acknowledge the serious artistic work of community theater. Van Erven’s continual insertion of his own biography into the book, however, distracts from the engaging accounts of the projects themselves. No doubt this material represents the author’s effort to deconstruct his own position as privileged observer of the local productions he describes. Yet van Erven often seems at pains to justify that position. His acknowledgments begin, “I could not have completed this task without a certain degree of western privilege that provided me access to advanced education and then a tenured position at a Dutch university, which helped me open necessary doors to funding and technical facilities.” He also begins each chapter with a first-person account of his impressions of each country or tales of past visits to the locale. The information generally sheds little light on the subject at hand; instead it draws the reader’s attention to the author’s travels. For example, he recounts his father taking a job in Utrecht when he was nine, his own transfer to a different Catholic high school in order to prepare for university, and his 1979 backpacking holiday in Costa Rica. The book has some unique features that seem designed to encourage teachers to adopt it in the classroom. The small paperback occasionally spills over into textbook format with 79 Published by Duke University Press Theater sal omon boxed sections highlighting significant issues brought out by each case, such as the overall funding plan for a particular project, how a particular group splits directing responsibilities, or a summary of a group’s particular method of playmaking. A video is also available, which presumably shows scenes from the rehearsal processes and performances. Unfortunately, although van Erven recommends watching relevant sections of the video before reading each chapter, and while he clearly intended the book and the video to complement each other, the video is being marketed separately and was not available for review. The final chapter provides a summary of the state of community theater worldwide. Many of the remarks are drawn from a panel at the 1998 International Drama/Theater and Education conference in Kenya, where participants from all the projects covered in the book gathered to discuss one another’s work and view the video. Collecting this global community in one place was an extraordinary feat, so it was disappointing that the coverage of the panel discussion (an opportunity to hear more directly the voices of the theater artists van Erven finds so neglected) too quickly turned into van Erven’s own summary of points. Perhaps the video provides a better glimpse of this valuable event. Van Erven’s global tour of community theater may occasionally make the reader feel that she is participating in some sort of new sociocultural eco-tour. But the book is an important contribution in many respects. It draws attention to a number of dedicated artists around the world engaged in creating community theater, and it constructs a history of the influences on their work. It shows how different groups adapt their creative methods to their own needs and resources and illustrates the depth of commitment and creativity taking place in this work. Finally, it advocates a renewed recognition of the form. In the end, like any good community theater production, this book may help bring about a sense of community, in this case among all those engaged in the difficult but rewarding work of making community theater happen. Chr istiane Riera Sal omon The Spanish Connection The Esperpento Tradition in the Works of Ramón del Valle-Inclán and Luís Buñuel by Diane M. Almeida 2000: Edwin Mellen Press Starting with the book’s title, Diane M. Almeida brandishes her unambiguous intention — to place Ramón del Valle-Inclán, creator of the tragicomic genre he labeled esperpento, side by side with his younger contemporary Luís Buñuel. Almeida’s purpose is to track down their use of esperpento in order to highlight “the great and often unacknowledged debt that the cinema owes to its predecessor, the theater.” The book consists of two chapters: “Valle-Inclán and the Esperpento Tradition” and “Luís Buñuel: The View from the Other Shore.” Meant to be a condensed account of the playwright’s influences on the filmmaker, instead it seems a rushed, incomplete study of both. In her first chapter, Almeida describes the term esperpento —Valle-Inclán’s funhouse mirror par excellence that distorts and reflects in vibrantly grotesque ways. Besides dissecting the concept of esperpento in the four plays that the playwright has categorized as esperpento—Luces de Bohemia (1920), and Las galas del difunto, Los cuernos de don Friolera, and La hija del capitán, which make up the trilogy Martes de carnaval (1930) — Almeida expands the term’s meaning 80 Published by Duke University Press Theater bo oks beyond Valle-Inclán’s own body of work. For her, esperpento is at the core of Spanish sensibility and can be traced back to Goya, Quevedo, El Greco, and Zorrilla, among others. Almeida drops a few pearls along the way. She compares Valle-Inclán’s satirical vein with that of José Echegaray and weighs Buñuelian characters against those of the Marquis de Sade. Of particular interest is her linkage of esperpento to surrealism — both artistic manifestations “yearning for a revolutionary change in the perception and understanding of reality” trying to free themselves from “cultural constraints.” Unfortunately, many of her most promising ideas are left unexplored. For example, after she carefully compiles a list of cinematic techniques Valle-Inclán melded into his innovative stage directions, she sums up with this anticlimactic, innocuous remark: “Had he been born later, perhaps he would have been as extraordinary a filmmaker as he was a playwright.” In her less incisive second chapter, Almeida focuses on Buñuel’s first three movies: Un chien andalou (1929) and L’âge d’or (1930), both scripts written with Salvador Dalí, and the documentary The Land without Bread (1932). The films are arguably Buñuel’s most surrealist, completed when he was still a passionate young agitator. They are rough pieces of filmmaking, soaked in the anarchic spirit of the Paris of the 1920s, and unrepresentative of the artist Buñuel became in the 1960s and 1970s while collaborating with Jean-Claude Carrière. Moreover, the films’ tricky, absurdist nature forces Almeida to linger on long, tedious plot summaries that occasionally result in comical passages: “The cyclist reappears, magically erases his mouth and replaces it with a hair stolen from the woman’s armpit.” These three films introduce icons and themes that recur throughout Buñuel’s career — the disembodied hands at the opening shot of Un chien andalou and the fetishized foot in L’âge d’or, for example. But is it possible to mention “sexually transgressive behavior” without bringing up the charmingly perverted Sevérine from Belle du jour (1966)? Or list erotic dismemberments without mentioning Catherine Deneuve as an amputee in Tristana (1970)? Or discuss how Buñuel debunks the bourgeois without considering The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)? His later films offer more complex illustrations of these elements and would further validate Almeida’s claim that Buñuel was an author of esperpentos. More often than not, Almeida writes with the muted voice of an unimpassioned scholar, methodically concerned with a checklist of essentials. Shackled to details, she fails to reveal the ideology behind the aesthetics of esperpento. She argues, for example, that ValleInclán blends tragedy and comedy as an undercutting technique that helps him maintain a “non-moralizing posture, even in his most bitingly satirical plays.” She admits that “the esperpentos deal with many of the social and political controversies that plagued Spain” but only hastily alludes to the horrors of World War I and the corrupted military government of Primo de Rivera. Almeida’s inadequate appreciation of these artists’ political edginess is mostly felt in the case of Buñuel, who was known largely for his ability to steep sexually twisted narratives in caustic cultural critique. She tames these proud iconoclasts by repeatedly defining their morality as “unconventional.” This kind of ineffectual categorization lacks gusto and makes me yearn for deeper insights into the radical methods employed by Buñuel and Valle-Inclán to portray their society. Although I was disappointed by The Esperpento Tradition in the Works of Ramón del Valle-Inclán and Luís Buñuel, it does remind its readers of the untilled, fertile ground connecting Spanish theater and film. 81 Published by Duke University Press Theater shandel l Jon at h a n S h a n de l l Shake speare ’s Genders, Then and Now Shakespeare and Masculinity by Bruce R. Smith 2000: Oxford University Press Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage by Carol Chillington Rutter 2000: Routledge These two new examinations of gender and Shakespeare could not be more different. Bruce R. Smith takes us back to Renaissance England: surveying Shakespeare’s canon within its original context in order to outline various Elizabethan ideals of masculinity and manliness for the contemporary reader. His goal is textual illumination from a historical perspective. What did it mean to “be a man” in Shakespeare’s time? What values did men share, reject, strive toward, or fear? How do these ideals and behavior patterns become visible within Shakespeare’s drama? Carol Chillington Rutter, on the other hand, begins squarely in the here and now: revisiting and deconstructing late-twentiethcentury Shakespearean stage and film productions. She looks backward from the present, analyzing and questioning inherited patterns of dramatic representation for Shakespeare’s female figures. How does the work of certain directors, designers, and critics overlook, marginalize, or simplify some of Shakespeare’s women? In what ways do recent productions reveal modern prejudices toward certain female characters? What new readings emerge from familiar texts when we envision more enlight- ened stagings and filmings? In these two recent works of Shakespearean criticism, each author’s strength stands as the other’s weakness, and vice versa. What a Piece of Work Is Man Smith’s Shakespeare and Masculinity travels securely and carefully across its scholarly terrain, building a complex understanding of Renaissance male identity from a variety of critical vantage points. Each chapter takes a distinct angle on early modern masculinity and its contexts. The section called “Persons” explores the dramatic significance of Elizabethan theories of human physiology and biological gender difference; “Ideals” identifies various iconic masculine social types — the Chivalrous Knight, the Herculean Hero, the Humanist Man of Moderation, the Merchant Prince, and the Saucy Jack — that “offer themselves for emulation in Shakespeare’s scripts”; “Passages” takes a Joseph Campbell approach, focusing on those transitional identity-changing phases in life that mark the boundary between youth and young manhood, or between adulthood’s prime and old age; “Others” looks at the various Lacanian “opposite selves” against which the Shakespearean man might form his selfimage: women, foreigners, superiors, inferiors, and sodomites. In his final chapter, “Coalescences,” Smith fuses his various lines of inquiry into a new understanding of how character and identity are formed, one that transcends the familiar opposition between “essentialism versus constructivism . . . as an all-or-nothing proposition.” In Smith’s reading, masculine identity becomes a coalescence of internal and external forces, a dynamic dialectic between individual essences and larger social or historical constructs. Though his writing is often too 82 Published by Duke University Press Theater bo oks formal, more like a scholarly catalogue than an energetic critical narrative, Smith clearly draws a number of different axes of masculinity within which he locates characters as diverse as Macbeth, Falstaff, Prospero, Prince Hal, Shylock, Brutus, and Malvolio. If only this author had followed more resolutely some of the many avenues suggested by his own writing. Though he constantly points his reader toward fundamental problems and anxieties at the heart of male identityformation in Shakespeare, he never actually provides a new reading of a play that might bring the dramatic impact of these paradoxes into sharper focus. For instance, while “medical” theories posited men as excessively hot-blooded and passionate, social mores demanded that he always “be reasonable” in his actions; Coriolanus is a tragedy that springs directly from this dissonance. And while “money-based capitalism (the emergent culture) was replacing land-based feudalism (the residual culture)” in English life, men consistently felt a profound tension between the new economy and entrenched socioeconomic prejudices. Viewed through this lens, The Merchant of Venice emerges as more than just anti-Semitism. The line between camaraderie and homoerotic desire was always dangerous territory for any sociable Elizabethan male to negotiate: “What a Renaissance man most desires to be is another man’s friend; what he most abhors to be is a sodomite.” Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Sonnets hold this dangerous subtextual tension. But Smith never engages any single work in detail. The perspective is always general, therefore insights into the plays are limited and cursory. It remains for the reader to plumb the depths of Shakespeare’s drama by applying Smith’s gender-based framework. O, I Could Pl ay the Woman Rutter’s Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage displays the opposite problem: too much eagerness to make probing and specific critical statements, without securing a solid critical footing from which these bold leaps should commence. In examining certain female characters and their stage representations in the late twentieth century, Rutter purports to undertake “a series of specific case studies of the work bodies do on Shakespeare’s stage.” But as often happens with this pesky term, “the body” becomes an overused and almost meaningless referent. Rutter invokes “the body” constantly throughout her writing, in the service of topics as diverse as race and casting, costume, female intimacy, or misogynist language. Only occasionally does she refer directly to an actual physical human corpus Imogene Stubbs and Zoe Wanamaker in Trevor Nunn’s 1989 Othello. Photo: Joe Cocks, courtesy the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon 83 Published by Duke University Press Theater shandel l present on the stage. She writes of live bodies, dead bodies, illegible bodies, black bodies, absent bodies, snatched bodies, full bodies, unruly bodies, and more. And the more she intones on “the body,” the mushier this word — and, consequently, the entire unifying premise of her book — becomes. And that’s a shame, because much valuable insight hides among all these bodies. Rutter engages in a serious critical project: the analysis not of Shakespearean texts but of a Shakespearean performance tradition. Her analysis reveals how different productions of a familiar play will shape, and even manipulate, public opinion — especially in England, where the offerings of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, the BBC, and the recent Branagh-led explosion of Shakespeare films pile dramatic interpretations of the same text on top of one another. The latest film of Hamlet, for example, or a high-profile new staging of Troilus and Cressida or King Lear, interacts not only with Shakespeare’s text but also with all other artistic approaches that linger in the cultural memory. Rutter illustrates this theatrical and cinematic cross-talk by revisiting selected productions from her distinctly feminist perspective, observing how direction, casting, design, and individual performances create meaning within a production and ultimately participate in larger conversations on what Shakespeare signifies to us and what we signify through Shakespeare. This is one Shakespearean scholar who grasps all the dimensions and responsibilities involved in theatrical criticism. How do recent film treatments of Ophelia’s funeral exclude Ophelia herself from the narrative? Why do postwar producers continue to ignore the textual evidence in Antony and Cleopatra by casting Cleopatra as white (even as they surround her with dark-skinned Egyptian attendants)? How has costume design helped perpetuate a misogynist reading of Troilus and Cressida on British stages since 1960? And most important, what alternative readings can be mined from these texts? How does our understanding of Othello change when the actress playing Emilia finds much more than just a battered wife in her role? These are some of the questions Rutter explores. One need not have seen the productions and films in question to understand and appreciate her arguments. Detailed descriptions of a key scene, a telling montage, or an important garment repeatedly make the dynamics of an entire work vivid within her analysis. All Shakespeare fans (especially the non-English) will appreciate Rutter’s work as much for the glimpse it provides into notable bygone productions as for the conclusions it draws from their representations of women. Too bad these chapters weren’t allowed to stand on their own merits, perhaps as essays in a collection that refrained from manufacturing a thematic through-line. Though Rutter’s book is often insightful and convincing, occasionally its “body” language tells a different story. 84 Published by Duke University Press Theater bo oks E m i ly S ho oltz Tac kling a Century on the Br itish S tage British Theatre since the War by Dominic Shellard 1999: Yale University Press British Theatre between the Wars, 1918 – 1939 edited by Clive Barker and Maggie B. Gale 2000: Cambridge University Press Censorship, sex, politics, and Laurence Olivier: there are certain things in British theater you can depend on. How to look at these phenomena (and sundry others also in the mix) is the task tackled by two recent books on British theater history. In British Theatre between the Wars, 1918 – 1939, Clive Barker and Maggie B. Gale view the interwar theater scene as connected offshoots of a political, social, and economic nucleus. They shove “the relationship between theater, politics and social change” to the fore and are particularly interested in dissecting how theatrical trends and the changing makeup of audiences related to the shifting terrain of interwar society. The eight essays collected in the volume offer a series of mini-treatises on specific genres (the thriller, the revue) or social phenomena (perceptions of gender and sexuality)— spotlighting sex, for instance, or censorship — to critique the assumption that interwar theater was conservative escapism that failed to reflect the period’s social upheavals. Essays on subjects ranging from the community historical pageants to the International Labor Party Arts Guild portray a theater intimately, though not always obviously, connected to the social and political life of the nation. Barker’s opening essay details the historical context, linking the relaxation of censorship during the war to the desire to give on- leave soldiers the morale-boosting sexual spectacle they desired, a change also connected to the shifting appeal of theater to a lowermiddle-class audience as Edwardian patrons disappeared. Barker enlivens his contextualization with details, from the statistical mechanics of theater rentals, to the shift of national consciousness between the pleasure-seeking 1920s and the increasingly ominous 1930s. After Barker’s essay the volume builds outward to examine specific genres. John Stokes’s piece on the popularity of violent thrillers in the post– World War I theater is rich with elaborate descriptions of long-forgotten plays, while Maggie Gale’s excellent piece on the contributions of women artists and audiences introduces female playwrights, directors, and producers who exemplify the period’s archetypal New Woman. Although space limitations force Gale into brief sketches of women theatermakers like Lena Ashwell and Auriol Lee, she is eons ahead of the existing theater histories that leave these women out altogether and feminist histories that claim only the most socially radical and marginalized women. John Deeny’s thoughtful look at sexual politics of the period, specifically the formation of “a lesbian and homosexual dramatic, theatrical and cultural history,” uses two plays, Children in Uniform (1933) and The Green Bay Tree (1933) to probe the connections between sexuality and censorship. Despite the glitzy subject, a weaker contribution to the collection is James Ross Moore’s essay “Girl Crazy: Musicals and Reviews between the Wars,” which trudges laboriously through the genre’s history, getting bogged down in the specifics of countless individual productions, all blending finally into a wash of warbling ingenues. The collection’s most engaging essay is Tony Howard’s “Shakespeare in the 1930s.” Like Shellard in British Theatre since the War, he addresses the work of the Royal Shakespeare 85 Published by Duke University Press Theater sho oltz Company and the Old Vic, but Howard takes specific examples and explores the political context and national identity that inform each production. His description of the decade’s range of Henry Vs and Shylocks, for instance, speaks with brilliant clarity to Britain’s increasing nationalism and xenophobia as pressures mounted abroad. Beyond simply outlining how artists used and abused Shakespeare as a political platform, Howard also keeps the evolving art of the theater present, looking at how Tyrone Guthrie made Shakespeare sexual, for example, or how Norman Wilkinson brought design into the twentieth century. Barker and Gale have assembled a fine and diverse collection of essays offering colorful investigations of the interwar theater; as a body of work they show the complexity of a period in need of further research. They have the contextualizing influence of time on their side, while Shellard, in tackling more recent history, has trouble locating the parameters of his subject. In the preface to his ambitious chronicle of British theater in the latter half of the twentieth century, Shellard asserts that his work is “not intended to be definitive but introductory . . . if it succeeds in providing useful signposts that help orient the reader towards further investigation, it will have achieved its aim.” Reading this volume is a bit like swiftly browsing the bookshelves of an impassioned enthusiast, pausing occasionally to skim a dust-jacket or a couple of pages: while you won’t come away with newfound expertise on any particular topic, you may gather a range of intriguing tidbits. Shellard’s sweeping catalog of notable productions, artists, critics, movements, institutional developments, and lengthy play synopses is readable and unpretentious, though in places the organizational scheme within chapters is elusive. In his attempt to gather and make sense of the history of the past half-century, Shellard has crammed a little bit of everything, with the inevitable result of covering very little adequately. His personal and rather conservative biases often leak through, particularly as he lingers affectionately over subjects like the careers of Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Tynan, leaving the likes of Sarah Kane with a scant half-paragraph. His main focus is the evolution of the mainstream London stage since 1945, and as such this volume is not the resource for a reader curious to glean a sense of how things transpired in the provinces or in theaters not attended by the big-name critics. Shellard clearly intended to create a brief but encyclopedic reference volume and introductory educational tool rather than a critical work to be read cover to cover, as he often repeats information in subsequent sections and requotes plays in multiple contexts (Look Back in Anger emerges a clear favorite, particularly the Jimmy/Cliff exchange over “posh newspapers”). Many of the two- or three-page segments crave books of their own (“The Royal Court: 1957 – 1962” or “The Influence of the French”), but Shellard nonetheless packs in a torrent of informative, though brief, highlights. The volume is thick with meticulously footnoted gems of quotation from critics and artists of the period and is often worth consulting as a reference for these alone. Despite its inherent limitations, British Theatre since the War is more or less what Shellard proclaims: an unintimidating survey of the vast panorama of twentieth-century British theater. For the curious undergraduate or a time-pressed fact seeker, Shellard’s book provides introductory signposts, while British Theatre between the Wars maps out a more richly detailed landscape. 86 Published by Duke University Press