Shakespeare in the New Europe.

Price, Joseph G.

Edited by Michael Hattaway, Boika Sokolova, and Derek Roper. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994.

In 1993, after I had organized a collaborative research team under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities to conduct a retrospective study of Shakespeare in the various worlds of communism, 1920-1990, we debated whether sufficient temporal distance and experience had passed to allow for meaningful evaluation and judgment. Concluding in the affirmative, we realized that crucial to the study was the living memory of those who had participated in the politics and culture.

I doubt that I would come to the same conclusion with the essays that make up Shakespeare in the New Europe, edited by Michael Hattaway, Boika Sokolova, and Derek Roper. The twenty-one essays resulted from a conference of international scholars in Bankya, a town near Sofia, in late spring 1993. As the introduction admits, "It had proved difficult to find contributors from the countries where the impact of the events had been greatest" and the conferees "knew that, although some stability had emerged in the new Europe, the new maps are just new texts, the reading of which must remain provisional." For the Europe under discussion was that which emerged after the fall of the Berlin wall.

Consequently, too few of the essays deal directly with the subject of the book. The first three essays discuss performance and criticism in Bulgaria and the two Germanies before 1989. Similarly, Marta Gibinska writes of Hamlet in Poland from 1945 to 1989. Jonathan Bate strays farther afield in analyzing Shakespeare's influence on Walter Scott and Victor Hugo; when he turns to the twentieth century, he focuses on Caliban and the Caribbean. Richard Burt provides a slim frame of European and American perspectives on censorship and sexuality, but the essay explores three films, Prospero's Books, Queer Edward II, and My Own Private Idaho.

A second set of essays explicates Shakespeare's texts sub specie contemporaneitatis: nationalism, militarism, authority, tribalism, postmodernism, displacement, multiculturalism, new historicism, appropriations. Fortinbras (and Rambo) represent the resurgence of macho honor. Richard II and Henry V tackle the question of nationhood. Michael Hattaway reviews British productions of the history plays as political plays since 1955. Both James Siemon and Erica Sheen use Cymbeline as a vehicle for postmodern readings and speculations. Harriet Hawkins defends "Shakespeare's Radical Romanticism" against current emphases upon tribal and cultural differences with the choices Jessica, Desdemona, and Cleopatra. Terence Hawkes dances lightly through Much Ado About Nothing with such new historicist links as Benedick's "me thinks you look with your eyes as other women do" with Queen Elizabeth's "We can see well enough" spoken forty years earlier. His nod to the subject of the book comes in his last sentence, "But then, as I hope to have persuaded my fellow, newly constituted spooks, as we begin benignly to stalk a new Europe, it takes one to know one."

Without question, many of these essays have value as pieces of modern criticism, but the subject of Shakespeare in the new Europe is served best and admirably by the authors who locate their theses within its boundaries. Here, the living memory vitalizes the experience. Martin Hilsky records the many instances where Czech audiences responded emotionally and gleefully to the politically subversive semantics of Love's Labours Lost, a play which he translated for the theater both before and after perestroika.

Odette-Irenne Blumenfeld's title, "Shakespeare in Post-Revolutionary Romania: the Great Directors Are Back Home," delineates her striking reconstructions of Liviu Ciulei's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Andrei Serban's Twelfth Night, both produced in 1991. Of Ciulei's production, she begins, "The lights come up on an empty arena stage and backwall entirely covered with bright red vinyl, a playing area that will remain intact to the end of the performance. A shocking visual image for an audience who have for years associated this colour with the flag epitomizing the victory of communism." Of Serban's production, she singles out Malvolio as an old Communist. To Malvolio's last line, "I'll be reveng'd on the pack of you," Serban added "hoodlums/cads," terms applied by the authorities to the young people rebelling in University Square in Budapest.

Evgenia Pancheva describes Bulgarian productions of Much Ado and The Merchant of Venice in terms of the arbitrariness of interpretation and the rigidity of the literal law. We learn much when she concludes, "This is a Shakespeare hushed down, borrowing from himself and others, trimmed to alleviate--or exacerbate?--the wounds of guilty, slanderous, politicizing, revengeful, sexually aroused, banished and reacknowledged, thinking Bulgaria." Mark Sokolyansky convincingly describes the "Russian experience" with Shakespeare, a movement from the "idealized and romanticized" realist of the Renaissance to "Shakespeare's bitter irony that is a better remedy for suffering society."

There is no final word, of course, in a Europe as turbulent today as when this book was published, but perhaps the most telling word comes from Croatia. Janja Ciglar-Zanic recalls the despairing relevance which the director, Nenni Delmestre, noted about his 1992 Zagreb production of Titus:

Our Titus Andronicus should be a play about Croatia, about the horror

of its war and postwar times, not presented in a literal and banal way . . .

but rather as a play about an enormous wound which has no chance of

healing. It grows deeper instead, until it becomes a grave in which all

our hopes for justice and life worth living are buried.