Jennifer Drouin. Shakespeare in Quebec: Nation, Gender, and Adaptation.

Schechter, Laura

Jennifer Drouin. Shakespeare in Quebec: Nation, Gender, and Adaptation. Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 2014. 286 pp. $45.50.

Taking up francophone Shakespearean adaptations that are rarely presented outside of Quebec, Jennifer Drouin's monograph is at once informative and quirky. In connecting francophone Quebecois creative material to anglophone critical work, Drouin's goal is "to bridge Canada's 'two solitudes' " (vii), and she is largely successful in this pursuit. Noting that Quebecois authors have been busy adapting William Shakespeare's work since the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, Drouin counts over thirty relevant creative works written in French, not to mention translations. While she points to a Quebecois pride in maintaining " 'la langue de Moliere,' " the output of francophone Shakespearean material far outstrips any attention paid to the former author (3). Importantly, Drouin suggests that while the Quebecois recognize Shakespeare's cultural cachet they do not venerate his work; this level of appreciation allows authors a great deal of flexibility in reworking the playwright's material. Weaving through the author's study of textual hybridity, adaptation, and appropriation is her recognition that Quebec itself is a cultural nexus. Indeed, the region has a long history of colonization and appropriation, changing hands from France to Britain to Canada, simultaneously exerting colonial control over First Nations groups and also witnessing influxes of immigration from specific international sites. The result is a region with "colonial, anti-colonial, neocolonial, or postcolonial situations" developing at various points in its history (13), and "adaptation" as a concept becomes at once textually, politically, and socially inflected.

According to Drouin, Shakespeare's works are capable of spurring new conversations of specific relevance to modern Quebec. Indeed, since the Quiet Revolution, plays focusing on gender, sexuality, nationalism, the 1970 October Crisis, the referenda of 1980 and 1995, and aids have all been produced. Chapter 1 tracks postcolonial discourses in contemporary Que bec, comparing Quebecois nationalism to iterations found in anglophone Canada and other English Commonwealth countries such as Australia, New Zealand, and Scotland. As she makes a case for differentiating postcolonial culture in Quebec from that in Canada, Drouin notes that Canadian anglophones often treat Shakespeare with what readers and playgoers take to be an appropriate level of gravitas, yet anglophone productions and adaptations have also been more willing to take up questions of culture, gender, and sexuality. At the same time, the author acknowledges that Canada's " 'well-entrenched cultural institutions' " may allow for more self-reflexive critique: " 'a society that feels threatened by its marginality in a global context,' " on the other hand, could feel pressure to focus on a sense of nationalism before other concerns (15). Drouin's first chapter is an ambitious study of Quebec's national identity, and it tracks several relevant influences and concerns. This makes for an informative chapter but, unfortunately, one that also reads as slightly hodgepodge. The nationalist thread (or threads) in the chapter must hold together Shakespeare in Canada, Quebec, Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, Catalonia, and India; British colonialism as metaphorical cultural rape; clerical nationalism in the Catholic Church; the Quiet Revolution; and feminist and queer positive political initiatives. The number and scope of concerns is thoughtprovoking, but the larger nationalist study occasionally gets lost.

Chapter 2 is more focused and takes up the issue of adaptation, analyzing the need to alter what is "alien," thus fitting older work within a new context and social use, and Drouin crucially connects this understanding of adaptation to larger postcolonial processes (43). The author notes the capaciousness and plasticity in Quebecois, adaptation, and Shakespeare, the three terms that establish a foundation for her book. She argues that, in the same way "[a]daptation involves making a Shakespeare that is foreign, alien, and other fit a particular conception of the self," the Quebecois must now alter an older sense of national identity--one based on having been "conquered" by foreigners--to embrace a newer collective identity founded on the progress that followed the Quiet Revolution (43). Drouin distinguishes between adaptation and appropriation in ways that are both helpful and nuanced, and she develops a strong sense of the terms' connections to various works by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Linda Hutcheon, and Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier. Drouin's second chapter draws attention to the flexibility of adaptation as a term, even as she provides handy adjectival categories to help distinguish various uses of older texts. Indeed, she notes that adaptation can comfortably encompass all sorts of descriptors: "extrapolated, feminist, hybrid, interpolated, mashed-up, meta," and more (63). In short, Drouin's first and second chapters clearly establish an understanding of adaptation as both literary and social process, and her ensuing analysis of relevant plays is well informed by these initial discussions.

Chapters 3 through 6 consider specific Quebecois works from roughly the past forty-five years, and Drouin emphasizes the critique of gender and nation that these adaptations inspire. Robert Gurik's 1968 drama Hamlet, prince du Quebec forms the basis of analysis in chapter 3, and Drouin argues that this play, the first Quebecois Shakespearean adaptation, allows for discussion of Quebec's demands for sovereignty, all filtered through a familiar treatment of "ceaseless thought versus the urgency to take action" (6). Shakespeare's Hamlet is reimagined to incorporate a nationalism filled with anti-ecclesiastical feeling and philosophies similar to those expressed by African decolonization advocates, and Gurik's play explicitly connects the characters in Shakespeare's Hamlet to modern Quebecois political figures and institutions.

Gurik's play is positioned squarely in contemporary debate, its references explicitly dating it to the discourses circulating in Quebec in the 1960s and 1970s, but Michel Garneau's "tradaptations" of Macbeth and The Tempest, Macbeth (1978), and La tempete (1973/1989) approach those debates from a different historical reference point. In her fourth chapter Drouin examines Garneau's reworkings of Shakespeare's plays, noting that these tradaptations are at once translations and adaptations (yet something else entirely new as well). By making use of a francophone language similar to that spoken in eighteenth-century New France, Garneau situates his plays as prior to the British conquest. This historical resonance is strengthened by references to Quebec's landscape: the tradaptation of Macbeth includes translation choices that gesture toward the Plains of Abraham as the site of Macbeth's decisive battle, for example. Garneau's works thus display a sophisticated transhistorical narrative of national resistance. Importantly, Drouin treats the playwright's decision to write in Quebecois French as part of a larger movement among postcolonial authors who are intent on holding on to their traditional national identities.

While Gurik's and Garneau's plays leave little room for women on stage, prioritizing conceptions of national identity over gendered, JeanPierre Ronfard imagines women as future leaders who will correct and invigorate nations led astray by corruption in both Lear (1977) and Vie et mort du Roi Boiteaux (1981). Taking up carnivalesque and magic realist elements in order to further political critiques of a nation mismanaged by men, Ronfard's adaptations of King Lear and Richard III integrate feminist conversations that developed in the 1970s. In chapter 5 Drouin maintains that Vie et mort's focus on female political potential actually reflects the dip in nationalist sentiment following the unsuccessful referendum of 1980. Drouin's discussion of carnival in the works of Ronfard is particularly strong and reads as perhaps more in depth than her chapter on Gurik's work. Ronfard's work may have also been more complex than Gurik's, allowing Drouin more analytical and interpretive space to flourish, however.

Chapter 6 concludes earlier conversations about the tension between cohesive national identity and various social markers, focusing on the issues that playwrights such as Gurik and Garneau ignored in favour of a larger nationalist vision. Indeed, while early nationalist works were authored by men working from within the mainstream of francophone Quebecois culture, Drouin notes a recent surge in publications by writers in traditionally marginalized positions. More than two dozen relevant Shakespearean adaptations have been penned since 1990, the attempt to integrate the voices and concerns of marginalized groups into a coherent nationalist identity often an evident challenge. Drouin concludes that while authors have recently devoted more time to gender, sexuality, and other minoritized positions, showing a genuine interest in pluralism, national identity still looms most largely in Quebecois adaptations, the need to differentiate Quebecois culture from Canadian apparently more urgent than other distinctions.

In short, Drouin's examination of Quebecois literature is a refreshing, entirely new addition to the field of Shakespeare studies. This work would be of interest to readers who focus on any one of her three key terms--Quebecois, adaptation, or Shakespeare--as well as those interested in postcolonial studies. The plays examined by Drouin are inventive, politically engaged, and unusual, if occasionally heavy-handed, and Drouin also offers a useful appendix with records of adaptations written since 1960. The author's first monograph is an accessible, absorbing account of playwrights not well known outside of Quebec, and it draws attention to our ongoing, sometimes irreverent engagement with Shakespeare around the world.

Laura Schechter

University of Alberta