Hamlet without Hamlet (review)
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Abstract
to comedies and tragedies also, as Bevington illustrates in his spatial analysis of Romeo and Juliet, with its changes from ballroom to garden, from appearances at a window to descents to the main stage, and from bedroom to tomb. He gives examples from several plays of the multiple uses of the stage’s upper gallery (which was not the balcony conventionally imagined in Romeo and Juliet), as well as the discovery space from which the action was brought forward to the main part of the stage. With later productions that strove for verisimilitude the flexibility was lost, though audiences were able to enjoy such sights as boats buffeted by naturalistic tempests, detailed replicas of Venice and Verona, Palladian great houses with real grass in their cultivated gardens, and many other examples of the scene-maker’s craft. Shakespeare refers to the theater and to theatrical performance repeatedly, and one virtue of the twentieth-century return to presentational staging is that it can highlight the plays’ self-consciousness about theatricality — the ingenuity, for example, of surrogate directors such as Iago, Richard III, Hamlet, Cleopatra, Prospero, and several others — in creating scenes and plots. For Bevington this is a crucial aspect of the plays, and he makes a convincing case that the Duke in Measure for Measure, to take a notorious critical example, should be judged less as a “meddling friar” than as a playwright trying to exert control over the action. The more realistic the settings are (though the book does not drive this argument hard), the more difficult it is to respond to the plays’ personages except as imitations of real people with real motives. The revival of all-male casts by contemporary theater companies such as the British Cheek by Jowl reinforces a related point: gender, too, is a performance. Bevington’s accessible study, with its many examples of productions from Shakespeare’s time to the present and its good-natured acceptance of the many transformations they have undergone, will be welcomed by general readers. Most of the major screen adaptations are dealt with also, though necessarily not at great length. While Shakespearean specialists may not encounter too much material in the book that is new to them — the play-by-play plot summaries, for example, that provide contexts for the author’s points about theater seem especially to be addressed to nonspecialists — even veteran Shakespeareans will profit from the varied reminders of how important performance and staging have always been to interpretation of the plays. BRIDGET GELLERT LYONS Rutgers University, Emerita