Shakespeare on the University Stage

Abstract

Shakespeare on the University Stage. Edited by Andrew James Hartley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 Andrew James Hartley's collection Shakespeare on the University Stage brings together sixteen essays that examine the phenomenon of campus Shakespeare from a range of historical, cultural, aesthetic and theoretical perspectives. As Hartley points out in his introduction, such performances provide the primary experience of live Shakespeare for many people around the world (and especially in the United States), yet they are remarkably evanescent and understudied. This impressive book helps to fill what Hartley has elsewhere called "one of Shakespeare criticism's singular blind spots" (Shakespeare Survey 65 [2012], 194). Shakespeare on the University Stage asks a range of searching questions in an attempt to understand the complex variety of university Shakespeare: "How does it uniquely manifest larger cultural concerns, assumptions, and prejudices, and how is it shaped by the pedagogical dimension of its academic context? How do such productions subvert or confirm ideas about theatre in general and Shakespeare in particular that are disseminated through the larger culture in complex and unexamined ways, and what is the relationship of those ideas to their equivalents on the professional stage?" (8-9). The diverse essays in Shakespeare on the University Stage provide an array of answers to these and other questions, and they certainly encourage sustained future scholarship on this neglected topic. The book begins and ends with two leaders in the Shakespeare performance field, Peter Holland and W. B. Worthen, who provide, respectively, a historical context for campus Shakespeare and a theoretical interrogation of it. In between, essays explore the development of Shakespeare performance in a range of international educational traditions. Many consider the cultural status of Shakespeare and the politics implicit in his role in education; several note how campus Shakespeare performances provide a laboratory for current concerns about ideology and identity (especially gender identity). Hartley's concern is not with how performance is used in classroom teaching, a topic much discussed elsewhere, but with actual productions: both those formally mounted by university departments as part of their teaching mission and cultural calendar, and those put on by ad hoc student groups for creative expression, intellectual enrichment, or simply fun. The essays in Shakespeare on the University Stage are not subdivided into labeled sections, but there is a meaningful arc to their organization. The book begins with the history of university Shakespeare in the Anglo-American world, then branches out into a consideration of different global traditions, and ends with a consideration of some of the challenges, and new potentialities, for educational Shakespeare performance today. Holland begins the historical section with a series of snapshots of early campus Shakespeare: from Polonius' memories of having "played once i' th' university," to the 1610 Oxford performance at which Desdemona moved the spectators to pity, to the jesting about Shakespeare, Burbage and Kemp in the Cambridge Parnassus plays. Surprisingly, there seems to have been no regular performance of Shakespeare at the English universities until well into the nineteenth century. When it came, it was amateur and unofficial, performed by student dramatic societies, and neither connected to the university curriculum nor to the professional theater. Eventually, it became associated with both (at least in the United States), as English and then Drama/Theatre emerged as academic disciplines, each with its own investment in Shakespeare. This brief but complicated history has made campus Shakespeare "a paradoxical cultural and pedagogical event," according to Holland: "It works in the complex interstices of competing and irreconcilable demands between college and community, between pedagogy and pleasure" (26). …