Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural History

Michael Dobson. Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 201 1. 265pp. £53.00 (US $85.00). ISBN: 9780521862349.Michael Dobson's thoroughly enjoyable book opens with a fascinating description of the first recorded amateur performance of a Shakespeare play. This was a performance of Hamlet on 5 September 1607 on board the Red Dragon, at harbor in Sierra Leone for the benefit of the local ruling families.The work concludes with an equally fascinating description of a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream by members of Cambridge University Press in 2009. In between these two types of performance, Dobson traces the "significant ways in which the plays of William Shakespeare have participated in English-speaking culture over the four centuries since they were written" (1). Overall the movement Dobson traces is from "private performance" in royal households and noble homes, to the emergence of amateur dramatic clubs from the late Victorian period onwards as nonprofessional performances of Shakespeare became a thoroughly middleclass activity. Bridging this movement is a chapter devoted to "Shakespeare in exile: expatriate performance" which explores Shakespeare's export as a "national treasure" (113) for elites travelling and living abroad, as well as military and colonial performances, defiantly asserting Britishness and "Merry England" (127). Beyond that, and very movingly, Dobson has unearthed descriptions of performances by British prisoners of war in World War II, such as an "elegantly dressed" performance of Hamlet in Oflag VIIIB in Bavaria in 1941 (136).Private performance in aristocratic households became very popular during the eighteenth century, "part of a general withdrawal of the upper classes from the public sphere, which peaked in France, Switzerland, Italy and parts of what is now Germany as well as in Britain during the 1770s and 1780s" (10). Such performances, especially in royal households such as those at Leicester House in the 1740s encouraged by Frederick, Prince of Wales, benefitted from advice and training from professional actors, in that case James Quinn. However, although briefly discussing performances in royal households (34-36), Dobson concentrates on reconstructing provincial performances by wealthy amateurs in Salisbury in the 1770s and then the spectacular "great Kilkenny" theatricals performed from 1802-19. In the Kilkenny performances, the lines between amateur and professional are very blurred, as Dobson notes musicians were hired from the Smock Alley theatre as well as actresses to "spare decent women" from playing unseemly heroines, such as Juliet (55). …