Book Reviews

Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance vol. 15 (30), 2016; DOI: 10.1515/mstap-2017-0013 Book Reviews Wilson, Richard. Worldly Shakespeare: The Theatre of Our Good Will (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2016. Pp. 303). Reviewed by Adam Hansen∗ This volume represents yet another characteristically bracing and engaging work, from a scholar who has made a career of writing similarly stimulating books. Richard Wilson’s laudable and crucial aims here are in accord with his other writing on Shakespeare: to situate him not only in relation to the ‘worldly’—that is, material and ideological (especially religious)—contexts in which he wrote and was initially received, but also in relation to later contexts of his reception and re-writing, including in our own world now. Along those lines, and citing John Hale, Wilson notes that “the age of Shakespeare was the ‘high-point of cosmopolitanism’: for everyone except the English” (249; italics in original). Plus ça change, non? Helena’s “vows to take the road to the Field of the Stars” as a pilgrim to Spain in All’s Well That Ends Well shows English audiences a bond and a history “they have repressed” (249). As the world knows too well, recent events have manifested a comparable English ‘Europhobic’ urge (265). Here, as elsewhere, then, Wilson is critical of the “old myth of Shakespeare as mystic monarchist”; what makes this book a significant new development in his thinking (and in the age of Trump and Brexit) is the way it shows how “Shakespeare’s paradoxical royalism has…been given a fresh populist spin”, not least by being “inspired by a cult of the Catholic and Fascist jurist Carl Schmitt” (5). Schmitt’s ideas—and his acolytes’—are continually contested in Worldly Shakespeare, even as they are given the serious attention their current sway requires. This is another characteristic trait of Wilson’s work, distinguished as it is by its profound engagement with both the traditions of and latest swerves in (largely continental) critical theory. If you’re not up to thinking about and with Agamben, Derrida, Gadamer, Sloterdijk, or Žižek, then this book probably isn’t for you. But if you’d like to be, Wilson offers an exemplary model of the way theory enables and does not inhibit: discussion of Measure for ∗ Senior Lecturer in English, Northumbria University, UK. © by the author, licensee Łódź University – Łódź University Press, Łódź, Poland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 178 Book Reviews Measure is grounded in the diction of postmodern and deconstructive interpretation, the play being replete with “disappointing surrogacies, each a simulacrum or approximation that fails to duplicate the original” (232). Yet such discourse is, in the end, invoked to interrogate the text in terms of resolutely worldly political and religious contexts, not least when Angelo refers to having “Heaven in my mouth” (2.4): “In Shakespeare’s Vienna the Duke’s devolution generates a legitimacy crisis that extends to the most vicarious of substitutions, the transubstantiation symbolism of the body and blood of Christ” (232). Wilson, in turn, builds on the evidence about Thomas Middleton’s co-authorship to query whether we should even see it as Shakespeare’s Vienna: “The textual disintegration of Measure for Measure is fatal to the myth of Shakespeare as a mystic royalist” (237). Wilson also ably shifts from the global and abstract to the local and particular, as when discussing the significance, for example, of Pericles and King Lear as performed in 1609 “in the Yorkshire Dales…by a company of outlawed Catholic players” (194) in a chapter on Twelfth Night and Iran. Given Wilson’s theoretical scope and inclusivity, it seems churlish to notice an absence, but perhaps some reflection on Homi Bhabha’s now old but still relevant work on the place and effects of incommensurability, mimicry and difference in colonialism (proper, post- and neo-) in The Location of Culture (1994) might have further enriched the discussions here about “incommensurable difference” between different “ideological or confessional” (3) systems. With more than an eye on our current divisions and travails (not least violent censorship), Worldly Shakespeare contends that Shakespearean theatre offers “an agonistic drama of deliberate offence masked as good will, rather than of mutual understanding” (5). Furthermore, this “agonistic drive” comes from and stages “the irreconcilability of rival claims of citizen or sovereignty, equality or freedom, norm or exception, presence or representation” (6-7). This was a theatre of “decentered interpretation, of offence with good will” (15). With this perspective, few of Shakespeare’s plays pass without discussion, and few discussions leave Shakespeare’s plays the same. Hamlet emerges as “a form of holy terror” (18). Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy is ‘a deeply disturbing meditation on the absolute antagonism of the jihad’ (118): ‘‘To be or not to be’ is a question that takes us right into the mind of what we would now call a suicide bomber’ (125). In “Veiling an Indian Beauty: Shakespeare and the Hijab”, Wilson brilliantly explores concealment by scarf and silk across a range of early modern texts. In so doing, he contextualizes performances of religious identity and community, past and present. The “scarf / Veiling” in The Merchant of Venice 3.2. represents, obscures and reveals “an object of both danger and desire”, an embodied otherness made all the more dangerous and desirable in a theatre, as “a masking or ritualization of antagonism as the precondition of racial, religious, sexual and artistic freedoms” (165). When outlining his aims © by the author, licensee Łódź University – Łódź University Press, Łódź, Poland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 Book Reviews 179 for the text (and the study of Shakespeare), Wilson suggests “by staging toleration in conflict, these 400-year-old play scripts continue to provide us with pretexts for our globalised yet multifaceted communities, in these paradoxical times of Facebook and fatwa” (14). Can there be a more critical and vital apprehension of Shakespeare than this? One slight quibble might be directed at the format of the book, which is set in small font, and with closely-packed lines. Closely-argued ideas like these deserve better. © by the author, licensee Łódź University – Łódź University Press, Łódź, Poland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 180 Book Reviews Chesnoiu, Monica Matei, ed. Shakespeare in Elysium: Romanian Afterlives (Constanța: Ovidius University Press, 2016. Pp. 209). Reviewed by Andrzej Wicher∗ 1 The present book is a collection of academic articles, written in English, by various authors and concerning William Shakespeare and his works both in their original literary form and in their modern, predominantly theatrical, adaptations. Most of the articles are connected, in one way or another, with the Romanian culture and Romanian reception of Shakespeare. The title of the book Shakespeare in Elysium: Romanian Afterlives is somewhat mysterious because it suggests some vision of paradise, though not necessarily in the Christian sense of the word. The subtitle, on the other hand, suggests that we should expect some reflections on the Romanian reception of Shakespeare. Why should this topic awake any paradisiac associations is unclear. Neither is it clear why the editors of this book, by using the word “afterlives”, should emphasize the posthumous nature of Shakespeare’s career in Romania. There are not many places, outside England itself, where Shakespeare’s name and his works were known in the playwright’s lifetime. It is true that the introductory article by Monica Matei Chesnoiu entitled Et in Elysium Ego: Shakespeare and the Place of Memory goes some way towards explaining and justifying this title, but I am not entirely convinced by this argument. 2 The book opens with the Foreword by Paul Brummel entitled Shakespeare and Rumania—An Enduring Love Affair. It is a brief survey of the history of the reception, translations and theatrical adaptations of Shakespeare’s works in Romania. This text is written in very good English and I do not have any serious reservations about it. In a more critical vein, I do not think it is a distinctive feature of Romania, as the author seems to suggest (cf. 2), that Shakespeare is popular there as a tragedian, rather than as an author of comedies. Shakespeare’s tragedies have always been better known than his comedies, with the exception perhaps of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The author very justly points out to the political functioning of Shakespeare’s plays’ in Romania particularly in the times of the communist dictatorship. It is probably common to all East European countries that those plays were of great use to smuggle in the undesirable, from ∗ Faculty of Philology, University of Łódź. © by the author, licensee Łódź University – Łódź University Press, Łódź, Poland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 Book Reviews 181 the authorities’ point of view, ideological content, which was usually done without adding any new things because, owing to a deeply political nature of Shakespeare’s most important plays, it was enough to emphasize some of their already existing aspects. 3 Let me now come back to the article by Monica Matei Chesnoiu Et in Elysium Ego: Shakespeare and the Place of Memory. The author focuses on the quasi-religious cult of Shakespeare and quotes the Dutch Shakespearean scholar Paul Franssen who said that “Such fantasies often take the form of Shakespeare’s ghost’s appearing on earth, or of mortals being granted an interview with his shade in Elysium” (7).

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