Cross-Cultural Performances: Differences in Women's Revisions of Shakespeare.

Marianne Novy, ed. Cross-Cultural Performances: Differences in Women's Re-Visions of Shakespeare. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. 274 pp. $49.95 (cl); $18.95 (pap). ISBN: 0-252-06323-6.

This book complements an earlier collection, Women's Re-Visions of Shakespeare: On the Responses of Dickinson, Woolf, Rich, H.D., George Eliot, and Others, ed. Marianne Novy (1990), which, as Novy writes in the new volume, "stayed within the world of white women, particularly Anglo-American women, and . . . paid very little attention to women of the theatre" (2). Cross-Cultural Performances seeks to correct this partiality by offering essays "on women whose response to Shakespeare is cross-cultural not just in terms of time but also in terms of race and relation to colonialism" (2), women like Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison, and other essays that explore the "[r]esponses of women of the theatre to Shakespeare," a "complex history, which includes accommodation, confrontation and appropriation, opposition to Shakespeare and oppositional use of him" (7). Among these responses are those of the Victorian actress Helen Faucit, described by Julie Hankey, and, in productions in the last decade or so, of the Monstrous Regiment, the Royal Shakespeare Company's Women's Project, and the Women's Theatre Group (three "British feminist alternatives to Shakespeare," 214), described by Lizbeth Goodman. Other authors (there are twelve essays plus an introduction by the editor and an afterword by Peter Erickson) include Margaret Ferguson on Othello and Oroonoko, Judith Lee on "Isak Dinesen's Re-Visions of The Tempest," and Joyce Green MacDonald on Deborah Warner's Titus Andronicus.

It would be unfair to generalize absolutely about these essays beyond recognizing their intersection with the book's announced purposes. But it must be said that many of them take an adversarial, combative, and mean-spirited stance toward their subject. The voice one hears is often that of an honors student in Harold Bloom's School of Resentment. Since Shakespeare stands for patriarchy, conservative politics, and Elizabethan hegemony (an identification more assumed here than argued), many of these authors insist on their own status as opponents of these values and of readers who have believed that Shakespeare's plays can be divorced from politics and ideology. Part of the argument is over whose authority will now matter. In his afterword Peter Erickson seems quite intoxicated by the potential strength of the present work. He proclaims the "signal formations of institutional power" that have been established by essay collections, including this one, and he warns that such collections have the ability to "decide . . . which names [of scholars and critics] will be put into circulation" (251) for the future. It is not uninteresting to note this perpetual tendency of power (the vision of hegemony!) to corrupt even those whose professional stance is in opposition to power and all that it has wrought.

"Is to invoke Shakespearean drama always to reproduce Shakespearean ideology? (150), Valerie Traub asks in her essay on Gloria Naylor and Zora Neale Hurston, and although her answer is "no," the fear that the correct answer is "yes" is implicit in these pages. This fear produces some strange notions about the way people do and should respond to Shakespeare and about the Shakespeare to whom they respond. After detailing Maya Angelou's great affection for Shakespeare, shown in an address she delivered in 1985, Marianne Novy writes that, by contrast, "As Malin LaVon Walther [one of the contributors] shows, Toni Morrison in 1981 was much more critical of Shakespeare; this shows the difficulty of arguing an absolute trajectory of increased opposition over time among black women. A black woman's response to Shakespeare today, like a white woman's, is influenced not only by race but by many aspects of her biographical, historical, and political location' (6). Indeed so, and I would have added to this list of the determinants of one's response to art one's selfhood, one's conceivably unduplicated take on things. But who would have wished to argue an absolute trajectory based on race and gender? Is not the expectation that black women (in contrast to white women) would all read Shakespeare the same way reductionist, even racist? Novy seems astonished to learn that a black woman's reading of Shakespeare can be as individual (to use an old-fashioned word she avoids) as anyone else's.

In "Hamlet in Mizoram," focusing on that northeastern border state, Ania Loomba describes some of the contemporary consequences of the contestation in nineteenth-century India between "Shakespeare . . . as a vehicle for colonialism" (231) and Shakespeare as one of "'the blessings that Europe showers upon us'" (232). In a most informative essay, Loomba considers the dilemma of the post-colonial reader. "The heterogeneity of twentieth-century audiences and readers of Shakespeare," she writes, "partly the result of colonial history, has especially spawned a variety of cross-cultural readings by conventionally marginalized readers" (229). Such readers bring with them "cultural difference," but at the same time "they are always in some danger . . . of reading difference either to erase it or to resubscribe to Western cultural hegemony or to confirm the universality of dominant cultural phenomena and literary texts or human subjects." An emblem of this tendency, in Shakespeare, she finds in Caliban's cursing Prospero in the language Prospero gave him ("You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is I know how to curse"). "Not only does Prospero's language make the curse possible," Loomba writes, "but in cursing, Caliban creatively uses . . . and therefore perpetuates Prospero's language" (229-30). But Prospero's language is the only language around, and it is perverse to suggest that in learning it Caliban is merely confirming a cultural phenomenon. Does Loomba believe that every single thing imperialists bring to colonized peoples is bad for them? Probably so. There is irony, moreover, not only in Caliban's being denied other uses of language, but also in Prospero's language being used against him.

I found highly engaging Margaret Drabble's account of playing Imogen in 1960 in a Marlowe Society production of Cymbeline. When young, Drabble "longed to be an actress" (127). She saw performances of The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and she read all the plays. "I was bewitched," she tells us. "I thought then, as I think now, that the greatness of these works is some kind of testimony to the possibilities of the human spirit, possibilities that most of us daily deny" (128). Margaret Drabble is not only an illuminating presence but also a formidable one: I wonder how many other critics could make such a statement and still be welcomed into this volume. A desire to deny Shakespeare's transcending "greatness," to make his cultural prominence merely contingent, is basic to much of Cross-Cultural Performances, which makes Drabble's essay the most subversive statement in its pages.

MARK TAYLOR Manhattan College