Shakespeare in Production: Whose History?

Things have changed since the 1981 World Shakespeare Congress, 'Shakespeare, Man of the Theatre', showed most attending academics unaware of what went on in a theatre. The RSC's TV programmes and books, then such sensitive scholarly work as Samuel Crowl's, have toppled barriers. The danger now is of performance criticism becoming another bandwagon.

H. R. Coursen jumps on carrying a 'New Historicism' banner, professing to examine productions in the context of their zeitgeist. A jargon-ridden, stylistically incoherent introduction seems less concerned with response to art than with what postmodern critics are no longer 'allowed' to say and think. Thereafter discussions are so drowned in quotations it is unclear whether Coursen has anything to say. Often the quotations are from newspaper reviews. …