Lois Potter and Arthur F. Kinney, eds. Shakespeare: Text and Theater. Essays in Honor of Jay L. Halio.(Book Review)

Publication: Comparative Drama

Publication Date: 22-MAR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 www.wmich.edu/compdr

Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999. Pp. 346. $49.50.

In their Preface and Acknowledgments to Shakespeare: Text and Theater: Essays in Honor of Jay L. Halio, editors Lois Potter and Arthur F. Kinney announce that they wanted their collection to celebrate the full range of Jay Halio's wide professional accomplishments and values: his commitment to teaching and scholarship, his generous encouragement of other critical voices, his interest in textual study, and his excitement about performance. Most of all, the editors hoped that their collection would demonstrate the vital interdependence of these remarkable qualities and interests that have shaped Halio's distinguished career. The result is a fine collection of separate arguments reflecting variable methods and interests, yet simultaneously integrated into a complementary whole vision. The collection is organized into three parts: "Texts," "Performances," and "Text and Performance." As these categories suggest, the progression of essays moves toward more overtly synthetic critical arguments, but each essay is, in its own way, multivocal.

Appropriately, the volume begins with Stanley Wells's appreciation of the tribute given (posthumously) to Shakespeare by his collaborators: the First Folio of 1623 edited by John Heminges and Henry Condell. It was also a gift to us since it made available for the first time not only an expanded canon of texts--including eighteen previously unpublished plays--but also an invaluable glimpse into theatrical practice: how these plays might have been performed and cut. For Wells, "[t]he Folio is a tribute to Shakespeare the dramatist, and affirmation of the belief that his plays reached full fruition only in the theater" (27).

Other contributors in this section explore the performance implications of textual evidence and vice versa. Susan Snyder...

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